Their Master's war

Five

Hark was so terrified that he didn't care who knew it. In fifteen minutes the ship was due to make a jump. His new memory contained only the scantiest information about the jump. He knew that it was what moved the cluster from one point in the universe to another in a matter of minutes. There was the suggestion that it had something to do with the bending of the relationship between space and time, but there was nothing about the actual mechanics of the thing. It was either a closely guarded Therem secret or maybe just something that mere troopers didn't need to know. There was nothing about the terror of the jump in his new memory. He had learned about that on the messdeck during the last three days. Directly the jump had been announced, the whole messdeck had fallen into a deep gloom. Even the normally unshakable Dyrkin was affected. It started to appear as if the troopers hated the jump more than they hated combat. In combat, they were at least partially in control of their destiny. During the jump, they were completely helpless.

It took a while for Hark to find out what exactly was so frightening about the jump. Before the gloom set in, things had improved a little on the messdeck. The newcomers hadn't been completely accepted, but they were being tolerated. Toleration, however, didn't extend to answering a lot of damn-fool questions. A full day had gone by before Hark got an answer out of a taciturn longtimer called Helot, who summed it up in just three sentences.

"It's more pain than it's possible to imagine. You feel like you're being torn apart limb from limb. The worst part is that it seems to go on forever."

When Hark had tried to ask more questions, Helot bad cut him off.

"You'll find out."

It wasn't that the previous three days had been spent sitting around the messdeck listening to scuttlebutt. Rance had worked them close to the point of exhaustion. The intake had gone through one more training session together, and then each group of five, four in the case of Hark's, had been integrated with the twenty to which they had been assigned. From that point on, the long-timers and the recruits had trained together as a complete combat team. Working alongside the veterans had at first filled Hark with a deep depression at how little he knew. As the sessions progressed he was quite amazed by the speed at which he was picking up the rudiments of ground fighting. On the other hand, he still had grave doubts as to whether he would ever be good enough to survive the real thing. The recruits' off-duty time was almost nonexistent, but the gloom on the messdeck was so deep that it couldn't help but affect them. They caught the longtimers' dread of the jump and amplified it with their own fear of the unknown.

About an hour before jumptime, Rance visited the messdeck. He made a point of always being there just before a jump. The purpose was to reinforce control and authority at a moment when the men were at their most angry. The noncoms in the Alliance were never allow, to forget that the great trooper uprising of a quarter of century earlier had exploded immediately before a jump. The revolt had spread through almost half the ships* the fleet and had come close to crippling the campai^_ against the Yal. The presence of the new intake just made the situation more delicate. The longtimers, if they hadn't actually been telling horror stories, would at least have dropped a few sinister hints. He decided that the recruits could probably use a few reassuring words.

"I won't lie to you. The jump is one of the most unpleasant experiences that a man can go through. While it lasts, you may think that you are actually dying. Get one thing straight. You will not die. The jump's awful, but it will do you no permanent harm. It's just one of the things you have to live with. By now, you've probably heard all kinds of wild tales about how bad the jump can be. I want you to put them out of your mind. It's bad, but you'll get over it. Someone may have tried to tell you that men have gone mad during their first jump. That's bull."

A couple of the recruits looked up sharply. Rance cursed himself. They apparently hadn't heard the story, j He silently cursed again as Dacker raised his hand.; Dacker, along with Renchett, was one of the main trou-j blemakers in Elmo's twenty. He was undoubtedly trying to pull something.

"Permission to speak, Topman Rance?"

When Dacker was polite, it always meant that he was looking to score off a superior. It was a kind of reverse insolence.

"What do you want, Dacker?"

"Begging the topman's pardon, but the stories about rookies going mad during a jump isn't all bull. When I was back on the Yalna 7, there was this recruit who-"

"Shut up, Dacker. Whatever you've got in your mind never happened. It's a mess monkey's tall story." "I saw it with my-" "Shut it, Dacker!"

