Shedding their garments until they were naked, and helped by the tech, the five-man maniple worked past the eel-like mass of tubes and slid into the very slick fabric within the suits.
“It’s freezing,” said Lance.
“It feels like oil,” Omi said.
“The inside of each suit conforms to your body shape,” said the tech, for once sounding professional.
After they were secure, he latched them, checking the seals and dropping their visors. He came to Marten last.
“You know what?” whispered the tech.
Marten lay snug like a caterpillar in its cocoon, and about as immobile. He peered at the tech smiling down at him. The boy had bad breath.
“You getting brave now?” asked Marten.
“I could poke out your eyes,” said the tech, showing Marten the penlight laser-spotter in his hand. “But you know why I’m not going too?”
“‘Cause the sight of blood scares you?”
“No, Mr. Tough-Guy, because every way you look at this, you’re doomed. The Highborn are firing their spreads into five different cones of probability, and even then, they’re not really sure they’ll get this X-ship. Think about that. Five different vectors they’re firing into, using a hundred Storm-Assault Missiles like this one. And you can bet that if you miss your target that you’re never coming home. You’ll just go on sailing forever, sooner or later dying from lack of oxygen.”
Marten remained silent because he couldn’t think of anything to say.
The tech nodded and looked at the others.
Marten knew the look. He was building up courage, probably to shout this information to everyone.
Marten said, “Remember, though, we might make it back.”
“What?”
“One out of five isn’t zero.”
The tech stared. “You’re even dumber than you look if you think those are good odds. Besides, even if you get there you have to break into the battleship.”
“Yeah, bad odds,” Marten said. “But do you want to bet your life on it?”
The tech’s eyes shifted away. He pushed off Marten’s suit and floated out the room. As the hatch slammed shut, hypos from the suit’s medikit pricked each of them. A cool, numbing sensation spread over Marten. Then his helmet grew opaque and VR-images blossomed onto the HUD (Heads Up Display) section of the visor. It showed him the outside of the missile, from a camera there.
A bloated, gross feeling suddenly overwhelmed him. Then his helmet’s intercom buzzed.
“I feel like throwing up,” Vip said.
“Try and relax,” said Lance.
“Yeah,” Marten said.
By the sounds, valves in the room opened and an ethylene glycol solution that made sludge seem thin glopped in. It pressed against the G-suits and the oily inner surface of the suit’s interior seemed to sink into Marten’s skin. As the tech had predicated, Marten felt as if he was being smothered. three atmospheric pressures compressed against each of their G-suits. The reason they’d been given drugs was so their innards became pressurized enough to resist the outer force.
The delicacy of the human body meant that a person could only take eight Gs before passing out from lack of oxygen to the brain. Highborn could take about twice as much, which was another of their superiorities over premen. With these suits, however, the shock troopers could survive the twenty-five G acceleration that the missile needed in order to catch up to the Bangladesh after the beamship passed Mercury. The suits would also stimulate their muscles throughout the trip so they wouldn’t atrophy.
“This is gonna be a load of fun,” said Lance.
With his chin pressing the various switches in his suit, Marten checked the VR files. Battle plans, entertainment dramas, porn, it was all here. He switched to the missile’s cone camera, watching them being slid out of the hanger and toward the gargantuan boost ship.
Highborn glory: Succeed or die.
The quiet, desperate rage that he’d been struggling to contain blossomed into something darker and more urgent. Not only were they ripping him away from all that he’d ever worked for, but… They were cheap missile fodder, a mere biological component webbed into a warhead—becoming the warhead. They were a bio-weapon of a different sort. They were dogs to kick around and abuse, and geld if they became too intractable. No. This was worse than madness. It was inhuman debasement, a shredding of all dignity. Escape was no longer good enough. If he made to the Outer Planets he vowed to warn them of the hell that was coming and do everything he could to help stop it.
25.
Both Highborn Grand Admiral Cassius and Social Unity’s Supreme Commander, General James Hawthorne, considered themselves keen students of military history. Each searched the past for clues, looking for what to avoid or what to do.
Throughout his life, the Grand Admiral had only known victory. Beginning as a young clone-cadet in the Moscow War Academy, to the stunning and brilliant Second Battle of Deep Mars Orbit in 2339, he’d shown dash, iron will and a fanatical, almost otherworldly genius. In the Second Battle of Deep Mars Orbit, he had crushed the combined Fleets of the Mars Rebels and the Jupiter Confederation’s Expeditionary Force sent to help the Martians. Genius had marked even his planning and execution of the Highborn Rebellion in 2349.
Most Highborn likened him to the ancient world-conqueror, Alexander the Great, while the Social Unitarians thought he more resembled the worst of civilization’s scourges, Genghis Khan.
The Grand Admiral planned to outdo both ancient warlords. After conquering the four inner planets and crushing Social Unity, he dreamt of continuing with the Jupiter System. He would crush its Galilean moon-kingdoms of Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, together with the rest of the gas giant’s snowballs awash in wealth and high technology. The strange space-habitat states orbiting Jupiter would also be plucked like ripe fruit. Then he would lunge at the Saturn System, at Uranus. He dreamed of the subjection of the entire Solar System, all the way to the distant science outposts on Charon. The crux of his reasoning settled upon the fact that he was a Highborn, a true lord of Order and genetically superior to the masses of Homo sapiens spread helter-skelter throughout the system. After all, the two examples from the past had been mere premen. Still, both premen had overcome fantastic odds and preformed outstanding feats of daring and strategic brilliance. In some senses, they could be emulated. But instead of their earth-bound glories, future ages would marvel at his conquests, at his stunning judgments and genius. Or so he mused in his quieter moments of reflection.
As he lay in his study aboard the Doom Star Julius Caesar, which orbited the Earth’s Moon, he pondered a different problem: namely, the X-Ship Bangladesh. He pondered it as he laid his nine-foot frame on the couch. He had tossed his boots aside. His feet crossed at the ankles and perched on the couch’s armrest. He kept twitching his VR-gloved hand, images flashing across the lens of his VR-goggles.
The people and point in history he settled upon were the Japanese of the early to middle Twentieth Century. They had been militarists, men who understood about honor and the will to fight. What most intrigued the Grand Admiral were the last days of 1941 and the next several months of 1942. It began with a naval battle called Pearl Harbor. He twitched his fingers, studying the plan, the risks and the brilliant execution of this Nipponese Admiral Yamamoto. After the incredible victory in Hawaii, the Japanese Fleets had scored one stunning win after another from the Philippines to the Indian Ocean. Finally, with their island empire won in a few swift months, the Japanese gathered their naval vessels into a vast armada to finish off the Americans at Midway.
The Grand Admiral read fast and he frowned at what he read. At Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had planned in minute detail and with painstaking thoroughness. They had trained to a pitch of excellence of nearly Highborn quality. But the Midway Operation, it had been a sloppy affair born of conceit. Ah, the old historian had a phrase for it: victory disease. The Japanese of World War Two had won so handily and so quickly that they soon believed that their superiority was inborn, innate and would always be that way.