The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century (14 page)

“Freeman, this is Potter.”

“Potter, this is Smithy. Freeman’s out; Samuels is out. We only have five men left. Give us some cover so we can get….”

“Roger, Smithy.”—
click
—“Open up, A team. The B’s are really hurtin’.”

I
PEEKED OUT
over the edge of the rock. My rangefinder said that the bunker was about three hundred fifty meters away, still pretty far. I aimed just a smidgeon high and popped three, then down a couple of degrees and three more. The first ones overshot by about twenty meters, then the second salvo flared up directly in front of the bunker. I tried to hold on that angle and popped fifteen, the rest of the magazine, in the same direction.

I should have ducked down behind the rock to reload, but I wanted to see where the fifteen would land, so I kept my eyes on the bunker while I reached back to unclip another magazine….

When the laser hit my image converter there was a red glare so intense it seemed to go right through my eyes and bounce off the back of my skull. It must have been only a few milliseconds before the converter overloaded and went blind, but the bright green afterimage hurt my eyes for several minutes.

Since I was officially “dead,” my radio automatically cut off and I had to remain where I was until the mock battle was over. With no sensory input besides the feel of my own skin—and it ached where the image converter had shone on it—and the ringing in my ears, it seemed like an awfully long time. Finally, a helmet clanked against mine:

“You O.K., Mandella?” Potter’s voice.

“Sorry, I died of boredom twenty minutes ago.”

“Stand up and take my hand.” I did so and we shuffled back to the billet. It must have taken over an hour. She didn’t say anything more, all the way back—it’s a pretty awkward way to communicate—but after we’d cycled through the air lock and warmed up, she helped me undo my suit. I got ready for a mild tongue-lashing, but when the suit popped open, before I could even get my eyes adjusted to the light, she grabbed me around the neck and planted a wet kiss on my mouth.

“Nice shooting, Mandella.”

“Huh?”

“The last salvo before you got hit—four direct hits; the bunker decided it was knocked out, and all we had to do was walk the rest of the way.”

“Great.” I scratched my face under the eyes and some dry skin flaked off. She giggled.

“You should see yourself, you look like….”

“All personnel report to the assembly area.” That was the captain’s voice. Bad news.

She handed me a tunic and sandals. “Let’s go.”

The assembly area/chop hall was just down the corridor. There was a row of roll-call buttons at the door; I pressed the one beside my name. Four of the names were covered with black tape. That was good, we hadn’t lost anybody else during today’s maneuvers.

The captain was sitting on the raised dais, which at least meant we didn’t have to go through the tench-hut bullshit. The place filled up in less than a minute; a soft chime indicated the roll was complete.

Captain Stott didn’t stand up. “You did
fairly
well today, nobody got killed and I expected some to. In that respect you exceeded my expectations but in
every
other respect you did a poor job.

“I am glad you’re taking good care of yourselves because each of you represents an investment of over a million dollars and one-fourth of a human life.

“But in this simulated battle against a
very
stupid robot enemy, thirty-seven of you managed to walk into laser fire and be killed in a
sim
ulated way and since dead people require no food
you
will require no food, for the next three days. Each person who was a casualty in this battle will be allowed only two liters of water and a vitamin ration each day.”

We knew enough not to groan or anything, but there were some pretty disgusted looks, especially on the faces that had singed eyebrows and a pink rectangle of sunburn framing their eyes.

“Mandella.”

“Sir?”

“You are far and away the worst burned casualty. Was your image converter set on normal?”

Oh, crap. “No, sir. Log two.”

“I see. Who was your team leader for the exercise?”

“Acting Corporal Potter, sir.”

“Private Potter, did you order him to use image intensification?”

“Sir, I…I don’t remember.”

“You don’t. Well, as a memory exercise you may join the dead people. Is that satisfactory?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Dead people get one last meal tonight, and go on no rations starting tomorrow. Are there any questions?” He must have been kidding. “All right. Dismissed.”

I
SELECTED THE
meal that looked as if it had the most calories and took my tray over to sit by Potter.

“That was a quixotic damn thing to do. But thanks.”

“Nothing. I’ve been wanting to lose a few pounds anyway.” I couldn’t see where she was carrying any extra.