Dacker shut up, but the damage was done. The recruits looked green. There was one consolation. The newcomers' fear might provide sufficient amusement to the longtimers that it would take the edge off their resentment. Rance always felt like a fraud after these speeches. He hated the jumps as much as anyone, and he also hated lying to his men. Individuals did go mad on their first jump. Some not until their second, third, or twentieth. The idea that the jump was ultimately harmless was a heavily promoted piece of fiction. The truth was that the Therem had been frequently approached to try to get something done to mitigate the pain of the jump. They claimed that it was impossible. The pain was a side effect unique to humans. No other species suffered anything like it, and there was nothing that could be done.

Rance's last job before he sealed himself in his coffin was to check in with his immediate superior, his line officer. If he shared anything with Dacker, it was a distaste for officers. The men despised them because they were almost never in combat. With Rance, who had more contact with them, the hate went deeper. The officers had blended. They were trying to be more Therem than the Therem themselves. At moments like this, just be fore a jump, there was something that particularly both ered him: The officers showed no sign of agitation. One of the hoariest stories in trooper legend was that the officers did have something to ease the pain, something that was denied to the rank and file. The story might be as old as the jump drive, but Rance had never totally been able to dismiss it.

Line Officer Berref was one of the least appealing of his kind. There was a condescending limpness about him that grated on Rance. His pale blue uniform was a little too immaculate. The way his blond hair was combed into crisp waves was a little too elegant. The officer's ring that he wore on the little finger of his left hand was just too large and showy. Too much time had l^een spent on the perfection of his pencil mustache. These, however, were only the external symptoms of what Rance really loathed. Berref and, in Rance's experience, the majority of the officer corps approached the war as an exercise in morbid cynicism. The men were expendable cattle, battle fuel-there were plenty more where they came from. The only thing that had to be preserved was the war. It was inevitable that the two most powerful species in the galaxy should lock in perpetual combat from the moment they discovered each other. The Yal and the Therem existed, and therefore they warred. The officers gave the impression that they considered their duty to be the day-to-day and year-to-year management of that war.

"Men bedded down for the jump, Topman?"

"All in their coffins, sir."

"Any trouble?"

"Just the usual hostility."

"But no actual trouble?"

"No trouble."

"Then you better get yourself sealed in, and I'll talk to you after the recovery."

Rance watched the line officer walk away. He simply couldn't believe that anyone was able to remain so calm before a jump. The bastards had to have something that wasn't being given out to the men. Rance found that he had been gritting his teeth.

"One day, you're finally going to go into combat, and I'm finally going to blow your forsaken head off."

A siren wailed through the messdeck. The coffin lids slowly lowered. Hark found that his fists were clenching and unclenching. How would it start? What would be the first sign? Could it really be as bad as they said? The tongtimers on the messdeck didn't seem the kind to exaggerate. Inside the coffin, all Hark could hear was his own breathing. Through the transparent cover, he watched the lights on the messdeck go out. Only small red safety lamps remained. Cold sweat beaded his back. How would he endure it if it was as bad as they said? If he went mad, he didn't doubt that they would dispose of him as arbitrarily as they had disposed of Eslay.

Hark waited, resigned to the coming agony, but for what seemed like an hour, nothing happened. The constant, muscle-tensing fear was exhausting. Let it start. At least end the suspense. Or maybe the jump had been postponed. Did he dare hope for a temporary reprieve? At that precise moment, a vibration ran through the coffin as if the ship had shifted or stretched. He continued to hope, but he knew in his heart that something was starting. For no logical reason, Hark had somehow imagined that the pain would start slowly and gradually increase in intensity. As the first shock seared through him, he knew that he had been completely wrong.

There was molten fire in his bones. At the same time he was being twisted out of shape. It was worse than being twisted-he was losing his shape, he was being spread across space, smeared over the blackness of the void. He was falling and screaming. Every deformed nerve was being tortured; the teeth were being dragged from his gaping mouth. His own screams beat inside his head until his skull started to fragment. His brain boiled over in an eruption of excruciating color. This was worse even than the datashot. His surroundings gone, he was alone, a thing without form, constantly shifting and rending. All that remained was the pain. It was his very being, burning through eternity. The pain defined him.

