Renchett had to go on performing. "You going to make me?"
"Don't be dumber than you have to be."
Renchett shrugged. He wasn't going to mess with Dyrkin. He got up and went to put the knife in his kit. His walk wasn't quite steady.
The incident had effectively killed conversation. The thirteen had turned in on themselves. Stress reaction and alcohol had blurred into a somber depression. Some had actually passed out. At least three were staring blankly at the patterns on the screen and might as well have been dead to the world. Hark was somewhere between sleeping and waking. He was no more used to booze than Morish was. Deep inside the haze, he became aware that someone nearby was talking to him. He opened his eyes. He had a difficulty focusing, but after a few moments Elmo's face swam partway into place. His mouth was moving.
"… and I never saw anything like it. Nothing. That thing today. Right?" "Huh?"
"That little skirmish you bastards were in."
"What about it?"
"It was nothing."
"Nothing?"
"Nothing."
"You weren't even there… Overman Elmo."
"I didn't have to be there. I saw how many of you bastards came back. At Seven Walls, I was the only one of my twenty to come back. That's how I got to be overman."
A slurred voice came from the other side of the room. "Why don't you put a cover on it, Elmo. We all heard about you at Seven Walls."
Elmo swayed around, peering into the gloom. "Who said that?"
There were a couple of drunken laughs.
"Listen, you slime, the new meat ain't heard it, and they gotta respect me."
"They ain't new meat anymore. They've seen combat."
"They still got to respect me."
Hark was drunkenly horrified. He had always respected Elmo. It was only now that the respect was starting to fragment. Hark wished that the overman would shut up and fall over. He was in no condition for a conflict of original loyalties. Elmo, however, was made of sterner stuff. He put a hand on Hark's shoulder, leaned close, and lowered his voice. Hark could smell the liquor on his breath.
"It was this huge Yal redoubt, see? Seven concentric walls maybe four meters thick. Whole standard of blanketing it with neutrino charges. Thought we were going to go blind from the afterflash. Finally, they sent in us ground monkeys. We were told it'd be a walk… a piece of cake… right? The walls were breached, and we assumed that it was going to be a fish kill. Some piece of cake… We got inside, and they hit us with everything they had. They'd darksided a whole strike force on a moon where nobody had bothered to look. The heavy punishers came in first… By the time they hit, we made it down into bunkers. They were full of dead chibas and scalies and some things we'd never seen before… the chibas are rotting off their frames while there's an earth- quake going on all around us… You never seen anything like it…"
Maybe it was just that Elmo was one of the first authority figures Hark had seen. Maybe that was the reason for the trust at first sight. Maybe it was just another part of the programming. Was he going to find out that Rance also had feet of clay?
"When I say earthquake… I mean a goddamn earthquake. The ceilings are coming in, and guys are getting crushed by chunks of plasteel. I'm lying facedown in a mess of chiba goop and expecting to die at any minute. It's black as pitch, and the noise is like one continuous explosion. There's somebody screaming in my ear, and I don't know if it's me or the monkey next to me."
Elmo was no longer talking to Hark. He was staring blindly into nowhere, reliving the time in the bunker.
"Yeah, and then the pounding stops, and for a few moments, there's complete silence. We're still lying there, not daring to breathe, wondering what they're going to throw at us next. The punishers are only the first stage. We wait… and after a while there's this quiet little sound from way down in the tunnels… a clicking. There ain't a man down in that bunker that didn't know what it was and what it meant. It's that noise the scalies' exoskeletons make when they move. We lined our red-scopes in a goddamn hurry and there they were… an assault line of the bastards things… with tom-tom guns in front of them… coming up through the lower tunnels."
Elmo shuddered at the memory.
"It's hand to hand… or hand to tentacle… or whatever those things have at the end of their arms. The tomtoms are going off right in among us, and we're falling back from the get go. It's a goddamn slaughter… casualties all the way to the surface. We should have known something was wrong when the scalies stopped pressing. Those of us who were left came out into the light and immediately got it by batwings, sweeping us with hard radiation. That's where I lost my hair…just one e-vac managed to get in… and I was one of the lucky ones."
Elmo leaned forward and reached for one of the remaining bottles. He missed it by a matter of centimeters and toppled over. He had another try for the bottle from a prone position. This time he was a little more successful. He got the bottle to his mouth, and after spilling a good deal, he managed a swallow, only to gag. Hark stared in bleary disgust as Overman Elmo, an individual whom he had previously looked up to, lay on his side with drool hanging from the corner of his mouth.
"Yeah… I was one of… the… lucky… ones…"
Overman Elmo's eyes closed. Hark was filled with a massive sense of relief.
It was maybe two hours later when Rance came into the messdeck. He had expected to find the men passed out drunk. That was as it should be. They had been damn lucky to get off that battery planet with such minimal casualties. It could have been a whole lot worse. The additional stress of the prolonged exchange of fire must have been close to the last straw. He had half expected to find Elmo passed out among the men, but that wasn't as it should be. Noncoms didn't get falling-down drunk on the messdecks, particularly a noncom who had sat out the mission. He'd been watching Elmo for some time. There was little doubt that the overman had run out of road. By the program, Rance should take the matter to the line officer, but he'd already decided that he'd hold off for a while. It was a matter of loyalty. Elmo had been a good man. Most of the other survivors from Seven Walls had gone crazy. If Rance reported Elmo,
Berref would undoubtedly have the overman termed. It would be better at least to let Elmo keep his dignity. These things had a habit of taking care of themselves. When a man ran out of road, he didn't last much longer in combat.
Eight
The news was both good and bad. There was a jump coming-but after the jump there would be a stop at a recstar.
"Liberty."
"Women!"
"Give it to me!"
"I'd give up getting laid if I could miss the jump." "You gotta enjoy what you can get." "And you gotta suffer to get it." "That's the way of it." "You said it."
Just as they thought that they were being accepted, Hark and his intake were once again taking a nervous backseat. The recstar, after combat, was the next great mystery. Hark himself, who had started to feel that he was growing into the role of the fighting man, was pushed back into the shadows of the awkward and nervous semivirgin listening to the others giggling in the darkness on the hillside. What would these women be like? What had the therem done to them? Had they been as ruthlessly programmed as the men? The longtimers were no help.
"Hell, boy, they're just like us." A day later someone else had told him. "They're different, real different. Ain't that the point of it all?"
There was the usual, less than satisfactory, consensus.
"You'll find out."
As the jumptime approached an entirely new atmosphere took over the messdeck. There was little of the usual griping and complaining, and almost a lightness in the air. Even Dacker was unusually amiable, and Renchett managed to keep his knife sheathed. The general feeling seemed to be that now that they were going somewhere they wanted to go, they were almost prepared to take the jump in stride. It was something that Hark had never seen before, and it made him slightly uneasy. It was hard to accept that these battle-hardened killers were capable of a juvenile excitement. There were outbreaks of joking and horseplay. Dyrkin actually smiled. The prospect of a respite from the war, no matter how temporary, brought out something else in the men. There was an all around increase in personal hygiene, chins were shaved close to the bone, and troopers even borrowed small mirrors from one another and studied their appearances. The ones who had exposed prosthetics actually polished them to a high, burnished shine. These endeavors caused a good deal of raucous comment.