Space Soldiers

by Jack Dann

  At last one shot hit home. The machine was wrecked, but its impetus carried it on to knock Nogara down again.

  There was a shaky quiet in the Great Hall, which was wrecked as if by a bomb. Lucinda got unsteadily to her feet. There were sobs and moans and gropings everywhere, but no one else was standing.

  She picked her way dazedly over to the smashed assassin machine. She felt only a numbness, looking at the rags of clothing and flesh that still clung to its metal frame. In her mind, she could see her brother’s face as it once had been, strong and smiling.

  Now there was something that mattered more than the dead, if she could only recall what it was—of course, the berserker’s hostages, the good kind spacemen. She could try to trade Karlsen’s body for them.

  The serving machines, built to face emergencies on the order of spilled wine, were dashing to and fro in the nearest thing to panic that mechanism could achieve. They impeded Lucinda’s progress, but she had the heavy coffin wheeled halfway across the Hall when a weak voice stopped her. Nogara had dragged himself up to a sitting position against the overturned table.

  He croaked again: “—alive.”

  “What?”

  “Johann’s alive. Healthy. See? It’s a freezer.”

  “But we all told the berserker he was dead.” She felt stupid with the impact of one shock after another. For the first time she looked down at Karlsen’s face, and long seconds passed before she could tear her eyes away. “It has hostages. It wants his body.”

  “No.” Nogara shook his head. “I see, now. But no. I won’t give him to berserkers, alive.” A brutal power of personality still emanated from his broken body. His gun was gone, but his power kept Lucinda from moving. There was no hatred in her now.

  She protested, “But there are seven men out there.”

  “Berserker’s like me.” Nogara bared pain-clenched teeth. “It won’t let prisoners go. Here. The key . . .” He pulled it from inside his torn-open tunic.

  Lucinda’s eyes were drawn once again to the cold serenity of the face in the coffin. Then on impulse she ran to get the key. When she did so Nogara slumped over in relief, unconscious or nearly so.

  The coffin lock was marked in several positions, and she turned it to emergency revival. Lights sprang on around the figure inside, and there was a hum of power.

  By now the automated systems of the ship were reacting to the emergency. The serving machines had begun a stretcher-bearer service, Nogara being one of the first victims they carried away. Presumably a robot medic was in action somewhere. From behind Nogara’s throne chair a great voice was shouting.

  “This is ship defense control, requesting human orders! What is the nature of emergency?”

  “Do not contact the courier ship!” Lucinda shouted back. “Watch it for an attack. But don’t hit the lifeboat!”

  The glass top of the coffin had become opaque.

  Lucinda ran to the viewport, stumbling over the body of Mical and going on without a pause. By putting her face against the port and looking out at an angle she could just see the berserker-courier, pinkly visible in the wavering light of the hypermass, its lifeboat of hostages a small pink dot still in place before it.

  How long would it wait, before it killed the hostages and fled?

  When she turned away from the port, she saw that the coffin’s lid was open and the man inside was sitting up. For just a moment, a moment that was to stay in Lucinda’s mind, his eyes were like a child’s, fixed helplessly on hers. Then power began to grow behind his eyes, a power somehow completely different from his brother’s and perhaps even greater.

  ###

  Karlsen looked away from her, taking in the rest of his surroundings, the devastated Great Hall and the coffin. “Felipe,” he whispered, as if in pain, though his half-brother was no longer in sight.

  Lucinda moved toward him and started to pour out her story, from the day in the Flamland prison when she had heard that Karlsen had fallen to the plague.

  Once he interrupted her. “Help me out of this thing; get me space armor.” His arm was hard and strong when she grasped it, but when he stood beside her, he was surprisingly short. “Go on, what then?”

  She hurried on with her tale, while serving machines came to arm him. “But why were you frozen?” she ended, suddenly wondering at his health and strength.

  He ignored the question. “Come along to Defense Control. We must save those men out there.”