He was like a star made of constantly exploding and regenerating agony.

To his surprise, he found that he could think inside the suffering. If anything, that made it worse. The capacity to think prevented him from losing himself in the howling hallucinations that racked his overloaded senses. He began to feel how the pain came in distinct phases. There was no respite, and each was as bad as the next. All the change of phase meant was a shift in emphasis. There was the blinding red-gold fire that burned and consumed his flesh. There were the icy razor bolts that ripped and gouged through the backs of his eyes. There was the terrible spatial distortion in which even his identity became unrecognizable. Worst of all, the hallucinations refused to stop. The cycle of torment went on and on, a spiraling loop on which he helplessly hung, twisted, and turned.

At first, he couldn't believe that it had stopped. It had been everything. He was pressed hard against the side of the coffin, clawing at the lining and muttering to himself. His eyes were tightly shut, and the visions of horror lingered like an afterimage while his nervous system cringed, believing in nothing but the next stage in the cycle.

"Let it stop, please. Let it stop! Let it stop?*

When the messdeck siren started braying again, he thought that it was still his screaming.

"Let it…"

The last word was a sob. He opened his eyes. Everything was back to normal. The lights were coming on, but none of it seemed real. The pain-that was real, that was everything. Except that the pain had gone. There was blood on the palms of his hands where his fingernails had dug in. His right shoulder hurt. He must have been banging it against the inside of the coffin. The cover opened. He experienced a fresh clutch of dread. The unreality was still there. Had he gone mad? There seemed to be something wrong with the light; things didn't look right. The cover was now fully open. Hark tentatively sat up. Immediately, his stomach revolted. He was racked by a spasm of dry retching, and sweat poured from his upper body. He felt dizzy and had to grab hold of the side of the coffin. Strangely, there was a kind of comfort in this violent physical reaction. If he could feel like this, he was probably still sane. The madness that he had felt back on the planet had been nothing like this. There was a certain safety in madness, and the last thing he felt was safe. Reality seemed to be returning. He waited until the spasm passed, wiped off his face, then tried to stand. His legs felt like rubber, but by concentrating hard, he managed it. Others on the messdeck were emerging from their coffins. To a man, they looked as bad as he felt. Most were verging on green, and most had dark circles under eyes that still stared in horror. It wasn't long, though, before the cursing started. "Shit."

It was Dyrkin, as top man in the pecking order, who led the chorus of complaint.

"I ain't never going to go through that again. They're going to have to burn me first."

"There's got to be some other way."

Renchett, who had recovered faster than most, spat on the deck. "Of course there's a better way. We all know that the officers and medians don't do the jump the hard way. They got something. They got drugs or shielding or implants or something. They don't have to feel it the way we do."

Elmo had come into the messdeck. He looked almost as bad as the men did, but he was doing his best to pull his overman authority back together.

"Curse it up, boys. Get really angry. That's the best way to get over a jump. Anyone in really bad shape?"

Dyrkin scowled. "We're all in really bad shape. What did you expect?"

"Don't get on my ass, Dyrkin. We ail went through the same shit."

"Did we?"

Elmo ignored the challenge. He wasn't in any mood to deal with the age-old bitch that came up with every jump.

"If there are no casualties, you better eat and then get suited up." "What?"

Everyone turned and looked at Renchett. He was a troublemaker and a mess monkey lawyer, but nobody yelled at an overman. His face was a mask of furious outrage.

"What do you mean suit up?"

Elmo was very calm. The aftermath of a jump could also be a potential flashpoint. "Are you talking to me, Renchett?"

"I'm looking at you, ain't I?"

"Under normal circumstances, your mouth would have earned you three days in a pod."

"Under normal circumstances, we'd be getting a down day with all the food and booze we want. After a jump, the messdecks get drunk. That's the rule."

"That's the tradition, and these aren't normal circumstances. We're in an A-plus combat zone, and we got a new intake to bring up to scratch."

"Screw the new meat. Let them take care of themselves. I hurt all over."

