“O.K., move to the center and clear out the rubble. Take your time. No rush until you pull the pin.”
“Sure, Sergeant.” We could hear small echoes of rocks clattering; sound conduction through her boots. She didn’t say anything for several minutes.
“Found bottom.” She sounded a little out of breath.
“Ice, or rock?”
“Oh, it’s rock, Sergeant. The greenish stuff.”
“Use a low setting, then. One point two, dispersion four.”
“God darn it, Sergeant, that’ll take forever.”
“Yeah, but that stuff’s got hydrated crystals in it—heat it up too fast and you might make it fracture. And we’d just have to leave you there, girl.”
“O.K., one point two dee four.” The inside edge of the crater flickered red with reflected laser light.
“When you get about half a meter deep, squeeze it up to dee two.”
“Roger.” It took her exactly seventeen minutes, three of them at dispersion two. I could imagine how tired her shooting arm was.
“Now rest for a few minutes. When the bottom of the hole stops glowing, arm the charge and drop it in. Then walk out. Understand? You’ll have plenty of time.”
“I understand, Sergeant. Walk out.” She sounded nervous. Well, you don’t often have to tiptoe away from a twenty microton tachyon bomb. We listened to her breathing for a few minutes.
“Here goes.” Faint slithering sound of the bomb sliding down.
“Slow and easy now, you’ve got five minutes.”
“Y-yeah. Five.” Her footsteps started out slow and regular. Then, after she started climbing the side, the sounds were less regular; maybe a little frantic. And with four minutes to go—
“Crap!” A loud scraping noise, then clatters and bumps.
“What’s wrong, Private?”
“Oh, crap.” Silence. “Crap!”
“Private, you don’t wanna get shot, you tell me what’s wrong!”
“I…I’m stuck, damn rockslide…DO SOMETHING I can’t move. I can’t move I, I—”
“Shut up! How deep?”
“Can’t move my crap, my damn legs HELP ME—”
“Then damn it use your arms—push!—you can move a ton with each hand.” Three minutes.
Then she stopped cussing and started to mumble, in Russian, I guess, a low monotone. She was panting and you could hear rocks tumbling away.
“I’m free.” Two minutes.
“Go as fast as you can.” Cortez’s voice was flat, emotionless.
At ninety seconds she appeared crawling over the rim. “Run, girl…you better run.” She ran five or six steps and fell, skidded a few meters and got back up, running; fell again, got up again—
It looked like she was going pretty fast, but she had only covered about thirty meters when Cortez said, “All right, Bovanovitch, get down on your stomach and lie still.” Ten seconds, but she didn’t hear him, or she wanted to get just a little more distance, and she kept running, careless leaping strides and at the high point of one leap there was a flash and a rumble and something big hit her below the neck and her headless body spun off end over end through space, trailing a red-black spiral of flash-frozen blood that settled gracefully to the ground, a path of crystal powder that nobody disturbed while we gathered rocks to cover the juiceless thing at the end of it.
That night Cortez didn’t lecture us, didn’t even show up for night-chop. We were all very polite to each other and everybody was afraid to talk about it.
I sacked with Rogers; everybody sacked with a good friend, but all she wanted to do was cry, and she cried so long and so hard that she got me doing it, too.
7
“Fire team A—move out!” The twelve of us advanced in a ragged line toward the simulated bunker. It was about a kilometer away, across a carefully prepared obstacle course. We could move pretty fast, since all of the ice had been cleared from the field, but even with ten days’ experience we weren’t ready to do more than an easy jog.
I carried a grenade launcher, loaded with tenth-microton practice grenades. Everybody had their laser-fingers set at point oh eight dee one; not much more than a flashlight. This was a simulated attack—the bunker and its robot defender cost too much to be used once and thrown away.
“Team B follow. Team leaders, take over.”
We approached a clump of boulders at about the halfway mark, and Potter, my team leader, said “Stop and cover.” We clustered behind the rocks and waited for team B.
