“Frozen stiff with fear, you mean.”
To Stromsen, “You, too, Miss Stromsen. You’ve earned a promotion.”
“Thank you, sir,” was all she could say.
“And you, little lady,” he said to Yang. “You were outstanding.”
She started to say something, then flung her arms around Hazard’s neck and squeezed tight. “I was so frightened!” she whispered in his ear. “You kept me from cracking up.”
Hazard held her around the waist for a moment. As they disengaged he felt his face turning flame red. He turned away from the hatch, not wanting to see the expressions on the rest of his crew members.
Buckbee was coming through the air lock. Behind him were his five men. Including Jon Jr.
They passed Hazard in absolute silence, Buckbee’s face as cold and angry as an Antarctic storm.
Jon Jr. was the last in line. None of the would-be boarders was in handcuffs, but they all had the hangdog look of prisoners. All except Hazard’s son.
He stopped before his father and met the older man’s gaze. Jon Jr.’s gray eyes were level with his father’s, unswerving, unafraid.
He made a bitter little smile. “I still don’t agree with you,” he said without preamble. “I don’t think the IPF is workable — and it’s certainly not in the best interests of the United States.”
“But you threw your lot in with us when it counted,” Hazard said.
“The hell I did!” Jon Jr. looked genuinely aggrieved. “I just didn’t see any sense in dying for a lost cause.”
“Really?”
“Cardillo and Buckbee and the rest of them were a bunch of idiots. If I had known how stupid they are I wouldn’t…”
He stopped himself, grinned ruefully, and shrugged his shoulders. “This isn’t over, you know. You won the battle, but the war’s not ended yet.”
“I’ll do what I can to get them to lighten your sentence,” Hazard said.
“Don’t stick your neck out for me! I’m still dead-set against you on this.”
Hazard smiled wanly at the youngster. “And you’re still my son.”
Jon Jr. blinked, looked away, then ducked through the hatch and made for a seat in the shuttle.
Hazard formally turned the station over to its new commander, saluted one last time, then went into the shuttle’s passenger compartment. He hung there weightlessly a moment as the hatch behind him was swung shut and sealed.
Most of the seats were already filled. There was an empty one beside Yang, but after their little scene at the hatch Hazard was hesitant about sitting next to her. He glided down the aisle and picked a seat that had no one next to it. Not one of his crew. Not Jon Jr.
There’s a certain amount of loneliness involved in command, he told himself. It’s not wise to get too familiar with people you have to order into battle.
He felt, rather than heard, a thump as the shuttle disengaged from the station’s air lock. He sensed the winged hypersonic spaceplane turning and angling its nose for reentry into the atmosphere.
Back to…Hazard realized that home, for him, was no longer on Earth. For almost all of his adult life, home had been where his command was. Now his home was in space. The time he spent on Earth would be merely waiting time, suspended animation until his new command was ready.
“Sir, may I intrude?”
He looked up and saw Stromsen floating in the aisle by his seat.
“What is it, Miss Stromsen?”
She pulled herself down into the seat next to him but did not bother to latch the safety harness. From a breast pocket in her sweat-stained fatigues she pulled a tiny flat tin. It was marked with a red cross and some printing, hidden by her thumb.
Stromsen opened the tin. “You lost your medication patch,” she said. “I thought you might want a fresh one.” She was smiling at him, shyly, almost like a daughter might.
Hazard reached up and felt behind his left ear. She was right, the patch was gone.
“I wonder how long ago…”
“It’s been hours, at least,” said Stromsen.
“Never noticed.”
Her smile brightened. “Perhaps you don’t need it anymore.”
He smiled back at her. “Miss Stromsen, I think you’re absolutely right. My stomach feels fine. I believe I have finally become adapted to weightlessness.”
“It’s rather a shame that we’re on our way back to Earth. You’ll have to adapt all over again the next time out.”
Hazard nodded. “Somehow I don’t think that’s going to be much of a problem for me anymore.”
