Old Man's War Boxed Set 1 (17 page)

“God damn it, Bender!” Viveros yelled. “Get back here now! That’s an order!”

“I’m not ‘just following orders’ anymore, Corporal!” Bender yelled back, and then started to sprint.

“Shit!” Viveros screamed, and started after him. I grabbed for her and missed.

By now Lieutenant Keyes and the other officers looked up and saw Bender racing toward the Whaidians, Viveros chasing behind. I saw Keyes yell something and Viveros pull up suddenly; Keyes must have sent his order over the BrainPal as well. If he had ordered Bender to stop, Bender ignored the command and continued his race to the Whaidians.

Bender finally stopped at the lip of the amphitheater, and stood there silently. Eventually the Feuy, the one leading the chant, noticed the sole human standing at the edge of his congregation and stopped his chanting. The congregation, confused, lost the chant and spent a minute or so muttering before noticing Bender as well, and turned to face him.

This was the moment Bender was waiting for. Bender must have spent the few moments while the Whaidians noticed his presence composing what he was going to say and translating it into Whaidian, because when he spoke, he attempted their language, and by all professional accounts, did a reasonable job of it.

“My friends, my fellow searchers for peace,” he began, reaching out to them with his hands curved in.

Data culled from the event would eventually show that no fewer than forty thousand tiny needlelike projectiles that Whaidians call
avdgur
struck Bender’s body in the space of less than one second, shot from clubs that were not clubs at all, but traditional projectile weapons in the shape of a tree branch sacred to the Whaidian people. Bender literally melted as each
avdgur
sliver penetrated his unitard and his body, slicing away at the solidity of his form. Everyone agreed later that it was one of the most interesting deaths any of us had ever seen in person.

Bender’s body fell apart in a misty splash and the CDF soldiers opened fire into the amphitheater. It was indeed a turkey shoot; not a single Whaidian made it out of the amphitheater or managed to kill or wound another CDF soldier other than Bender. It was over in less than a minute.

Viveros waited for the cease-fire order, walked over to the puddle that was what was left of Bender, and started stamping in it furiously. “How do you like your peace now, motherfucker?” she cried as Bender’s liquefied organs stained the lower half of her legs.

“Bender was right, you know,” Viveros said to me on the way back to the
Modesto
.

“About what?” I asked.

“About the CDF being used too fast and too much,” Viveros said. “About it being easier to fight than to negotiate.” She waved in the general direction of the Whaidian home planet, which was receding behind us. “We didn’t
have
to do this, you know. Knock these poor sons of bitches out of space and make it so they spend the next couple of decades starving and dying and killing each other. We didn’t murder civilians today—well, other than the ones that got Bender. But they’ll spend a nice long time dying from disease and murdering each other because they can’t do much of anything else. It’s no less of a genocide. We just feel better about it because we’ll be gone when it happens.”

“You never agreed with Bender before,” I said.

“That’s not true,” Viveros said. “I said that he didn’t know shit, and that his duty was to us. But I didn’t say he was wrong. He should have listened to me. If he’d have followed his fucking orders, he’d be alive now. Instead I’m scraping him off the bottom of my foot.”

“He’d probably say he died for what he believed in,” I said.

Viveros snorted. “Please,” she said. “Bender died for Bender. Shit. Walking up to a bunch of people whose planet we just destroyed and acting like he was their
friend
. What an asshole. If I were one of them, I’d have shot him, too.”

“Damn real live people, getting in the way of peaceful ideals,” I said.

Viveros smiled. “If Bender were
really
interested in peace instead of his own ego, he’d have done what I’m doing, and what you should do, Perry,” she said. “Follow orders. Stay alive. Make it through our term of infantry service. Join officer training and work our way up. Become the people who are giving the orders, not just following them. That’s how we’ll make peace when we can. And that’s how I can live with ‘just following orders.’ Because I know that one day, I’ll make those orders change.” She leaned back, closed her eyes and slept the rest of the way back to our ship.