Barely visible in their blackened suits, the dozen men and women whispered by us. As soon as they were clear, they jogged left, out of our line of sight.
“Fire!” Red circles of light danced a half-click downrange, where the bunker was just visible. Five hundred meters was the limit for these practice grenades; but I might luck out, so I lined the launcher up on the image of the bunker, held it at a 45° angle and popped off a salvo of three.
Return fire from the bunker started before my grenades even landed. Its automatic lasers were no more powerful than the ones we were using, but a direct hit would deactivate your image converter, leaving you blind. It was setting down a random field of fire, not even coming close to the boulders we were hiding behind.
Three magnesium-bright flashes blinked simultaneously, about thirty meters short of the bunker. “Mandella! I thought you were supposed to be good with that thing.”
“Damn it, Potter—it only throws half a click. Once we get closer, I’ll lay ’em right on top, every time.”
“Sure you will.” I didn’t say anything. She wouldn’t be team leader forever. Besides, she hadn’t been such a bad girl before the power went to her head.
Since the grenadier is the assistant team leader, I was slaved into Potter’s radio and could hear B team talk to her.
“Potter, this is Freeman. Losses?”
“Potter here—no, looks like they were concentrating on you.”
“Yeah, we lost three. Right now we’re in a depression about eighty, a hundred meters down from you. We can give cover whenever you’re ready.”
“O.K., start.” Soft click: “A team follow me.” She slid out from behind the rock and turned on the faint pink beacon beneath her powerpack. I turned on mine and moved out to run alongside of her and the rest of the team fanned out in a trailing wedge. Nobody fired while B team laid down a cover for us.
All I could hear was Potter’s breathing and the soft crunch-crunch of my boots. Couldn’t see much of anything, so I tongued the image converter up to a log two intensification. That made the image kind of blurry but adequately bright. Looked like the bunker had B team pretty well pinned down; they were getting quite a roasting. All of their return fire was laser; they must have lost their grenadier.
“Potter, this is Mandella. Shouldn’t we take some of the heat off B team?”
“Soon as I can find us good enough cover. Is that all right with you? Private?” She’d been promoted to corporal for the duration of the exercise.
We angled to the right and laid down behind a slab of rock. Most of the others found cover nearby, but a few had to just hug the ground.
“Freeman, this is Potter.”
“Potter, this is Smithy. Freeman’s out; Samuels is out. We only have five men left. Give us some cover so we can get….”
“Roger, Smithy.”—click—“Open up, A team. The B’s are really hurtin’.”
I PEEKED OUT over the edge of the rock. My rangefinder said that the bunker was about three hundred fifty meters away, still pretty far. I aimed just a smidgeon high and popped three, then down a couple of degrees and three more. The first ones overshot by about twenty meters, then the second salvo flared up directly in front of the bunker. I tried to hold on that angle and popped fifteen, the rest of the magazine, in the same direction.
I should have ducked down behind the rock to reload, but I wanted to see where the fifteen would land, so I kept my eyes on the bunker while I reached back to unclip another magazi
ne….
When the laser hit my image converter there was a red glare so intense it seemed to go right through my eyes and bounce off the back of my skull. It must have been only a few milliseconds before the converter overloaded and went blind, but the bright green afterimage hurt my eyes for several minutes.
Since I was officially “dead,” my radio automatically cut off and I had to remain where I was until the mock battle was over. With no sensory input besides the feel of my own skin—and it ached where the image converter had shone on it—and the ringing in my ears, it seemed like an awfully long time. Finally, a helmet clanked against mine:
“You O.K., Mandella?” Potter’s voice.
“Sorry, I died of boredom twenty minutes ago.”
