Their Master's War

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.

When all fourteen men were dressed to their satisfaction, there was nothing to do but wait. There was no way that they could pretend that they felt like anything but a bunch of kids about to go off on an adventure. The Screen in the downden came to life. Once again it was an image fed in by an external scanner. Hark had his first sight of a recstar.

"There she is!"

"Ain't she a little beauty?"

From the outside, the recstar was anything but beautiful. It looked more like another military installation than a palace of carnal delights. Essentially it was a small planetoid, an irregular chunk of slate-gray rock that had been hollowed out, built over, and heavily fortified. Hark could see seven fire domes, and there were undoubtedly more on the far side. Docking spires jutted from the surface like metallic spines. Ropes of tubular moveways snaked across the uneven, cratered surface. There were other installations that Hark didn't recognize. Everything was the same drab gray as the original rock. Morish voiced the three recruits' surprise.

"It's a damned fortress."

Dacker laughed. "What did you expect? That it'd be painted red and gold with a welcome sign flashing? It wasn't put there just for our benefit. It's a regular class-three orbiter. The women were an afterthought. They're down in the interior, down by the core."

The recstar grew bigger and bigger until it filled the entire screen and smaller surface details became visible. It was much larger than Hark had first imagined. Although it hardly dwarfed the cluster, it was possibly as large-the screen didn't make it easy to judge scale. The perspective altered, and the recstar became a vertical horizon. The cluster seemed to be traveling across it. Lights were visible as the scanner tracked the orbiter's darkside. Multicolored plasma pulsed around a discharge stack. In the side-on sky, a small pale sun was visible. It had to be a long way away-it was scarcely larger than the background stars. Hark was overtaken by a lonely desolation that men should have to visit the women of their species in the bowels of this infinitely remote weapons base circling its tiny, distant sun.

Sirens were braying in other parts of the ship, and the forward motion stopped. A line of surface craft came over the horizon, slab-sided, rust-streaked bucket shuttles headed for the cluster. Elmo was back on the messdeck.

"We better move out if we're going to be on one of the first of those boats."

The troopers didn't need a second urging to start filing out. By the time they reached their designated air lock, an umbilical had been stretched and attached to the first of the shuttles. There were lines of men from other messdecks waiting to free-fall to the surface craft. Elmo's fourteen didn't make it onto the first ship, and there was a delay while a second shuttle maneuvered into the loading position and the umbilical was reattached. Finally it was their turn to swing feet-first into the ribbed tube and float to the entry port of the shuttle. A loading attendant moved them inside. The interior of the shuttle was not quite as Spartan as that of an e-vac. There was atmosphere and even rudimentary berths, gee-frame shocktraps with webbing straps to secure their occupants. The shuttle accelerated hard and fast, and the passengers were pushed back into the frames with their faces distorting. The shuttle also landed hard, but nobody cared. They were down on the recstar and out of the war for a short space of time.

There were no humans manning the upper levels of the planetoid. The loading areas and weapon systems were being operated by huge lanteres, bulky chitinous creatures three times as tall as a man. They survived in an environment of methane and ammonia and dim orange light that was as thick as soup. The troopers had to cross their areas through transparent airtight tunnels. It was like walking on the bottom of a dense, alien sea. The lanteres were uncomfortably similar to giant versions of the crayshells Hark had speared and eaten in his youth. When one reared from its hydrolastic control bed to peer at the humans in the tunnel, he did his best to avoid the multiple eyes that were clustered between its twin antennae.

A lengthy descent by a cage elevator, mostly through solid rock, brought them to their own environment. The humans seemed to have been deliberately isolated from the military functions of the base. The first thing to hit the men was the rich and complex diversity of smells. Cooking food mingled with perfume, alcohol, and a dozen blends of incense. Above all, there was the warm funk of humanity. The elevator gates slid back, and the fourteen stepped out into a crowd that strolled and sauntered and aimlessly mingled. It was a shock. After what seemed like a lifetime of military hurry up and wait, there was an almost unthinkable luxury in this aimless-ness and lack of organization. Color was a second shock. Against the drab uniformity of the messdecks, the riotous color in the heart of the recstar was positively shameless. It was something that affected even the long-timers. After a couple of paces, the whole group stopped and just drank in the scene as the elevator gates closed behind them. There was music in the air that vied with the shouts of laughter and the general buzz of conversation. The crowd seemed to stretch on forever. There seemed to be men from every function that humans performed on a battle cluster. A group of drop pilots in midnight-blue uniforms leaned on a supporting pillar singing drunken harmonies. A gang of sluicers in green coveralls emerged from a booze den shouting raucously. But by far the majority were in the dress tan of ground troopers. More important, there were women. There were women in all shapes and sizes, there were women in feathers and bright colors, there were women with painted faces and metallic jewelry, and women who were all but naked. Hark thought that a short redheaded woman had smiled at him, but before he could say anything, she was gone.

