by Mick Farren
The Therem themselves were comparatively few in number, and they were spread very thinly across the multiple fronts of their endless war. As a consequence, the medians and their equivalents among the other client species wielded considerable power. They were in virtual control of everything except basic strategy. As far as the human ground troops were concerned, they were the ultimate authority, the high priests of battle.
The briefing room was in the upper part of the ship, an area that Rance rarely visited. It was on the very outside of the hull, enclosed in a transparent dome that afforded a panoramic view of space and the two nearest ships in the cluster. They were close to a binary star system, the usual red gas giant and white dwarf. As Rance entered the room, dead on the mark of 0700, he peered out of the dome to see if any of the training exercise was visible. There was no sign of them. They had to be on another side of the ship. He didn't want to look at the stars. They were undoubtedly the next target, and he knew for sure that he'd grow to hate them before the operation was over.
The ship's other nine topmen were already there when Rance arrived. He exchanged curt greetings with them. The topmen on any ship were a tight, if taciturn, club. They were the ones who ran the combat, the real thing, when the troops were beyond the reach of medians and officers.
"Bad jump."
"A swine."
"Anybody get psychs?"
Topman Benset nodded.
"I had one come out mute and staring."
"You keep it from the men?"
"Sure, I gassed them down, disappeared him, and planted the suggestion that he'd been taken in for redata-ing the day before."
"Anyone else?"
The topmen shook their heads.
"One ain't bad for a jump like that."
The conversation stopped, and the topmen snapped to attention as some thirty line officers filed in. They were followed just seconds later by the five medians. There were no preliminaries. The room immediately came to order. The medians even looked alien. They also looked very much alike. They had been selectively bred to be what they were, and in the process they had lost all vestige of hair. There was almost a luminescence to their polished bald heads, and there was much speculation as to what kind of bodies were concealed under their flowing, dark blue robes. Delarac, the one who did the talking at these briefings, motioned a corpse-white hand toward the dome. "Dark, please."
The topman nearest the environ panel opaqued the dome. There was a projection pedestal in the center of the room. In the darkness, a miniature of the binary star system floated above it, performing a speeded-up version of the movements of the originals. There was also one attendant planet. That had to be the target.
"Observe the planet."
Nobody knew what the exact relationship was between the individual medians, whether they were all the same rank or whether some were senior to others. Did the fact that Delarac always spbke at briefings indicate that he was the head median? Or perhaps he was the lowliest.
"It is a planet of very little worth. Class G, bad atmosphere, mainly rock and dust, minimal indigenous life, and a potentially unstable system. Normally it would not be worth a second glance except that the Yal have positioned a network of dome batteries in its northern hemisphere, and there will be no hope of clearing them from this quadrant unless it is removed."
There was a narrowing of eyes among the topmen. This was going to be a bitch.
"The Yal installations are shielded against attack from space, and since they can draw power from an entire planet, I seriously doubt that we can break the shields, even with a prolonged bombardment by the whole cluster. We could, of course, continue bombardment until they drained the basic molecular structure of the planet and caused a final disintegration, but planetary annihilation is strictly against Alliance fundamental policy and thus we are left with only one viable option."
The topmen knew what was coming next.
"The strategy is crude, and it may prove costly, but there are no practical alternatives. Simultaneously, we will bombard their screens from orbit and mount a ground attack on their installations. The pressure on their screens should cause them to compress above the batteries and render them ineffective at surface level. Our troops should have no trouble moving through and destroying the domes."
Rance watched the tiny illuminated planet tracing figure eight's around the model of the binary. It always sounded so simple at these briefings. Walk in and destroy the domes, a clean, surgical operation. In the sterile darkness of the briefing room there was no hint of the noise and the fear and the broken bodies.
"The cluster will be in position in two standards. Our dropcraft will launch at 1500 precisely. Our barrage will commence immediately the dropcraft are clear of the cluster. Once our forces are in position on the ground, they are likely to encounter some light ground defenses, but our scans of the Yal emplacements have shown nothing that should cause any major problems. It would appear to be a simple operation, free of any serious complications. You will receive your individual battle orders immediately after this briefing is over. Do any of you officers have questions?"
A number of officers had minor queries for which Delarac had short, summary answers. When they were finished, the median turned his attention to the topmen.
"How about you?"
Benset stiffened. "Yes, sir, I have a question." "What is it?"
Delarac's expression suggested that he had invited questions from the topmen only as a formal courtesy and had not actually expected any to be asked.
"Sir, it occurs to me that if the Yal screens were to cave in under the fire from the cluster while we were in the middle of the attack on the domes, at least a portion of the force on the ground could be wiped out by our own guns."
It was hard to tell with medians, but from where Rance was standing, it seemed that Delarac's expression has become even bleaker than usual.
