Their Master's war

Three

"Poor little bleeders."

Topman Rance leaned back in the angle of two plasma ducts and braced his foot against a third, making himself as comfortable as possible. Over at the far end of Receiving Hold 3, the first of the new intake were starting to emerge from the lock that led to the sterile area. They looked like corpses in the blue light that spilled out from the lock, and they moved as if, to a man, they were demoralized and completely terrified. Arms were wrapped around chests and hands covered genitals, a few fingered their freshly shaved heads, and all peered uneasily into the shadows as if they expected some new awfulness to fall on them at any moment. Back in those shadows, Rance nodded. He liked them like that. Once the fight and the pride had been juiced out of them and they were about to jump out of their skins, they were also ready for him to rebuild them.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing on any star vessel was the noise. It was never quiet. There was a constant dull cacophony of sighs and booms and deep metallic groans. Discharging energy snapped and crackled, and escaping gases whistled and shrilled. Water dripped, and totally unknown things grumbled and murmured. Those who spent their lives on starships never thought of them as cold machines. It was like being inside, even being a part of, a vast living organism. Receiving Hold 3 on its own was quite enough to awe any newcomer. It looked like a place where gods might dwell, a huge cathedral space enclosed in a frame of arching power conduits like giant pillars and the meshed complexity of the plasma transmission. It was a place of dark, menacing spaces and mysterious blackness. It was also big enough to accommodate a dropcraft or an e-vac. At the opposite end, the towering bulkhead doors opened directly onto the emptiness of space.

"If those poor bastards knew that, they'd probably shit on the spot."

Rance remembered the first time he'd seen empty space. It was a moment he'd never forget. He'd been almost as raw as these suckers.

A plasma throwoff crackled and flowed down the wall. The whole intake cringed. Rance knew that it was almost time to show himself, but he held off for a few moments to give the debris in their minds a little longer to settle. As if it wasn't bad enough that they'd been ripped from their families, their culture, and their planet — from everything that might give them a familiar bearing-they'd also been given the datashot. The datashot may have been ultimately efficient, a complete education and military training in a single electric moment, but it was also ultimately cruel. Even the longtimers didn't like to talk about their moment of datashot. Men who'd spent a lifetime in combat and seen a dozen sets of friends killed, men who needed only the slightest of excuses to wade knee-deep in blood atrocity, still feared the memory of the datashot. All that one needed to know to be a ground trooper of the Therem Alliance was fused into the brain in a single jolting instant. The horror was a side effect of unimaginable pain. The machines that made the interface and the creatures that operated them had no idea that the agony they caused was quite literally unbearable. The illusion was one of the body being exploded into fragments. The spine would snap in a thousand places, the skull would be shattered, and bunches of nerves would be torn out by the roots as waves of burning images seared the passages of the mind. After the pain there was another horror. Suddenly, there were pictures inside each recruit's head like a new mind. They seemed to come from nowhere, memories in which the rememberer didn't exist, memories to which he had no right. The troopers knew things that there was no reason for them to know. They prayed that they'd go mad and that they'd stop trying to make sense of it all. Rance shook his head. After twenty years, the memory was still too close.

An atmosphere line valved off an excess of pressure with a shriek. The intake moved closer to each other as if looking for some kind of mutual protection. That was also good. It was never too early for them to start banding and forming ties. No one else was going to look after them. They were all out of the lock now, all twenty replacements, shaved and sprayed and irradiated. Even the bacteria of their home planet had been taken from them.

Rance swung down from his vantage point. His boots crashed on the steel floor, and the echoes bounced around the vaulted roof of the hold. The intake started to back away, back toward the blue-lighted sterile lock. What did they think they were going to do? Did they think the lock was the way back into the womb? He rapped out his first command.

"Stand right where you are!"

Without thinking, all of the intake halted. Some even came halfway to attention. The datashot had taken and was already starting to shake down into the normal brain patterns.

"Does everyone understand what I'm saying?"

It was actually too much to expect any of them to answer. They had the new language in their heads, but the use of it would require a little practice.

"If you understand what I'm saying, I want you to raise your right hand. This is a very simple order. If you understand what I'm saying, raise your right hand."

All twenty of them raised their hands. Two, however, raised their left. They would have to go in for testing. If the flip-flop persisted, they'd finish up on disposal. Rance tapped the switchbox on his belt. More lights came on in the hold. It made the place a little less intimidating. The intake still had their arms in the air. They probably wouldn't lower them until they were given the countermand. Rance assumed control. After the data-shot, they were like blank slates. He was the first thing that would be imprinted on them. There was nothing like a little discipline to help their minds shake down and start functioning.

