Their Master's War (7 page)

to move out of the messdeck. As Elmo marched them for the second time through the complex and mysterious bowels of the ship, there was a whole different spirit among the recruits. They had come in as nervous newcomers with nothing but their underclothes to protect them. Now, with the sole exception of Eslay, who still looked less than comfortable in his suit, they were almost standing tall as they walked through the corridors and companionways carrying their weapons and helmets. Their boots crashed on the deck plates, and they no longer flinched at the ship's random groans and booms, the flares of plasma, and the flashes of static.

The spirit wilted slightly when they confronted the large circular air lock that led to the exterior of the ship. Beyond the thick double iris was an unknown infinity that was so awesome that not even the suit-induced euphoria could totally calm their fears. Rance continued to give them no time to panic. At his order, they put on their helmets. He and Elmo carefully checked the seals, then Elmo operated the air lock controls. The inner iris opened with a hollow, echoing sigh. They stepped inside. The iris closed behind them. As the air drained out of the lock, the suits began to alter. They ceased to be a smooth second skin and started to tuck and roll over the vulnerable parts of the men's bodies, providing ribbed protection for the knees and elbows, for the crotch and kidneys and the pit of the stomach. The second iris opened, and the blackness of space was above their heads. For a few moments, they had no chance to take in the view. There was the instant of disorientation as their horizontal perspective performed a ninety-degree turn, then a clutch of dizziness as they stepped from the floor of the air lock onto the subjectively vertical surface of the ship's hull. In that instant, the pseudograv built into their boots took over from the ship's internal gravity. Everything normalized, and the air lock became a rapidly closing hole in what was now the ground.

For once, Rance didn't hurry them. No one, not even a topman, could bully a recruit through his first contact with the emptiness of space and the different but equally frightening vastness of the battle cluster itself. They had to be given time to stand and stare. Hark and the others did exactly that. Even in the desert, when he had gazed up in wonder at the night sky, he had never felt so completely dwarfed. There were numbers in his head that attempted to make sense of the endless black and the cold light of the thousands of stars, but they didn't help any. There were also numbers for the battle cluster, but those were equally meaningless. Hark couldn't conceive how anything so vast could have been built even by Gods. Thirteen huge ships, each as large as the one on which he was standing and each having its unique if inexplicable design and form, hung together in an unidentifiable configuration, the relationships of which Hark knew that he would never begin to understand. The way the giant ships were clustered together reminded Hark of some strange, exotic flower. The parts added up to a unit that was somehow greater than the sum of the individual parts. Although the ships floated free of each other, there could be no mistaking the fact that the cluster was a fully integrated unit. There were continuous ship-to-ship exchanges of all kinds of raw energy. A faint rainbow aurora glowed in the space between two ships that were long tapering triangles and a third that was a bulky, irregular spheroid. A ship that appeared to be constructed of hexagonal crystals discharged cracks of purple ball lightning into empty space. Three other ships were linked by a vibrating web of plasma pseudopods. The overall impression was one of the battle cluster being so highly charged that it could scarcely contain its own impossible levels of power. All served to reinforce Hark's original

feeling that the ship, and now the cluster, was more a living thing than a collection of soulless machines. Rance allowed the recruits their moments of naked wonder, but eventually he snapped them back to the matter at hand. They were marched across the vast expanse of the
Anah
J's outer hull to where the other groups of five that made up the intake were waiting for them along with their overmen. Hark had somehow expected the surface of the ship's hull to be a featureless sheet of smooth metal. If anything, it was quite the reverse. It was covered by a deep patina of fine dust, pebbles, and even small rocks. It was pitted both by numerous small craters and by large washes of fused and blackened metal that were clearly legacies from previous battles. As they marched toward the others, the five passed a team of four humpbacked, suited nonhuman creatures performing a minor repair on the hull with vibrant red lasers. Their suits were jointed steel armor, not the living parasites issued to the troopers. Waed and Morish paused to look more closely at the creatures, but Elmo chivvied them along.

"Keep it moving. You're going to have to get used to a lot of different species before you're through. There's nothing particularly interesting about the nohans."

When they reached the other squads of five, they were formed into parade ranks. Rance positioned himself in front of the whole intake.

"The overmen will now hand out the energy packs."

Of all the danger spots in the induction process, this was probably the most crucial. The recruits would now be armed and capable of the most terrible destruction if any of them decided to psych or serk. His hold on them had to be absolute.

"Do not load the energy packs until I give the word!"

Each recruit was handed the dull black pod, slightly larger than a clenched fist. It clipped into the underside

of his weapon. Each had the specifications of the MEW and its energy source in his new memory, and only the dullest failed to experience a slight thrill of excited fear at the realization of the extent of the power he was holding in his hand.

