The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century (13 page)

We were lined up, single file, on a permaplast sidewalk connecting the billet and the supply hut. We’d practiced walking inside, all morning, and this wasn’t any different except for the exotic scenery. Though the light was rather dim, you could see all the way to the horizon quite clearly, with no atmosphere in the way. A black cliff that looked too regular to be natural stretched from one horizon to the other, passing within a kilometer of us. The ground was obsidian-black, mottled with patches of white, or bluish, ice. Next to the supply hut was a small mountain of snow in a bin marked OXYGEN.

The suit was fairly comfortable, but it gave you the odd feeling of being simultaneously a marionette and a puppeteer. You apply the impulse to move your leg and the suit picks it up and magnifies it and moves your leg for you.

“Today we’re only going to walk around the company area and nobody will
leave
the company area.” The captain wasn’t wearing his .45, but he had a laser-finger like the rest of us. And his was probably hooked up.

Keeping an interval of at least two meters between each person, we stepped off the permaplast and followed the captain over the smooth rock. We walked carefully for about an hour, spiraling out, and finally stopped at the far edge of the perimeter.

“Now everybody pay close attention. I’m going out to that blue slab of ice”—it was a big one, about twenty meters away—“and show you something that you’d better know if you want to live.”

He walked out a dozen confident steps. “First I have to heat up a rock—filters down.” I slapped the stud under my armpit and the filter slid into place over my image converter. The captain pointed his finger at a black rock the size of a basketball and gave it a short burst. The glare rolled a long shadow of the captain over us and beyond. The rock shattered into a pile of hazy splinters.

“It doesn’t take long for these to cool down.” He stooped and picked up a piece. “This one is probably twenty or twenty-five degrees. Watch.” He tossed the “warm” rock on the ice slab. It skittered around in a crazy pattern and shot off the side. He tossed another one, and it did the same.

“As you know, you are not quite
perfectly
insulated. These rocks are about the temperature of the soles of your boots. If you try to stand on a slab of hydrogen the same thing will happen to you. Except that the rock is
already
dead.

“The reason for this behavior is that the rock makes a slick interface with the ice—a little puddle of liquid hydrogen—and rides a few molecules above the liquid on a cushion of hydrogen vapor. This makes the rock, or
you
, a frictionless bearing as far as the ice is concerned and you
can’t
stand up without any friction under your boots.

“After you have lived in your suit for a month or so you
should
be able to survive falling down, but right
now
you just don’t know enough. Watch.”

The captain flexed and hopped up onto the slab. His feet shot out from under him and he twisted around in midair, landing on hands and knees. He slipped off and stood on the ground.

“The idea is to keep your exhaust fins from making contact with the frozen gas. Compared to the ice they are as hot as a blast furnace and contact with any weight behind it will result in an explosion.”

A
FTER THAT DEMONSTRATION
, we walked around for another hour or so, and returned to the billet. Once through the air lock, we had to mill around for a while, letting the suits get up to something like room temperature. Somebody came up and touched helmets with me.

“William?” She had MC COY stenciled above her faceplate.

“Hi, Sean. Anything special?”

“I just wondered if you had anyone to sleep with tonight.”

That’s right; I’d forgotten, there wasn’t any sleeping roster here. Everybody just chose his own partner. “Sure, I mean, uh, no…no, I haven’t asked anybody, sure, if you want to….”

“Thanks, William. See you later.” I watched her walk away and thought that if anybody could make a fighting suit look sexy, it’d be Sean. But even Sean couldn’t.

Cortez decided we were warm enough and led us to the suit room where we backed the things into place and hooked them up to the charging plates—each suit had a little chunk of plutonium that would power it for several years, but we were supposed to run on fuel cells as much as possible. After a lot of shuffling around, everybody finally got plugged in and we were allowed to unsuit, ninety-seven naked chickens squirming out of bright green eggs. It was
cold
—the air, the floor, and especially the suits—and we made a pretty disorderly exit toward the lockers.

I slipped on tunic, trousers and sandals and was still cold. I took my cup and joined the line for soya, everybody jumping up and down to keep warm.

