Starship Troopers (18 page)

Only they didn’t. They dropped in where we should have dropped, found unfriendly natives and had their own troubles. We never saw them. So we stayed where we were, soaking up casualties from time to time and passing them out ourselves as opportunity offered—while we ran low on ammo and jump juice and even power to keep the suits moving. This seemed to go on for a couple of thousand years.

Dutch and I were zipping along close to a wall, headed for our special-weapons squad in answer to a yell for help, when the ground suddenly opened in front of Dutch, a Bug popped out, and Dutch went down.

I flamed the Bug and tossed a grenade and the hole closed up, then turned to see what had happened to Dutch. He was down but he didn’t look hurt. A platoon sergeant can monitor the physicals on every man in his platoon, sort out the dead from those who merely can’t make it unassisted and must be picked up. But you can do the same thing manually from switches right on the belt of a man’s suit.

Dutch didn’t answer when I called to him. His body temperature read ninety-nine degrees, his respiration, heartbeat, and brain wave read zero— which looked bad but maybe his suit was dead rather than he himself. Or so I told myself, forgetting that the temperature indicator would give no reading if it were the suit rather than the man. Anyhow, I grabbed the can-opener wrench from my own belt and started to take him out of his suit while trying to watch all around me.

Then I heard an allhands call in my helmet that I never want to hear again. “Sauve qui peut! Home! Home! Pickup and home! Any beacon you can hear. Six minutes! All hands, save yourselves, pick up your mates. Home on any beacon! Sauve qui—“

I hurried.

His head came off as I tried to drag him out of his suit, so I dropped

him and got out of there. On a later drop I would have had sense enough to salvage his ammo, but I was far too sluggy to think; I simply bounced away from there and tried to rendezvous with the strong point we had been heading for.

It was already evacuated and I felt lost . . . lost and deserted. Then I heard recall, not the recall it should have been “Yankee Doodle” (if it had been a boat from the Valley Forge) -- but “Sugar Bush,” a tune I didn’t know. No matter, it was a beacon; I headed for it, using the last of my jump juice lavishly—got aboard just as they were about to button up and shortly thereafter was in the Voortrek, in such a state of shock that I couldn’t remember my serial number.

I’ve heard it called a “strategic victory”—but I was there and I claim we took a terrible licking.

Six weeks later (and feeling about sixty years older) at Fleet Base on Sanctuary I boarded another ground boat and reported for duty to Ship’s Sergeant Jelal in the Rodger Young. I was wearing, in my pierced left ear lobe, a broken skull with one bone. Al Jenkins was with me and was wearing one exactly like it (Kitten never made it out of the tube). The few surviving Wildcats were distributed elsewhere around the Fleet; we had lost half our strength, about, in the collision between the Valley Forge and the Ypres; that disastrous mess on the ground had run our casualties up over 80 per cent and the powers-that-be decided that it was impossible to put the outfit back together with the survivors—close it out, put the records in the archives, and wait until the scars had healed before reactivating Company K (Wildcats) with new faces but old traditions.

Besides, there were a lot of empty files to fill in other outfits. Sergeant Jelal welcomed us warmly, told us that we were joining a smart outfit, “best in the Fleet,” in a taut ship, and didn’t seem to notice our ear skulls. Later that day he took us forward to meet the Lieutenant, who smiled rather shyly and gave us a fatherly little talk. I noticed that Al Jenkins wasn’t wearing his gold skull. Neither was I—because I had already noticed that nobody in Rasczak’s Roughnecks wore the skulls.

They didn’t wear them because, in Rasczak’s Roughnecks, it didn’t matter in the least how many combat drops you had made, nor which ones; you were either a Roughneck or you weren’t -- and if you were not, they didn’t care who you were. Since we had come to them not as recruits but as combat veterans, they gave us all possible benefit of doubt and made us welcome with no more than that unavoidable trace of formality anybody necessarily shows to a house guest who is not a member of the family.

But, less than a week later when we had made one combat drop with them, we were full fledged Roughnecks, members of the family, called by our first names, chewed out on occasion without any feeling on either side that we were less than blood brothers thereby, borrowed from and lent to, included in bull sessions and privileged to express our own silly opinions with complete freedom -- and have them slapped down just as freely. We even called non-coms by their first names on any but strictly duty occasions. Sergeant Jelal was always on duty, of course, unless you ran across him dirtside, in which case he was “Jelly” and went out of his way to behave as if his lordly rank meant nothing between Roughnecks.

