by Joe Haldeman
He pressed the side of his ring twice and shook it by his ear. ‘Anybody up in the shop?’
‘Harrison, unless he’s on a call.’
A woman walked up, and at first I didn’t recognize her, pale and disheveled, bloodstained tunic. It was Estelle Harmony.
Doc Wilson looked up. ‘Any new customers, Doctor Harmony?’
‘No,’ she said dully. ‘The maintenance man was a double traumatic amputation. Only lived a few minutes. We’re keeping him running for transplants.’
‘All those others?’
‘Explosive decompression.’ She sniffed. ‘Anything I can do here?’
‘Yeah, just a minute.’ He tried his ring again. ‘God damn it. You don’t know where Harrison is?’
‘No … well, maybe, he might be in Surgery B if there was trouble with the cadaver maintenance. Think I set it up all right, though.’
‘Yeah, well, hell you know how …’
‘Mark!’ said the medic with the blood bag.
‘One more half-liter femoral,’ Doc Wilson said. ‘Estelle, you mind taking over for one of the medics here, prepare this gal for surgery?’
‘No, keep me busy.’
‘Good — Hopkins, go up to the shop and bring down a roller and a liter, uh, two liters isotonic fluorocarb with the primary spectrum. If they’re Merck they’ll say “abdominal spectrum.”’ He found a part of his sleeve with no blood on it and wiped his forehead. ‘If you find Harrison, send him over to surgery A and have him set up the anesthetic sequence for abdominal.’
‘And bring her up to A?’
‘Right. If you can’t find Harrison, get somebody—’ he stabbed a finger in my direction, ‘—this guy, to roll the patient up to A; you run ahead and start the sequence.’
He picked up his bag and looked through it. ‘We could start the sequence here,’ he muttered. ‘But hell, not with paramethadone — Marygay? How do you feel?’
She was still crying. ‘I’m … hurt.’
‘I know,’ he said gently. He thought for a second and said to Estelle, ‘No way to tell really how much blood she lost. She may have been passing it under pressure. Also there’s some pooling in the abdominal cavity. Since she’s still alive I don’t think she could’ve bled under pressure for very long. Hope no brain damage yet.’
He touched the digital readout attached to Marygay’s arm. ‘Monitor the blood pressure, and if you think it’s indicated, give her five cc’s vasoconstrictor. I’ve gotta go scrub down.’
He closed his bag. ‘You have any vasoconstrictor besides the pneumatic ampoule?’
Estelle checked her own bag. ‘No, just the emergency pneumatic … uh … yes, I’ve got controlled dosage on the ’dilator, though.’
‘OK, if you have to use the ’constrictor and her pressure goes up too fast—’
‘I’ll give her vasodilator two cc’s at a time.’
‘Check. Hell of a way to run things, but … well. If you’re not too tired, I’d like you to stand by me upstairs.’
‘Sure.’ Doc Wilson nodded and left.
Estelle began sponging Marygay’s belly with isopropyl alcohol. It smelled cold and clean. ‘Somebody gave her No-shock?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘about ten minutes ago.’
‘Ah. That’s why the Doc was worried — no, you did the right thing. But No-shock’s got some vasoconstrictor. Five cc’s more might run up an overdose.’ She continued silently scrubbing, her eyes coming up every few seconds to check the blood pressure monitor.
‘William?’ It was the first time she’d shown any sign of knowing me. ‘This wom—, uh, Marygay, she’s your lover? Your regular lover?’
‘That’s right.’
‘She’s very pretty.’ A remarkable observation, her body torn and caked with crusting blood, her face smeared where I had tried to wipe away the tears. I suppose a doctor or a woman or a lover can look beneath that and see beauty.
‘Yes, she is.’ She had stopped crying and had her eyes squeezed shut, sucking the last bit of moisture from the paper wad.
‘Can she have some more water?’
‘OK, same as before. Not too much.’