“How c-cold, do you think, it is, M-Mandella?” That was McCoy.

“I don’t, even want, to think, about it.” I stopped jumping and rubbed myself as briskly as possible, while holding a cup in one hand. “At least as cold as Missouri was.”

“Ung…wish they’d, get some damn heat in, this place.” It always affects the small girls more than anybody else. McCoy was the littlest one in the company, a waspwaist doll barely five feet high.

“They’ve got the airco going. It can’t be long now.”

“I wish I, was a big, slab of, meat like, you.”

I was glad she wasn’t.

6

We had our first casualty on the third day, learning how to dig holes.

With such large amounts of energy stored in a soldier’s weapons, it wouldn’t be practical for him to hack out a hole in the frozen ground with the conventional pick and shovel. Still, you can launch grenades all day and get nothing but shallow depressions—so the usual method is to bore a hole in the ground with the hand laser, drop a timed charge in after it’s cooled down and, ideally, fill the hole with stuff. Of course, there’s not much loose rock on Charon, unless you’ve already blown a hole nearby.

The only difficult thing about the procedure is getting away. To be safe, we were told, you’ve got to either be behind something really solid, or be at least a hundred meters away. You’ve got about three minutes after setting the charge, but you can’t just spring away. Not on Charon.

The accident happened when we were making a really deep hole, the kind you want for a large underground bunker. For this, we had to blow a hole, then climb down to the bottom of the crater and repeat the procedure again and again until the hole was deep enough. Inside the crater we used charges with a five-minute delay, but it hardly seemed enough time—you really had to go slow, picking your way up the crater’s edge.

Just about everybody had blown a double hole; everybody but me and three others. I guess we were the only ones paying really close attention when Bovanovitch got into trouble. All of us were a good two hundred meters away. With my image converter turned up to about forty power, I watched her disappear over the rim of the crater. After that I could only listen in on her conversation with Cortez.

“I’m on the bottom, Sergeant.” Normal radio procedure was suspended for these maneuvers; only the trainee and Cortez could broadcast.

“O.K., move to the center and clear out the rubble. Take your time. No rush until you pull the pin.”

“Sure, Sergeant.” We could hear small echoes of rocks clattering; sound conduction through her boots. She didn’t say anything for several minutes.

“Found bottom.” She sounded a little out of breath.

“Ice, or rock?”

“Oh, it’s rock, Sergeant. The greenish stuff.”

“Use a low setting, then. One point two, dispersion four.”

“God darn it, Sergeant, that’ll take forever.”

“Yeah, but that stuff’s got hydrated crystals in it—heat it up too fast and you might make it fracture. And we’d just have to leave you there, girl.”

“O.K., one point two dee four.” The inside edge of the crater flickered red with reflected laser light.

“When you get about half a meter deep, squeeze it up to dee two.”

“Roger.” It took her exactly seventeen minutes, three of them at dispersion two. I could imagine how tired her shooting arm was.

“Now rest for a few minutes. When the bottom of the hole stops glowing, arm the charge and drop it in. Then
walk
out. Understand? You’ll have plenty of time.”

“I understand, Sergeant. Walk out.” She sounded nervous. Well, you don’t often have to tiptoe away from a twenty microton tachyon bomb. We listened to her breathing for a few minutes.

“Here goes.” Faint slithering sound of the bomb sliding down.

“Slow and easy now, you’ve got five minutes.”

“Y-yeah. Five.” Her footsteps started out slow and regular. Then, after she started climbing the side, the sounds were less regular; maybe a little frantic. And with four minutes to go—

“Crap!” A loud scraping noise, then clatters and bumps.

“What’s wrong, Private?”

“Oh, crap.” Silence. “Crap!”

“Private, you don’t wanna get shot, you
tell me what’s wrong
!”

“I…I’m stuck, damn rockslide…DO SOMETHING I can’t move. I can’t move I, I—”

“Shut up! How deep?”

“Can’t move my crap, my damn legs HELP ME—”

“Then damn it use your arms—push!—you can move a ton with each hand.” Three minutes.

Then she stopped cussing and started to mumble, in Russian, I guess, a low monotone. She was panting and you could hear rocks tumbling away.