He let his head sink back into the seat cushion and closed his eyes, enjoying for the first time the exhilarating floating sensation of weightlessness.
Editor’s Introduction to:
THE WAR MEMORIAL
by Allen M. Steele
“IT IS WELL that war is so terrible! Otherwise we should grow too fond of it!” Robert E. Lee is said to have told General James Longstreet as he watched the Union forces, banners waving, advance to engage Lee’s well-prepared army in the Union disaster at Fredericksburg. Allen Steele tells us of another battle that emphasizes the lesson.
THE WAR MEMORIAL
by Allen M. Steele
The first-wave assault is jinxed from the very beginning.
Even before the dropship touches down, its pilot shouts over the comlink that a Pax missile battery seven klicks away has locked in on their position, despite the ECM buffer set up by the lunarsats. So it’s going to be a dust-off; the pilot has done his job by getting the men down to the surface, and he doesn’t want to be splattered across Mare Tranquillitatis.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Baker Company has been deployed for less than two minutes before the Pax heatseekers pummel the ground around them and take out the dropship even as it begins its ascent.
Giordano hears the pilot scream one last obscenity before his ugly spacecraft is reduced to metal rain, then something slams against his back and everything within the suit goes black. For an instant he believes he’s dead, that he’s been nailed by one of the heatseekers, but it’s just debris from the dropship. The half-ton ceramic-polymer shell of the Mark III Valkyrie Combat Armor Suit has absorbed the brunt of the impact.
When the lights flicker back on within his soft cocoon and the flatscreen directly in front of his face stops fuzzing, he sees that not everyone has been so lucky. A few dozen meters away at three o’clock, there’s a new crater that used to be Robinson. The only thing left of Baker Company’s resident card cheat is the severed rifle arm of his CAS.
He doesn’t have time to contemplate Robinson’s fate. He’s in the midst of battle. Sgt. Boyle’s voice comes through the comlink, shouting orders. Traveling overwatch, due west, head for Marker One-Eight-Five. Kemp, take Robinson’s position. Cortez, you’re point. Stop staring, Giordano (yes sir). Move, move, move…
So they move, seven soldiers in semi-robotic heavy armor, bounding across the flat silver-gray landscape. Tin men trying to outrun the missiles plummeting down around them, the soundless explosions they make when they hit. For several kilometers around them, everywhere they look, there are scores of other tin men doing the same, each trying to survive a silent hell called the Sea of Tranquillity.
Giordano is sweating hard, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He tells himself that if he can just make Marker One-Eight-Five—crater Arago, or so the map overlay tells him—then everything will be okay. The crater walls will protect them. Once Baker Company sets up its guns and erects a new ECM buffer, they can dig in nice and tight and wait it out; the beachhead will have been established by then and the hard part of Operation Monkey Wrench will be over.
But the crater is five-and-a-half klicks away, across plains as flat and wide-open as Missouri pasture, and between here and there a lot of shitfire is coming down. The Pax Astra guns in the foothills of the lunar highlands due west of their position can see them coming; the enemy has the high ground, and they’re throwing everything they can at
the invading force.
Sgt. Boyle knows his platoon is in trouble. He orders everyone to use their jumpjets. Screw formation; it’s time to run like hell.
Giordano couldn’t agree more whole-heartedly. He tells the Valkyrie to engage the twin miniature rockets mounted on the back of his carapace.
Nothing happens.
Once again, he tells the voice-activated computer mounted against the back of his neck to fire the jumpjets. When there’s still no response, he goes to manual, using the tiny controls nestled within the palm of his right hand inside the suit’s artificial arm.
At that instant, everything goes dark again, just like it did when the shrapnel from the dropship hit the back of his suit.
This time, though, it stays dark.
A red LCD lights above his forehead, telling him that there’s been a total system crash.
Cursing, he finds the manual override button and stabs it with his little finger. As anticipated, it causes the computer to completely reboot itself; he hears servomotors grind within the carapace as its limbs move into neutral position, until his boots are planted firmly on the ground and his arms are next to his sides, his rifle pointed uselessly at the ground.