Luisa Viveros died two months later on a shithole ball of mud called Deep Water. Our squad walked into a trap set in the natural catacombs below the Hann’i colony that we’d been ordered to clear out. In battle we’d been herded into a cave chamber that had four additional tunnels feeding into it, all ringed with Hann’i infantry. Viveros ordered us back into our tunnel and began firing at its mouth, collapsing the tunnel and sealing it off from the chamber. BrainPal data shows she then turned and began taking out the Hann’i. She didn’t last long. The rest of the squad fought our way back to the surface; not an easy thing to do, considering how we’d been herded in the first place, but better than dying in an ambush.

Viveros got a medal posthumously for bravery; I was promoted to corporal and given the squad. Viveros’ cot and locker were given to a new guy named Whitford, who was decent enough, as far as it went.

The institution had replaced a cog. And I missed her.

Thomas died because of something he ate.

What he ingested was so new the CDF didn’t have a name for it yet, on a colony so new it also didn’t have a name, merely an official designation: Colony 622, 47 Ursae Majoris. (The CDF continued to use Earth-based stellar designations for the same reason they continued to use a twenty-four-hour clock and a 365-day year: Because it was easiest to do it that way.) As a matter of standard operating procedure, new colonies transmit a daily compilation of all colony data into a skip drone, which then skips back to Phoenix so that the Colonial government can keep tabs on colony matters.

Colony 622 had sent drones since its landing six months earlier; aside from the usual arguments, snafus and scuffles that accompany any new colony founding, nothing of any note was reported, except for the fact that a local slime mold was gunking up damn near everything, popping up in machinery, computers, animal pens and even colony living quarters. A genetic analysis of the material was sent back to Phoenix with the request that someone create a fungicide that would get the mold literally out of the colonist’s hair. Blank skip drones started arriving immediately after that, with no information uploaded from the colony.

Thomas and Susan were stationed on the
Tucson,
which was dispatched to investigate. The
Tucson
attempted to raise the colony from orbit; no luck. Visual targeting of the colony buildings showed no movement between buildings—no people, no animals, no nothing. The buildings themselves, however, didn’t seem to be damaged. Thomas’ platoon got the call for recon.

The colony was covered with goo, a coating of slime mold several centimeters thick in some places. It dripped off power lines and was all over the communication equipment. This was good news—there was now a possibility that the mold had simply overwhelmed the equipment’s transmission ability. This momentary burst of optimism was brought to an abrupt halt when Thomas’ squad got to the animal pens to find all of the livestock dead and deeply decomposed thanks to the industrious work of the mold. They found the colonists shortly thereafter, in much the same state. Nearly all of them (or what was left of them) were in or near their beds; the exceptions being families, who were often found in children’s rooms or the hallways leading to them, and the members of the colony working the graveyard shift, who were found at or near their posts. Whatever hit, hit late and so fast that colonists simply didn’t have time to react.

Thomas suggested taking one of the corpses to the colony’s medical quarters; he could perform a quick autopsy that might give some insight into what had killed the colonists. His squad leader gave assent, and Thomas and a squadmate hunkered over one of the more intact bodies. Thomas grabbed under the arms and the squadmate took the legs. Thomas told his squadmate to lift on the count of three; he got to two when the slime mold rose up from the body and slapped him wetly on the face. He gasped in surprise; the slime mold slid into his mouth and down his throat.

The rest of Thomas’ squad immediately cued their suits to provide faceplates, and not a moment too soon, since in a matter of seconds, slime mold leaped from every crack and crevice to attack. All over the colony, similar attacks were made nearly simultaneously. Six of Thomas’ platoon mates also found themselves with a mouthful of slime mold.

Thomas tried to pull the slime mold out of his mouth, but it slid farther into his throat, blocking his airway, pushing into his lungs and down his esophagus into his stomach. Thomas sent via his BrainPal that his squadmates should take him to the medical quarters, where they might be able to suction enough of the mold out of his body to allow him to breathe again; the SmartBlood meant they would have almost fifteen minutes before Thomas began to suffer permanent brain damage. It was an excellent idea and probably would have worked, had not the slime mold begun to excrete concentrated digestive acids into Thomas’ lungs, eating him from the inside while he was still alive. Thomas’ lungs began to dissolve immediately; he was dead from shock and asphyxiation minutes later. The six other platoon mates joined in his fate, the fate that had, everyone later agreed, also befallen the colonists.