"You just ran out of chances, Renchett. One more word and you're in a pod."

Elmo let Renchett glare defiance for a full fifteen seconds, then he gave him a final chance to save face.

"Get your suit on, trooper."

Renchett turned on his heel, ripped his suit from its environment, dumped it on the ground, and trod on it. The suit, as though sensing his anger, hesitated before climbing up his legs.

"Do the rest of you have any objections to climbing into your suits?"

The rest of the twenty turned away. There was some muttering, but they all started hauling out their equipment.

Rance had decided that he wasn't going to go out on the hull for the training sessions. The new men were getting close to being as ready as they would ever be, and the overmen were more than capable of keeping the men running. The jump had been particularly unkind to him, and he wanted nothing more than to spend the day sleeping it off. Unfortunately, that wasn't going to be possible. The medians would be holding a briefing for noncoms and officers at 0700, and he had to be there. If anything, the medians were worse than the line officers. They'd done more than blended. They'd gone all the way over. They dealt directly with the Therem, and in doing so they had lost all but the faintest shreds of their humanity. They were cold and unworldly, with an attitude that came close to an alien mysticism. For them, the war against the Yal was a holy cause, now and forever, amen. They had become so emotionless that they couldn't even manage the cynicism of the line officers. Rance detested the line officers, but the medians gave him the chills. The single consolation was that a topman had only limited contact with them.

The Therem themselves were comparatively few in number, and they were spread very thinly across the multiple fronts of their endless war. As a consequence, the medians and their equivalents among the other client species wielded considerable power. They were in virtual control of everything except basic strategy. As far as the human ground troops were concerned, they were the ultimate authority, the high priests of battle.

The briefing room was in the upper part of the ship, an area that Rance rarely visited. It was on the very outside of the hull, enclosed in a transparent dome that afforded a panoramic view of space and the two nearest ships in the cluster. They were close to a binary star system, the usual red gas giant and white dwarf. As Rance entered the room, dead on the mark of 0700, he peered out of the dome to see if any of the training exercise was visible. There was no sign of them. They had to be on another side of the ship. He didn't want to look at the stars. They were undoubtedly the next target, and he knew for sure that he'd grow to hate them before the operation was over.

The ship's other nine topmen were already there when Rance arrived. He exchanged curt greetings with them. The topmen on any ship were a tight, if taciturn, club. They were the ones who ran the combat, the real thing, when the troops were beyond the reach of medians and officers.

"Bad jump."

"A swine."

"Anybody get psychs?"

Topman Benset nodded.

"I had one come out mute and staring."

"You keep it from the men?"

"Sure, I gassed them down, disappeared him, and planted the suggestion that he'd been taken in for redata-ing the day before."

"Anyone else?"

The topmen shook their heads.

"One ain't bad for a jump like that."

The conversation stopped, and the topmen snapped to attention as some thirty line officers filed in. They were followed just seconds later by the five medians. There were no preliminaries. The room immediately came to order. The medians even looked alien. They also looked very much alike. They had been selectively bred to be what they were, and in the process they had lost all vestige of hair. There was almost a luminescence to their polished bald heads, and there was much speculation as to what kind of bodies were concealed under their flowing, dark blue robes. Delarac, the one who did the talking at these briefings, motioned a corpse-white hand toward the dome. "Dark, please."

The topman nearest the environ panel opaqued the dome. There was a projection pedestal in the center of the room. In the darkness, a miniature of the binary star system floated above it, performing a speeded-up version of the movements of the originals. There was also one attendant planet. That had to be the target.

"Observe the planet."

Nobody knew what the exact relationship was between the individual medians, whether they were all the same rank or whether some were senior to others. Did the fact that Delarac always spbke at briefings indicate that he was the head median? Or perhaps he was the lowliest.

"It is a planet of very little worth. Class G, bad atmosphere, mainly rock and dust, minimal indigenous life, and a potentially unstable system. Normally it would not be worth a second glance except that the Yal have positioned a network of dome batteries in its northern hemisphere, and there will be no hope of clearing them from this quadrant unless it is removed."