“I know a good exercise,” I said. She smiled without looking up from her tray. “Have anybody for tonight?”

“Kind of thought I’d ask Jeff….”

“Better hurry, then. He’s lusting after Uhuru.” Well, that was mostly true. Everybody did.

“I don’t know. Maybe we ought to save our strength. That third day….”

“Come on.” I scratched the back of her hand lightly with a fingernail. “We haven’t sacked since Missouri. Maybe I’ve learned something new.”

“Maybe you have.” She tilted her head up at me in a sly way. “O.K.”

Actually, she was the one with the new trick. The French corkscrew, she called it. She wouldn’t tell me who taught it to her, though. I’d like to shake his hand.

8

The two weeks’ training around Miami Base eventually cost us eleven lives. Twelve, if you count Dahlquist. I guess having to spend the rest of your life on Charon, with a hand and both legs missing, is close enough to dying.

Little Foster was crushed in a landslide and Freeland had a suit malfunction that froze him solid before we could carry him inside. Most of the other deaders were people I didn’t know all that well. But they all hurt. And they seemed to make us more scared rather than more cautious.

Now darkside. A flier brought us over in groups of twenty, and set us down beside a pile of building materials, thoughtfully immersed in a pool of helium II.

We used grapples to haul the stuff out of the pool. It’s not safe to go wading, since the stuff crawls all over you and it’s hard to tell what’s underneath; you could walk out onto a slab of hydrogen and be out of luck.

I’d suggested that we try to boil away the pool with our lasers, but ten minutes of concentrated fire didn’t drop the helium level appreciably. It didn’t boil, either; helium II is a “superfluid,” so what evaporation there was had to take place evenly, all over the surface. No hot spots, so no bubbling.

We weren’t supposed to use lights, to “avoid detection.” There was plenty of starlight, with your image converter cranked up to log three or four, but each stage of amplification meant some loss of detail. By log four, the landscape looked like a crude monochrome painting, and you couldn’t read the names on people’s helmets unless they were right in front of you.

The landscape wasn’t all that interesting, anyhow. There were half a dozen medium-sized meteor craters—all with exactly the same level of helium II in them—and the suggestion of some puny mountains just over the horizon. The uneven ground was the consistency of frozen spiderwebs; every time you put your foot down, you’d sink half an inch with a squeaking crunch. It could get on your nerves.

It took most of a day to pull all the stuff out of the pool. We took shifts napping, which you could do either standing up, sitting, or lying on your stomach. I didn’t do well in any of those positions, so I was anxious to get the bunker built and pressurized.

We could build the thing underground—it’d just fill up with helium II—so the first thing to do was to build an insulating platform, a permaplast-vacuum sandwich three layers tall.

I was an acting corporal, with a crew of ten people. We were carrying the permaplast layers to the building site—two people can carry one easily—when one of “my” men slipped and fell on his back.

“Damn it, Singer, watch your step.” We’d had a couple of deaders that way.

“Sorry, Corporal. I’m bushed, just got my feet tangled up.”

“Yeah, just watch it.” He got back up all right, and with his partner placed the sheet and went back to get another.

I kept my eye on him. In a few minutes he was practically staggering, not easy to do with that suit of cybernetic armor.

“Singer! After you set that plank, I want to see you.”

“O.K.” He labored through the task and mooched over.

“Let me check your readout.” I opened the door on his chest to expose the medical monitor. His temperature was two degrees high; blood pressure and heart rate both elevated. Not up to the red line, though.

“You sick or something?”

“Hell, Mandella, I feel O.K., just tired. Since I fell I’ve been a little dizzy.”

I
CHINNED THE
medic’s combination. “Doc, this is Mandella. You wanna come over here for a minute?”

“Sure, where are you?” I waved and he walked over from poolside.

“What’s the problem?” I showed him Singer’s readout.

He knew what all the other little dials and things meant, so it took him a while. “As far as I can tell, Mandella…he’s just hot.”

“Hell, I coulda told you that,” said Singer.

“Maybe you better have the armorer take a look at his suit.” We had two people who’d taken a crash course in suit maintenance; they were our “armorers.”

I chinned Sanchez and asked him to come over with his tool kit.

