"Damn!"
The crew shielded their eyes. Blinding white light poured through the single armored viewslit. The screen threatened to burn out. The fireball started to rise. The area below it glowed white, a vast sea of liquid rock. The fireball was gathering speed and expanding.
"Hold tight. Here comes the shock wave."
The ship felt like God had kicked it. It was like a living thing. The kick was followed by a spasm of monstrous shudders. They were falling.
"I hope she holds together."
The crew were punching buttons. There was almost a detachment about the way they worked. Panels lit, others went out.
"Here's where we find out."
There was a sickening lurch as the crew tried to power out of the deadfall. There were shouts from below.
"Smoke! Something's leaking smoke!"
The crew was concentrating oh coaxing the e-vac to gain altitude.
"Tell them it's nothing to worry about. I'd have worried if we hadn't burst a few seams."
The ship continued to spin and buffet, but they were making ground. There was the pressure of acceleration under their feet.
"The atmosphere is hosing out. We're riding the up-draft. It should take us halfway to the cluster."
In the well of the ship, Hark clung to a grab bar, his eyes closed, and prayed for it all to be over, ont way or another. He didn't really care. He couldn't take any more. The courage that he'd found earlier seemed to have deserted him. He didn't even care that he'd been whimpering out loud when they'd been falling and that the rest of his messdeck had probably heard him over the communicator. The man next to him turned his head and looked at Hark.
"Suit stopped pumping?"
Hark couldn't recognize him behind the faceplate of his helmet.
"I don't understand."
'They don't tell you, but you find out. It's the suits." Hark was at a loss. "Suits?"
"It's the suits that do it to us. None of us want to do what we do in combat. We don't want to take the risks. Once the suit smells your adrenaline and starts pumping itself, you don't have a chance. You're blind and crazy. You'll go anywhere and do anything they tell you."
"What does the suit do? What does it pump into us?"
"Who the hell knows. Some endorphin cocktail of fearblockers, ones that can be absorbed through the skin. That's why the trip back from combat can be really rough. The battle's over, the suit stops pumping, and you come down seeing the full forsaken horror of it. At least we get to get drunk when we get back. It helps."
"They get us every way, don't they?"
"You're learning."
Up in the crew bubble, Rance pursed his lips. He preferred that the recruits learn about the suits as late as possible. Doubtless Hark would tell all the others.
Seven
Naked, they filed into the blue room, carrying their equipment and weapons. The lock sealed. First the water jets came on and washed away the fine purple dust. Next it was the turn of the bright blue lights-the radiation would kill any native bacteria that they might have picked up. Hark noticed that some of the men had brought back small souvenirs of the battle. Helot had the severed metal claw-hand of a chiba gunner. He must have hacked it off one of the corpses in the gunpit while he was manning the captured PBA. It was being decontaminated along with everything else.
Dyrkin looked around at the others. There were thirteen of them. Of the nineteen who had gone down, five were dead; Kemlo, who had been snagged by the wire, had been taken to sick bay to be fitted with a prosthetic foot. They had been less badly hit than some of the other twenties.
"So now we get drunk."
"Polluted. I got to get rid of the taste."
Their ship clothes were laid out for them. They quickly dressed. The lights went out. The lock at the other end of the chamber opened. They filed out into the receiving hold and were somewhat surprised to find that it was a hive of activity. Lights were flashing, and sirens were blaring. Nohan damage-control parties were hurrying to their battle positions. Fault-trace robots, no bigger than a man's foot, skittered about the floor. A gang of human core jumpers, wearing yellow radiation armor, doubled away down a corridor. The PA was issuing orders and bulletins in human, the whistling trills of the nohan, and a wash-of-sound speech that Hark couldn't recognize.
Rance grabbed the first passing human. "What's going on?"
"A Yal battle wagon is closing with us, one of the big ones. We're going to engage."
Dyrkin spit on the deck. "That's all we need."
Rance quickly gathered his men.
"We go back to the mes§decks. We're ground troops. There's nothing we can do in a space battle except get in the way."
Dacker grunted. "We can get ourselves killed."
"That's taken as given around here."
Once on the messdeck, there was nothing to do but wait. The thirteen gathered in the downden. Within minutes, Dacker and Renchetrhad become involved in an argument with Elmo.
"The least you could do would be to issue the booze."
"I can't cut loose a booze issue when the cluster's on full action alert. They'd bust me to trooper or worse. We're going into combat, damn it."
"We've already seen our combat, and after combat, we get drunk. That's the rule."
"And talking of combat, Overman Elmo, we didn't see you down planetside."
"Rance took the command. There was no reason for me to stick my neck out."
"Some of us didn't have the option."
"What are you scum trying to say?"
"Just that we missed you, Overman Elmo."
"You all know that I've seen my share of fighting." He fingered the bald patches on his skull where the hair had long ago fallen out. "I've got a right to sit one out now and again."
Renchett wasn't prepared to let it go. He had absolute contempt for anyone who wasn't always in the thick of the action. It seemed to be the compensation for any second thoughts he might have about his own single-minded bloodletting. "Maybe you've seen too much," Overman Elmo."
"Why don't you just cut loose our booze, Overman Elmo? We're fighting men."
"You two are full of crap, and I'm not issuing booze until we're stood down. If you want to make any more of it, you'll find yourself on a field punishment."
Dacker and Renchett didn't say anything, but they stood their ground and glowered. They seemed to be trying to work out precisely how far the overman could be pushed. It took Dyrkin to step in and put a stop to the war of nerves.
"Why don't we get the screen going and see what's happening outside
After a few seconds' hesitation, Renchett and Dacker turned their attention from Elmo to the wall screen. The first image to appear was the same naked woman Helot and Wabst had been watching before the drop. This drew a halfheartedly ribald cheer from the men. Hark remembered that Wabst was among the dead. Dyrkin adjusted the "single control. The naked dancing girl was replaced by a high-resolution picture of the Yal battleship. There could not have been a greater contrast. Warm, inviting human flesh gave way to cold, deadly alien technology. It was hard to tell from the screen just how big the enemy ship was. Hark had to assume that the many small points of light circling around it were attendant space vessels. If they were only as large as the dropcraft, the Yal ship was very big indeed, larger than any ship in the cluster but not as big as the whole of the cluster together. It was also nothing like any of the ships in the cluster. It seemed to have been constructed from giant hexagonal crystals placed side by side and bonded together. It was not unlike an irregular bundle of translucent rods. Their pointed tips flashed and glittered. To Hark, it was a chill, threatening light. Four of the central rods extended far beyond the others to form a kind of prow, the tip of which glowed with a green light. It was the same green as the fire from the Yal weapons down on the planet.