  He went familiarly to the nerve center of the ship and hurled himself into the combat chair of the Defense Officer, who was probably dead. The panel before Karlsen came alight and he ordered at once, “Get me in contact with that courier.”

  Within a few moments, a flat-sounding voice from the courier answered routinely. The face that appeared on the communication screen was badly lighted; someone viewing it without advance warning would not suspect that it was anything but human.

  “This is High Commander Karlsen speaking from the Nirvana.” He did not call himself governor or lord, but by his title of the great day of the Stone Place. “I’m coming over there. I want to talk to you men on the courier.”

  The shadowed face moved slightly on the screen. “Yes, sir.”

  Karlsen broke off the contact at once. “That’ll keep its hopes up. Now I need a fast launch. You, robots, load my coffin aboard one. I’m on emergency revival drugs now and if I live I may have to refreeze for a while.”

  “You’re not really going there?”

  Up out of the chair again, he paused. “I know berserkers. If chasing me is that thing’s prime function it won’t waste a shot or a second of time on a few hostages while I’m in sight.”

  “You can’t go,” Lucinda heard herself saying. “You mean too much to all men—”

  “I’m not committing suicide; I have a trick or two in mind.” Karlsen’s voice changed suddenly. “You say Felipe’s not dead?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Karlsen’s eyes closed while his lips moved briefly, silently. Then he looked at Lucinda and grabbed up paper and a stylus from the Defense Officer’s console. “Give this to Felipe,” he said, writing. “He’ll set you and the captain free if I ask it. You’re not dangerous to his power. Whereas I . . .”

  VI

  From the Defense Officer’s position, Lucinda watched Karlsen’s crystalline launch leave the Nirvana and take a long curve that brought it near the courier at a point some distance from the lifeboat.

  “You on the courier,” Lucinda heard him say. “You can tell it’s really me here on the launch, can’t you? You can DF my transmission? Can you photograph my retinas through the screen?”

  And the launch darted away with a right-angle swerve, dodging and twisting at top acceleration, as the berserker’s weapons blasted the space where it had been. Karlsen had been right. The berserker spent not a moment’s delay or a single shot on the lifeboat, but hurled itself instantly after the launch.

  “Hit that courier!” Lucinda screamed. “Destroy it!” A salvo of missiles left the Nirvana, but it was a shot at a receding target, and it missed. Perhaps it missed because the courier was already in the fringes of the distortion surrounding the hypermass.

  Karlsen’s launch had not been hit, but it could not get away. It was a glassy dot vanishing behind a screen of blasts from the berserker’s weapons, a dot being forced into the maelstrom of the hypermass.

  “Chase them!” cried Lucinda, and saw the stars tint blue ahead; but almost instantly the Nirvana’s auto pilot countermanded her order, barking mathematical assurance that to accelerate any further in that direction would be fatal to all aboard.

  The launch was now going certainly into the hypermass, gripped by a gravity that could make any engines useless. And the berserker-ship was going headlong after the launch, caring for nothing but to make sure of Karlsen.

  The two specks tinted red, and redder still, racing before an enormous falling cloud of dust as if flying into a planet’s sunset sky. And then th
e red shift of the hypermass took them into invisibility, and the universe saw them no more.

  Soon after the robots had brought the men from the lifeboat safely aboard Nirvana, Holt found Lucinda alone in the Great Hall, gazing out the viewport.

  “He gave himself to save you,” she said. “And he’d never even seen you.”

  “I know.” After a pause Holt said, “I’ve just been talking to Lord Nogara. I don’t know why, but you’re to be freed, and I’m not to be prosecuted for bringing the damned berserker aboard. Though Nogara seems to hate both of us . . .”

  She wasn’t listening; she was still looking out the port.

  “I want you to tell me all about him someday,” Holt said, putting his arm around Lucinda. She moved slightly, ridding herself of a minor irritation that she had hardly noticed. It was Holt’s arm, which dropped away.

  “I see,” Holt said, after a while. He went to look after his men.