"The possibility has been considered, but it would appear to be a low-probability scenario. Of course, as you well know, anything can happen in the heat of battle, and if such a thing did come to pass, it would be unfortunate. It is not, however, anything that merits a change in plans. Any more questions?" The median's tone seemed to indicate that he didn't expect any.
Rance snapped to attention. "Yes, sir, one more question."
"Rance, isn't it?"
"Yes, sir."
"What is it, Rance?"
"Sir, what is to stop the Yal batteries from blowing the dropcraft out of the air before we even reach the ground?"
Delarac looked at Rance as if he were a particularly backward child. "All our evaluations indicate that the fire from the cluster will be more than enough to keep the Yal batteries occupied. The dropcraft may take some hits, but losses should remain within acceptable levels."
"Thank you, sir."
In other words, "We take our chances."
There was something almost uncanny about the way the news of the impending combat spread through the messdecks. There was no formal announcement, but suddenly everyone knew. They were being dropped onto some forsaken dust bowl planet with poisonous air and were expected to knock out a nest of Yal big guns. The consensus was that it would be bloody. For the soldier, pessimism is a natural state. It makes survival a pleasant surprise. Each man reacted to the news in his own way. Some withdrew, others cursed and complained, a few broke into secret caches of booze or drugs. Some went about their normal routine with a fatalistic resignation. Renchett worked on his knife with a renewed fury. Dyrkin was almost serene, as if he were somehow looking forward to the fight. There was a major outbreak of gallows humor, with jokes about mutilation being particularly popular. The sexual content of many of the jokes started Hark to wondering again about what had happened to the women. On what might possibly be the eve of destruction, though, it hardly seemed right to ask.
Of all the men on the messdecks, the recruits had the most difficulty in dealing with this precombat tension. At least the longtimers could reassure them
selves that they had survived before and could conceivably survive again. The new meat had no such comfort. They had no previous experience. They didn't know if they were even capable of surviving. They didn't know how they'd react or whether they'd be able to stand up to combat at all. They were facing the unknown, and like all who face the unknown, they imagined the worst. They waited and nursed their fear. They were quiet and subdued, avoiding each other's eyes and those of the longtimers. They couldn't join in the grim ribaldry; they had no macho swagger to protect them and no knives to hone. All they could do was sit in the background and wait.
Hark, feeling totally at a loss, decided that the last best resort might be sleep. While no one was looking, he retreated to his coffin, stripped off his clothes, lay down, and lowered the lid. Despite the legacy of aching muscles from the day's grueling training session on the hull, sleep didn't come easily. It was the first time that he'd really been alone with his thoughts since he'd been brought to the ship. There was no one yelling at him and no one beating on him. With the lid sealed, he couldn't hear the voices of the longtimers in the downden. All he could hear was the noise in his own head. It couldn't match the voices of the overmen yelling through his communicator and echoing around the inside of his helmet, but it was more than enough of a howl to keep him from immediate sleep. There was so much to absorb, and all of it shaken and stirred by the jump and the datashot. The worst tiling that the howl told him was that there was nothing in his mind that he could trust. His current reality was so imposing and so awful that it was scarcely believable, but his previous life, sitting astride a mount in the high desert, had become as tenuous as a fading dream. If he had been in a position to ask a Therem, the Therem would have told him that the howl was a sign that the healing process that followed the datashot was nearing a satisfactory conclusion, but Hark would never in his life be in a position to ask a Therem anything, and Therems rarely, if ever, volunteered information to troopers.
Hark slept fitfully for a time, but the confusion followed him into his nightmares. Finally, he came wide awake and had to face the fact that he was quite incapable of sleep. He popped the seal on his coffin and lifted the lid. The covers were closed on most of the other coffins but not all of them, and a light shone out of the downden. Hark decided that he'd get a drink of water from the spigot. As he walked down the aisle between the coffins, he noticed that a number of the sleepers were tossing and turning just as he had been. Inside the downden, Helot lounged in a deep chair, and a trooper called Wabst, to whom Hark had never spoken, was sprawled out on the strangely shaped couch. Hark didn't pay much attention to the pair of them until he'd drunk a cupful of the ship's metallic water. It was only then that he noticed how both men were wearing their battle suits rolled down to around their waists so their upper bodies were naked. They had their eyes closed and had strange expressions on their faces, and there was the image of an explicitly gyrating naked woman on the wall screen. Hark was shocked. He found that his high desert prudery hadn't deserted him. He'd heard among the young men around the fire that there were women in distant tribes who performed such lewd dances, but he had never seen anything even close to the image on the screen. And yet it couldn't be the image that was making the two longtimers behave the way they were. They couldn't see the dancing woman-their eyes were tightly shut. The realization hit him like a hammer. It was the suits. The suits were doing something to them. Something close to sexual. Hark was in a quandary. What was he supposed to do? He felt that he was intruding, seeing what he had neither right nor desire to see. He was thinking about creeping away unseen, but the steel cup that was attached to the spigot clinked as it dropped to the length of its chain. Both men's eyes snapped open with a killer's reflex. Helot glared at him. "What do you think you're looking at?"