“Stand up and take my hand.” I did so and we shuffled back to the billet. It must have taken over an hour. She didn’t say anything more, all the way back—it’s a pretty awkward way to communicate—but after we’d cycled through the air lock and warmed up, she helped me undo my suit. I got ready for a mild tongue-lashing, but when the suit popped open, before I could even get my eyes adjusted to the light, she grabbed me around the neck and planted a wet kiss on my mouth.
“Nice shooting, Mandella.”
“Huh?”
“The last salvo before you got hit—four direct hits; the bunker decided it was knocked out, and all we had to do was walk the rest of the way.”
“Great.” I scratched my face under the eyes and some dry skin flaked off. She giggled.
“You should see yourself, you look like….”
“All personnel report to the assembly area.” That was the captain’s voice. Bad news.
She handed me a tunic and sandals. “Let’s go.”
The assembly area/chop hall was just down the corridor. There was a row of roll-call buttons at the door; I pressed the one beside my name. Four of the names were covered with black tape. That was good, we hadn’t lost anybody else during today’s maneuvers.
The captain was sitting on the raised dais, which at least meant we didn’t have to go through the tench-hut bullshit. The place filled up in less than a minute; a soft chime indicated the roll was complete.
Captain Stott didn’t stand up. “You did fairly well today, nobody got killed and I expected some to. In that respect you exceeded my expectations but in every other respect you did a poor job.
“I am glad you’re taking good care of yourselves because each of you represents an investment of over a million dollars and one-fourth of a human life.
“But in this simulated battle against a very stupid robot enemy, thirty-seven of you managed to walk into laser fire and be killed in a simulated way and since dead people require no food you will require no food, for the next three days. Each person who was a casualty in this battle will be allowed only two liters of water and a vitamin ration each day.”
We knew enough not to groan or anything, but there were some pretty disgusted looks, especially on the faces that had singed eyebrows and a pink rectangle of sunburn framing their eyes.
“Mandella.”
“Sir?”
“You are far and away the worst burned casualty. Was your image converter set on normal?”
Oh, crap. “No, sir. Log two.”
“I see. Who was your team leader for the exercise?”
“Acting Corporal Potter, sir.”
“Private Potter, did you order him to use image intensification?”
“Sir, I…I don’t remember.”
“You don’t. Well, as a memory exercise you may join the dead people. Is that satisfactory?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Dead people get one last meal tonight, and go on no rations starting tomorrow. Are there any questions?” He must have been kidding. “All right. Dismissed.”
I SELECTED THE meal that looked as if it had the most calories and took my tray over to sit by Potter.
“That was a quixotic damn thing to do. But thanks.”
“Nothing. I’ve been wanting to lose a few pounds anyway.” I couldn’t see where she was carrying any extra.
“I know a good exercise,” I said. She smiled without looking up from her tray. “Have anybody for tonight?”
“Kind of thought I’d ask Jeff….”
“Better hurry, then. He’s lusting after Uhuru.” Well, that was mostly true. Everybody did.
“I don’t know. Maybe we ought to save our strength. That third day….”
“Come on.” I scratched the back of her hand lightly with a fingernail. “We haven’t sacked since Missouri. Maybe I’ve learned something new.”
“Maybe you have.” She tilted her head up at me in a sly way. “O.K.”
Actually, she was the one with the new trick. The French corkscrew, she called it. She wouldn’t tell me who taught it to her, though. I’d like to shake his hand.
8
The two weeks’ training around Miami Base eventually cost us eleven lives. Twelve, if you count Dahlquist. I guess having to spend the rest of your life on Charon, with a hand and both legs missing, is close enough to dying.
Little Foster was crushed in a landslide and Freeland had a suit malfunction that froze him solid before we could carry him inside. Most of the other deaders were people I didn’t know all that well. But they all hurt. And they seemed to make us more scared rather than more cautious.
Now darkside. A flier brought us over in groups of twenty, and set us down beside a pile of building materials, thoughtfully immersed in a pool of helium II.