"Stand right where you are! You don't have to run away from me. You're going to grow to love me before we're through. And while we're at it, why don't we lower those stupid hands. We don't want to look foolish, do we?"

The hands dropped. Rance gave a satisfied nod. He walked forward and indicated a white line that had been painted across the floor of the hold.

"This is very simple. You will all move up to this line here. You will all face in this direction, and you will stand with your toes touching the line. And when I say touching, I mean touching. I want the toes of both your feet exactly on the line. Not behind it and not in front of it. Now, move!"

They jumped. Rance was reasonably pleased. It shouldn't take too long to shake this bunch into combat readiness. Rance walked slowly along the line with deliberate steps, his boots ringing on the floor. In every way he was the complete opposite of the dazed naked men in his charge. His black suit was glossy, his harness gleamed, and the steel tips of his boots were buffed until they shone like mirrors. In his twenty years of fighting for the Therem, the life of a ground trooper had thrown everything at him that it was possible to take and still survive. His eyes were hard, narrow slits with deeply etched, humorless lines radiating from their corners. His mouth was a tight-lipped line with few signs that it ever let go and laughed. His hair was cropped short in the style of the longtimers and was rapidly turning to an iron-gray. A network of scars ran from his right ear to the point of his jaw and bore testimony to the ravages of the unending war.

"You are all very confused now, but the confusion will not last. You have been recruited as ground troopers attached to the fifth ship of the Anah battle cluster of the Therem Alliance. You are already twelve licks out from your home planet, and you will never see it again. In our language, the enemy we fight is called the Yal. It's doubtful that you will ever come face to face with them. The war in which you are now involved is almost completely fought by proxies. We are some of theiii. All the information that you need to make the adjustments to your new situation has already been placed in your memories. You simply have to accept it and make use of it. Once you do that, your confusion will diminish."

One man's toes protruded over the white line. Rance paused beside him and brought his steel-shod boot down hard on them. The recruit screamed and fell to his knees. This one would have to be put in for reexamination.

"On your feet, damn you!"

The man struggled painfully to stand. It was likely that at least one of his toes was broken; Rance had stamped on them with considerable force. It wasn't that Rance was a sadist. It was that he simply didn't have the time anymore. If the individual trooper was going to survive, if the squad was going to survive, indeed, if the whole damned army was going to survive, orders had to be obeyed immediately and precisely. Approximation could mean death or worse. There had been a time when Rance had questioned, when he'd even railed against the system by which the Therem held them all in total bondage. Now he neither raged nor wanted to know why. There was no percentage. He just lived. In a war without reasons or answers or even passion, and certainly without an end, survival became everything. Rebellion had been replaced by a dry bitterness.

"You may be wondering why you should have been snatched up into space from your idyllic and primitive little planet by what you thought of as a god and pressed into service in a war you never heard of. You may feel that it's extremely unfair." Rance looked coldly up and down the line of men. "From this point on you can forget about fair. This is a vastly unfair universe. The best you can expect is a good deal of variety."

Static arced with a sharp whipcrack. The intake jerked. Rance didn't even look around. They were starting to settle down. The sooner the better, as far as he was concerned. His sense of order was offended by their stumbling around like zombies after the trauma of pickup and datashot. He took these details only because pickups were ten times worse. Rance always did his best to avoid pickups, fixing it so that he could stay on the mothership, up in the cluster. Pickups could become messy. Even with the mind control cranked to redline, the primitives could still serk out and cause a great deal more trouble than they were worth. He'd heard that this lot's culture had been based on a symbiosis with some kind of riding lizard. Animals could also be a problem. Apparently a number of these couldn't be driven off after their riders had been taken, and were pulped by the backwash as the pickup shuttle lifted.

It was the eyes that he had to watch. When they came out of the sterile area, their eyes were like those of children, wide and frightened, unmarked and unknowing. It was all too easy to forget the bodies of these men. They were sinewy and lean, hardened by deprivation, some bore the scars of knives or the goring of animals. These men were hunters and fighters. They were able to adjust to the situation and their new, imposed memories with great rapidity. Sometimes the adjustment could be so rapid that more than one topman had lost his life when a recruit used his new skills and knowledge in an attempt at an old-fashioned, take-a-few-with-him kamikaze.