He was awed. What was one supposed to do in a place like this? Could it really be so easy? Finally Renchett broke the spell.

"So what do we do first?"

Dyrkin assumed command of the group.

"We find ourselves a comfortable place to drink and plan our strategy."

"Why don't we go straight to the knocking shops and get down to it?"

"You have no imagination or finesse, brother Helot. The fighting men of the Anah 5 deserve better than a twenty-minute knocking shop."

Renchett grinned. "That's the truth!"

In all Therem installations, recreational space seemed to be at a premium, and this was no exception. The overall impression was that an entire town, built from whatever materials were at hand, had been crammed into a system of tunnels and low caverns, but despite what were obviously adverse conditions, an exciting and vibrant humanity flourished in,these caves. The elevator gates had opened on an intersection of three fairly wide but low-ceilinged arterial corridors. Each corridor was lined on both sides with booths offering various forms of entertainment for the visiting men. There were drinking joints and places to eat; one sign advertised dancing girls, while another hinted at a more esoteric sexual display. Smaller alleys ran off the main corridors, and these had their own varied attractions. There was something exhilarating about being surrounded by so many people behaving the way humans were supposed to behave. The fighting men of the Anah 5 advanced down the middle corridor in an aggressively self-conscious group. Dyrkin, as usual, took the point, staring into each booze den they passed.

"The ones right by the elevator banks are strictly for sluicers and suckers. If you're smart, you press on into the center."

Couples walked by arm in arm and openly kissed and fondled each other. Hark was bemused. Would he behave like that? A scantily clad woman with a butterfly tatooed on her forehead actually beckoned to him. He was about to break ranks and go and talk to her, but Dyrkin pulled him up short.

"Forget it, boy. Only a fool goes with the first one he sees."

Hark shrugged and kept on walking. Dyrkin was probably right. There was also so much to see. It was strange to be once again around human constructions. A side effect of living in a battle cluster was that one started to believe that everything in the universe had been made by the Therem and forgot that humans could also be creative in their own simple way. Each of the booths that they passed was unique. Some were gaudy, others makeshift, even dilapidated, but others were nothing less than works of art. There was a terrible irony, Hark thought, in that the women down here created while the men were off somewhere else destroying. Something had gone terribly wrong with the way human beings existed.

The bulk of the materials from which the booths were constructed had obviously been cannibalized from other parts of the base, but also evident were gems, fabrics, and decorative plastics that had no place in a Therem military installation. They had been manufactured in the women's colony or brought in from elsewhere. It all seemed to point to the fact that the women had organized a fairly complex internal economy and were permitted to conduct some measure of interplanetary trade.

Dyrkin, who seemed to be treating the liberty as if it were a full-blown mission, finally found a drinking booth that met his standards. It was a prime spot on the corn- dor, situated under a ventilation shaft. The upward shaft gave the place more headroom and brought a constant cool breeze, and the booth's dim, golden light produced an illusion of spaciousness that was a definite plus in the crowded environment. A huge flag with a stylized and exceedingly phallic serpent painted on it hung down from the inside of the shaft and fluttered gently. There was plenty of room for the men from the Anah 5. The only customers were three e-vac crew and a woman in a silver tunic that might have originally been cut from a radiation suit. A grade-two armorer was sitting at the same table as the woman, but he was so comprehensively drunk that she seemed to be preparing to dump him. A music unit was pumping muted electronic rhythms.

"This place'll do."

"It's kind of quiet, ain't it?"

"It won't stay that way for long, now that we're here."

"Why don't we go someplace with a bit more life? The big place back down the corridor-that looked okay. At least there were women in there."

"Trust the old master. There'll be plenty of women, and not just thumbprint whores, either."