I went out to the locker alcove and into the head for a paper towel. Now that the fumes from the pressurizing fluid had cleared, I could smell the air. It smelled wrong. Light machine oil and burnt metal, like the smell of a metal-working shop. I wondered whether they had overloaded the airco. That had happened once before, after the first time we’d used the acceleration chambers.
Marygay took the water without opening her eyes.
‘Do you plan to stay together when you get back to Earth?’
‘Probably,’ I said. ‘If we get back to Earth. Still one more battle.’
‘There won’t be any more battles,’ she said flatly. ‘You mean you haven’t heard?’
‘What?’
‘Don’t you know the ship was hit?’
‘Hit!’ Then how could any of us be alive?
‘That’s right.’ She went back to her scrubbing. ‘Four squad bays. Also the armor bay. There isn’t a fighting suit left on the ship … and we can’t fight in our underwear.’
‘What — squad bays, what happened to the people?’
‘No survivors.’
Thirty people. ‘Who was it?’
‘All of the third platoon. First squad of the second platoon.’
Al-Sadat, Busia, Maxwell, Negulesco. ‘My God.’
‘Thirty deaders, and they don’t have the slightest notion of what caused it. Don’t know but that it may happen again any minute.’
‘It wasn’t a drone?’
‘No, we got all of their drones. Got the enemy vessel, too. Nothing showed up on any of the sensors, just blam! and a third of the ship was torn to hell. We were lucky it wasn’t the drive or the life-support system.’ I was hardly hearing her. Penworth, LaBatt, Smithers. Christine and Frida. All dead. I was numb.
She took a blade-type razor and a tube of gel out of her bag. ‘Be a gentleman and look the other way,’ she said. ‘Oh, here.’ She soaked a square of gauze in alcohol and handed it to me. ‘Be useful. Do her face.’
I started and, without opening her eyes, Marygay said, ‘That feels good. What are you doing?’
‘Being a gentleman. And useful, too—’
‘All personnel, attention, all personnel.’ There wasn’t a squawk-box in the pressure chamber, but I could hear it clearly through the door to the locker alcove. ‘All personnel echelon 6 and above, unless directly involved in medical or maintenance emergencies, report immediately to the assembly area.’
‘I’ve got to go, Marygay.’
She didn’t say anything. I didn’t know whether she had heard the announcement.
‘Estelle,’ I addressed her directly, gentleman be damned. ‘Will you—’
‘Yes. I’ll let you know as soon as we can tell.’
‘Well.’
‘It’s going to be all right.’ But her expression was grim and worried. ‘Now get going,’ she said, softly.
By the time I picked my way out into the corridor, the ’box was repeating the message for the fourth time. There was a new smell in the air, that I didn’t want to identify.
5
Halfway to the assembly area I realized what a mess I was, and ducked into the head by the NCO lounge. Corporal Kamehameha was hurriedly brushing her hair.
‘William! What happened to you?’
‘Nothing.’ I turned on a tap and looked at myself in the mirror. Dried blood smeared all over my face and tunic. ‘It was Marygay, Corporal Potter, her suit … well, evidently it got a crease, uh …’
‘Dead?’
‘No, just badly, uh, she’s going into surgery—’
‘Don’t use hot water. You’ll just set the stain.’
‘Oh. Right.’ I used the hot to wash my face and hand, dabbed at the tunic with cold. ‘Your squad’s just two bays down from Al’s, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did
you see what happened?’
‘No. Yes. Not when it happened.’ For the first time I noticed that she was crying, big tears rolling down her cheeks and off her chin. Her voice was even, controlled. She pulled at her hair savagely. ‘It’s a mess.’
I stepped over and put my hand on her shoulder. ‘DON’T touch me!’ she flared and knocked my hand off with the brush. ‘Sorry. Let’s go.’
At the door to the head she touched me lightly on the arm. ‘William …’ She looked at me defiantly. ‘I’m just glad it wasn’t me. You understand? That’s the only way you can look at it.’
I understood, but I didn’t know that I believed her.