  TIME PIECE

  Joe Haldeman

  Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Joe Haldeman earned a B.S. in physics and astronomy from the University of Maryland, and did postgraduate work in mathematics and computer science. But his plans for a career in science were cut short by the U.S. Army, which sent him to Vietnam in 1968 as a combat engineer. Seriously wounded in action, Haldeman returned home in 1969 and began to write. He sold his first story to Galaxy in 1969, and by 1976 had garnered both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award for his famous novel The Forever War, one of the landmark books of the seventies. He took another Hugo Award in 1977 for his story “Tricentennial,” won the Rhysling Award in 1983 for the best science fiction poem of the year (although usually thought of primarily as a “hard-science” writer, Haldeman is, in fact, also an accomplished poet, and has sold poetry to most of the major professional markets in the genre), and won both the Nebula and the Hugo Award in 1991 for the novella version of “The Hemingway Hoax.” His story “None So Blind” won the Hugo Award in 1995. His novel Forever Peace won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His other books include two mainstream novels, War Year and 1969; the SF novels Mindbridge, All My Sins Remembered, There Is No Darkness (written with his brother, SF writer Jack C. Haldeman II), Worlds, Worlds Apart, Worlds Enough and Time, Buying Time, The Hemingway Hoax, and Forever Peace, and the “techno-thriller” Tools of the Trade; the collections Infinite Dreams, Dealing in Futures, Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds, and None So Blind; and, as editor, the anthologies Study War No More, Cosmic Laughter, and Nebula Award Stories Seventeen. His most recent book is the novel Forever Free. Haldeman lives part of the year in Boston, where he teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the rest of the year in Florida, where he and his wife, Gay, make their home.

  In the taut and fast-paced story that follows, he shows us that sometimes it’s possible to win the battle and lose the war. Or maybe lose both—slowly and inexorably.

  ###

  They say you’ve got a fifty-fifty chance every time you go out. That makes it one chance in eight that you’ll live to see your third furlough; the one I’m on now.

  Somehow the odds don’t keep people from trying to join. Even though not one in a thousand gets through the years of training and examination, there’s no shortage of cannon fodder. And that’s what we are. The most expensive, best-trained cannon fodder in the history of warfare. Human history, anyhow; who can speak for the enemy?

  I don’t even call them snails anymore. And the thought of them doesn’t trigger that instant flash of revulsion, hate, kill-fever—the psyconditioning wore off years ago, and they didn’t renew it. They’ve stopped doing it to new recruits; no percentage in berserkers. I was a wild one the first couple of trips, though.

  Strange world I’ve come back to. Gets stranger every time, of course. Even sitting here in a bogus twenty-first-century bar, where everyone speaks Basic and there’s real wood on the walls and peaceful holograms instead of plug-ins, and music made by men . . .

  But it leaks through. I don’t pay by card, let alone by coin. The credit register monitors my alpha waves and communicates with the bank every time I order a drink. And, in case I’ve become addicted to more modern vices, there’s a feelie matrix (modified to look like an old-fashioned visiphone booth) where I can have my brain stimulated directly.

  Thanks but no, thanks—always get this picture of dirty hands inside my skull, kneading, rubbing. Like when you get too close to the enemy and they open a hole in your mind and you go spinning down and down and never reach the bottom till you die. I almost got too close last time.

  ###

  We were on a three-man reconnaissance patrol, bound for a hellish little planet circling the red giant, Antares. Now red giant stars don’t form planets in the natural course of things, so we had ignored Antares; we control most of the space around it, so why waste time in idle exploration? But the enemy had detected this little planet—God knows how—and about ten years after they landed there, we monitored their presence (gravity waves from the ships’ braking) and my team was assigned the reconnaissance. Three men against many, many of the enemy—but we weren’t supposed to fight if we could help it; just take a look around, record what we saw, and leave a message beacon on our way back, about a light-year out from Antares. Theoretically, the troopship following us by a month will pick up the information and use it to put together a battle plan. Actually, three more recon patrols precede the troop ship at one-week intervals; insurance against the high probability that any one patrol will be caught and destroyed. As the first team in, we have a pretty good chance of success, but the ones to follow would be in trouble if we didn’t get back out. We’d be past caring, of course; the enemy doesn’t take prisoners.