There was a small sensor pad beside the entrance to the booth, and as they went inside, each man was supposed to press the ball of his right thumb into the pad's receptor. Every recstar establishment-eating house, knocking shop, dance hall-had one of these devices to the right of its door. Each strolling vendor and street-walking prostitute carried a smaller, portable version of the unit hung around her neck on a lanyard. The sensors were the basis of the women's economy. Each thumbprint registered somewhere in the infinite memory of the base's central intelligence. The number of thumbprints credited to a business or individual dictated the quantity of goods and services that could be drawn from the base. If either fell below a minimum quota of prints, that franchise would be revoked, and the vendor would find herself back scuffling in the general population. The advantage of the system, from the visiting men's point of view, was that it created a sense of competition that made for a far higher quality and greater variety of available amusements. It ensured that the recstar offered the fighting men the very best that it could. It also gave the Therem, if indeed they cared, the capacity to monitor the tastes and appetites of every single trooper who took liberty there. At first, Hark assumed that the thumbprint system was yet another example of Therem applied psychology. It was only later that he discovered that the women themselves had been instrumental in devising the system. The competition gave them a certain sense of worth and dignity and, at least in their own minds, made their situation something above a state of enforced prostitution. The distinction was largely illu-sionary, but in the Therem Alliance, even an illusion was better than nothing.

When the fourteen troopers had seated themselves, a tall, muscular blonde emerged from a room in back of the booth.

"I'm Vana, and I'm going to be your hostess for as long as you're here."

Fourteen troopers stared hungrily at Vana. "Will you look at that."

"Glad you like what you see." Vana's smile was strictly professional.

Dyrkin immediately got down to business. "So what you got to get loaded on around here?"

"You must be the maingun in this bunch."

"You got it."

"So you know what the deal is." "We got to like the place first." "Maybe you should try the special."

"Sure, specials all round."

Hark realized that there was some kind of liberty ritual getting started here. The special came in liter steins, piping hot, heavily spiced, and accompanied by beakers of ice water. Hark took a first experimental swallow, and his head swam. The drink had to contain other intoxicants in addition to the alcohol. Although powerful, the effect was much more subtle than the burn of the raw booze he'd tasted on the Anah 5. After three rounds of specials, Dyrkin made up his mind.

"Yo, Vana!"

"You want another round?"

"We want to make this place our home base for the duration."

Vana nodded. "Fourteen of you?"

"Fourteen."

'Ten thumbs per man per thousand minutes. We supply the food, and we invite over some of our friends. Deal?"

Dyrkin looked around at the others. Not all of them looked completely sold on the booth, but they all nodded. They had to concede that Dyrkin knew how to run a liberty.

"Deal."

The grade-two armorer, who had been facedown on the table for a while, sat up with a start. The woman in silver had already begun to exchange glances with Renchett.

"What the hell is going on in here?" the armorer demanded drunkenly.

He got unsteadily to his feet and squinted blearily at the troopers.

"Forsaken ground monkeys."

He had clearly taken leave of his reason.

"I ain't sharing a bar with no ground monkeys."

Renchett was on his feet and coming around the table.

"We got a problem here?"

He slapped the drunk hard on the chest with the flat of his hand. "Because-if you got a problem-" He punctuated his words with further slaps. His voice was flat and unemotional. "-then you-better-leave."

The drunk staggered backward. Renchett was maneuvering him in the direction of the exit. When he had the armorer where he wanted him, he propelled him through the doorway with a practiced kick. This was more than enough for the e-vac crew. They practically fell out of their seats.

"We ain't no heroes. You can have the place."

The fourteen had secured their territory.

Just as Vana had promised, the women quickly began to arrive. To everyone's delight they seemed to have no reservations about getting acquainted with the troopers. A young, very rounded olive-skinned woman who said her name was Zydell had wriggled into Hark's lap after only the most minimal of invitations. The specials had started to make Hark a little dizzy. He'd started to sweat and was seeing the faintest of blurred hallucinations. On the advice of Vana, he'd switched to a pale amber concoction that was called a juliet. The dizzy feeling had abated and he'd stopped sweating, but if anything, the hallucinations had become more intense. After three Juliets, and with Zydell smiling, stroking his ear, and running her hands over his close-cropped hair, he felt uncommonly good. Better, in fact, than he could ever remember feeling before. This had to be the real reward of the warrier. Zydell held up her sensor box, and he happily pressed his thumb into it and eased down in his seat, luxuriating in the sense of well-being. Then an unfortunate thought struck him. Maybe this was exactly the way the Therem wanted him to feel. More of their bloody psychology. He was surprised at the strength of his own cynicism.