"What's your problem, new meat? You got some kind of attitude?" "No, I…"
Wabst started. "What do you think a man's supposed to do when the nearest woman's at least a hundred licks away?"
Helot's face twisted into an unpleasant grin. "This green bastard hasn't made friends with his suit yet."
Hark had a flesh-creep preview of how he'd feel the next time his suit crawled up his legs. By now, Wabst was also grinning.
"Men do all kinds of things when they're kept away from women."
Hark blurted it out before he could stop himself. "Where are the women?"
"Nobody tell you?"
"No."
"Well, kid, the nearest woman is somewhere out on a recstar halfway across the galaxy." "What's a recstar?'* "He don't know what recstar is." "Poor bastard's dumber than he looks." "So what's a recstar?"
"A recstar, new meat, is nothing you need worry about until you've been through combat."
"And he don't look like he's going to get through combat anyhow."
Six
"Disengaging on my mark!" "Mark!"
"Everyone stay calm."
There was a series of loud bangs as the drop craft disengaged from the conveyor. It nosed out of the lock and slid into space. Its human cargo, the nineteen troopers and five sappers plus Elmo, Rance, and the pilot, experienced a stomach-twisting lurch as they passed out of the Anah 5's internal gravity. They were falling. The men floated in their seats, pressing up against the lap bars. Their helmets were sealed. They were locked into their seats, their weapons racked beside them.
"Better enjoy the calm before the storm; we'll hit the atmosphere soon enough."
The troopers sat facing one another in two rows, backs to the outside of the craft. Beyond the armored shell, fifty-nine identical ships were falling from the cluster in three distinct waves. The free-fall was comparatively easy to get used to. It was smooth and even. Despite the obvious built-in uneasiness, free-fall did have a certain calming effect. The fear of what was com ing was inside each trooper with a dry-mouthed vengeance, but it was being challenged by a mounting excitement. They were fighting men going out to do what they did best.
"Everyone take it easy. One step at a time."
Hark was surprised at how well he was coping with his fear. He had imagined that it would have him paralyzed by this point. In fact, it was quite the reverse. He wanted to go. He wanted to be down on the ground and getting on with it. His mind kept saying it to him. Yeah! Go! Go! He could hardly stop himself from grasping for his MEW.
"Easy."
Rance's voice was in everyone's helmet. He soothed his troops and held them in check much in the way that a rider might gentle a skittish mount. Rance knew that his calming words were pure bluff. He was as scared as anyone, but he had said the words so many times that they were as good as real.
The pilot's voice cut in. "Atmosphere coming up!"
Unseen by the men-the only vision port in the craft was in the pilot's cabin-wings extended from the sides of the dropcraft's needle body, delta, membrane airfoils that gave the ship both lift and deceleration. They immediately glowed cherry-red; the wings were designed to recycle the released energy back to the ship's propulsion plant. The invasion fleet streaked through the upper atmosphere like silent gliding moths leaving trails of fire. Inside the craft, though, things were not quite as serene. The ship bounced and wallowed. It shook and buffeted. The cabin floor pushed up under the men's feet as the airfoils bit into the planet's thickening air. There were curses and mutterings all down the lines of men. Rance quickly stepped on this routine bitching.
"You can cut that out "for a start!"
The cabin was filled with noise. The air screamed by outside. The airfoils groaned and the structure of the ship protested as both were subjected to more and more stress. Then, without warning, the ship was blown to one side by a violent explosion. The first one was followed by three more in quick succession. Fear swamped excitement.
The pilot's voice came on again. "The first wave are taking a beating. There's six of them down already."
"Where the fuck is the covering fire? We're flying into the biggest goddamn guns on the planet, and we ain't got no covering fir
e!"
"Put a lid on that, Renchett!"
"Signal from the cluster, they're opening up." Each time the pilot cut into their communicators there was a burst of static and the almost unintelligible ship-to-ship cross talk.
Someone cursed. "Will you look at that!" "Look at what?"
"The whole damn sky's lit up! It's our barrage." The static in their helmets became deafening. Rance and the pilot were only just audible. "Hang on tight!"
"There's no more fire coming at us. Some of the first wave are safely on the ground."
The dropcraft continued to bounce, shake, and buffet, but there were no more explosions. Hark was suddenly aware that he was gripping the lap bar so tightly that his hands hurt. The excitement was back.
"Ground coming up."
"Hang on!"
"Here we go! Wait for it… nowV
The dropcraft hit ground with a bone-jarring jolt. Its wings feathered up. It plunged, bounced, and skidded over an uneven surface. For a moment, it seemed to be slewing sideways, about to roll over, then, at the last moment, it jerked to a stop. There was an instant of stunned silence before Rance started yelling in their ears again.
