"Do not load the energy packs until I give the word!"
Each recruit was handed the dull black pod, slightly larger than a clenched fist. It clipped into the underside of his weapon. Each had the specifications of the MEW and its energy source in his new memory, and only the dullest failed to experience a slight thrill of excited fear at the realization of the extent of the power he was holding in his hand.
"Take the energy pack in your left hand. Hold your weapon by its midsection with the underside pointing away from you."
He paused until all of the recruits had it right.
"Place the pack between the guide blocks but do not, I repeat, do not push it home."
Again he paused.
"On the command 'Load' you will load your weapons. At all times, you will keep your hands away from the triggers."
The overmen walked down the rows of recruits to make sure that they followed Rance's instructions to the letter. It was only when they were completely satisfied that the order was given.
"Intake… load!"
The energy packs were slammed home. There was no noise in the silence of space.
"Open formation, advance! Keep those hands away from the triggers!"
They spread out into one long, extended rank, each man some two meters from the next one.
"Weapons ready!"
Weapons were pushed forward by nervous hands.
"In this first phase of the exercise, lighted targets will appear in front of you. They will move toward you. The object is to shoot them down before they reach you. You will use all of the functions of your weapons, and I will call the changes of function."
Now that the weapons were energized, Rance was brutal efficiency. All the "my children" mockery had gone from his voice.
"Targets up!"
A blip of yellow light appeared from nowhere and floated a couple of meters above the surface of the hull. At first there was just the one, then it subdivided into a whole line of blips, maybe twenty in all. They advanced on the troopers at about the speed of a man walking.
"Set to blast and fire at will!"
There was a moment of hesitation, as if none of the recruits wanted to be the first to fire.
"The idea is to shoot them down. They're the enemy, and they want to kill you."
The recruits' weapons went off almost as one. A number of the blips vanished, but by no means was every shot a hit. Rance raised his hand.
"Targets down."
The yellow blips vanished.
"That was uniformly pathetic. In combat, you'll rarely have an enemy moving as slowly as that. Targets up!"
For the next four hours, they practiced with their weapons. The speed of the blips increased, and their movement became trickier; they ducked and weaved, and toward the end, they fired bolts of green light that delivered a severe but not incapacitating shock to whomever they hit. Rance had the men constantly switching functions on their weapons. They jumped from laser-trace to blast, from blast to heat ray to concussion, and back to lasertrace. Very early in the exercise, Hark realized that the multiple triggers on the MEW were almost identical to the prayer levers with which he'd worshiped back on his planet. This left him with a growing feeling that his former life had been a cruel deceit.
Rance not only worked the men hard on their weapons, he also pushed them toward the limit of their physical capabilities. He had them running and diving, crawling on their stomachs, all the time firing as they went, beating off the repeated attacks of the blips. He constantly reminded them that it was a matter of kill or be killed. He apparently had an uncompromisingly basic view of warfare.
The disaster didn't occur until the exercise was almost over. Only one recruit from Hark's squad, Eslay, seemed unable either to cop the feel of the MEW or to keep up with the rest of the intake. When the blips started firing shocks, he was constantly being zapped. Finally he gave up and dropped to his knees with a sighing sob that was audible over everyone's communicator. Two blips hovered over him, hitting his body with repeated shocks. He was now babbling in a language that Hark didn't understand. Then, to the horror of the other recruits, the babbling turned to screams that reverberated inside their helmets. The seal between Eslay's helmet and his suit was opening. The suit was peeling back. Blood fountained from the exposed flesh as it went into explosive decompression. More blood splashed the inside of his helmet visor. As the suit retreated toward Eslay's waist, his lungs blew. The force of his chest rupturing lifted him clear off the surface. The suit snaked off his dead legs and, carried by the grav still running in his boots, dropped to the floor. Eslay's corpse, naked except for his helmet, continued to float upward. Rance quickly stepped up to the nearest recruit and took his weapon. He set it to blast, aimed it at the body, and held down the trigger until there was nothing left. He calmly turned and handed the weapon back to its owner, then he faced the stunned recruits.
"Couldn't just leave him to float around, could we?"
Hark was shocked by the blunt callousness. Surely a man's death deserved something, some kind of observation. Rance seemed to be well aware of the feeling.
"Think we should have taken the time to give him a decent burial? Let me tell you something, getting a de- cent burial can be a dangerous luxury. The first thing you learn is that a dead body is a worthless lump of organic garbage and isn't something you take risks for. Anything else is sentiment, and sentiment can get you killed. You're probably wondering how it was that the suit came off him and could the same thing happen to you. The answer is that it might, but it most likely won't, unless you cave in like he did. Not often, but now and again, a suit turns on its wearer if it feels he isn't giving one hundred percent. Eslay didn't like his suit, and apparently it didn't like him."
Rance made a dismissive gesture, and the overmen began herding the recruits into ordered ranks preparatory to returning to the interior of the ship. Elmo picked up Eslay's suit, boots, and weapon. As they marched away, Rance didn't go with them. He needed a few moments to himself. Eslay's death was damned nuisance. Now he'd have to make a report to the line officer.
Five
Hark was so terrified that he didn't care who knew it. In fifteen minutes the ship was due to make a jump. His new memory contained only the scantiest information about the jump. He knew that it was what moved the cluster from one point in the universe to another in a matter of minutes. There was the suggestion that it had something to do with the bending of the relationship between space and time, but there was nothing about the actual mechanics of the thing. It was either a closely guarded Therem secret or maybe just something that mere troopers didn't need to know. There was nothing about the terror of the jump in his new memory. He had learned about that on the messdeck during the last three days. Directly the jump had been announced, the whole messdeck had fallen into a deep gloom. Even the normally unshakable Dyrkin was affected. It started to appear as if the troopers hated the jump more than they hated combat. In combat, they were at least partially in control of their destiny. During the jump, they were completely helpless.
It took a while for Hark to find out what exactly was so frightening about the jump. Before the gloom set in, things had improved a little on the messdeck. The newcomers hadn't been completely accepted, but they were being tolerated. Toleration, however, didn't extend to answering a lot of damn-fool questions. A full day had gone by before Hark got an answer out of a taciturn longtimer called Helot, who summed it up in just three sentences.