Their Master's War (13 page)

"I didn't have to be there. I saw how many of you

bastards came back. At Seven Walls, I was the only one of my twenty to come back. That's how I got to be overman."

A slurred voice came from the other side of the room. "Why don't you put a cover on it, Elmo. We all heard about you at Seven Walls."

Elmo swayed around, peering into the gloom. "Who said that?" There were a couple of drunken laughs.

"Listen, you slime, the new meat ain't heard it, and they gotta respect me."

"They ain't new meat anymore. They've seen combat."

"They still got to respect me."

Hark was drunkenly horrified. He had always respected Elmo. It was only now that the respect was starting to fragment. Hark wished that the overman would shut up and fall over. He was in no condition for a conflict of original loyalties. Elmo, however, was made of sterner stuff. He put a hand on Hark's shoulder, leaned close, and lowered his voice. Hark could smell the liquor on his breath.

"It was this huge Yal redoubt, see? Seven concentric walls maybe four meters thick. Whole standard of blanketing it with neutrino charges. Thought we were going to go blind from the afterflash. Finally, they sent in us ground monkeys. We were told it'd be a walk... a piece of cake... right? The walls were breached, and we assumed that it was going to be a fish kill. Some piece of cake... We got inside, and they hit us with everything they had. They'd darksided a whole strike force on a moon where nobody had bothered to look. The heavy punishers came in first... By the time they hit, we made it down into bunkers. They were full of dead chibas and scalies and some things we'd never seen before... the chibas are rotting off their frames while there's an earth quake going on all around us... You never seen anything like it..." Maybe it was just that Elmo was one of the first authority figures Hark had seen. Maybe that was the reason for the trust at first sight. Maybe it was just another part of the programming. Was he going to find out that Rance also had feet of clay?

"When I say earthquake... I mean a goddamn earthquake. The ceilings are coming in, and guys are getting crushed by chunks of plasteel. I'm lying facedown in a mess of chiba goop and expecting to die at any minute. It's black as pitch, and the noise is like one continuous explosion. There's somebody screaming in my ear, and I don't know if it's me or the monkey next to me." Elmo was no longer talking to Hark. He was staring blindly into nowhere, reliving the time in the bunker.

"Yeah, and then the pounding stops, and for a few moments, there's complete silence. We're still lying there, not daring to breathe, wondering what they're going to throw at us next. The punishers are only the first stage. We wait... and after a while there's this quiet little sound from way down in the tunnels... a clicking. There ain't a man down in that bunker that didn't know what it was and what it meant. It's that noise the scalies' exoskeletons make when they move. We lined our red-scopes in a goddamn hurry and there they were... an assault line of the bastards things... with tom-tom guns in front of them... coming up through the lower tunnels."

Elmo shuddered at the memory.

"It's hand to hand... or hand to tentacle... or whatever those things have at the end of their arms. The tomtoms are going off right in among us, and we're falling back from the get go. It's a goddamn slaughter... casualties all the way to the surface. We should have

known something was wrong when the scalies stopped pressing. Those of us who were left came out into the light and immediately got it by batwings, sweeping us with hard radiation. That's where I lost my hair.. .just one e-vac managed to get in... and I was one of the lucky ones." Elmo leaned forward and reached for one of the remaining bottles. He missed it by a matter of centimeters and toppled over. He had another try for the bottle from a prone position. This time he was a little more successful. He got the bottle to his mouth, and after spilling a good deal, he managed a swallow, only to gag. Hark stared in bleary disgust as Overman Elmo, an individual whom he had previously looked up to, lay on his side with drool hanging from the corner of his mouth.

"Yeah... I was one of... the... lucky... ones..."