"You may wonder why a species like the Therem should bother with primitives like yourself. The truth of the matter is that our masters find us valuable weapons. And make no mistake, the Therem are precisely that. Now and again, you may hear them referred to as our allies. That's shit. They own us. We're clever violent little monkeys, and we make great planetside shock troops. Why do you think that they'd go to all the trouble of maintaining an accessible supply of us close to all combat sectors? Somewhere in your brand-new memories, you'll find the phrase 'planet forming.' There are hundreds of worlds just like yours, planned environments to keep you primitive but also to make you tough and resourceful, worlds from which you can be harvested any time they need replacement battle fodder."

Rance halted. He looked up and down the line of men.

"You have been harvested. You're battle fodder, and you might as well make the best of it."

Rance noticed that two of the intake seemed to be shaking down. Their eyes were starting to harden and focus. It was time to get them under his control before they got ideas of their own. He stood in front of the nearest one, a young man of medium height, in his late teens or early twenties, with the high forehead and the hooked bird of prey nose that seemed to be common to this colony. He looked capable enough, and recent extensive bruising on his left shoulder tended to indicate that he was a fighter.

"You know your name yet?"

The recruit's lips moved awkwardly. "Umm…"

"Come on, boy. You know your name. You can do it."

"Hark…"

"One more time."

"Hark. My… name… is… Hark." "Very good."

Hark knew that they'd somehow changed his name. They'd also changed his language. The new unfamiliar words felt strange, harsh even, in his mouth, but at least the panic had receded a little. He felt more able to control it. He didn't understand where he was or what was happening, but he found that if he concentrated on an object, the new parts of his mind would tell him what it was and what it was for. When the images had first come, immediately after the pain, they had been so vast that he had felt they were going to swallow him. His identity was diminished almost to nothing. The only consolation was that he could ask questions of the new mind and, at least, he was Hark. There was a number, as well.

"I'm Hark 34103-301782."

"Very good, but don't overreach yourself."

Rance seemed to have lost interest in him. He walked down the line, looking closely at each recruit in turn. When he finished, he stood a few paces back.

"I think you're ready for the first stage."

He touched a control on his belt, and a small port opened. A number of gray metal cases, one for each recruit, glided through it, floating just a fraction of a centimeter from the ground on a gain-reverse field. Hark was amazed that he knew these things.

"This is your basic kit. Inside it you will find underclothing, multimed-in fact, everything that you need to keep yourself clean and healthy. You will also find that there are spaces to store field rations and ammunition as and when they're issued. The basic kit is your friend. It will follow you anywhere."

Even though the new mind explained that it was a perfectly normal, even mundane, occurrence arid nothing compared to what he might see in the future, Hark still marveled when the cases divided, each one floating toward a different recruit to settle on the ground in front of him.

Rance seemed to be amused by their reactions. "Open the cases."

Seventeen of the twenty recruits leaned forward and flicked the red toggle on the top of the case. Seventeen cases flipped open. Rance made a mental note of the three who had failed to connect with the instructions in their new minds. Among them was the one who'd had his toes stomped. Rance knew it was too late for that one. He was beyond reexamination. He'd have to go all the way back.

"You will take out a set of underclothes and put them on.

All of the seventeen seemed to know what to do. They picked out a pair of shorts and a singlet each, but a number, including Hark, put them on inside out at first try. Rance simply pointed at the mistake and, straight away, it became clear. Once they were dressed, even if it was only in drab tan shorts and a singlet, they were invested with a certain minimal dignity. Shoulders were squared, and the terror had gone out of their eyes. Rance was making a final inspection when four other men in suits and harness came through a port and into the hold. Their insignia identified them as overmen, the rank below topman. They were longtimers, and they saluted Rance with an easy familiarity. One of them, a short, thickset man, did all the talking.

"These ready for the messdecks yet?"

Rance shrugged. "Ready as they're going to get. You can berth them down for the throughwatch. Nextday, we introduce them to suits, boots, helmets, and weapons."

"Nextday? Soon as that?"

Rance scowled at the overman. "It's going to bloody have to be, Elmo, my son. They'll need to be jumptuned by the day after. I've heard we gotta jump in three."

"The cluster can't make no jump window in three days, can it?"

"It can if it has to. By all accounts, things are not going as well as they might in the sector."

