“You sound like you think we’re not going to win.” Gorman was on his back, his boots elevated against the wall to reduce the swelling.
“We’re not gonna win, Wisp. Weren’t you listening just now?”
“Stop calling him that.” Trent rasped from his left.
“What? Wisp? If he’s Holy Whisper, he shouldn’t mind. They don’t mind anything. Right, Gorman?”
“Actually we mind a lot of things. Killing, for one. That’s why we’re all objectors. But you’re right, in that we don’t get excited about silly name-calling. But as insults go, that one’s not that bad at all and it reminds us of our origin. God’s call isn’t a shout, it’s a whisper.” He raised himself up on an elbow. “And a wisp can be a very important thing, if you think about it. A wisp of smoke, for example. You ever had to fight a shipboard fire, Corporal?”
“Not yet.”
“I only fought one. Pulling mid-deck watch, smelled smoke. Sensors went off right after that, and of course the hatches all sealed automatically, so it was just a few of us against this wall of flame.” His voice trailed off.
“So tell me. Did you get down and pray, or did you fight that thing alongside the others?”
“You can pray and fight at the same time, Corporal. Especially if you learn how before things get rough. It’s important to have a philosophy of life . . . and of death.”
“Well I’m an orphan, so nobody ever bothered to give me one of those. Guess I was robbed, huh?”
“You can’t be robbed of something you never had. Even less of something you gave away.”
Trent’s voice rose from the shadows. “You’re an orphan?”
“Yes. I was born on Celestia. Escaped from the orphanage just before they would have sent me to the mines. Did you know that on Celestia the word for orphan is the same as the word for slave? It’s true. So I ran off when I was probably ten.”
“Probably?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. They don’t keep very accurate records on the slaves.”
Mortas turned away from watching the surface. “How old are you now?”
“At Scout Basic they ran a whole bunch of tests on us and one doctor said I was fifteen. That was five years ago.”
“Amazing. How long were you in the service before you went to the Spartacans?”
“I wasn’t. Like I said, I was fifteen when they caught me and handed me off to the Force. Cleaned out this entire slum of every runaway, piled us into these massive corrugated boxes, and next stop was Scout Basic.”
“I thought the Spartacans were all volunteers.”
“Don’t know who Spartacus was, Lieutenant? Don’t worry, nobody seems to. He was a slave of the Romans, led a revolt and ended up getting executed for it. That’s one of the first stories they tell you at Scout Basic. Not that they needed to.”
“Needed to what?”
“Tell us a scary story to keep us in line.” Cranther’s voice became thin, bled of emotion. “They left us in that box for hours, no food, no water, no toilets. I swear they waited until the fights started before they opened this one hatch. Five or six guys in those massive armored suits came walking in, all of ’em holding these big shock-sticks. Man, did those things have a jolt.
“They started at one end of the box and just worked their way through, shocking the heck out of every one of us. We attacked them, of course, but that was a waste of time because of the armor. How they knew who hadn’t been jolted I will never figure out. I pushed this one kid in front of me, got around behind them while they were letting him have it, and the next thing I knew I was on the floor screaming, all my muscles going berserk and my insides feeling like they were being ground up.
“And then they just walked out. Left us there in this pile of shit and piss and vomit and bodies, half my muscles didn’t work for I don’t know how long.”
“Why’d they do that?”
“Every Spartacan’s got a different opinion, but I go with how I felt right at that moment. Completely helpless. I think that’s why they did it. To let us know we were totally in their power, that they could do whatever they wanted. I swear, lying there thinking of what they might decide to do next was worse than anything they did later.
“So finally we’d recovered enough to stand up, and that’s when the loudspeaker said that they were going to drop one wall of the box and that we were supposed to get our toes on these white lines that were painted on the pavement just outside. We were all happy to do that, but then the loudspeaker said that the last guy out of the box was going to wish he’d moved a little faster.”
The stars allowed Mortas to see the little man shudder before he continued.
“So the wall comes down with a crash, this mass of bodies goes tumbling over it, it’s daylight outside so nobody can see, everybody’s running into everybody else, ‘Where are the lines? Where are the lines?’ and then somehow we found ’em and we were all standing like statues in three long rows. Still wearing our civilian clothes, covered in filth, but we were really dedicated at that moment to standing in that formation.
“And the armored suits came back, just took this one guy, just grabbed him at random, no way they could have known who was last out of that box, and they dragged him out in front of the others. They pinned that poor bastard to the ground, stood on him with those massive suits, and shocked him until he passed out screaming his head off.
“And nobody in that formation made a move to help him.” He gave a short laugh. “It was a thing of genius.”
They all waited for him to say more, but after a time it was clear that he was finished. Gorman lifted his boots off the rock where they’d been propped and curled himself up into a sitting position.
“I’m not doubting you, Corporal, but how do you know they just picked that one guy? How do you know he wasn’t the last one out of the box?”
“Because I wasn’t last.”
Mortas had the final guard shift of the night, and he leaned his chest against the hole’s dirt wall as the sky slowly began to lighten. A breeze had sprung up over time, causing the brush in front of him to sway back and forth. In the predawn darkness it reminded him of undersea grass he’d once seen while snorkeling at home, gently rocking to invisible currents.
