Those Bugs lay eggs. They not only lay them, they hold them in reserve, hatch them as needed. If we killed a warrior -- or a thousand, or ten thousand—his or their replacements were hatched and on duty almost before we could get back to base. You can imagine, if you like, some Bug supervisor of population flashing a phone to somewhere down inside and saying, "Joe, warm up ten thousand warriors and have ‘em ready by Wednesday... and tell engineering to activate reserve incubators N, O, P, Q, and R; the demand is picking up."
I don't say they did exactly that, but those were the results. But don't make the mistake of thinking that they acted purely from instinct, like termites or ants; their actions were as intelligent as ours (stupid races don't build spaceships!) and were much better co ordinated. It takes a minimum of a year to train a private to fight and to mesh his fighting in with his mates; a Bug warrior is hatched able to do this.
Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M. I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commissars didn't care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance; however the trouble with "lessons from history" is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins.
But we were learning. Technical instructions and tactical doctrine orders resulted from every brush with them, spread through the Fleet. We learned to tell the workers from the warriors—if you had time, you could tell from the shape of the carapace, but the quick rule of thumb was: If he comes at you, he's a warrior; if he runs, you can turn your back on him. We learned not to waste ammo even on warriors except in self-protection; instead we went after their lairs. Find a hole, drop down it first a gas bomb which explodes gently a few seconds later, releasing an oily liquid which evaporates as a nerve gas tailored to Bugs (it is harmless to us) and which is heavier than air and keeps on going down -- then you use a second grenade of H. E. to seal the hole.
We still didn't know whether we were getting deep enough to kill the queens -- but we did know that the Bugs didn't like these tactics; our intelligence through the Skinnies and on back into the Bugs themselves was definite on this point. Besides, we cleaned their colony off Sheol completely this way. Maybe they managed to evacuate the queens and the brains... but at least we were learning to hurt them.
But so far as the Roughnecks were concerned, these gas bombings were simply another drill, to be done according to orders, by the numbers, and on the bounce.
Eventually we had to go back to Sanctuary for more capsules. Capsules are expendable (well, so were we) and when they are gone, you must return to base, even if the Cherenkov generators could still take you twice around the Galaxy. Shortly before this a dispatch came through breveting Jelly to lieutenant, vice Rasczak. Jelly tried to keep it quiet but Captain Deladrier published it and then required him to eat forward with the other officers. He still spent all the rest of his time aft.
But we had taken several drops by then with him as platoon leader and the outfit had gotten used to getting along without the Lieutenant -- it still hurt but it was routine now. After Jelal was commissioned the word was slowly passed around among us and chewed over that it was time for us to name ourselves for our boss, as with other outfits.
Johnson was senior and took the word to Jelly; he picked me to go along with him as moral support. "Yeah?" growled Jelly.
"Uh, Sarge—I mean Lieutenant, we've been thinking—"
"With what?"
"Well, the boys have sort of been talking it over and they think—well, they say the outfit ought to call itself: ‘Jelly's Jaguars.' "
"They do, eh? How many of ‘em favor that name?"
"It's unanimous," Johnson said simply.
"So? Fifty-two ayes... and one no. The noes have it." Nobody ever brought up the subject again.
Shortly after that we orbited at Sanctuary. I was glad to be there, as the ship's internal pseudo-gravity field had been off for most of two days before that, while the Chief Engineer tinkered with it, leaving us in free fall -- which I hate. I'll never be a real spaceman. Dirt underfoot felt good. The entire platoon went on ten days' rest & recreation and transferred to accommodation barracks at the Base.