We used grapples to haul the stuff out of the pool. It’s not safe to go wading, since the stuff crawls all over you and it’s hard to tell what’s underneath; you could walk out onto a slab of hydrogen and be out of luck.
I’d suggested that we try to boil away the pool with our lasers, but ten minutes of concentrated fire didn’t drop the helium level appreciably. It didn’t boil, either; helium II is a “superfluid,” so what evaporation there was had to take place evenly, all over the surface. No hot spots, so no bubbling.
We weren’t supposed to use lights, to “avoid detection.” There was plenty of starlight, with your image converter cranked up to log three or four, but each stage of amplification meant some loss of detail. By log four, the landscape looked like a crude monochrome painting, and you couldn’t read the names on people’s helmets unless they were right in front of you.
The landscape wasn’t all that interesting, anyhow. There were half a dozen medium-sized meteor craters—all with exactly the same level of helium II in them—and the suggestion of some puny mountains just over the horizon. The uneven ground was the consistency of frozen spiderwebs; every time you put your foot down, you’d sink half an inch with a squeaking crunch. It could get on your nerves.
It took most of a day to pull all the stuff out of the pool. We took shifts napping, which you could do either standing up, sitting, or lying on your stomach. I didn’t do well in any of those positions, so I was anxious to get the bunker built and pressurized.
We could build the thing underground—it’d just fill up with helium II—so the first thing to do was to build an insulating platform, a permaplast-vacuum sandwich three layers tall.
I was an acting corporal, with a crew of ten people. We were carrying the permaplast layers to the building site—two people can carry one easily—when one of “my” men slipped and fell on his back.
“Damn it, Singer, watch your step.” We’d had a couple of deaders that way.
“Sorry, Corporal. I’m bushed, just got my feet tangled up.”
“Yeah, just watch it.” He got back up all right, and with his partner placed the sheet and went back to get another.
I kept my eye on him. In a few minutes he was practically staggering, not easy to do with that suit of cybernetic armor.
“Singer! After you set that plank, I want to see you.”
“O.K.” He labored through the task and mooched over.
“Let me check your readout.” I opened the
door on his chest to expose the medical monitor. His temperature was two degrees high; blood pressure and heart rate both elevated. Not up to the red line, though.
“You sick or something?”
“Hell, Mandella, I feel O.K., just tired. Since I fell I’ve been a little dizzy.”
I CHINNED THE medic’s combination. “Doc, this is Mandella. You wanna come over here for a minute?”
“Sure, where are you?” I waved and he walked over from poolside.
“What’s the problem?” I showed him Singer’s readout.
He knew what all the other little dials and things meant, so it took him a while. “As far as I can tell, Mandella…he’s just hot.”
“Hell, I coulda told you that,” said Singer.
“Maybe you better have the armorer take a look at his suit.” We had two people who’d taken a crash course in suit maintenance; they were our “armorers.”
I chinned Sanchez and asked him to come over with his tool kit.
“Be a couple of minutes, Corporal. Carryin’ a plank.”
“Well, put it down and get on over here.” I was getting an uneasy feeling. Waiting for him, the medic and I looked over Singer’s suit.
“Uh-oh,” Doc Jones said. “Look at this.” I went around to the back and looked where he was pointing. Two of the fins on the heat exchanger were bent out of shape.
“What is wrong?” Singer asked.
“You fell on your heat exchanger, right?”
“Sure, Corporal—that’s it, it must not be working right.”
“I don’t think it’s working at all,” said Doc.
Sanchez came over with his diagnostic kit and we told him what had happened. He looked at the heat exchanger, then plugged a couple of jacks into it and got a digital readout from a little monitor in his kit. I didn’t know what it was measuring, but it came out zero to eight decimal places.
Heard a soft click, Sanchez chinning my private frequency. “Corporal, this guy’s a deader.”
“What? Can’t you fix the damn thing?”
“Maybe…maybe I could, if I could take it apart. But there’s no way….”
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