Thomas’ platoon leader gave orders to leave Thomas and the other victims behind; the platoon retreated to the transport and made its way back to the
Tucson
. The transport was denied permission to dock. The platoon was led in, one by one, in hard vacuum to kill whatever mold was still lingering on their suits, and then subjected to an intense external and internal decontamination process that was every bit as painful as it sounds.

Subsequent unmanned probes showed no survivors of Colony 622 anywhere, and that the slime mold, beyond possessing enough intelligence to mount two separate coordinated attacks, was nearly impervious to traditional weaponry. Bullets, grenades and rockets affected only small portions while leaving other portions unharmed; flamethrowers fried up a top layer of slime mold, leaving layers underneath untouched; beam weaponry slashed through the mold but did minimal overall damage. Research on the fungicide the colonists had requested had begun but was halted when it was determined that the slime mold was present almost everywhere on the planet. The amount of effort to locate another inhabitable planet was deemed less expensive than eradicating the slime mold on a global scale.

Thomas’ death was a reminder that not only don’t we know what we’re up against out here, sometimes we simply can’t
imagine
what we’re up against. Thomas made the mistake of assuming the enemy would be more like us than not. He was wrong. He died because of it.

Conquering the universe was beginning to get to me.

The unsettled feeling had begun at Gindal, where we ambushed Gindalian soldiers as they returned to their aeries, slashing their huge wings with beams and rockets that sent them tumbling and screeching down sheer two-thousand-meter cliff faces. It had really started to affect me above Udaspri, as we donned inertia-dampening power packs to provide better control as we leaped from rock fragment to rock fragment in Udaspri’s rings, playing hide-and-seek with the spiderlike Vindi who had taken to hurling bits of the ring down to the planet below, plotting delicate decaying orbits that aimed the falling debris directly on top of the human colony of Halford. By the time we arrived at Cova Banda, I was ready to snap.

It might have been because of the Covandu themselves, who in many respects were clones of the human race itself: bipedal, mammalian, extraordinarily gifted in artistic matters, particularly poetry and drama, fast breeding and unusually aggressive when it came to the universe and their place in it. Humans and the Covandu frequently found themselves fighting for the same undeveloped real estate. Cova Banda, in fact, had been a human colony before it had been a Covandu one, abandoned after a native virus had caused the settlers to grow unsightly additional limbs and homicidal additional personalities. The virus didn’t give the Covandu even a headache; they moved right in. Sixty-three years later, the Colonials finally developed a vaccine and wanted the planet back. Unfortunately, the Covandu, again all too much like humans, weren’t very much into the whole sharing thing. So in we went, to do battle against the Covandu.

The tallest of whom is no more than one inch tall.

The Covandu are not so stupid as to launch their tiny little armies against humans sixty or seventy times their size, of course. First they hit us with aircraft, long-range mortars, tanks and other military equipment that might actually do some damage—and did; it’s not easy to take out a twenty-centimeter-long aircraft flying at several hundred klicks an hour. But you do what you can to make it difficult to use these options (we did this by landing in Cova Banda’s main city’s park, so any artillery that missed us hit their own people) and anyway, eventually you’ll dispose of most of these annoyances. Our people used more care destroying Covandu forces than they typically might, not only because they’re smaller and require more attention to hit. There’s also the matter that no one wants to have been killed by a one-inch opponent.

Eventually, however, you shoot down all the aircraft and take out all the tanks, and then you have to deal with the individual Covandu themselves. So here’s how you fight one: You step on him. You just bring your foot down, apply pressure and it’s done. As you’re doing this, the Covandu is firing his weapon at you and screaming at the top of his tiny little lungs, a squeak that you may just be able to hear. But it’s useless. Your suit, designed to apply brakes on a human-scale high-powered projectile, barely registers the bits of matter flung at your toes by a Covandu; you barely register the crunch of the little being you’ve stomped. You spot another one, you do it again.

We did this for hours as we waded through Cova Banda’s main city, stopping every now and then to sight a rocket on a skyscraper five or six meters high and take it down with a single shot. Some of our platoon would spray a shotgun blast into a building instead, letting the individual shot, each big enough to take a Covandu’s head clean off, rattle through the building like mad pachinko balls. But mostly, it was about the stomping. Godzilla, the famous Japanese monster, who had been undergoing his umpteenth revival as I left the Earth, would have felt right at home.