There was a narrowing of eyes among the topmen. This was going to be a bitch.

"The Yal installations are shielded against attack from space, and since they can draw power from an entire planet, I seriously doubt that we can break the shields, even with a prolonged bombardment by the whole cluster. We could, of course, continue bombardment until they drained the basic molecular structure of the planet and caused a final disintegration, but planetary annihilation is strictly against Alliance fundamental policy and thus we are left with only one viable option."

The topmen knew what was coming next.

"The strategy is crude, and it may prove costly, but there are no practical alternatives. Simultaneously, we will bombard their screens from orbit and mount a ground attack on their installations. The pressure on their screens should cause them to compress above the batteries and render them ineffective at surface level. Our troops should have no trouble moving through and destroying the domes."

Rance watched the tiny illuminated planet tracing figure eight's around the model of the binary. It always sounded so simple at these briefings. Walk in and destroy the domes, a clean, surgical operation. In the sterile darkness of the briefing room there was no hint of the noise and the fear and the broken bodies.

"The cluster will be in position in two standards. Our dropcraft will launch at 1500 precisely. Our barrage will commence immediately the dropcraft are clear of the cluster. Once our forces are in position on the ground, they are likely to encounter some light ground defenses, but our scans of the Yal emplacements have shown nothing that should cause any major problems. It would appear to be a simple operation, free of any serious complications. You will receive your individual battle orders immediately after this briefing is over. Do any of you officers have questions?"

A number of officers had minor queries for which Delarac had short, summary answers. When they were finished, the median turned his attention to the topmen.

"How about you?"

Benset stiffened. "Yes, sir, I have a question." "What is it?"

Delarac's expression suggested that he had invited questions from the topmen only as a formal courtesy and had not actually expected any to be asked.

"Sir, it occurs to me that if the Yal screens were to cave in under the fire from the cluster while we were in the middle of the attack on the domes, at least a portion of the force on the ground could be wiped out by our own guns."

It was hard to tell with medians, but from where Rance was standing, it seemed that Delarac's expression has become even bleaker than usual.

"The possibility has been considered, but it would appear to be a low-probability scenario. Of course, as you well know, anything can happen in the heat of battle, and if such a thing did come to pass, it would be unfortunate. It is not, however, anything that merits a change in plans. Any more questions?" The median's tone seemed to indicate that he didn't expect any.

Rance snapped to attention. "Yes, sir, one more question."

"Rance, isn't it?"

"Yes, sir."

"What is it, Rance?"

"Sir, what is to stop the Yal batteries from blowing the dropcraft out of the air before we even reach the ground?"

Delarac looked at Rance as if he were a particularly backward child. "All our evaluations indicate that the fire from the cluster will be more than enough to keep the Yal batteries occupied. The dropcraft may take some hits, but losses should remain within acceptable levels."

"Thank you, sir."

In other words, "We take our chances."

There was something almost uncanny about the way the news of the impending combat spread through the messdecks. There was no formal announcement, but suddenly everyone knew. They were being dropped onto some forsaken dust bowl planet with poisonous air and were expected to knock out a nest of Yal big guns. The consensus was that it would be bloody. For the soldier, pessimism is a natural state. It makes survival a pleasant surprise. Each man reacted to the news in his own way. Some withdrew, others cursed and complained, a few broke into secret caches of booze or drugs. Some went about their normal routine with a fatalistic resignation. Renchett worked on his knife with a renewed fury. Dyrkin was almost serene, as if he were somehow looking forward to the fight. There was a major outbreak of gallows humor, with jokes about mutilation being particularly popular. The sexual content of many of the jokes started Hark to wondering again about what had happened to the women. On what might possibly be the eve of destruction, though, it hardly seemed right to ask.