Overman Elmo's eyes closed. Hark was filled with a massive sense of relief. It was maybe two hours later when Rance came into the messdeck. He had expected to find the men passed out drunk. That was as it should be. They had been damn lucky to get off that battery planet with such minimal casualties. It could have been a whole lot worse. The additional stress of the prolonged exchange of fire must have been close to the last straw. He had half expected to find Elmo passed out among the men, but that wasn't as it should be. Noncoms didn't get falling-down drunk on the messdecks, particularly a noncom who had sat out the mission. He'd been watching Elmo for some time. There was little doubt that the overman had run out of road. By the program, Rance should take the matter to the line officer, but he'd already decided that he'd hold off for a while. It was a matter of loyalty. Elmo had been a good man. Most of the other survivors from Seven Walls had gone crazy. If Rance reported Elmo,

Berref would undoubtedly have the overman termed. It would be better at least to let Elmo keep his dignity. These things had a habit of taking care of themselves. When a man ran out of road, he didn't last much longer in combat.

Eight

The news was both good and bad. There was a jump coming—but after the jump there would be a stop at a recstar.

"Liberty."

"Women!"

"Give it to me!"

"I'd give up getting laid if I could miss the jump." "You gotta enjoy what you can get." "And you gotta suffer to get it." "That's the way of it." "You said it." Just as they thought that they were being accepted, Hark and his intake were once again taking a nervous backseat. The recstar, after combat, was the next great mystery. Hark himself, who had started to feel that he was growing into the role of the fighting man, was pushed back into the shadows of the awkward and nervous semivirgin listening to the others giggling in the darkness on the hillside. What would these women be like? What had the therem done to them? Had they been as ruthlessly programmed as the men? The longtimers were no help.

"Hell, boy, they're just like us." A day later someone else had told him. "They're different, real different. Ain't that the point of it all?"

There was the usual, less than satisfactory, consensus.

"You'll find out."

As the jumptime approached an entirely new atmosphere took over the messdeck. There was little of the usual griping and complaining, and almost a lightness in the air. Even Dacker was unusually amiable, and Renchett managed to keep his knife sheathed. The general feeling seemed to be that now that they were going somewhere they wanted to go, they were almost prepared to take the jump in stride. It was something that Hark had never seen before, and it made him slightly uneasy. It was hard to accept that these battle-hardened killers were capable of a juvenile excitement. There were outbreaks of joking and horseplay. Dyrkin actually smiled. The prospect of a respite from the war, no matter how temporary, brought out something else in the men. There was an all around increase in personal hygiene, chins were shaved close to the bone, and troopers even borrowed small mirrors from one another and studied their appearances. The ones who had exposed prosthetics actually polished them to a high, burnished shine. These endeavors caused a good deal of raucous comment.

"Women ain't going to be lovin' up to you on account of your spare parts, peckerhead."

"Getting something replaced is the sure sign of a real man. Women know that."

"Depends on what you got replaced."

"That's mine all mine, asshole."

"I don't know about that, but you still look like a chiba's cousin to me." One contributory factor to the general levity was the fact that the noncoms were pretty much staying away from the men on the messdecks. It was as though part of the preparation for liberty was a certain relaxing of the controls. Hark had learned enough to suspect that there was a deliberate psychology behind this. Nothing in the Therem Alliance seemed to happen by accident. It was only in the final hundred minutes before the jump that the more normal gloom reasserted itself. The pain was too close to pretend any longer that it was going to be a breeze. When the alarms sounded, the men went slowly to their coffins, reluctant to face unpleasant reality. Rance hurried them along; it appeared that Elmo was being kept away from the group. As Hark was climbing into his coffin, he found that the topman was standing over him.

"Don't worry, boy, you'll get through it."

"Can I ask a question?"

"If you make it fast."

"How long do we get on the recstar?"

Rance shrugged. "Seven standards, maybe ten if we're lucky. Don't think that our masters are doing this out of the kindess of their hearts. They don't have any. The cluster has to make repairs after that run-in with the Yal battlewagon, and it's easier to off-load the likes of us." The lid of the coffin lowered, and the waiting began. Hark had expected that this jump would be the same as the last one. Even inside his fear, he was surprised when, right from the start, it proved to be totally different. The only similarity to the last one was the level of pain. It was of no comfort to realize that each jump was unique and that there would be no getting used to them. This one came on slowly, a gradual build that started as a knot in his chest and spread out through the rest of his body. There were vivid hallucinations—monsters and

demons from his savage childhood ripped at his flesh and towered over the universe. They tore out his eyes and dragged his tortured body through pits of liquid fire. Encased in his screaming, he had one thing to hold on to, the one thing that he'd learned from his first jump.

