Enemy Papers Read online

  The Drac opened its mouth in horror, then closed it as black anger literally changed its color from yellow to reddish-brown.

  I had taken an oath to fight and die over many things, but that venerable rodent didn’t happen to be one of them. I laughed, and continued laughing until the guffaws in combination with my exhaustion forced me to my knees. I forced open my eyes to keep track of my enemy. The Drac was running toward the high ground, away from me and the sea. I half-turned toward the sea and caught a glimpse of a million tons of water just before they fell on me, knocking me unconscious.

  “Kiz da yuomeen, Irkmaan, ne?”

  My eyes were gritty with sand and stung with salt, but some part of my awareness pointed out: “Hey, you’re alive.” I reached to wipe the sand from my eyes and found my hands bound. A straight metal rod had been run through my sleeves and my wrists tied to it. As my tears cleared the sand from my eyes, I could see the Drac sitting on a smooth black boulder looking at me. It must have pulled me out of the drink. “Thanks, toad face. What’s with the bondage?”

  “Ess?”

  I tried waving my arms and wound up giving an impression of an atmospheric fighter dipping its wings. “Untie me, you Drac slime!” I was seated on the sand, my back against a rock.

  The Drac smiled, exposing the upper and lower mandibles that looked human —except, that instead of separate teeth, they were solid. “Eh, ne, Irkmaan.” It stood, walked over to me and checked my bonds.

  “Untie me!”

  The smile disappeared. ‘Ne!” It pointed at me with a yellow finger. “Kos son va?”

  “I don’t speak Drac, toad face. You speak Esper or English?”

  The Drac delivered a very human-looking shrug, then pointed at its own chest. “Kos va son Jeriba Shigan.” It pointed again at me. “Kos son va?”

  “Davidge. My name is Willis E. Davidge.”

  “Ess?”

  I tried my tongue on the unfamiliar syllables. “Kos va son Willis Davidge.”

  “Eh.” Jeriba Shigan nodded, then motioned with its fingers. “Dasu, Davidge.”

  “Same to you, Jerry.”

  “Dasu, dasu!” The toad face began sounding a little impatient. I shrugged as best I could. The Drac bent over and grabbed the front of my jumpsuit with both hands and pulled me to my feet. “Dasu, dasu, kizlode!”

  “All right! So dasu is get up. What’s a kizlode?”

  Jerry laughed. “Gavey kiz?”

  “Yeah, I gavey.”

  Jerry pointed at its head. “Lode.” It pointed at my head. “Kizlode, gavey?”

  I got it, then swung my arms around, catching Jerry upside its head with the metal rod. The Drac stumbled back against a rock, looking surprised. It raised a hand to its head and withdrew it covered with that pale pus that Dracs think is blood. It looked at me with murder in its eyes. “Gefh! Nu Gefh, Davidge!”

  “Come and get it, Jerry, you kizlode sonofabitch!”

  Jerry dived at me and I tried to catch it again with the rod, but the Drac caught my right wrist in both hands and, using the momentum of my swing, whirled me around, slamming my back against another rock. Just as I was getting back my breath, Jerry picked up a small boulder and came at me with every intention of turning my melon into pulp. With my back against the rock, I lifted a foot and kicked the Drac in the midsection, knocking it to the sand. I ran up, ready to stomp Jerry’s melon, but he pointed behind me. I turned and saw another tidal wave gathering steam, and heading our way. “Kid” Jerry got to its feet and scampered for the high ground with me following close behind. With the roar of the wave at our backs, we weaved among the black water and sand-ground black boulders until we reached Jerry’s ejection capsule. The Drac stopped, put its shoulder to the egg-shaped contraption, and began rolling it uphill. I could see Jerry’s point. The capsule contained all of the survival equipment and food either of us knew about. “Jerry!” I shouted above the rumble of the fast-approaching wave. “Pull out this damn rod and I’ll help!” The Drac frowned at me. “The rod, kizlode, pull it out!” I cocked my head toward my outstretched arm.