One of the others moved at his feet, and Mortas looked down to see Trent stretching and yawning. Cranther and Gorman were still asleep, the mapmaker with his feet elevated once again and the scout curled up into a ball. Trent stood up without disturbing the other two and joined him at the wall.
“Sun’s coming up.”
“Yeah. Seen anything out there? Animals? Birds?”
“No, but it was pitch dark during most of my shift. And the wind’s kept the brush moving, scraping against itself, making noise. Might have been something out there but I missed it.”
“I could have sworn something flew over us during my shift.” She stretched again, raising her arms over her head and arching her back. “Ya know, as hungry as we all are, I can honestly say that what bugs me right now is that I haven’t had my coffee.”
Mortas gave her a friendly smile, relieved that she’d found something to say that didn’t irritate him.
“We’d pull these long shifts when the wounded came in, and when the last ones had been sorted and handed off to the doctors I’d sit with the triage techs and drink this awful coffee and shoot the breeze. You wouldn’t believe the jokes they told, just to stay sane.”
“Sounds like a tough job.”
“For them it was. Not a lot of latitude. The scanners told them how bad off the patient was, and they sorted them according to Force guidance.” Trent shook her head. “They used all these codes and phrases so that anyone who was being set aside wouldn’t know what was happening.”
“Like FUAD?”
“Yeah. I guess making an acronym out of it made it less ugly.
The doctors would try to get involved with triage every now and then, so Command posted guards between the receiving bay and the surgery. Some of the techs wondered if that meant the triage guidance was wrong, but speaking up got you a tour in the brig, so they pretty much kept it to themselves.”
“They talked to you, though.”
“Hey, you move enough gurneys for them and they forget you’re a headshrinker. Besides, I think they felt sorry for me. All that training and no job.”
“Huh?”
She gave off a short, helpless laugh. “The only cases I ever got to handle were mandatory referrals or the ones who’d actually cracked up. Oh, I did get to listen to a couple of higher-highers complain about how lonely they were and that their subordinates didn’t like them, but all that did was piss me off. Every one of them spent years chasing that rank, some of them did really shitty things to get ahead, and now that they finally had what they’d been after so long, they had the nerve to say they didn’t like it. Boo fuckin’ hoo.”
They exchanged fraternal smiles, Mortas wondering if his own father might sometimes feel the way Trent was describing.
“Anyway, most people know that everything they tell me gets reported. So there’s not a lot of walk-in traffic. Heck, I was originally assigned to triage so I could comfort the dying, but then they changed the regs because the psychoanalysts were supposedly upsetting the wounded. But that was a lie; they just didn’t want anyone getting into the Waiting Room who didn’t absolutely have to be there.”
“Waiting Room?”
“Another one of those phrases. More like the Waiting To Die Room, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. They’ve got attendants and plenty of painkillers, but once you go in you’re not coming out.”
A dark rumor from Officer Basic tiptoed into his head. A former enlisted man, veteran of numerous fights, promising them that if they made it back to a ship their chances of living were better than fifty-fifty no matter how badly banged up they were. And that even if they couldn’t be saved they’d never know it.
Mortas was so engrossed in the memory that he didn’t realize Cranther had moved until the scout was standing next to him. The skull cap was in his hand, and he was scratching the stubble on his head. Yawning, he murmured, “Now you know why my ‘type’ always wants to know where the hot chow is. You gotta be crazy to hang around the sick bay.”
CHAPTER 4
They were approaching the mountain when the ration bag blew by. The dark edifice had grown massive with all the hours of walking, even when seen from inside the chasms. They got lucky with the timing, as Cranther had climbed up to check the surface when the bag appeared. One moment he’d been crouched on a small ledge near the top of the ravine and the next he was gone, as abruptly as if a giant bird had plucked him from their midst.
Mortas, robbed of energy by the constant ache in his stomach, had been sitting with the others when the scout scrambled away. He’d looked up in a daze, telling himself that he really should climb up there to see what was going on, when Trent beat him to it. She hopped up onto the spot vacated by Cranther, squatting while in the air so that only her head was visible when she landed. Mortas shook his head, not sure that he’d actually seen the display of acrobatics, but he didn’t get any more time to consider it. Cranther rolled over the side and dropped into the gully with a thud, his arms wrapped around his torso.
Mortas and Gorman both pulled him to his feet, confused by the theatrics until they saw that he was clutching the dull yellow rectangle of a combat ration. The rubberized pouch had been torn open at the top, and the scout upended it to show it was empty. Even so, its effect was explosive.
“Is it real?”
“Is that what I think it is?”
“Are there any more? Did you see any more?”
The words spewed from their mouths while the four of them passed the object from hand to hand like a priceless artifact. Mortas simply stood there, one hand on Cranther’s shoulder and the other on Gorman’s, swaying with fatigue and hunger and staring at the empty bag. He finally found the words.
“How old is it? Can you tell?”