There is a dull click from somewhere deep within the armor, then silence.
Except for the red LCD, everything remains dark.
He stabs frantically at the palm buttons, but there’s no power to any of the suit’s major subsystems. He tries to move his arms and legs, but finds them frozen in place.
Limbs, jumpjets, weapons, ECM, comlink … nothing works.
Now he’s sweating more than ever. The impact of that little bit of debris from the dropship must have been worse than he thought. Something must have shorted out, badly, within the Valkyrie’s onboard computer.
He twists his head to the left so he can gaze through the eyepiece of the optical periscope, the only instrument within the suit that isn’t dependent upon computer control. What he sees, terrifies him: the rest of his platoon jumpjetting for the security of the distant crater, while missiles continue to explode all around him.
Abandoning him. Leaving him behind.
He screams at the top of his lungs, yelling for Boyle and Kemp and Cortez and the rest, calling them foul names, demanding that they wait or come back for them, knowing that it’s futile. They can’t hear him. For whatever reason, they’ve already determined that he’s out of action; they cannot afford to risk their lives by coming back to lug an inert CAS across a battlefield.
He tries again to move his legs, but it’s pointless. Without direct interface from the main computer, the limbs of his suit are immobile. He might as well be wearing a concrete block.
The suit contains three hours of oxygen, fed through pumps controlled by another computer tucked against his belly, along with rest of its life-support systems. So at least he won’t suffocate or fry…
For the next three hours, at any rate.
Probably less. The digital chronometer and life-support gauge are dead, so there’s no way of knowing for sure.
As he watches, even the red coal of the LCD warning lamp grows dim until it finally goes cold, leaving him in the dark.
He has become a living statue. Fully erect, boots firmly placed upon the dusty regolith, arms held rigid at his sides, he is in absolute stasis.
For three hours. Certainly less.
For all intents and purposes, he is dead.
In the smothering darkness of his suit, Giordano prays to a god in which he has never really believed. Then, for lack of anything else to do, he raises his eyes to the periscope eyepiece and watches as the battle rages on around him.
He fully expects—and, after a time, even hopes—for a Pax missile to relieve him of his ordeal, but this small mercy never occurs. Without an active infrared or electromagnetic target to lock in upon, the heatseekers miss the small spot of ground he occupies, instead decimating everything around him.
Giordano becomes a mute witness to the horror of the worst conflict of the Moon War, what historians will later call the Battle of Mare Tranquillitatis. Loyalty, duty, honor, patriotism … all the things in which he once believed are soon rendered null and void as he watches countless lives being lost.
Dropships touch down near and distant, depositing soldiers in suits similar to his own. Some don’t even make it to the ground before they become miniature supernovas.
Bodies fly apart, blown to pieces even as they charge across the wasteland for the deceptive security of distant craters and rills.
An assault rover bearing three lightsuited soldiers rushes past him, only to be hit by fire from the hills. It is thrown upside down, crushing two of the soldiers beneath it. The third man, his legs broken and his suit punctured, manages to crawl from the wreckage. He dies at Giordano’s feet, his arms reaching out to him.
He has no idea whether Baker Company has survived, but he suspects it hasn’t, since he soon sees a bright flash from the general direction of the crater it was supposed to occupy and hold.
In the confines of his suit, he weeps and screams and howls against the madness erupting around him. In the end, he goes mad himself, cursing the same god to whom he prayed earlier for the role to which he has been damned.
If God cares, it doesn’t matter. By then, the last of Giordano’s oxygen reserves have been exhausted; he asphyxiates long before his three hours are up, his body still held upright by the Mark III Valkyrie Combat Armor Suit.
When he is finally found, sixty-eight hours later, by a patrol from the victorious Pax Astra Free Militia, they are astonished that anything was left standing on the killing ground. This sole combat suit, damaged only by a small steel pipe wedged into its CPU housing, with a dead man inexplicably sealed inside, is the only thing left intact. All else has been reduced to scorched dust and shredded metal.
