"So try not to throw up on them the first day."
It was probably a remark that Elmo shouldn't have made. Dacker pounced on it.
"Oh, we can hold our liquor, Overman Elmo."
Elmo ignored Dacker and started handing out the two-piece uniforms. When he was through, there was one uniform left. Dyrkin noticed it and raised an eyebrow.
"What's the spare set of tans for?"
Kemlo, who'd lost a foot to the wire, walked stiffly through the entrance to the messdeck. "That's for me. Think I'd miss the fun?"
He was dressed in a singlet and shorts. His brand-new artificial foot was gleaming stainless steel and made clicking noises as he walked. It was plain that he was still not completely used to it.
Dyrkin grinned. "I thought they'd termed you, buddy."
"I'm too ugly to kill." He flexed the skeletal toes of his steel foot. "Think the girls are going to like it?"
"Gonna knock 'em dead."
Elmo had produced a small plastic folder.
"You three new fish, you're entitled to your combat flashes. Here, impress the girls with them."
He handed red and yellow lightning patches to Hark, Morish, and Voda. Hark scowled. He didn't think that Elmo ought to be calling them new fish now that they'd been in combat. Elmo noticed his expression and looked at him questioningly.
"What's the matter with you, boy?"
Hark made his face a mask. "Nothing, Overman Elmo."
Elmo glanced around at the others with a knowing and unpleasant grin. "Maybe he's worried he won't be able to get it up when the time comes."
The joke was received by blank, stony faces. As far as the troopers were concerned, plrno had lost the right to insult anyone's manhood on this messdeck. There was a moment of tense silence, and then the overman turned on his heel and marched smartly away.
"Woo-hoo, did you see him go?"
"Showed that sorry sucker the door."
There was more to think about than the humiliation of Elmo. Getting ready for the liberty took on aspects of a ritual, and even the newcomers found themselves caught up in it. Hark carefully dressed himself in the new tan uniform. He couldn't help feeling a swell of pride as he applied the combat patch to the right sleeve. All around him, troopers were primping and preening. Nobody wanted to look anything but his absolute best. Small additions were being made to the uniforms. Some men hung them with pieces of jewelry and small trinkets. He noticed that some of the senior men boasted more insignia than just the single combat flash; he knew that the patches were earned for length of service and acts of outstanding merit. He had the data regarding the exact significance of each individual flash somewhere in his mind, but it was buried deep and he was too keyed up to dredge for it. Dyrkin had more insignia than anyone- his right sleeve was a blaze of glory. Maybe if Hark survived long enough he might get a few of those other patches.
A number of the men, as well as making sure they looked their best, were concealing weapons under their clothes-blackjacks, knives, brass knuckles, and homemade electroguns were strapped to legs and hidden under shirts. When Morish questioned Renchett about it, the longtimer, whose inevitable knife was pushed down in his boot, explained how when different units went on liberty at the same time there was always fighting. It was good to have an edge.
When all fourteen men were dressed to their satisfaction, there was nothing to do but wait. There was no way that they could pretend that they felt like anything but a bunch of kids about to go off on an adventure. The Screen in the downden came to life. Once again it was an image fed in by an external scanner. Hark had his first sight of a recstar.
"There she is!"
"Ain't she a little beauty?"
From the outside, the recstar was anything but beautiful. It looked more like another military installation than a palace of carnal delights. Essentially it was a small planetoid, an irregular chunk of slate-gray rock that had been hollowed out, built over, and heavily fortified. Hark could see seven fire domes, and there were undoubtedly more on the far side. Docking spires jutted from the surface like metallic spines. Ropes of tubular moveways snaked across the uneven, cratered surface. There were other installations that Hark didn't recognize. Everything was the same drab gray as the original rock. Morish voiced the three recruits' surprise.
"It's a damned fortress."