There*s going to be an end to this! It's going to end!

And it did. At the very peak of the pain it was gone. For an instant, he floated in a state of perfect peace, and then he was back in his coffin, soaked in sweat and aching in every part of his body.

"Did we make it okay?"

Immediately the men were out of their coffins, there was a definite effort to reestablish the previous festive mood. Everyone in the messdeck had come through the jump unscathed, and there were no deaths or insanity to cast a pall over the coming liberty. There was very little of the usual groaning and complaining. The troopers had too much to look forward to for them to dwell on the hangover from the jump

After about twenty minutes, Elmo appeared on the messdeck for the first time in days. There were a few contemptuous looks, but nobody said anything. The overman was followed by a small floating pallet loaded with fourteen folded tan uniforms.

"You lucky boys are being issued with new liberty dress."

"New tans?"

"That's right. Somebody up there must like you." "No kidding."

"So try not to throw up on them the first day."

It was probably a remark that Elmo shouldn't have made. Dacker pounced on it.

"Oh, we can hold our liquor, Overman Elmo."

Elmo ignored Dacker and started handing out the two-piece uniforms. When he was through, there was one uniform left. Dyrkin noticed it and raised an eyebrow.

"What's the spare set of tans for?"

Kemlo, who'd lost a foot to the wire, walked stiffly through the entrance to the messdeck. "That's for me. Think I'd miss the fun?"

He was dressed in a singlet and shorts. His brand-new artificial foot was gleaming stainless steel and made clicking noises as he walked. It was plain that he was still not completely used to it. Dyrkin grinned. "I thought they'd termed you, buddy."

"I'm too ugly to kill." He flexed the skeletal toes of his steel foot. "Think the girls are going to like it?"

"Gonna knock 'em dead."

Elmo had produced a small plastic folder.

"You three new fish, you're entitled to your combat flashes. Here, impress the girls with them." He handed red and yellow lightning patches to Hark, Morish, and Voda. Hark scowled. He didn't think that Elmo ought to be calling them new fish now that they'd been in combat. Elmo noticed his expression and looked at him questioningly.

"What's the matter with you, boy?"

Hark made his face a mask. "Nothing, Overman Elmo."

Elmo glanced around at the others with a knowing and unpleasant grin. "Maybe he's worried he won't be able to get it up when the time comes."

The joke was received by blank, stony faces. As far as the troopers were concerned, plrno had lost the right to insult anyone's manhood on this messdeck. There was a moment of tense silence, and then the overman turned on his heel and marched smartly away.

"Woo-hoo, did you see him go?"

"Showed that sorry sucker the door."

There was more to think about than the humiliation of Elmo. Getting ready for the liberty took on aspects of a ritual, and even the newcomers found themselves caught up in it. Hark carefully dressed himself in the new tan uniform. He couldn't help feeling a swell of pride as he applied the combat patch to the right sleeve. All around him, troopers were primping and preening. Nobody wanted to look anything but his absolute best. Small additions were being made to the uniforms. Some men hung them with pieces of jewelry and small trinkets. He noticed that some of the senior men boasted more insignia than just the single combat flash; he knew that the patches were earned for length of service and acts of outstanding merit. He had the data regarding the exact significance of each individual flash somewhere in his mind, but it was buried deep and he was too keyed up to dredge for it. Dyrkin had more insignia than anyone— his right sleeve was a blaze of glory. Maybe if Hark survived long enough he might get a few of those other patches.

A number of the men, as well as making sure they looked their best, were concealing weapons under their clothes—blackjacks, knives, brass knuckles, and homemade electroguns were strapped to legs and hidden under shirts. When Morish questioned Renchett about it, the longtimer, whose inevitable knife was pushed down in his boot, explained how when different units went on liberty at the same time there was always fighting. It was good to have an edge.