  Jerry placed a rock beneath the capsule to keep it from rolling back, then quickly untied my wrists and pulled out the rod. Both of us put our shoulders to the capsule, and we quickly rolled it to higher ground. The wave hit and climbed rapidly up the slope until it came up to our chests. The capsule bobbed like a cork, and it was all we could do to keep control of the thing until the water receded, wedging the capsule between three big boulders. I stood there, puffing.

  Jerry dropped to the sand, its back against one of the boulders, and watched the water rush back out to sea. “Magasiennal”

  “You said it, brother.” I sank down next to the Drac; we agreed by eye to a temporary truce, and promptly passed out.

  My eyes opened on a sky boiling with blacks and greys. Letting my head loll over on my left shoulder, I checked out the Drac. It was still out. First, I thought that this would be the perfect time to get the drop on Jerry. Second, I thought about how silly our insignificant scrap seemed compared to the insanity of the sea that surrounded us. Why hadn’t the rescue team come? Did the Dracon fleet wipe us out? Why hadn’t the Dracs come to pick up Jerry? Did they wipe out each other? I didn’t even know where I was. An island. I had seen that much coming in, but where and in relation to what? Fyrine IV; the planet didn’t even rate a name, but was important enough to die over.

  With an effort, I struggled to my feet. Jerry opened its eyes and quickly pushed itself to a defensive crouching position. I waved my hand and shook my head. “Ease off, Jerry. I’m just going to look around.” I turned my back on it and trudged off between the boulders. I walked uphill for a few minutes until I reached level ground.

  It was an island, all right, and not a very big one. By eyeball estimation, height from sea level was only eighty meters, while the island itself was about two kilometers long and less than half that wide. The wind whipping my jumpsuit against my body was at least drying it out, but as I looked around at the smooth-ground boulders on top of the rise, I realized that Jerry and I could expect bigger waves than the few puny ones we had seen.

  A rock clattered behind me and I turned to see Jerry climbing up the slope. When it reached the top, the Drac looked around. I squatted next to one of the boulders and passed my hand over it to indicate the smoothness, then I pointed toward the sea. Jerry nodded. “Ae, gavey.” It pointed downhill toward the capsule, then to where we stood. “Echey masu, nasesay.”

  I frowned, then pointed at the capsule. “Nasesay? The capsule?”

  “Ae, capsule nasesay. Echey masu.” Jerry pointed at its feet.

  I shook my head. “Jerry, if you gavey how these rocks got smooth”—I pointed at one—“then you gavey that masuing the nasesay up here isn’t going to do a damned bit of good.” I made a sweeping up and down movement with my hands. “Waves.” I pointed at the sea below. “Waves, up here.” I pointed to where we stood. “Waves, echey.”

  “Ae, gavey.” Jerry looked around the top of the rise, then rubbed the side of its face. The Drac squatted next to some small rocks and began piling one on top of another. “Viga, Davidge.”

  I squatted next to it and watched while its nimble fingers constructed a circle of stones that quickly grew into a dollhouse-sized arena. Jerry stuck one of its fingers in the center of the circle. “Echey, nasesay.”

  The days on Fyrine IV seemed to be three times longer than any I had seen on any other habitable planet. I use the designation “habitable” with reservations. It took us most of the first day to painfully roll Jerry’s nasesay up to the top of the rise. The night was too black to work and was bone-cracking cold. We removed the couch from the capsule, which made just enough room for both of us to fit inside. The body heat warmed things up a bit; and we killed time between sleeping, nibbling on Jerry’s supply of ration bars (they taste a bit like fish mixed with cheddar cheese), and trying to come to some agreement about language.

  “Eye.”

&n
bsp; “Thuyo.”

  “Finger.”

  “Zurath.”

  “Head.”

  The Drac laughed. “Lode.”

  “Ho, ho, very funny.”

  “Ho, ho.”

  It was when the talking stopped and the sleeping was to begin that I would find myself inside my own head, behind enemy lines. It’d be right there, a few centimeters away, a Drac. Yellow, loathsome, slick-skinned, noseless, toad face.