A trio of dancers in huge painted masks with exaggeratedly full, red lips and heavy sultry eyes swayed into the booth. After they'd completed a complex and highly erotic dance, they went around collecting thumbprints. The other women were vocal in their encouragement to give generously. At this point, Renchett, who had been kissing the woman in the silver tunic, looked around at the other men.

"Think we may be giving a bit freely with the thumbs, my brothers."

There was a chorus of disagreement from the women, but Renchett shook his head and held up a hand for silence.

"The way you have to look at it, my brothers, is that if all of us went sticking our thumbs in every receptacle that presented itself, we'd end up devaluing the currency."

There were shouts of approval from the men and catcalls from the women.

Zydell squirmed in Hark's lap. "That's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard."

Hark grinned. It had to be another liberty ritual, convincing the women that they wouldn't settle for anything less than value for print.

"I heard that if a man makes too free with his thumbprint, the sensors start refusing to accept it."

Vana raised a quizzical eyebrow. "I never heard that."

Zydell nuzzled Hark's ear. "You're not going to stop pressing my box, are you?"

Hark was about to thumb the sensor when a voice in his head warned him to back off for a moment. He held up his thumb.

"You heard what the topman said. Maybe I shouldn't be making too free with this."

Zydell didn't fit quite as comfortably into his lap anymore. "You want me to go?"

Hark didn't even have to summon his courage. The Juliets led him smoothly into it. "I thought you and me might go someplace together."

"I'd want double to go to my place. If you're so concerned about your precious thumb, we could do it right here. Some of your messmates don't seem too concerned about privacy."

Hark looked around and saw that a handful of the men had already retired to the shadows and were writhing on the floor with their female companions. He recognized Helot, nearest to the light, but he couldn't make out the features of the others. Hark didn't think that he could handle anything so public.

"I think I'd rather go for double."

At that moment, Vana put another juliet in front of him. He tetdn't actually asked for it, but he thumbed her sensor just the same. He didn't want to be too cheap. He put an arm round Zydell.

"We'll go to your place as soon as I've finished this."

"Sure." She didn't sound particularly enthusiastic.

The first fight started before the drink was gone. As liberty fights went, it was a comparatively mild affair. A gang of crawler jockeys, some ten in number and in worse condition than any of the the men from the Anah 5, stumbled through the entrance. Clearly they were unaware that the booth with the phallic snake banner had already been taken. Inside the door, they stopped dead, those in the rear stumbling blindly into the leaders.

"What?"

"The goddamn place is full of ground monkeys."

The troopers looked up, but nobody moved.

"Ah, let's get out of here. We don't need no trouble."

For a moment, it seemed as if this voice of reason might prevail and, despite the insult, the intrusion would come to nothing. Then a much more slurred voice piped up.

"Hell, we can take 'em."

Two more equally slurred voices joined in.

"Sure, screw 'em."

"Any crawler hump can take ground monkeys." This one seemed to fancy himself an orator. He glanced at his companions. "Am I right?"

The response was the kind of bravado of which only the very drunk are capable.

"Yeah, right!"

"Screw 'em."

The point of no return had been passed.

Renchett and Dyrkin were on their feet, the woman in silver protesting as she slid from Renchett's lap to the floor. The other troopers were also rising. The women were scrambling for cover. Dyrkin faced the drop pilots.

"You've got ten seconds to get out of here."

"Screw you!"

The crawler jockeys surged forward in a disorganized knot, but they really didn't stand a chance. Their reactions were slowed, and they hadn't had the same basic combat training as the troopers had. They weren't able to operate as a cohesive group. The troopers, on the other hand, drunk as they were, went to work together like a machine. Boots, fists, and the odd blackjack rained down a hail of blows. Renchett was swinging a chair in a wide circle. In less than a minute, it was all over. Four jocks were unconscious on the floor, and the rest had fled. Vana was inspecting the booth, totaling the damage in her head. The troopers were congratulating each other and calling for more booze. They had come through the incident virtually unscathed. Kendo had lost a tooth to a wild punch, and Dacker had been kicked in the groin, but that was all. Hark was one of the ones delegated to drag the unconscious jockeys outside and dump them in the corridor. He came back grinning and rubbing his hands with the air of a man who feels he's completed a well-done job. He had managed to get in a few licks of his own before the strangers had cut and run. His grin faded as he discovered that Zydell was nowhere to be seen. Damn. He'd been about to leave with her. All he could do was inwardly shrug and call for another drink. There were plenty more where she came from. At least, he hoped there were.