So they leave him standing.
They do not remove the CAS from its place, nor do they attempt to pry the man from his armor. Instead, they erect a circle of stones around the Valkyrie. Later, when peace has been negotiated and lunar independence has been achieved, a small plaque is placed at his feet.
The marker bears no name. Because so many lives were lost during the battle, no one can be certain of who was wearing that particular CAS on that particular day.
An eternal flame might have been placed at his feet, but it wasn’t. Nothing burns on the Moon.
Editor’s Introduction to:
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
by Michael Flynn
Mike Flynn is a polymath. He is known as a hard science SF writer who is also a storyteller, but he is also a quality control engineer who uses advanced probability theory in his work, a medieval history expert, and an accomplished writer on the history and philosophy of science. He is co-author, with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, of Fallen Angels.
When veterans get together they often tell war stories. Here we have war stories told with a decided twist.
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
by Michael Flynn
Winter having locked the passes with snow and ice, the brass parceled out long-deferred leaves and junior officers scattered across the country. Some descended on their hometowns to rest in the bosoms of their families. Some came to the City to rest in other sorts of bosoms. That was the last winter before the big offensive, when I still had the flat in Chelsea. Jimmy Topeka dropped in to see me, all somber as always. He seemed to have something on his mind, but he talked around it six ways from Sunday the way he always does and hadn’t gotten to the nub of it before Angel Osborne clumped his way up the stairs. I hadn’t seen Angel in almost three years, though he and Jimmy had crossed paths during the Red River campaign. I went how we lacked only Lyle “the Style” Guzman to make the old gang complete; and the Angel ups and beeps him over the Lynx and, wouldn’t you know it, Lyle was in the City, too. So before long we were all together, just like old times, drinking and shooting the shit and waiting for the sun to come up. Those were wild years, and we were stil
l young enough to be immortal.
I hadn’t much in the way of furniture; and once Angel had occupied two-thirds of the sofa, there was less of it to go around. Lyle, being slightly built, perched himself on the table, while Jimmy raided my kitchen and passed out bottles of Skull Mountain before squatting cross-legged on the floor. We all said what a coincidence and long time no see and what’ve you been up to.
It wasn’t quite like old times. A few years had gone by between us. They were long years; it didn’t seem possible they’d held only three-hundred-odd days each. The four of us had been different places, seen different sights; and so we had become different men than the ones who had known each other at camp. But also there was a curtain between me and the three of them. Every now and then, in the midst of some tale or other, they would share a look; or they would fall silent and they’d say, well, you had to be there. You see, they’d been Inside and I hadn’t, and that marks a man.
Angel had served with the 82nd against the Snakes; and Lyle had seen action against both the Crips and the Yoopers. Jimmy allowed as he’d tangoed in the high country, where the bandits had secret refuges among the twisting canyons; but he said very little else. Only he drank two beers for every one the others put down, and Jimmy had never been a drinking man.
They asked politely what I’d been up to and pretended great interest in my stories and news dispatches. They swore they read all of my pieces on the ©-Net, and maybe they did.
They didn’t blame me for it. They knew I’d as soon be Inside with them, suited-up and popping Joeys. The four of us had been commissioned power suit lieutenants together; had gone through the grueling training side by side. I still had the bars. I still looked at them some nights when the hurt wasn’t so bad, when I could think about what might have been.
Talk detoured through the winter crop of Hollywood morphies and whether American could take Congress from Liberty next year and how the Air Cav had collared El Muerte down in the panhandle and have you seen Chica Domosan’s latest virtcheo. Angel and Lyle practically drooled when I told them I had the uncensored seedy; and they insisted on viewing it right then and there. I only had the one virtch hat, so they had to take turns watching. With the stereo earphones and the wrap-around goggs enclosing your head it was just like she was dancing and singing and peeling right there in front of you.
There Will Be War Volume X Page 10