"Take the energy pack in your left hand. Hold your weapon by its midsection with the underside pointing away from you."

He paused until all of the recruits had it right.

"Place the pack between the guide blocks but do not, I repeat, do not push it home." Again he paused.

"On the command 'Load' you will load your weapons. At all times, you will keep your hands away from the triggers."

The overmen walked down the rows of recruits to make sure that they followed Rance's instructions to the letter. It was only when they were completely satisfied that the order was given.

"Intake... load!"

The energy packs were slammed home. There was no noise in the silence of space.

"Open formation, advance! Keep those hands away from the triggers!" They spread out into one long, extended rank, each man some two meters from the next one.

"Weapons ready!"

Weapons were pushed forward by nervous hands.

"In this first phase of the exercise, lighted targets will appear in front of you. They will move toward you. The object is to shoot them down before they reach you. You will use all of the functions of your weapons, and I will call the changes of function."

Now that the weapons were energized, Rance was brutal efficiency. All the "my children" mockery had gone from his voice.

"Targets up!"

A blip of yellow light appeared from nowhere and floated a couple of meters above the surface of the hull. At first there was just the one, then it subdivided into a whole line of blips, maybe twenty in all. They advanced on the troopers at about the speed of a man walking.

"Set to blast and fire at will!"

There was a moment of hesitation, as if none of the recruits wanted to be the first to fire.

"The idea is to shoot them down. They're the enemy, and they want to kill you." The recruits' weapons went off almost as one. A number of the blips vanished, but by no means was every shot a hit. Rance raised his hand.

"Targets down."

The yellow blips vanished.

"That was uniformly pathetic. In combat, you'll rarely have an enemy moving as slowly as that. Targets up!"

For the next four hours, they practiced with their weapons. The speed of the blips increased, and their movement became trickier; they ducked and weaved, and toward the end, they fired bolts of green light that delivered a severe but not incapacitating shock to whomever they hit. Rance had the men constantly switching functions on their weapons. They jumped from laser-trace to blast, from blast to heat ray to concussion, and back to lasertrace. Very early in the exercise, Hark realized that the multiple triggers on the MEW were almost identical to the prayer levers with which he'd worshiped back on his planet. This left him with a growing feeling that his former life had been a cruel deceit. Rance not only worked the men hard on their weapons, he also pushed them toward the limit of their physical capabilities. He had them running and diving, crawling on their stomachs, all the time firing as they

went, beating off the repeated attacks of the blips. He constantly reminded them that it was a matter of kill
or
be killed. He apparently had an uncompromisingly basic view of warfare. The disaster didn't occur until the exercise was almost over. Only one recruit from Hark's squad, Eslay, seemed unable either to cop the feel of the MEW or to keep up with the rest of the intake. When the blips started firing shocks, he was constantly being zapped. Finally he gave up and dropped to his knees with a sighing sob that was audible over everyone's communicator. Two blips hovered over him, hitting his body with repeated shocks. He was now babbling in a language that Hark didn't understand. Then, to the horror of the other recruits, the babbling turned to screams that reverberated inside their helmets. The seal between Eslay's helmet and his suit was opening. The suit was peeling back. Blood fountained from the exposed flesh as it went into explosive decompression. More blood splashed the inside of his helmet visor. As the suit retreated toward Eslay's waist, his lungs blew. The force of his chest rupturing lifted him clear off the surface. The suit snaked off his dead legs and, carried by the grav still running in his boots, dropped to the floor. Eslay's corpse, naked except for his helmet, continued to float upward. Rance quickly stepped up to the nearest recruit and took his weapon. He set it to blast, aimed it at the body, and held down the trigger until there was nothing left. He calmly turned and handed the weapon back to its owner, then he faced the stunned recruits.

"Couldn't just leave him to float around, could we?"

Hark was shocked by the blunt callousness. Surelyaman's death deserved something, some kind of observation. Rance seemed to be well aware of the feeling.

"Think we should have taken the time to give himadecent burial? Let me tell you something, gettingade cent burial can be a dangerous luxury. The first thing you learn is that a dead body is a worthless lump of organic garbage and isn't something you take risks for. Anything else is sentiment, and sentiment can get you killed. You're probably wondering how it was that the suit came off him and could the same thing happen to you. The answer is that it might, but it most likely won't, unless you cave in like he did. Not often, but now and again, a suit turns on its wearer if it feels he isn't giving one hundred percent. Eslay didn't like his suit, and apparently it didn't like him."

Rance made a dismissive gesture, and the overmen began herding the recruits into ordered ranks preparatory to returning to the interior of the ship. Elmo picked up Eslay's suit, boots, and weapon. As they marched away, Rance didn't go with them. He needed a few moments to himself. Eslay's death was
3
damned nuisance. Now he'd have to make a report to the line officer. 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