‘I can sum it up very briefly,’ the commodore said in a tight voice, ‘if only because we know so little.
‘Some ten seconds after we destroyed the enemy vessel, two objects, very small objects, struck the Anniversary amidships. By inference, since they were not detected and we know the limits of our detection apparatus, we know that they were moving in excess of nine-tenths of the speed of light. That is to say, more precisely, their velocity vector normal to the axis of the Anniversary was greater than nine-tenths of the speed of light. They slipped in behind the repeller fields.’
When the Anniversary is moving at relativistic speeds, it is designed to generate two powerful electromagnetic fields, one centered about five thousand kilometers from the ship and the other about ten thousand klicks away, both in line with the direction of motion of the ship. These fields are maintained by a ‘ramjet’ effect, energy picked up from interstellar gas as we mosey along.
Anything big enough to worry about hitting (that is, anything big enough to see with a strong magnifying glass) goes through the first field and comes out with a very strong negative charge all over its surface. As it enters the second field, it’s repelled away from the path of the ship. If the object is too big to be pushed around this way, we can sense it at a greater distance and maneuver out of its way.
‘I shouldn’t have to emphasize how formidable a weapon this is. When the Anniversary was struck, our rate of speed with respect to the enemy was such that we traveled our own length every ten-thousandth of a second. Further, we were jerking around erratically with a constantly changing and purely random lateral acceleration. Thus the objects that struck us must have been guided, not aimed. And the guidance system was self-contained, since there were no Taurans alive at the time they struck us. All of this in a package no larger than a small pebble.
‘Most of you are too young to remember the term future shock. Back in the seventies, some people felt that technological progress was so rapid that people, normal people, couldn’t cope with it; that they wouldn’t have time to get used to the present before the future was upon them. A man named Toffler coined the term future shock to describe this situation.’ The commodore could get pretty academic.
‘We’re caught up in a physical situation that resembles this scholarly concept. The result has been disaster. Tragedy. And, as we discussed in our last meeting, there is no way to counter it. Relativity traps us in the enemy’s past; relativity brings them from our future. We can only hope that next time, the situation will be reversed. And all we can do to help bring that about is try to get back to Stargate, and then to Earth, where specialists may be able to deduce something, some sort of counterweapon, from the nature of the damage.
‘Now we could attack the Tauran’s portal planet from space and perhaps destroy the base without using you infantry. But I think there would be a very great risk involved. We might be … shot down by whatever hit us today, and never return to Stargate with what I consider to be vital information. We could send a drone with a message detailing our assumptions about this new enemy weapon … but that might be inadequate. And the Force would be that much further behind, technologically.
‘Accordingly, we have set a course that will take us around Yod-4, keeping the collapsar as much as possible between us and the Tauran base. We will avoid contact with the enemy and return to Stargate as quickly as possible.’
Incredibly, the commodore sat down and kneaded his temples. ‘All of you are at least squad or section leaders. Most of you have good combat records. And I hope that some of you will be rejoining the Force after your two years are up. Those of you who do will probably be made lieutenants, and face your first real command.
‘It is to these people I would like to speak for a few moments, not as your … as one of your commanders, but just as a senior officer and advisor.
‘One cannot make command decisions simply by assessing the tactical situation and going ahead with whatever course of action will do the most harm to the enemy with a minimum of death and damage to your own men and material. Modern warfare has become very complex, especially during the last century. Wars are won not by a simple series of battles won, but by a complex interrelationship among military victory, economic pressures, logistic maneuvering, access to the enemy’s information, political postures — dozens, literally dozens of factors.’
I was hearing this, but the only thing that was getting through to my brain was that a third of our friends’ lives had been snuffed out less than an hour before, and he was sitting up there giving us a lecture on military theory.
‘So sometimes you have to throw away a battle in order to help win the war. This is exactly what we are going to do.
‘This was not an easy decision. In fact, it was probably the hardest decision of my military career. Because, on the surface at least, it may look like cowardice.