But the Lieutenant was always “The Lieutenant”—never “Mr. Rasczak,” nor even “Lieutenant Rasczak.” Simply “The Lieutenant,” spoken to and of in the third person. There was no god but the Lieutenant and Sergeant Jelal was his prophet. Jelly could say “No” in his own person and it might be subject to further argument, at least from junior sergeants, but if he said, “The Lieutenant wouldn’t like it,” he was speaking ex cathedra and the matter was dropped permanently. Nobody ever tried to check up on whether or not the Lieutenant would or would not like it; the Word had been spoken.

The Lieutenant was father to us and loved us and spoiled us and was nevertheless rather remote from us aboard ship—and even dirtside . . . unless we reached dirt via a drop. But in a drop well, you wouldn’t think that an officer could worry about every man of a platoon spread over a hundred square miles of terrain. But he can. He can worry himself sick over each one of them. How he could keep track of us all I can’t describe, but in the midst of a ruckus his voice would sing out over the command circuit:

“Johnson! Check squad six! Smitty’s in trouble,” and it was better than even money that the Lieutenant had noticed it before Smith’s squad leader.

Besides that, you knew with utter and absolute certainty that, as long as you were still alive, the Lieutenant would not get into the retrieval boat without you. There have been prisoners taken in the Bug War, but none from Rasczak’s Roughnecks.

Jelly was mother to us and was close to us and took care of us and didn’t spoil us at all. But he didn’t report us to the Lieutenant—there was never a court-martial among the Roughnecks and no man was ever flogged. Jelly didn’t even pass out extra duty very often; he had other ways of paddling us. He could look you up and down at daily inspection and simply say, “In the Navy you might look good. Why don’t you transfer?”—and get results, it being an article of faith among us that the Navy crew members slept in their uniforms and never washed below their collar lines.

But Jelly didn’t have to maintain discipline among privates because he maintained discipline among his non-coms and expected them to do likewise. My squad leader, when I first joined, was “Red” Greene. After a couple of drops, when I knew how good it was to be a Roughneck, I got to feeling gay and a bit too big for my clothes—and talked back to Red. He didn’t report me to Jelly; he just took me back to the washroom and gave me a medium set of lumps, and we got to be pretty good friends. In fact, he recommended me for lance, later on.

Actually we didn’t know whether the crew members slept in their clothes or not; we kept to our part of the ship and the Navy men kept to theirs, because they were made to feel unwelcome if they showed up in our country other than on duty—after all, one has social standards one must maintain, mustn’t one? The Lieutenant had his stateroom in male officers’ country, a Navy part of the ship, but we never went there, either, except on duty and rarely. We did go forward for guard duty, because the Rodger Young was a mixed ship, female captain and pilot officers, some female Navy ratings; forward of bulkhead thirty was ladies’ country -- and two armed M. I. day and night stood guard at the one door cutting it. (At battle stations that door, like all other gastight doors, was secured; nobody missed a drop.)

Officers were privileged to go forward of bulkhead thirty on duty and all officers, including the Lieutenant, ate in a mixed mess just beyond it. But they didn’t tarry there; they ate and got out. Maybe other corvette transports were run differently, but that was the way the Rodger Young was run—both the Lieutenant and Captain Deladrier wanted a taut ship and got it.

Nevertheless guard duty was a privilege. It was a rest to stand beside that door, arms folded, feet spread, doping off and thinking about nothing . . . but always warmly aware that any moment you might see a feminine creature even though you were not privileged to speak to her other than on duty. Once I was called all the way into the Skipper’s office and she spoke to me—she looked right at me and said, “Take this to the Chief Engineer, please.”

