by Mick Farren
The men at one assembly point had to scatter to avoid the power wash as their ship came too close to the mark. Lanza's voice cut through the noise from the ships.
"We're getting out. The charges are armed, and nothing can stop them."
Five e-vacs settled on the battlefield, each in its own cloud of dust. Wide ramps extended to the ground. The first two men up on each side dragged the others in. The wounded were passed hand over hand.
"Let's go, go, go!"
The ramps started rising before the last men were inside. The final ones stumbled forward, half falling through the ports. There was a lurching confusion of men reaching for any handhold as the e-vac tilted into the air. There were no seats in an e-vac, just lines of grab bars. Rance used his rank to swing up to the overhead crew blister. The darkened cabin was cramped even for the two-man crew, who were secured in contour frames, hunched over multiple control boards. The lights of the panels were reflected eerily in their faceplates. Like the dropcraft, the e-vacs weren't pressurized. The best that Rance could do was to crouch in the hatchway, bracing himself against the top of the steel ladder that led up from the main well of the ship.
"Have the charges blown yet?" he asked.
"Not yet, but the shield's sagging."
Rance craned to see the groundside screen. It was true. From the air, it was possible to see the battering waves of energy that were pouring in from space. The Yal shield had been reduced to a red halo with a definite concave dip at its center. The e-vac lurched, and Rance was almost pitched into the well. There was cursing from below as a number of men lost their handholds and fell into those around them. One of the crew glanced around.
"Sorry about that."
Rance glared into the well.
"Turn up the grav on your boots, they'll anchor you."
Rance looked back just in time to see the charges blow. Rings of small explosions rippled around the bases of the domes. At first, there was no perceivable result. Rance bit his lip. Were they going to have to go through the whole bloody process again? Abruptly, the Yal shield winked out, and in the next moment, the visible world erupted. A huge fireball gathered on the ground. Shock waves spread to the horizon. The fireball started to rise. It was as if a star had been lit on the surface of the planet.
"Damn!"
The crew shielded their eyes. Blinding white light poured through the single armored viewslit. The screen threatened to burn out. The fireball started to rise. The area below it glowed white, a vast sea of liquid rock. The fireball was gathering speed and expanding.
"Hold tight. Here comes the shock wave."
The ship felt like God had kicked it. It was like a living thing. The kick was followed by a spasm of monstrous shudders. They were falling.
"I hope she holds together."
The crew were punching buttons. There was almost a detachment about the way they worked. Panels lit, others went out.
"Here's where we find out."
There was a sickening lurch as the crew tried to power out of the deadfall. There were shouts from below.
"Smoke! Something's leaking smoke!"
The crew was concentrating oh coaxing the e-vac to gain altitude.
"Tell them it's nothing to worry about. I'd have worried if we hadn't burst a few seams."
The ship continued to spin and buffet, but they were making ground. There was the pressure of acceleration under their feet.
"The atmosphere is hosing out. We're riding the up-draft. It should take us halfway to the cluster."
In the well of the ship, Hark clung to a grab bar, his eyes closed, and prayed for it all to be over, ont way or another. He didn't really care. He couldn't take any more. The courage that he'd found earlier seemed to have deserted him. He didn't even care that he'd been whimpering out loud when they'd been falling and that the rest of his messdeck had probably heard him over the communicator. The man next to him turned his head and looked at Hark.
"Suit stopped pumping?"
Hark couldn't recognize him behind the faceplate of his helmet.
"I don't understand."
'They don't tell you, but you find out. It's the suits." Hark was at a loss. "Suits?"
"It's the suits that do it to us. None of us want to do what we do in combat. We don't want to take the risks. Once the suit smells your adrenaline and starts pumping itself, you don't have a chance. You're blind and crazy. You'll go anywhere and do anything they tell you."
"What does the suit do? What does it pump into us?"
"Who the hell knows. Some endorphin cocktail of fearblockers, ones that can be absorbed through the skin. That's why the trip back from combat can be really rough. The battle's over, the suit stops pumping, and you come down seeing the full forsaken horror of it. At least we get to get drunk when we get back. It helps."
"They get us every way, don't they?"
"You're learning."
Up in the crew bubble, Rance pursed his lips. He preferred that the recruits learn about the suits as late as possible. Doubtless Hark would tell all the others.