The recruits were split into groups of five and led away by the overmen, one to each group. Exactly as Rance had predicted, the kit cases followed them, floating neatly to heel, each behind its own individual recruit. Even using the new mind as fully as he could, Hark found that he was totally unable to make any sense of the journey from Receiving Hold 3 to the troopers' messdecks. Hark was in the group led by Overman Elmo, the one who had done the talking. They followed him along a series of passages and companionways that curved and twisted in and out of a much larger and even more baffling system of ducts and grids and conduits that were the bowels of the cluster ship. Much of the interior of the ship seemed to exist in semidarkness with only intermittent red safety lights. Other parts were constantly bathed in streaming and dripping condensation, while still more flashed with dancing static. As well as the steam and electricity, there were also an infinite number of strange and, to Hark, very alien sounds. They ranged from a bass shudder that jarred his teeth to a high metallic whistling that rose beyond the limits of human hearing. Overman Elmo was short and stocky, with odd, spiky ginger hair that grew only patchily on one side of his head. Later it would be told how Elmo had been badly irradiated at the legendary assault on the Seven Walls. Overman Elmo didn't waste words and didn't seem particularly interested in the recruits' awestruck reaction to their first encounter with the deep interior of the ship. On the other hand, he did seem to be an individual who wouldn't crack or even waver under pressure. Despite all the strangeness, Hark instinctively trusted him and wondered if they were to be in his permanent charge.

As with so much else in the ship, the messdeck to which they were taken looked not so much like something that had been constructed with men in mind but something that had occurred naturally in the distant past, dark metal caves with ceilings so low that there were places where Hark had to duck his head. The messdeck was sandwiched between two levels of impossible machinery, the function of which, Hark suspected, only the Gods completely knew. It was Spartan in its simplicity. On the other side of the central aisle, there were two lines of what, the new mind informed him, the troopers called coffins. Each coffin was a container for one man. There were twenty on each side of the aisle. Every one had its own transparent cover. When the cover was lowered, it formed a perfect seal around its occupant. Pipes running into the base of the unit could pump in air in the event of an atmosphere failure. The coffin also had the capability of putting its occupant into something called the longsleep. Surprisingly, the new mind had little to tell him about the longsleep. It was uncharacteristically hazy, and he was unable to make it focus. It seemed that the longsleep was something that he would have to find out about for himself. All the coffins except five had their covers raised, and with military precision, they were all at exactly the same angle.

Overman Elmo scowled at the recruits. "Parasites in the belly of the beast, that's what we are. You'll get used to it, though. If you live that long."

He indicated the five coffins with their lids down.

"Pick one each. Their previous owners don't have any use for them."

"What happened to them?"

Elmo treated the recruit who'd spoken to a withering look. "What the hell do you think happened to them? This is a combat outfit. They're dead, and you're their replacements."

Each of the five recruits stood by a coffin.

"Okay, if you look at the base of the unit, you'll see a green toggle. Flip it out and your kit will stow itself in the base of the coffin. You see the slot? That's the place, and the only place, where you keep your kit."

The five recruits did as they were told, and the five eases slid obediently into their slots.

"You will observe, above the head of each unit, there's a rack and lockers. These will take your suit and helmet, your boots and weaponry. You see that one section of your locker space is padded and has an independent environment. You may well be wondering why anyone should go to so much trouble over a locker, particularly a worthless trooper's locker. This section is for your suit. Your suit is your life and your constant companion, and you will cherish it even above yourself. After you have slept through, you will be introduced to your suits. Once the rest of your equipment has been issued, I will show you how to correctly square away your area. I will show you once, and after that, short of actual battle conditions, I never want to see it vary. On this deck, you do things my way or you come to understand grief. I hope you're all taking me seriously."

Just in case they weren't, he allowed them a few seconds of contemplation before he went on.

Inside the coffin was a blanket and a small pillow. These were folded and laid out with an exact regularity. Hark saw how, in this world of machines, the men were made closer to machines themselves. He had a sudden longing to see the sky.

Elmo dismissed them. At the far end of the deck there was an open area where the troopers could spend what off-duty time they were allowed. Though reasonably clean, the area had a certain air of chaos that stood in total contrast to the military order of the coffins and lockers. The chairs, couches, and other mismatched furniture were old and battered. The long table that provided a central focus for the area had been slashed and carved on until hardly any of its original surface was left unmarked. The bulkheads were covered with drawings and pictures almost exclusively of naked women in fanciful and occasionally outrageous poses. Hark wondered what had happened to the women in this strange, enclosed metal world. If this initial experience was anything to go by, he doubted that he would get any immediate answer.

One piece of furniture puzzled Hark. It was circular and plastic, with a slight depression in its middle. As far as he could see, it must have been originally created for I a very strange creature and been adapted for human use only by what had obviously been a good deal of applied violence.

