Vilcabamba

“Moffatt, we will eat your brains, if you have any.” Prilk turned and walked away. His guards formed up around him. If the humans wanted to start fighting now, they were ready. Here, though, human and Krolpish customs coincided. The envoy was suffered to leave in peace. Trouble would start soon, but not yet. Not quite yet.

• • •

The free United States had to keep the Krolp away from the place in northeastern Utah under which they’d found silver. If the aliens started mining, they would turn too much of what was left of the country into a place not worth inhabiting. But the free USA also needed to show the Krolp that fighting a war for the silver would be more expensive than it was worth.

If we can, Harris Moffatt III thought gloomily. If we can.

He’d already got out of Grand Junction by then. He’d pulled north to Craig, Colorado, just in case. He sat in front of a microphone that led to an AM sending unit. AM radio had been almost extinct even on Earth when the Krolp came. To the striped centauroids, it was as one with hand axes and bows and arrows. That made it as secure a communications system as humanity had left. Smoke signals were primitive, too, but as long as the Native Americans could read them and the U.S. Cavalry couldn’t . . .

“Execute Plan Seventeen,” Moffatt said into the mike. “I repeat--execute Plan Seventeen.”

In the room next to his, an engineer flicked a switch, then lifted his thumb in the air. The order had gone out, and now the radio was off again. The cavalry could learn what smoke signals meant, and the Krolp--or the human traitors who served them--might monitor the AM band. You never could tell.

Moffatt’s mouth twisted. Oh, yes, you could. Whatever the aliens did drove more nails into the coffin of human freedom. It wasn’t even always intended to, but it did.

They didn’t attack the instant Prilk left the free USA. The President had feared they might. That would have complicated things for the United States--complicated them even worse than they were already. But, although Moffatt had feared a sudden assault, he hadn’t really expected one. The Krolp were so arrogant, they had trouble believing human beings still dared to tell them no and mean it.

He wished he could launch thermonuclear-tipped missiles at all the increasingly Krolpified cities in the occupied United States. In point of fact, he could; it wasn’t as if he didn’t have them. The only trouble was, they wouldn’t do much good. The Krolp would swat them out of the air with contemptuous ease.

No, you couldn’t stand toe to toe with the centauroids and slug. First they’d stand on your toes. Then they’d stand on you.

Well, the Native Americans couldn’t slug things out with the U.S. Cavalry. They still drove it crazy for a hell of a long time. They also lost in the end, something Harris Moffatt III didn’t care to dwell upon.

He and his Department of Defense experts monitored as many Krolpish channels as they could. They had to rely on bought and stolen devices; they could no more make the communicators the aliens used than Geronimo could have manufactured a telegraph clicker. But the aliens weren’t very good at keeping things secret from humans. They didn’t think they needed to bother, and most of the time they were right.

A major brought Moffatt a report: “The Subgovernor of the South Central Region has been taken ill. He’s in a Krolpish hospital. They’re trying to figure out what’s wrong with him.”

“I hope it’s nothing trivial,” Moffatt said.

“Me, too, Mr. President.” The major grinned. He wore one broad red stripe on each of his collar tabs to show his rank. That was a human adaptation of the Krolpish system. Once upon a time, the USA had used rank badges of its own. Harris Moffatt III happened to know that. What they were, he couldn’t have said. He’d never seen them. A few antiquarians might know, if the free United States still boasted antiquarians.

More reports floated into the free USA. Krolp administrators and their human flunkies came down with exotic illnesses or sudden cases of loss of life. A Krolpish flyer--which bore about the same relationship to a 797 airliner as the airliner did to a paper plane--slammed into the ground, killing several aliens and injuring several more. (Most survived unharmed. The Krolp built tough.) Bridges and overpasses mysteriously--or not so mysteriously--collapsed.

We can hurt you, the free USA was saying, as loud as it could. We can cause you more trouble than you thought we could.

So far, so good. Pretty soon, though, the Krolp would have some things of their own to say. Moffatt didn’t care to listen to them. As far as the Krolp were concerned, that meant less than nothing.

The free USA was as ready as it could be. Soldiers guarded the passes through which the centauroids were likeliest to come. The ground was mined, sometimes with nuclear explosives. The blasts wouldn’t bother the Krolp much. The avalanches they were positioned to set off would do more . . . everyone hoped.