Dacker laughed. "What did you expect? That it'd be painted red and gold with a welcome sign flashing? It wasn't put there just for our benefit. It's a regular class-three orbiter. The women were an afterthought. They're down in the interior, down by the core."
The recstar grew bigger and bigger until it filled the entire screen and smaller surface details became visible. It was much larger than Hark had first imagined. Although it hardly dwarfed the cluster, it was possibly as large-the screen didn't make it easy to judge scale. The perspective altered, and the recstar became a vertical horizon. The cluster seemed to be traveling across it. Lights were visible as the scanner tracked the orbiter's darkside. Multicolored plasma pulsed around a discharge stack. In the side-on sky, a small pale sun was visible. It had to be a long way away-it was scarcely larger than the background stars. Hark was overtaken by a lonely desolation that men should have to visit the women of their species in the bowels of this infinitely remote weapons base circling its tiny, distant sun.
Sirens were braying in other parts of the ship, and the forward motion stopped. A line of surface craft came over the horizon, slab-sided, rust-streaked bucket shuttles headed for the cluster. Elmo was back on the messdeck.
"We better move out if we're going to be on one of the first of those boats."
The troopers didn't need a second urging to start filing out. By the time they reached their designated air lock, an umbilical had been stretched and attached to the first of the shuttles. There were lines of men from other messdecks waiting to free-fall to the surface craft. Elmo's fourteen didn't make it onto the first ship, and there was a delay while a second shuttle maneuvered into the loading position and the umbilical was reattached. Finally it was their turn to swing feet-first into the ribbed tube and float to the entry port of the shuttle. A loading attendant moved them inside. The interior of the shuttle was not quite as Spartan as that of an e-vac. There was atmosphere and even rudimentary berths, gee-frame shocktraps with webbing straps to secure their occupants. The shuttle accelerated hard and fast, and the passengers were pushed back into the frames with their faces distorting. The shuttle also landed hard, but nobody cared. They were down on the recstar and out of the war for a short space of time.
There were no humans manning the upper levels of the planetoid. The loading areas and weapon systems were being operated by huge lanteres, bulky chitinous creatures three times as tall as a man. They survived in an environment of methane and ammonia and dim orange light that was as thick as soup. The troopers had to cross their areas through transparent airtight tunnels. It was like walking on the bottom of a dense, alien sea. The lanteres were uncomfortably similar to giant versions of the crayshells Hark had speared and eaten in his youth. When one reared from its hydrolastic control bed to peer at the humans in the tunnel, he did his best to avoid the multiple eyes that were clustered between its twin antennae.
A lengthy descent by a cage elevator, mostly through solid rock, brought them to their own environment. The humans seemed to have been deliberately isolated from the military functions of the base. The first thing to hit the men was the rich and complex diversity of smells. Cooking food mingled with perfume, alcohol, and a dozen blends of incense. Above all, there was the warm funk of humanity. The elevator gates slid back, and the fourteen stepped out into a crowd that strolled and sauntered and aimlessly mingled. It was a shock. After what seemed like a lifetime of military hurry up and wait, there was an almost unthinkable luxury in this aimless-ness and lack of organization. Color was a second shock. Against the drab uniformity of the messdecks, the riotous color in the heart of the recstar was positively shameless. It was something that affected even the long-timers. After a couple of paces, the whole group stopped and just drank in the scene as the elevator gates closed behind them. There was music in the air that vied with the shouts of laughter and the general buzz of conversation. The crowd seemed to stretch on forever. There seemed to be men from every function that humans performed on a battle cluster. A group of drop pilots in midnight-blue uniforms leaned on a supporting pillar singing drunken harmonies. A gang of sluicers in green coveralls emerged from a booze den shouting raucously. But by far the majority were in the dress tan of ground troopers. More important, there were women. There were women in all shapes and sizes, there were women in feathers and bright colors, there were women with painted faces and metallic jewelry, and women who were all but naked. Hark thought that a short redheaded woman had smiled at him, but before he could say anything, she was gone.