And so had these youngsters, Aten’s briefing told me. Cloned from long-dead ancestors, gestated in artificial wombs, they were trained from birth to be soldiers and nothing else. They were raised in military camps, never seeing anything except military life, never allowed to mix with the civilian society that they were created to defend. They knew nothing but war, except for the brief periods between battles when they were trained for their next mission.
Some of their senior officers had been born naturally, to normal families, and joined the military voluntarily. But very few, even among the top officers, had homes and families outside the military. Like me, these troopers had been created to fight, to kill, and then to fight again until they themselves were killed.
I remembered the Sacred Band of ancient Thebes, the warrior troop made of pairs of lovers, men who would die fighting rather than let their partners down. And they had died fighting, down to the last one, when Philip’s Macedonians met them in the battle of Chaeronea. I had been there with Philip and his son Alexander. I had taken part in the hand-to-hand butchery.
What about these youngsters? Would they also fight to the last man—or woman? I recalled the words of an ancient general to his men: “Your job is not to die for your country. Your job is to get the other poor sonofabitch to die for his country.”
My job was to see to it that these young men and women won their battles with as few casualties as possible. I did not know them, not individually. Yet I was determined to be as good a commander for them as I could be. How good would that be? Would I be good enough, or would I get them all killed?
The testing time was fast approaching. Our landing vessel shot out of the cruiser’s launching bay, acceleration flattening us back in our liquid-filled seats. There were no windows, no viewing screens in the landing vehicle’s starkly utilitarian interior. Just the lurching and swaying of hypersonic flight and then the slamming shock of hitting the atmosphere, blazing through it like a falling meteor.
The whole squad was silent now. White-knuckle time. The enemy had thrown up nuclear missiles at the invasion fleet. We were supposed to be coming down on the far side of the planet, away from their only base. But what if they had more than the one base our scouts had detected? We had cleaned their satellites out of their orbits around the planet, but what if they had aircraft to intercept us? A single hit with a laser beam or the smallest of missiles would blow our hypersonic lander out of the sky. And us with it.
“Approaching jump zone,” came the word from the cockpit, little more than a whisper in my helmet earphones.
The ship was still bucking and vibrating badly, biting deeper and deeper into the atmosphere, its outer hull glowing cherry red from the heat. I stood up, unsteady in the rocking, jouncing plane.
“On your feet!” the sergeant bellowed. I knew his name: Manfred, a veteran, hard-bitten and tough enough to forge his squad into a unit that would follow him anywhere without question—and take care of each other, whether under fire or in some brawling training camp.
My three lieutenants were in the three other landers. Our plan was to hit four drop zones in a relatively clear flatland, consolidate our four squads, and then start to assemble the matter transceiver while establishing a defensive perimeter around the site.
It was a night landing. That made no sense to me, since enemy sensors could detect us just as easily in darkness as in daylight. It made things more difficult for us, not the enemy. But the upper echelons had dictated a night landing for reasons that they did not deign to share with the landing force.
So we buckled on our flight packs, tightened our harnesses and helmet straps and lined up for the jump. I was at the hatch, the first to go.
“Jump zone in ten seconds,” said the voice in my earphones.
The hatch slid smoothly open. A howling wind slammed at me, almost forcing me back a step. Automatically I pulled down the visor of my helmet. It was too dark out there to see anything with the unaided eyes, but the sensors in the visor lit up the scene quite well.
What I saw was not encouraging. A canopy of massive trees was whipping by, almost a blur at the speed the lander was maintaining. To jump into that jungle would be suicide.
“Jump!” rang in my earphones.
I jumped.
The flight pack vibrated against the small of my back, and suddenly I was hovering almost motionless in midair, falling slowly, floating almost. With my visor’s sensors I could see the unbroken carpet of the jungle canopy coming languidly toward me, countless arms of countless trees. Where was the clearing we were supposed to land in?
I was drifting, the energy sphere generated by the flight pack resisting both gravity and inertia but not quite overcoming them, so that I sank slowly, like a leaf drifting to the ground. It was almost a pleasant sensation. But no matter how languid my fall, I was still falling, and if I crashed into those thickly intertwined trees my chances of reaching the ground uninjured were dim.
It must have taken only a few seconds, but it seemed like hours to me. And then I saw the edge of the clearing, where the trees abruptly stopped and the ground was a relatively smooth carpet of grass.
Turning onto my back, I looked up into the starry sky and counted twenty-five silhouettes tumbling through the air. And behind them, the bulkier shapes of the transceiver’s components and our supplies and equipment. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of our lander, wings tucking back now for supersonic climb, banking steeply away from us and lighting off its main engines, heading back to the cruiser in orbit.
I rolled over again and prepared to land in the clearing, working the flight-pack controls on my belt to bring me to a gentle touchdown on the grass. My boots touched the grass, all right, and then kept right on going. I splashed and started sinking.
“It’s a swamp!” I yelled into my helmet mike. “Don’t touch down. Hover and look for solid ground.”
I tried to lift out of the quicksand-thick swamp but my left leg had caught on something. I could hear Sergeant Manfred and some of the troopers calling back and forth:
“Looks like some rocks up there.”
“Set down easy, see if it’s solid ground.”
“Boulders—yaargh!” A scream.
I was trying to pull free of the swamp, ratcheting up the power level of my flight pack slowly because my leg was caught and I did not want to wrench it or pop the tendons in my knee. At the same time I was searching across the open area, watching my troopers as they hovered, searching for a safe landing spot. One of them had screamed. Why?
“Look out! That thing’s moving!”
What in the seven levels of hell was going on? And what was my leg caught on? The equipment packs were coming down now, splashing into the swamp like rocks falling in slow motion; sinking out of sight.
“It’s alive!”
“Blast it! But don’t hit Jerron.”
I realized that my leg was not caught on anything. Something had grabbed the leg and was holding on to it. Tightly. Tight enough to bend the armor of my legging. I could feel it squeezing against my calf. Whatever it was, it was trying to pull me down into the grass-choked water.
I cranked the flight-pack power up higher and lifted up out of the swamp with something hanging on to my leg. I looked down and saw a nightmare tangle of tentacles and sharp snapping claws. It was climbing up my leg, trying to crack my armor and get at the meat inside.
Still rising slowly into the night sky, I pulled my pistol from its holster and took careful aim. Don’t shoot your own foot off, I warned myself. I thumbed the laser power to low and tried to convince my would-be devourer to let go. It snaked another tentacle toward my wrist, pincer snapping audibly despite the rush of wind whipping past my helmet.