‘The logistic computer calculates that we have about a 62 percent chance of success, should we attempt to destroy the enemy base. Unfortunately, we would have only a 30 percent chance of survival — as some of the scenarios leading to success involve ramming the portal planet with the Anniversary at light speed.’ Jesus Christ.
‘I hope none of you ever has to face such a decision. When we get back to Stargate, I will in all probability be court-martialed for cowardice under fire. But I honestly believe that the information that may be gained from analysis of the damage to the Anniversary is more important than the destruction of this one Tauran base.’ He sat up straight. ‘More important than one soldier’s career.’
I had to stifle an impulse to laugh. Surely ‘cowardice’ had nothing to do with his decision. Surely he had nothing so primitive and unmilitary as a will to live.
The maintenance crew managed to patch up the huge rip in the side of the Anniversary and to repressurize that section. We spent the rest of the day cleaning up the area; without, of course, disturbing any of the precious evidence for which the commodore was willing to sacrifice his career.
The hardest part was jettisoning the bodies. It wasn’t so bad except for the ones whose suits had burst.
I went to Estelle’s cabin the next day, as soon as she was off duty.
‘It wouldn’t serve any good purpose for you to see her now.’ Estelle sipped her drink, a mixture of ethyl alcohol, citric acid and water, with a drop of some ester that approximated the aroma of orange rind.
‘Is she out of danger?’
‘Not for a couple of weeks. Let me explain.’ She set down her drink and rested her chin on interlaced fingers. ‘This sort of injury would be fairly routine under normal circumstances. Having replaced the lost blood, we’d simply sprinkle some magic powder into her abdominal cavity and paste her back up. Have her hobbling around in a couple of days.
‘But there are complications. Nobody’s ever been injured in a pressure suit before. So far, nothing really unusual has cropped up. But we want to monitor her innards very closely for the next few days.
‘Also, we were very concerned about peritonitis. You know what peritonitis is?’
‘Yes.’ Well, vaguely.
‘Because a part of her intestine had ruptured under pressure. We didn’t want to settle for normal prophylaxis because a lot of the, uh, contamination had impacted on the peritoneum under pressure. To play it safe, we completely sterilized the whole sheba
ng, the abdominal cavity and her entire digestive system from the duodenum south. Then of course, we had to replace all of her normal intestinal flora, now dead, with a commercially prepared culture. Still standard procedure, but not normally called for unless the damage is more severe.’
‘I see.’ And it was making me a little queasy. Doctors don’t seem to realize that most of us are perfectly content not having to visualize ourselves as animated bags of skin filled with obscene glop.
‘This in itself is enough reason not to see her for a couple of days. The changeover of intestinal flora has a pretty violent effect on the digestive system — not dangerous, since she’s under constant observation. But tiring and, well, embarrassing.
‘With all of this, she would be completely out of danger if this were a normal clinical situation. But we’re decelerating at a constant 1—½ gees, and her internal organs have gone through a lot of jumbling around. You might as well know that if we do any blasting, anything over about two gees, she’s going to die.’
‘But … but we’re bound to go over two on the final approach! What—’
‘I know, I know. But that won’t be for a couple of weeks. Hopefully, she will have mended by then.
‘William, face it. It’s a miracle she survived to get into surgery. So there’s a big chance she won’t make it back to Earth. It’s sad; she’s a special person, the special person to you, maybe. But we’ve had so much death … you ought to be getting used to it, come to terms with it.’
I took a long pull at my drink, identical to hers except for the citric acid. ‘You’re getting pretty hard-boiled.’
‘Maybe … no. Just realistic. I have a feeling we’re headed for a lot more death and sorrow.’
‘Not me. As soon as we get to Stargate, I’m a civilian.’
‘Don’t be so sure.’ The old familiar argument. ‘Those clowns who signed us up for two years can just as easily make it four or—’
‘Or six or twenty or the duration. But they won’t. It would be mutiny.’
‘I don’t know. If they could condition us to kill on cue, they can condition us to do almost anything. Re-enlist.’