  We came out of lightspeed close to Antares, so the bulk of the star would mask our braking disturbance, and inserted the ship in a hyperbolic orbit that would get us to the planet—Anomaly, we were calling it—in about twenty hours.

  “Anomaly must be tropical over most of its surface.” Fred Sykes, nominally the navigator, was talking to himself and at the two of us while he analyzed the observational data rolling out of the ship’s computer. “No axial tilt to speak of. Looks like they’ve got a big outpost near the equator, lots of electromagnetic noise there. Figures . . . the goddamn snails like it hot. We requisitioned hot-weather gear, didn’t we, Pancho?”

  Pancho, that’s me. “No, Fred, all we got’s parkas and snowshoes.” My full name is Francisco Jesus Mario Juan-José Hugo de Naranja, and I outrank Fred, so he should at least call me Francisco. But I’ve never pressed the point. Pancho it is. Fred looked up from his figure and the rookie, Paul Spiegel, almost dropped the pistol he was cleaning.

  “But why . . .” Paul was staring. “We knew the planet was probably Earthlike if the enemy wanted it. Are we gonna have to go tromping around in space suits?”

  “No, Paul, our esteemed leader and supply clerk is being sarcastic again.” He turned back to his computer. “Explain, Pancho.”

  “No, that’s all right.” Paul reddened a bit and also went back to his job. “I remember you complaining about having to take the standard survival issue.”

  “Well, I was right then and I’m doubly right now. We’ve got parkas back there, and snowshoes, and a complete terranorm environment recirculator, and everything else we could possibly need to walk around in comfort on every planet known to man—Dios! That issue masses over a metric ton, more than a gigawatt laser. A laser we could use, but crampons and pith helmets and elephant guns . . .”

  Paul looked up again. “Elephant guns?” He was kind of a freak about weapons.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s a gun that shoots elephants?”

  “Right. An elephant gun shoots elephants.”

  “Is that some new kind of ammunition?”

  I sighed, I really sighed. You’d think I’d get used to this after twelve years—or four hundred—in the service. “No, kid, elephants were animals, big gray wrinkled animals with horns. You used an elep
hant gun to shoot at them.

  “When I was a kid in Rioplex, back in the twenty-first, we had an elephant in the zoo: used to go down in the summer and feed him synthos through the bars. He had a long nose like a fat tail, he ate with that.”

  “What planet were they from?”

  It went on like that for a while. It was Paul’s first trip out, and he hadn’t yet gotten used to the idea that most of his compatriots were genuine antiques, preserved by the natural process of relativity. At lightspeed you age imperceptibly, while the universe’s calendar adds a year for every light-year you travel. Seems like cheating. But it catches up with you eventually.

  We hit the atmosphere of Anomaly at an oblique angle and came in passive, like a natural meteor, until we got to a position where we were reasonably safe from detection (just above the south polar sea), then blasted briefly to slow down and splash. Then we spent a few hours in slow flight at sea level, sneaking up on their settlement.

  It appeared to be the only enemy camp on the whole planet, which was typical. Strange for a spacefaring, aggressive race to be so incurious about planetary environments, but they always seemed to settle in one place and simply expand radially. And they do expand; their reproduction rate makes rabbits look sick. Starting from one colony, they can fill a world in two hundred years. After that, they control their population by infantiphage and stellar migration.

  We landed about a hundred kilometers from the edge of their colony, around local midnight. While we were outside setting up the espionage monitors, the ship camouflaged itself to match the surrounding jungle optically, thermally, magnetically, etc.—we were careful not to get too far from the ship; it can be a bit hard to find even when you know where to look.