“I’m free.” Two minutes.

“Go as fast as you can.” Cortez’s voice was flat, emotionless.

At ninety seconds she appeared crawling over the rim. “Run, girl…you better run.” She ran five or six steps and fell, skidded a few meters and got back up, running; fell again, got up again—

It looked like she was going pretty fast, but she had only covered about thirty meters when Cortez said, “All right, Bovanovitch, get down on your stomach and lie still.” Ten seconds, but she didn’t hear him, or she wanted to get just a little more distance, and she kept running, careless leaping strides and at the high point of one leap there was a flash and a rumble and something big hit her below the neck and her headless body spun off end over end through space, trailing a red-black spiral of flash-frozen blood that settled gracefully to the ground, a path of crystal powder that nobody disturbed while we gathered rocks to cover the juiceless thing at the end of it.

That night Cortez didn’t lecture us, didn’t even show up for night-chop. We were all very polite to each other and everybody was afraid to talk about it.

I sacked with Rogers; everybody sacked with a good friend, but all she wanted to do was cry, and she cried so long and so hard that she got me doing it, too.

7

“Fire team A—move out!” The twelve of us advanced in a ragged line toward the simulated bunker. It was about a kilometer away, across a carefully prepared obstacle course. We could move pretty fast, since all of the ice had been cleared from the field, but even with ten days’ experience we weren’t ready to do more than an easy jog.

I carried a grenade launcher, loaded with tenth-microton practice grenades. Everybody had their laser-fingers set at point oh eight dee one; not much more than a flashlight. This was a
simulated
attack—the bunker and its robot defender cost too much to be used once and thrown away.

“Team B follow. Team leaders, take over.”

We approached a clump of boulders at about the halfway mark, and Potter, my team leader, said “Stop and cover.” We clustered behind the rocks and waited for team B.

Barely visible in their blackened suits, the dozen men and women whispered by us. As soon as they were clear, they jogged left, out of our line of sight.

“Fire!” Red circles of light danced a half-click downrange, where the bunker was just visible. Five hundred meters was the limit for these practice grenades; but I might luck out, so I lined the launcher up on the image of the bunker, held it at a 45° angle and popped off a salvo of three.

Return fire from the bunker started before my grenades even landed. Its automatic lasers were no more powerful than the ones we were using, but a direct hit would deactivate your image converter, leaving you blind. It was setting down a random field of fire, not even coming close to the boulders we were hiding behind.

Three magnesium-bright flashes blinked simultaneously, about thirty meters short of the bunker. “Mandella! I thought you were supposed to be
good
with that thing.”

“Damn it, Potter—it only throws half a click. Once we get closer, I’ll lay ’em right on top, every time.”

“
Sure
you will.” I didn’t say anything. She wouldn’t be team leader forever. Besides, she hadn’t been such a bad girl before the power went to her head.

Since the grenadier is the assistant team leader, I was slaved into Potter’s radio and could hear B team talk to her.

“Potter, this is Freeman. Losses?”

“Potter here—no, looks like they were concentrating on you.”

“Yeah, we lost three. Right now we’re in a depression about eighty, a hundred meters down from you. We can give cover whenever you’re ready.”

“O.K., start.” Soft click: “A team follow me.” She slid out from behind the rock and turned on the faint pink beacon beneath her powerpack. I turned on mine and moved out to run alongside of her and the rest of the team fanned out in a trailing wedge. Nobody fired while B team laid down a cover for us.

All I could hear was Potter’s breathing and the soft
crunch-crunch
of my boots. Couldn’t see much of anything, so I tongued the image converter up to a log two intensification. That made the image kind of blurry but adequately bright. Looked like the bunker had B team pretty well pinned down; they were getting quite a roasting. All of their return fire was laser; they must have lost their grenadier.

“Potter, this is Mandella. Shouldn’t we take some of the heat off B team?”

“Soon as I can find us good enough cover. Is that all right with you? Private?” She’d been promoted to corporal for the duration of the exercise.

We angled to the right and laid down behind a slab of rock. Most of the others found cover nearby, but a few had to just hug the ground.