Of all the men on the messdecks, the recruits had the most difficulty in dealing with this precombat tension. At least the longtimers could reassure themselves that they had survived before and could conceivably survive again. The new meat had no such comfort. They had no previous experience. They didn't know if they were even capable of surviving. They didn't know how they'd react or whether they'd be able to stand up to combat at all. They were facing the unknown, and like all who face the unknown, they imagined the worst. They waited and nursed their fear. They were quiet and subdued, avoiding each other's eyes and those of the longtimers. They couldn't join in the grim ribaldry; they had no macho swagger to protect them and no knives to hone. All they could do was sit in the background and wait.

Hark, feeling totally at a loss, decided that the last best resort might be sleep. While no one was looking, he retreated to his coffin, stripped off his clothes, lay down, and lowered the lid. Despite the legacy of aching muscles from the day's grueling training session on the hull, sleep didn't come easily. It was the first time that he'd really been alone with his thoughts since he'd been brought to the ship. There was no one yelling at him and no one beating on him. With the lid sealed, he couldn't hear the voices of the longtimers in the downden. All he could hear was the noise in his own head. It couldn't match the voices of the overmen yelling through his communicator and echoing around the inside of his helmet, but it was more than enough of a howl to keep him from immediate sleep. There was so much to absorb, and all of it shaken and stirred by the jump and the datashot. The worst tiling that the howl told him was that there was nothing in his mind that he could trust. His current reality was so imposing and so awful that it was scarcely believable, but his previous life, sitting astride a mount in the high desert, had become as tenuous as a fading dream. If he had been in a position to ask a Therem, the Therem would have told him that the howl was a sign that the healing process that followed the datashot was nearing a satisfactory conclusion, but Hark would never in his life be in a position to ask a Therem anything, and Therems rarely, if ever, volunteered information to troopers.

Hark slept fitfully for a time, but the confusion followed him into his nightmares. Finally, he came wide awake and had to face the fact that he was quite incapable of sleep. He popped the seal on his coffin and lifted the lid. The covers were closed on most of the other coffins but not all of them, and a light shone out of the downden. Hark decided that he'd get a drink of water from the spigot. As he walked down the aisle between the coffins, he noticed that a number of the sleepers were tossing and turning just as he had been. Inside the downden, Helot lounged in a deep chair, and a trooper called Wabst, to whom Hark had never spoken, was sprawled out on the strangely shaped couch. Hark didn't pay much attention to the pair of them until he'd drunk a cupful of the ship's metallic water. It was only then that he noticed how both men were wearing their battle suits rolled down to around their waists so their upper bodies were naked. They had their eyes closed and had strange expressions on their faces, and there was the image of an explicitly gyrating naked woman on the wall screen. Hark was shocked. He found that his high desert prudery hadn't deserted him. He'd heard among the young men around the fire that there were women in distant tribes who performed such lewd dances, but he had never seen anything even close to the image on the screen. And yet it couldn't be the image that was making the two longtimers behave the way they were. They couldn't see the dancing woman-their eyes were tightly shut. The realization hit him like a hammer. It was the suits. The suits were doing something to them. Something close to sexual. Hark was in a quandary. What was he supposed to do? He felt that he was intruding, seeing what he had neither right nor desire to see. He was thinking about creeping away unseen, but the steel cup that was attached to the spigot clinked as it dropped to the length of its chain. Both men's eyes snapped open with a killer's reflex. Helot glared at him. "What do you think you're looking at?"

"What's your problem, new meat? You got some kind of attitude?" "No, I…"

Wabst started. "What do you think a man's supposed to do when the nearest woman's at least a hundred licks away?"

Helot's face twisted into an unpleasant grin. "This green bastard hasn't made friends with his suit yet."

Hark had a flesh-creep preview of how he'd feel the next time his suit crawled up his legs. By now, Wabst was also grinning.

"Men do all kinds of things when they're kept away from women."

Hark blurted it out before he could stop himself. "Where are the women?"

"Nobody tell you?"

"No."

"Well, kid, the nearest woman is somewhere out on a recstar halfway across the galaxy." "What's a recstar?'* "He don't know what recstar is." "Poor bastard's dumber than he looks." "So what's a recstar?"

"A recstar, new meat, is nothing you need worry about until you've been through combat."

"And he don't look like he's going to get through combat anyhow."