A screen that showed moving pictures was set like a window in one of the bulkheads. A scratched and blotchy drama was being acted out by figures in strange armor who fought with swords. Back on his home world, this would have been a magical wonder to Hark; here, the new mind told him that it was only entertainment. There were just three men in the area. Two were staring at the screen while a third was winding tape around the handle of a large and vicious-looking knife. It was the same tape that affixed the pictures of naked women to the bulkheads, and it had also been employed extensively to repair the furniture. Hark, who was the first of the five to enter the area, nodded in greeting and was completely ignored. Finally the man taping the knife looked up and grunted. "New meat."

Hark nodded again. "We are new here."

The one with the knife spit on the floor and wrapped another twist of tape around the handle. This messdeck apparently had no tradition of hospitality or welcome for new recruits.

These troopers were hardly what Hark had expected. He had started to imagine that their future comrades would all be slick and polished like Topman Rance or Overman Elmo. These three were quite the opposite. They were close to ragged. The trooper with the knife was stripped to the waist, and an oily bandanna was tied around his head. There was a certain logic to that. It was hot on the messdeck. The man's chest was covered in scar tissue from old burns. His uniform pants were equally scrungy and crudely hacked off between knee and ankle. In total contrast, his boots were immaculate. The trooper had stopped winding tape around the knife handle and was now honing the gleaming blade with a small whetstone. His total absorption in the task made it close to an act of love.

Hark looked slowly around the room.

"Is it permitted for us to sit down?"

Again he was ignored. Hark glanced at the other recruits and shrugged. He selected a chair at the head of the big table and sat down. The other four did the same. Their attitude was one of uneasy defiance. What could these men do to them that hadn't already been done? A series of deep, rumbling shudders ran through the ship. The recruits turned to each other in alarm. The old-timers didn't even look up. The tremors subsided, and the recruits attempted to relax. Hark turned and watched the flickering images on the screen. The strange armored warriors were still hacking their way through their bloody intrigues. Unfortunately, when the characters spoke, their language was unintelligible. Even going deep into the new mind, he couldn't understand a word they were saying. After a while, he stopped trying to follow the story and settled into listening to the constant internal noises of the ship.

He was drifting into a half sleep when he heard voices from the other end of the messdeck and five men came down the aisle between the twin lines of coffins. They were an odd mixture. Two were in full harness and bulky black suits and carried black visored helmets under their arms. The new mind told Hark that these were the suits that Topman Rance had mentioned. These were the suits that the troopers wore into battle and into the emptiness of space. The material from which the suits were constructed was like nothing that Hark had ever seen. It was constantly in motion as if it were alive, molding itself to the wearer's body every time he moved. The other three men were dirty and oily, as if they had spent many hours doing hard manual work around machinery. They were dressed in ragged, cut-down dark green coveralls. One o them was a giant, his head shaved and his body such a mass of scars that it scarcely seemed possible that he could have lived through such injuries. Part of his left arm, a section of the forearm between the wrist and elbow, had been replaced by a steel and plastic prosthesis. Despite the fact that the section above it was entirely false, the giant's left hand seemed perfectly natural.

The giant was first into the rest area. He was so tall that he had to maintain a continuous stoop to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling. The trooper with the knife looked up as he approached the table.

"So how goes it, Dyrkin?"

The giant snorted. "How's it supposed to go when you've spent all the watch unblocking a filter in the forsaken twenties?"

The trooper with the knife shrugged. "You shoulda gone sick like me."

Dyrkin scowled. "Still jerking off that knife, Ren-chett? I wouldn't have thought you'd be so eager to use it again, not after the last time."

Renchett wiped the blade one last time and then slid it into his boot. "I'm in no hurry. No doubt we'll be dropping into some kind of shit soon enough… and talking of shit-" He jabbed a bony finger in the direction of Hark and the other recruits. "You see what we got here?"

Dyrkin nodded. "I seen it. I was just getting around to dealing with it."

He suddenly lunged across the table and grabbed Hark by the front of his singlet. "You're sitting in my chair, filth. What you got to say about that?"

Hark's mouth dropped open. "I didn't know-I-"

"Then you ought to have known."

Hark found himself jerked up and out of his seat, dragged across the table, and thrown bodily into a bulkhead. He lay winded for a few seconds, then he started to grow angry. He might have been delivered into this alien place, but he was still an Ashak-ai warrior. He scrambled to his feet and swung his fist at Dyrkin. The blow was stopped cold by a massive hand. The giant twisted Hark's arm, forcing Hark to bend half double. At the same time, he brought the steel forearm down across Hark's back. Hark's knees buckled, and he dropped to the deck plates with the world spinning around him.