The second fight came after about twenty minutes. The crawler crews returned in force, twenty-five of them or more, carrying clubs and pieces of broken furniture; it was obvious that their sole intention was to stomp the troopers from the Anah 5. The fourteen might have been taken by surprise had Kemlo not been outside the booth collecting his wits and nursing his bruised jaw. He spotted the gang marching determinedly down the corridor and darted into the booth to give the alarm.

"Big team of jockeys coming at us!"

Weapons were hastily pulled from their hiding places. Vana yelled at Dyrkin. "Take it outside, goddamm it! I don't want the whole place wrecked. There's stuff in here that I can't replace."

The fourteen troopers boiled out of the booth. The pilots were almost on them. Renchett's knife flashed in the dim light. There were shouts and screams as the noninvolved struggled to get out of the way before the two gangs ran headfirst into each other. Dyrkin's voice rose above the general din.

"Flying wedge! Hit it!"

Dyrkin had no intention of running headfirst into anything. They were in combat again and back on their programmed reflexes. They formed a solid arrowhead and, with Renchett and Dyrkin himself at its point, charged the disorganized mob of jocks. The crawler crews split apart, and the troopers waded into them. Hark found himself in the second rank. When he'd followed the others out of the booth, he'd had no weapon, but almost immediately a jock had swung at him with a short length of ceram pipe. Conditioning took over, and Hark chopped down hard with the edge of his hand. He thought he heard the wrist snap. The pipe dropped, and he caught it before it hit the ground. Now he started to swing it. The moment took hold of him. He being was dedicated to knocking over crawler men. Bastards.

At first, it was a surprisingly quiet fight. Nobody yelled or screamed; all that could be heard were grunts, curses, and the sounds of falling blows. The troopers started to fan out, pushing the jocks before them. The nature of the fight began to change. The crawler jockeys wanted to break and run, but the troopers were pressing them too hard, and they were being forced into the surrounding booths. This, in turn, caused a new phase of confusion. The occupants of the booths took exception to a crowd of bruised and bleeding men falling into their parties. Further fights started, with the crawler crews taking the brunt of it. Dyrkin's single sharp burst of organization had been more than enough. He relaxed. The troopers who still wanted to brawl followed them into the booths and added to the mayhem. Others stood and caught their breath and watched as the chain reaction got started.

The fighting was threatening to spread all the way down the corridor. Men were thrown through the flimsy partitions that separated the booths. Crystal screens splintered and fragmented. Curtains billowed into strange shapes, were ripped down, and drunks staggered blindly, wrapped up in their folds. The walls around a jum-yum show collapsed, and the participants scrambled from the mudpit, reaching for their clothes. A sluicer on a private orgy of property damage ran headfirst into a stone column and stunned himself. A number of men were crawling on all fours clutching their heads. Other casualties simply leaned, and still more were stretched out cold. A small fire had started in a darkened booth. Somewhere else, a woman was yelling hysterical abuse. There was the first pop of an electrogun. It was quickly followed by the shrill of whistles and the crash of steel feet on the corridors. "Shore patrol!"

Only the very, very drunk needed a second warning. Nobody wanted to be grabbed by the shore patrol. Such an unlucky offender automatically went back to his ship and maybe a field punishment. The fighting stopped instantly, and, to a man, the brawlers scattered. The sirens were coming down the corridor. There was no way that anyone could stand up to the shore patrol. The white-uniformed women in their heavy-duty servo rigs were stronger than any man. There were rumors that even without the rigs, the women of the shore patrol could incapacitate a man. Once those steel pincers locked onto one's arm, there was no escape. If the victim struggled, they'd crush the bone.

Hark took off with the rest. He was running blindly, straight down the corridor. The sirens trilled, and the servo feet crashed behind him. He glanced back. The shore patrol servos were like huge parodies of humans with hulking counterbalanced shoulders and a flashing light where the head should logically be. They lurched relentlessly forward, exactly reproducing the movements of the small figures inside them. Someone near him was shouting with laughter. Hark could feel it, too. There was an exhilaration in the running. People stood in the entrances to booths and watched them pounding past. Some applauded and shouted encouragement.