My daily shipside job, aside from cleaning, was servicing electronic equipment under the close supervision of “Padre” Migliaccio, the section leader of the first section, exactly as I used to work under Carl’s eye. Drops didn’t happen too often and everybody worked every day. If a man didn’t have any other talent he could always scrub bulkheads; nothing was ever quite clean enough to suit Sergeant Jelal. We followed the M. I. rule; everybody fights, everybody works. Our first cook was Johnson, the second section’s sergeant, a big friendly boy from Georgia (the one in the western hemisphere, not the other one) and a very talented chef. He wheedled pretty well, too; he liked to eat between meals himself and saw no reason why other people shouldn’t.

With the Padre leading one section and the cook leading the other, we were well taken care of, body and soul—but suppose one of them bought it? Which one would you pick? A nice point that we never tried to settle but could always discuss.

The Rodger Young kept busy and we made a number of drops, all different. Every drop has to be different so that they never can figure out a pattern on you. But no more pitched battles; we operated alone, patrolling, harrying, and raiding. The truth was that the Terran Federation was not then able to mount a large battle; the foul-up with Operation Bughouse had cost too many ships, ‘way too many trained men. It was necessary to take time to heal up, train more men.

In the meantime, small fast ships, among them the Rodger Young and other corvette transports, tried to be everywhere at once, keeping the enemy off balance, hurting him and running. We suffered casualties and filled our holes when we returned to Sanctuary for more capsules. I still got the shakes every drop, but actual drops didn’t happen too often nor were we ever down long—and between times there were days and days of shipboard life among the Roughnecks.

It was the happiest period of my life although I was never quite consciously aware of it—I did my full share of beefing just as everybody else did, and enjoyed that, too.

We weren’t really hurt until the Lieutenant bought it.

I guess that was the worst time in all my life. I was already in bad shape for a personal reason: My mother had been in Buenos Aires when the Bugs smeared it.

I found out about it one time when we put in at Sanctuary for more capsules and some mail caught up with us a note from my Aunt Eleanora, one that had not been coded and sent fast because she had failed to mark for that; the letter itself came. It was about three bitter lines. Somehow she seemed to blame me for my mother’s death. Whether it was my fault because I was in the Armed Services and should have therefore prevented the raid, or whether she felt that my mother had made a trip to Buenos Aires because I wasn’t home where I should have been, was not quite clear; she managed to imply both in the same sentence.

I tore it up and tried to walk away from it. I thought that both my parents were dead—since Father would never send Mother on a trip that long by herself. Aunt Eleanora had not said so, but she wouldn’t have mentioned Father in any case; her devotion was entirely to her sister. I was almost correct -- eventually I learned that Father had planned to go with her but something had come up and he stayed over to settle it, intending to come along the next day. But Aunt Eleanora did not tell me this.

A couple of hours later the Lieutenant sent for me and asked me very gently if I would like to take leave at Sanctuary while the ship went out on her next patrol—he pointed out that I had plenty of accumulated R&R and might as well use some of it. I don’t know how he knew that I had lost a member of my family, but he obviously did. I said no, thank you, sir; I preferred to wait until the outfit all took R&R together.

I’m glad I did it that way, because if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been along when the Lieutenant bought it . . . and that would have been just too much to be borne. It happened very fast and just before retrieval. A man in the third squad was wounded, not badly but he was down; the assistant section leader moved in to pick up -- and bought a small piece of it himself. The Lieutenant, as usual, was watching everything at once -- no doubt he had checked physicals on each of them by remote, but we’ll never know. What he did was to make sure that the assistant section leader was still alive; then made pickup on both of them himself, one in each arm of his suit.

He threw them the last twenty feet and they were passed into the retrieval boat -- and with everybody else in, the shield gone and no interdiction, was hit and died instantly.

I haven’t mentioned the names of the private and of the assistant section leader on purpose. The Lieutenant was making pickup on all of us, with his last breath. Maybe I was the private. It doesn’t matter who he was. What did matter was that our family had had its head chopped off. The head of the family from which we took our name, the father who made us what we were.

After the Lieutenant had to leave us Captain Deladrier invited Sergeant Jelal to eat forward, with the other heads of departments. But he begged to be excused. Have you ever seen a widow with stern character keep her family together by behaving as if the head of the family had simply stepped out and would return at any moment? That’s what Jelly did. He was just a touch more strict with us than ever and if he ever had to say: “The Lieutenant wouldn’t like that,” it was almost more than a man could take. Jelly didn’t say it very often.