  The rolls on my ship had a lot of blank spaces because of the pilots the Dracs had whacked. I knew a lot of the names: Ozawa, Chandler, the Starov twins: Mikhail and Whatsisname.

  Whatsisname.

  I knew a lot of names, I could remember a lot of faces. I didn’t know anyone, though. I felt bad when my fellow pilots went down, but only because it meant my team had taken a hit. It wasn’t as though any friends had taken one.

  Friends. Who were my friends?

  That one group commander, Dunlap, the one before Santos, used to say, “If you have to ask questions like Who are my friends, you are in trouble.”

  Dunlap was trying to get us to hang together, rely on each other, work as a team—no. Work as a family.

  I asked the question, who are my friends, and still didn’t have an answer an hour later. I wondered how much trouble Dunlap would say I was in.

  In the dim green glow of one of the capsule’s fading battery lights, I looked at the Drac and realized that I had spent more time in close contact with this thing than I had with any human, except my parents.

  Trouble. Dunlap didn’t know what trouble was.

  At dawn on the second day, we rolled and pushed the capsule into the center of the rise and wedged it between two large rocks, one of which had an overhang that we hoped would hold down the capsule when one of those big soakers hit. Around the rocks and capsule, we laid a foundation of large stones and filled in the cracks with smaller stones. ‘ By the time the wall was knee high, we discovered that building with those smooth, round stones and no mortar wasn’t going to work. After some experimentation, we figured out how to break the stones to give us flat sides with which to work. It’s done by picking up one stone and slamming it down on top of another.

  We took turns, one slamming and one building. The stone was almost a volcanic glass, and we also took turns extracting rock splinters from each other. It took nine of those endless days and nights to complete the walls, during which waves came close many times and once washed us ankle deep. For six of those nine days, it rained. ; The capsule’s survival equipment included a plastic blanket, and that became our roof. It sagged in at the center, and the hole we put in it there allowed the water to run out, keeping us almost dry and giving us a supply of fresh water. If a wave of any determination came along, we could kiss the roof goodbye; but we both had confidence in the walls, which were almost two meters thick at the bottom and at least a meter thick at the top.

  After we finished, we sat inside and admired our work for about an hour, until it dawned on us that we had just worked ourselves out of jobs.

  “What now, Jerry?”

  “Ess?”

  “What do we do now?”

  The Drac looked at the shelter, then up at the gloomy sky. “Now wait, we.” The Drac shrugged. “Else what, ne?”

  I nodded. “Gavey.”

  I got to my feet and walked to the passageway we had built. With no wood for a door, where the walls would have met, we bent one out and extended it about three meters around the other wall with the opening away from the prevailing winds.

  The never-ending winds were still at it, but the rain had stopped. The shack wasn’t much to look at, but looking at it stuck there in the center of that deserted island made me feel good. As Shizumaat observed, “Intelligent life making its stand against the universe.” Or, at least, that’s the sense I could make out of Jerry’s hamburger of English. I shrugged and picked up a sharp splinter of stone and made another mark in the large standing rock that served as my log. Ten scratches in all, and under the seventh, a small x to indicate the big wave that just covered the top of the island.

  I threw down the splinter. “Damn, I hate this place!”

  “Ess?” Jerry’s head poked around the edge of the opening. “Who talking at, Davidge?”

  I glared at the Drac, then waved my hand at it. “Nobody.”

  “Ess va nobody?”

  “Nobody. Nothing.”

  “Ne gavey, Davidge.”

  I poked at my chest with my finger. “Me! I’m talking to myself! You gavey that stuff, toad face!”

  Jerry shook its head. “Davidge, now I sleep. Talk not so much nobody, ne?” It disappeared back into the opening.

  “And so’s your mother!” I turned and walked down the slope. Except, strictly speaking, toad face, you don’t have a mother—or father. “If you had your choice, who would you like to be trapped on a desert island with?” I wondered if anyone ever picked a wet freezing corner of Hell shacked up with a hermaphrodite.

