“It’s so dirty.”
I shrugged. “It’s so army.”
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were going home.
LIEUTENANT MANDELLA
2024–2389 A.D.
1
“Quick and dirty.” I was looking at my platoon sergeant, Santesteban, but talking to myself. And anybody else who was listening.
“Yeah,” he said. “Gotta do it in the first coupla minutes or we’re screwed tight.” He was matter-of-fact, laconic. Drugged.
Private Collins came up with Halliday. They were holding hands unselfconsciously. “Lieutenant Mandella?” Her voice broke a little. “Can we have just a minute?”
“One minute,” I said, too abruptly. “We have to leave in five, I’m sorry.”
Hard to watch those two together now. Neither one had any combat experience. But they knew what everybody did; how slim their chances were of ever being together again. They slumped in a corner and mumbled words and traded mechanical caresses, no passion or even comfort. Collins’s eyes shone but she wasn’t weeping. Halliday just looked grim, numb. She was normally by far the prettier of the two, but the sparkle had gone out of her and left a well-formed dull shell.
I’d gotten used to open female homosex in the months since we’d left Earth. Even stopped resenting the loss of potential partners. The men together still gave me a chill, though.
I stripped and backed into the clamshelled suit. The new ones were a hell of a lot more complicated, with all the new biometrics and trauma maintenance. But well worth the trouble of hooking up, in case you got blown apart just a little bit. Go home to a comfortable pension with heroic prosthesis. They were even talking about the possibility of regeneration, at least for missing arms and legs. Better get it soon, before Heaven filled up with fractional people. Heaven was the new hospital/rest-and-recreation planet.
I finished the set-up sequence and the suit closed by itself. Gritted my teeth against the pain that never came, when the internal sensors and fluid tubes poked into your body. Conditioned neural bypass, so you felt only a slight puzzling dislocation. Rather than the death of a thousand cuts.
Collins and Halliday were getting into their suits now and the other dozen were almost set, so I stepped over to the third platoon’s staging area. Say goodbye again to Marygay.
She was suited and heading my way. We touched helmets instead of using the radio. Privacy.
“Feeling OK, honey?”
“All right,” she said. “Took my pill.”
“Yeah, happy times.” I’d taken mine too, supposed to make you feel optimistic without interfering with your sense of judgment. I knew most of us would probably die, but I didn’t feel too bad about it. “Sack with me tonight?”
“If we’re both here,” she said neutrally. “Have to take a pill for that, too.” She tried to laugh. “Sleep, I mean. How’re the new people taking it? You have ten?”
“Ten, yeah, they’re OK. Doped up, quarter-dose.”
“I did that, too; try to keep them loose.”
In fact, Santesteban was the only other combat veteran in my platoon; the four corporals had been in UNEF for a while but hadn’t ever fought.
The speaker in my cheekbone crackled and Commander Cortez said, “Two minutes. Get your people lined up.”
We had our goodbye and I went back to check my flock. Everybody seemed to have gotten suited up without any problems, so I put them on line. We waited for what seemed like a long time.
“All right, load ’em up.” With the word “up,” the bay door in front of me opened — the staging area having already been bled of air — and I led my men and women through to the assault ship.
These new ships were ugly as hell. Just an open framework with clamps to hold you in place, swiveled lasers fore and aft, small tachyon powerplants below the lasers. Everything automated; the machine would land us as quickly as possible and then zip off to harass the enemy. It was a one use, throwaway drone. The vehicle that would come pick us up if we survived was cradled next to it, much prettier.
We clamped in and the assault ship cast off from the Sangre y Victoria with twin spurts from the yaw jets. Then the voice of the machine gave us a short countdown and we sped off at four gees’ acceleration, straight down.
The planet, which we hadn’t bothered to name, was a chunk of black rock without any normal star close enough to give it heat. At first it was visible only by the absence of stars where its bulk cut off their light, but as we dropped closer we could see subtle variations in the blackness of its surface. We were coming down on the hemisphere opposite the Taurans’ outpost.
Our recon had shown that their camp sat in the middle of a flat lava plain several hundred kilometers in diameter. It was pretty primitive compared to other Tauran bases UNEF had encountered, but there wouldn’t be any sneaking up on it. We were going to careen over the horizon some fifteen klicks from the place, four ships converging simultaneously from different directions, all of us decelerating like mad, hopefully to drop right in their laps and come up shooting. There would be nothing to hide behind.
I wasn’t worried, of course. Abstractedly, I wished I hadn’t taken the pill.
We leveled off about a kilometer from the surface and sped along much faster than the rock’s escape velocity, constantly correcting to keep from flying away. The surface rolled below us in a dark gray blur; we shed a little light from the pseudo-cerenkov glow made by our tachyon exhaust, scooting away from our reality into its own.
The ungainly contraption skimmed and jumped along for some ten minutes; then suddenly the front jet glowed and we were snapped forward inside our suits, eyeballs trying to escape from their sockets in the rapid deceleration.
“Prepare for ejection,” the machine’s female-mechanical voice said. “Five, four…”
The ship’s lasers started firing, millisecond flashes freezing the land below in jerky stroboscopic motion. It was a twisted, pock-marked jumble of fissures and random black rocks, a few meters below our feet. We were dropping, slowing.
“Three—” It never got any farther. There was a too bright flash and I saw the horizon drop away as the ship’s tail pitched down — then clipped the ground, and we were rolling, horribly, pieces of people and ship scattering. Then we slid pinwheeling to a bumpy halt, and I tried to pull free but my leg was pinned under the ship’s bulk: excruciating pain and a dry crunch as the girder crushed my leg; shrill whistle of air escaping my breached suit; then the trauma maintenance turned on snick, more pain, then no pain and I was rolling free, short stump of a leg trailing blood that froze shiny black on the dull black rock. I tasted brass and a red haze closed everything out, then deepened to the brown of river clay, then loam and I passed out, with the pill thinking this is not so bad …
The suit is set up to save as much of your body as possible. If you lose part of an arm or a leg, one of sixteen razor-sharp irises closes around your limb with the force of a hydraulic press, snipping it off neatly and sealing the suit before you can die of explosive decompression. Then “trauma maintenance” cauterizes the stump, replaces lost blood, and fills you full of happy-juice and No-shock. So you will either die happy or, if your comrades go on to win the battle, eventually be carried back up to the ship’s aid station.
We’d won that round, while I slept swaddled in dark cotton. I woke up in the infirmary. It was crowded. I was in the middle of a long row of cots, each one holding someone who had been three-fourths (or less) saved by his suit’s trauma maintenance feature. We were being ignored by the ship’s two doctors, who stood in bright light at operating tables, absorbed in blood rituals. I watched them for a long time. Squinting into the bright light, the blood on their green tunics could have been grease, the swathed bodies, odd soft machines that they were fixing. But the machines would cry out in their sleep, and the mechanics muttered reassurances while they plied their greasy tools. I watched and slept and woke up in different places.