Cranther spit a few flecks of dirt from his lips before smiling up at him. “We may not have to find that cliff after all, El-tee. That bag hasn’t been blowing around here more than a few days.”
“We need to get up on that mountain, Lieutenant.”
“How?” Mortas’s patience had finally worn thin. It had taken a remarkably short time for the elation caused by the ration bag to erode. They’d walked for two more hours, finally reaching the base of the new ridge and also discovering that it ended only a short distance from where they now huddled. His head throbbed from dehydration, and his hands were shaking from hunger. Gorman’s feet were obviously torturing him even though he hadn’t said a word in complaint, and even Trent was showing signs of exhaustion.
“We won’t have to climb it. If we just skirt around the end there I’m sure we’ll have a nice, easy walk up.”
“Why? We need water, and I guarantee there’s none up there.”
“What we need is to find whoever left that ration bag. If the Force put a survey team down here, they’ll be cruising around in some kind of vehicle. And the only way to see where they are, or where they went, is to get up high.”
“What if they’re not a survey team?” Gorman was holding the metal pole now, his hands gripping it tightly as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “What if they’re a recon outfit? What if they’re Spartacans?”
“They’re not Spartacans. If they were, we’d never have seen that ration bag. But if they’re some other kind of recon, they’ll be up on the high ground.”
“The water’s not up on that mountain. Look around you; the vegetation’s actually got some color to it, there are roots right here”—Mortas reached out and gave a tug at the tiny brown shoots protruding from the wall—“and we’re out of water. You said it yourself, we die if we don’t find more.”
“We die anyway if we don’t find whoever dropped that bag.”
“What if we’re wrong?” Gorman’s voice was a thin rasp. “Wrong about who dropped that thing? What if it’s the Sims?”
“The Sims. Come on, Gorman, even a shipboard type has to know they can’t eat our food and we can’t eat theirs.”
“I do. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been dropped by them instead of us. You never picked up something the enemy left behind, Corporal? Just out of curiosity?”
“Looking for intelligence is more like it. But this planet was listed as uninhabited when we went into the tubes, and now we found a human ration bag on it. What are you saying? Both sides landed here while we were being shit out the back end of that transport?”
“Actually, the Inserts are launched from the sides.”
“You know what I mean.” Cranther turned away in disgust. “Listen, Lieutenant, let me go up there alone. I can be up and back in no time.”
Mortas’s brain bucked against him weakly. So tired. So sick of walking. So hungry. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to let Cranther go and check it out . . .
“We shouldn’t split up.” Trent spoke with her eyes on the ground.
“What’s wrong, Captain? Afraid I’m gonna run off?”
“Right now nothing would please me more.”
“Okay, enough of that.” Mortas struggled to his feet. For an instant he envisioned himself running off instead of Cranther, finally free of the advice and the complaints and the bickering. “Cranther and I will go up on the ridge while you two—”
“Lieutenant.” Gorman’s voice was a hiss, and for a moment Mortas expected him to protest that he was fit enough to make the climb. He looked over sharply, but the mapmaker was pointing at something in the distance, his arm fully extended. Standing there leaning on the pipe, he looked like some ancient sage guiding his people through the
wilderness.
They all looked, and a moment later got to see what was so important. A large bird had flown between the two ridges, less than a mile from where they stood. It descended gracefully, as if coming in to land, and just before it disappeared below the level of the underbrush it unfurled an appendage from its beak.
“What was that? Its tongue?”
“Wait.” Cranther had stepped among them, his finger pointed as if imitating Gorman. His arm kept moving, though, tracing the bird’s flight behind the bushes. Judging the location of the ground, he gently brought the same arm up in a low trajectory, as if predicting where the bird would reemerge. He was only off by a second or two, as the creature rose into view again with a loud flap of its huge wings. Mortas didn’t want to say it, fearing it was in his mind, but he could have sworn he saw drops of water trailing from the bird’s tail feathers.
“It wasn’t a tongue. It was some kind of a straw. There’s standing water right over there.”
“How much longer are we going to wait?” Gorman’s voice was barely audible, but from lack of water more than caution. The group was huddled back-to-back in a bed of tall yellow grass on the edge of the most beautiful creek Mortas had ever seen.
“It’s like I told you. The predators always stake out the water source.” Cranther’s eyes were in constant motion, roving along the opposite bank. He’d guided them to a spot where the stream took a sharp turn and then had them hunker down in the grass near its edge. The plastic bucket was now tied to the end of the pipe they’d carried for so long, but the scout still insisted they wait.
The stream was probably only fifty yards wide, but the current was fast and the sound of the running water was driving Mortas mad. All twelve of the empty hoses were stacked in the center of their tiny perimeter, waiting to be filled. The dust of the long journey had turned them a dull red, and when he spared a glance at the others he saw the same color on faces, clothes, and hands.
“Okay.” Cranther slowly shifted from a squatting position to his stomach in the weeds. He gently spread the brush directly in front of him and then, instead of extending the pole, began handing back some of the stones that obviously formed the stream’s bed. He whispered without turning, his eyes fixed on the water. “Be ready to start heaving these things if something tries to grab me.”
Glory Main Page 5