“Be a couple of minutes, Corporal. Carryin’ a plank.”

“Well, put it down and get on over here.” I was getting an uneasy feeling. Waiting for him, the medic and I looked over Singer’s suit.

“Uh-oh,” Doc Jones said. “Look at this.” I went around to the back and looked where he was pointing. Two of the fins on the heat exchanger were bent out of shape.

“What is wrong?” Singer asked.

“You fell on your heat exchanger, right?”

“Sure, Corporal—that’s it, it must not be working right.”

“I don’t think it’s working at
all
,” said Doc.

Sanchez came over with his diagnostic kit and we told him what had happened. He looked at the heat exchanger, then plugged a couple of jacks into it and got a digital readout from a little monitor in his kit. I didn’t know what it was measuring, but it came out zero to eight decimal places.

Heard a soft click, Sanchez chinning my private frequency. “Corporal, this guy’s a deader.”

“What? Can’t you fix the damn thing?”

“Maybe…maybe I could, if I could take it apart. But there’s no way….”

“Hey! Sanchez?” Singer was talking on the general freak. “Find out what’s wrong?” He was panting.

Click.
“Keep your pants on, man, we’re working on it.”
Click.
“He won’t last long enough for us to get the bunker pressurized. And I can’t work on that heat exchanger from outside of the suit.”

“You’ve got a spare suit, haven’t you?”

“Two of ’em, the fit-anybody kind. But there’s no place…say….”

“Right. Go get one of the suits warmed up.” I chinned the general freak. “Listen, Singer, we’ve gotta get you out of that thing. Sanchez has a spare unit, but to make the switch, we’re gonna have to build a house around you. Understand?”

“Huh-uh.”

“Look, we’ll just make a box with you inside, and hook it up to the life-support unit. That way you can breathe while you make the switch.”

“Soun’s pretty compis…complicated t’me.”

“Look, just come along….”

“I’ll be all right, man, jus’ lemme res’….”

I grabbed his arm and led him to the building site. He was really weaving. Doc took his other arm, and between us we kept him from falling over.

“Corporal Ho, this is Corporal Mandella.” Ho was in charge of the life-support unit.

“Go away, Mandella, I’m busy.”

“You’re going to be busier.” I outlined the problem to her. While her group hurried to adapt the LSU—for this purpose, it need only be an air hose and heater—I got my crew to bring around six slabs of permaplast, so we could build a big box around Singer and the extra suit. It would look like a huge coffin, a meter square and six meters long.

We set the suit down on the slab that would be the floor of the coffin. “O.K., Singer, let’s go.”

No answer.

“Singer!” He was just standing there. Doc Jones checked his readout.

“He’s out, man, unconscious.”

M
Y MIND RACED
. There might just be room for another person in the box. “Give me a hand here.” I took Singer’s shoulders and Doc took his feet, and we carefully laid him out at the feet of the empty suit.

Then I laid down myself, above the suit. “O.K., close ’er up.”

“Look, Mandella, if anybody goes in there, it oughta be me.”

“No, Doc.
My
job. My man.” That sounded all wrong. William Mandella, boy hero.

They stood a slab up on edge—it had two openings for the LSU input and exhaust—and proceeded to weld it to the bottom plank with a narrow laser beam. On Earth, we’d just use glue, but here the only fluid was helium, which has lots of interesting properties, but is definitely not sticky.

After about ten minutes we were completely walled up. I could feel the LSU humming. I switched on my suit light—the first time since we landed on darkside—and the glare made purple blotches dance in front of my eyes.

“Mandella, this is Ho. Stay in your suit at least two or three minutes. We’re putting hot air in, but it’s coming back just this side of liquid.” I lay and watched the purple fade.

“O.K., it’s still cold, but you can make it.” I popped my suit. It wouldn’t open all the way, but I didn’t have too much trouble getting out. The suit was still cold enough to take some skin off my fingers and butt as I wiggled out.

I had to crawl feet-first down the coffin to get to Singer. It got darker fast, moving away from my light. When I popped his suit a rush of hot stink hit me in the face. In the dim light his skin was dark red and splotchy. His breathing was very shallow and I could see his heart palpitating.