I don’t remember exactly when it was I began to cry and kick skyscrapers, but I had done it long enough and hard enough that when Alan was finally called over to retrieve me, Asshole was informing me that I had managed to break three toes. Alan walked me back to the city park we’d landed in and had me sit down; as soon as I did, some Covandu emerged from behind a boulder and aimed his weapon at my face. It felt like tiny grains of sand were plunking into my cheek.

“God
damn
it,” I said, grabbed the Covandu like a ball bearing, and angrily flung him into a nearby skyscraper. He zoomed off, spinning in a flat arc, decelerated with a tinny
thunk
when he hit the building, and fell the two remaining meters to the ground. Any other Covandu in the area apparently decided against assassination attempts.

I turned to Alan. “Don’t you have a squad to pay attention to?” I asked. He’d been promoted after his squad leader had had his face torn off by an angry Gindalian.

“I could ask you the same question,” he said, and then shrugged. “They’re fine. They have their orders and there’s no real opposition anymore. It’s clean and sweep, and Tipton can handle the squad for that. Keyes told me to come hose you down and find out what the hell is wrong with you. So what the hell
is
wrong with you?”

“Christ, Alan,” I said. “I’ve just spent three hours stepping on intelligent beings like they were fucking bugs, that’s what’s wrong with me. I’m stomping people to death with my fucking
feet
. This”—I swept out an arm—“it’s just totally fucking ridiculous, Alan. These people are
one inch tall
. It’s like Gulliver beating the shit out of the Lilliputians.”

“We don’t get to choose our battles, John,” Alan said.

“How does this battle make you feel?” I asked.

“It bothers me a little,” Alan said. “It’s not a stand-up fight at all; we’re just blowing these people to hell. On the other hand, the worst casualty I have in my squad is a burst eardrum. That’s a miracle for you right there. So overall I feel pretty good about it. And the Covandu aren’t entirely helpless. The overall scoreboard between us and them is pretty much tied.”

This was surprisingly true. The Covandu’s size worked to their advantage in space battles; their ships are hard for ours to track and their tiny fighter craft do little damage individually but an immense amount in aggregate. It was only when it came to ground fights that we had the overwhelming advantage. Cova Banda had a relatively small space fleet protecting it; it was one of the reasons the CDF decided to try to take it back.

“I’m not talking about who’s ahead in the overall tally, Alan,” I said. “I’m talking about the fact that our opponents are one fucking inch tall. Before this, we were fighting spiders. Before
that,
we were fighting goddamned pterodactyls. It’s all messing with my sense of scale. It’s messing with my sense of me. I don’t feel human anymore, Alan.”

“Technically speaking, you’re
not
human anymore,” Alan said. It was an attempt to lighten my mood.

It didn’t work. “Well, then, I don’t feel connected with what it
was
to be human anymore,” I said. “Our job is to go meet strange new people and cultures, and kill the sons of bitches as quickly as we possibly can. We know only what we need to know about these people in order to fight with them. They don’t exist to be anything other than an enemy, as far as we know. Except for the fact that they’re smart about fighting back, we might as well be fighting animals.”

“That makes it easier for most of us,” Alan said. “If you don’t identify with a spider, you don’t feel as bad about killing one, even a big, smart one. Maybe especially a big, smart one.”

“Maybe that’s what’s bothering me,” I said. “There’s no sense of consequence. I just took a living, thinking thing and hurled it into the side of a building. Doing it didn’t bother me at all. The fact that it didn’t
does
bother me, Alan. There ought to be consequences to our actions. We have to acknowledge at least some of the horror of what we do, whether we’re doing it for good reasons or not. I have no horror about what I’m doing. I’m scared of that. I’m scared of what it means. I’m stomping around this city like a goddamned monster. And I’m beginning to think that’s exactly what I am. What I’ve become. I’m a monster. You’re a monster. We’re
all
fucking inhuman monsters, and we don’t see a damned thing wrong with it.”

Alan didn’t have anything to say to that. So instead we watched our soldiers, stomping Covandu to death, until finally there weren’t really any left to stomp.

“So what the hell is wrong with him?” Lieutenant Keyes asked Alan, about me, at the end of our post-battle briefing with the other squad leaders.