The sirens seemed to be falling back, but still he kept going. He stopped only when he was far ahead of them. By this time, he was completely winded. He had to bend double, hands on his knees, to force air into his straining lungs. Opposite him, in a similar position, was one of the jocks who had been involved in the fracas. They looked at each other. The earlier fury seemed a little absurd. Slowly they straightened up and went off in different directions.

Hark suddenly realized that he was lost. He turned around twice. Everyone who had run from the shore patrol had zigzagged and turned corners. He had simply followed suit. Now he didn't have a clue how to get back to the booth or to the rest of his messmates. There were people strolling by, but there was nothing that he could ask them. He didn't even know the name of the place. All he could remember was the phallic serpent banner.

A nearby drinking booth looked inviting. It was a low, faceted dome, and a warm red glow shone through the translucent hexagonal panels. He ducked through the low entrance, thumbing the sensor as he moved inside. A couple of people glanced up at him, but there was no overt hostility-in fact, the place was strangely subdued. The patrons there came from all the functions on a cluster and seemed to share two things in common: Almost all of men were veteran longtimers, and a high proportion were fitted with prosthetic limbs. They lounged on cushions that covered practically the entire floor. There was very little conversation, a noise generator filled the booth with quiet ambient sound. There was a drifting dreaminess to the interior of the dome that was like nothing Hark had previously encountered. Drinks were being served from a low half-moon bar, but they were largely ignored. Instead, attentions were focused on the small, pink ceramic cylinders, each about the size, of a man's forearm, that were being passed from hand to hand. Each man in turn opened the valve on the neck of the cylinder and drew deeply on the molded plastic nozzle. One lungful seemed to be enough. The valve was closed, the cylinder passed on, and then the man who had just used it flopped back on the cushions. Escaping gas filled the place with a sweet, almost sickly smell that made Hark feel a little queasy.

There were surprisingly few women in the dome, and the ones who were lying on the cushions looked much the same age as the men. They were certainly much older than Zydell and the other women who'd been at the "phallic serpent." The only exception was a very young woman who was sitting on a stool in the center of the floor. Naked to the waist, wearing only a pair of very tight cut-off shorts, she leaned back, one knee raised, arms braced against the back of the stool. She was staring dreamily at the ceiling. Blond curls cascaded down her shoulders. Although the pose was deliberately sexy, the girl seemed totally oblivious to the rest of the room. She looked like a living statue.

Hark squatted down on a cushion next to the half-moon bar. He wasn't sure how one was supposed to behave in this place. He glanced at the bartender.

"Could I get a juliet?"

"What the hell's a juliet?"

"I don't know." Maybe the juliet was something exclusive to the "phallic serpent." "So what's your special?';

A longtimer with a steel hand leaned over and spoke to him. His voice was slow and slurred and grated from deep in his throat. "You're in the wrong place, kid." I m sorry.

"You're too young. You need to be out fighting and whoring. You'll get to be like us soon enough. If you ain't killed first."

"I don't understand."

"Of course you don't. You're too young and green." "Do you know a place that has a serpent banner?"

The longtimer leaned closer. His breath reeked of the sweet gas. "Look into my eyes, boy. What do you see there?"

The eyes were heavy-lidded and bloodshot from the gas, but there was something else, a deadness that didn't come from anything but a lifetime of combat horror.

"That's the light-year stare, boy. It means you don't care no more. All you want to do is blot it out. How long you think any of us in here has got?"

"Get out of here, boy. Take all your energy someplace else and leave us alone."

Hark stood up so fast that he almost hit his head on the domed roof. He scrambled through the exit with all the clumsiness of headlong drunken panic. He didn't want to be one of those old men. Suddenly an idea beckoned. Couldn't he hide out there? Never go back to the Anah 5? The thought evaporated. They'd get him on his thumbprint. All he could do was go and look for his messmates. They were all he had. He chose a direction at random and started walking, hoping to see something that looked familiar. Nothing did. He knew that he ought to ask someone, but he held off after his experience in the dome. More than anything, he wanted to walk. He'd walk until he found a really rowdy booth, and then he'd ask someone about the phallic serpent banner. It was right at that moment that he heard the voice.

"Harkaan? Is that you?"

He turned and faced complete unreality. Her clothes were black and skintight, her face was heavily painted, and her hair had been bleached white and fluffed out, but there was no mistake.

"Conchela?"

Conchela, the witch girl who had ridden with him to the Valley of the Gods. He looked at what she had become and wondered how he appeared to her.

"Do they still call you Conchela?"

She nodded. "They still call me that."