  Half of the way down the slope, I followed the path I had marked with rocks until I came to my tidal pool that I had named “Rancho Sluggo.” Around the pool were many of the water-worn rocks, and underneath those rocks, below the pool’s waterline, lived the fattest orange slugs either of us had ever seen. I made the discovery during a break from house building and showed them to Jerry.

  Jerry shrugged. “And so?”

  “And so what? Look, Jerry, those ration bars aren’t going to last forever. What are we going to eat when they’re all gone?”

  “Eat?” Jerry looked at the wriggling pocket of insect life and grimaced. “Ne, Davidge. Before then pickup. Search us find, then pickup.”

  “What if they don’t find us? What then?”

  Jerry grimaced again and turned back to the half-completed house. “Water we drink, then until pickup.” He had muttered something about kiz excrement and my tastebuds, then walked out of sight.

  Since then I had built up the pool’s walls, hoping the increased protection from the harsh environment would increase the herd. I looked under several rocks, but no increase was apparent. And, again, I couldn’t bring myself to swallow one of the things. I replaced the rock I was looking under, stood and looked out to the sea. Although the eternal cloud cover still denied the surface the drying rays of Fyrine, there was no rain and the usual haze had lifted.

  In the direction past where I had pulled myself up on the beach, the sea continued to the horizon. In the spaces between the whitecaps, the water was as grey as a loan officer’s heart. Parallel lines of rollers formed approximately five kilometers from the island. The center, from where I was standing, would smash on the island, while the remainder steamed on. To my right, in line with the breakers, I could just make out another small island perhaps ten kilometers away. Following the path of the rollers, I looked far to my right, and where the grey-white of the sea should have met the lighter grey of the sky, there was a black line on the horizon.

  The harder I tried to remember the briefing charts on Fyrine IV’s land masses, the less clear it became. Jerry couldn’t remember anything either—at least nothing it would tell me. Why should we remember? The battle was supposed to be in space, each one trying to deny the other an orbital staging area in the Fyrine system. Neither side wanted to set foot on Fyrine, much less fight a battle there. Still, whatever it was called, it was land and considerably larger than the sand and rock bar we were occupying.

  How to get there was the problem. Without wood, fire, leaves, or animal skins, Jerry and I were destitute compared to the average poverty-stricken caveman. The only thing we had that would float was the nasesay. The capsule. Why not? The only real problem to overcome was getting Jerry to go along with it.

  That evening, while the greyness made its slow transition to black, Jerry and I sat outside the shack nibbling our quarter portions of ration bars. The Drac’s yellow eyes studied the dark line on the horizon, then it shook its head. “Ne, Davidge. Dangerous is.”

  I
popped the rest of my ration bar into my mouth and talked around it. “Any more dangerous than staying here?”

  “Soon pickup, ne?”

  I studied those yellow eyes. “Jerry, you don’t believe that any more than I do.” I leaned forward on the rock and held out my hands. “Look, our chances will be a lot better on a larger land mass. Protection from the big waves, maybe food.”

  “Not maybe, ne?” Jerry pointed at the water. “How nasesay steer, Davidge? In that, how steer? Ess eh soakers, waves, beyond land take, gavey? Bresha,” Jerry’s hands slapped together.“Ess eh bresha rocks on, ne? Then we death.”

  I scratched my head. “The waves are going in that direction from here, and so is the wind. If the land mass is large enough, we don’t have to steer, gavey?”

  Jerry snorted. “Ne large enough, then?”

  “I didn’t say it was a sure thing.”

  “Ess?”

  “A sure thing; certain, gavey?” Jerry nodded. “And for smashing up on the rocks, it probably has a beach like this one.”

  “Sure thing, ne!”

  I shrugged. “No, it’s not a sure thing, but, what about staying here? We don’t know how big those waves can get. What if one just comes along and washes us off the island? What then?”

  Jerry looked at me, its eyes narrowed. “What there, Davidge? Irkmaan base, ne?”

  I laughed. “I told you, we don’t have any bases on Fyrine IV.”

  “Why want go, then?”

  “Just what I said, Jerry. I think our chances would be better.”

  “Ummm.” The Drac folded its arms. “Viga, Davidge, nasesay stay. I know.”