Seven
Naked, they filed into the blue room, carrying their equipment and weapons. The lock sealed. First the water jets came on and washed away the fine purple dust. Next it was the turn of the bright blue lights-the radiation would kill any native bacteria that they might have picked up. Hark noticed that some of the men had brought back small souvenirs of the battle. Helot had the severed metal claw-hand of a chiba gunner. He must have hacked it off one of the corpses in the gunpit while he was manning the captured PBA. It was being decontaminated along with everything else.
Dyrkin looked around at the others. There were thirteen of them. Of the nineteen who had gone down, five were dead; Kemlo, who had been snagged by the wire, had been taken to sick bay to be fitted with a prosthetic foot. They had been less badly hit than some of the other twenties.
"So now we get drunk."
"Polluted. I got to get rid of the taste."
Their ship clothes were laid out for them. They quickly dressed. The lights went out. The lock at the other end of the chamber opened. They filed out into the receiving hold and were somewhat surprised to find that it was a hive of activity. Lights were flashing, and sirens were blaring. Nohan damage-control parties were hurrying to their battle positions. Fault-trace robots, no bigger than a man's foot, skittered about the floor. A gang of human core jumpers, wearing yellow radiation armor, doubled away down a corridor. The PA was issuing orders and bulletins in human, the whistling trills of the nohan, and a wash-of-sound speech that Hark couldn't recognize.
Rance grabbed the first passing human. "What's going on?"
"A Yal battle wagon is closing with us, one of the big ones. We're going to engage."
Dyrkin spit on the deck. "That's all we need."
Rance quickly gathered his men.
"We go back to the mes§decks. We're ground troops. There's nothing we can do in a space battle except get in the way."
Dacker grunted. "We can get ourselves killed."
"That's taken as given around here."
Once on the messdeck, there was nothing to do but wait. The thirteen gathered in the downden. Within minutes, Dacker and Renchetrhad become involved in an argument with Elmo.
"The least you could do would be to issue the booze."
"I can't cut loose a booze issue when the cluster's on full action alert. They'd bust me to trooper or worse. We're going into combat, damn it."
"We've already seen our combat, and after combat, we get drunk. That's the rule."
"And talking of combat, Overman Elmo, we didn't see you down planetside."
"Rance took the command. There was no reason for me to stick my neck out."
"Some of us didn't have the option."
"What are you scum trying to say?"
"Just that we missed you, Overman Elmo."
"You all know that I've seen my share of fighting." He fingered the bald patches on his skull where the hair had long ago fa
llen out. "I've got a right to sit one out now and again."
Renchett wasn't prepared to let it go. He had absolute contempt for anyone who wasn't always in the thick of the action. It seemed to be the compensation for any second thoughts he might have about his own single-minded bloodletting. "Maybe you've seen too much," Overman Elmo."
"Why don't you just cut loose our booze, Overman Elmo? We're fighting men."
"You two are full of crap, and I'm not issuing booze until we're stood down. If you want to make any more of it, you'll find yourself on a field punishment."
Dacker and Renchett didn't say anything, but they stood their ground and glowered. They seemed to be trying to work out precisely how far the overman could be pushed. It took Dyrkin to step in and put a stop to the war of nerves.
"Why don't we get the screen going and see what's happening outside
After a few seconds' hesitation, Renchett and Dacker turned their attention from Elmo to the wall screen. The first image to appear was the same naked woman Helot and Wabst had been watching before the drop. This drew a halfheartedly ribald cheer from the men. Hark remembered that Wabst was among the dead. Dyrkin adjusted the "single control. The naked dancing girl was replaced by a high-resolution picture of the Yal battleship. There could not have been a greater contrast. Warm, inviting human flesh gave way to cold, deadly alien technology. It was hard to tell from the screen just how big the enemy ship was. Hark had to assume that the many small points of light circling around it were attendant space vessels. If they were only as large as the dropcraft, the Yal ship was very big indeed, larger than any ship in the cluster but not as big as the whole of the cluster together. It was also nothing like any of the ships in the cluster. It seemed to have been constructed from giant hexagonal crystals placed side by side and bonded together. It was not unlike an irregular bundle of translucent rods. Their pointed tips flashed and glittered. To Hark, it was a chill, threatening light. Four of the central rods extended far beyond the others to form a kind of prow, the tip of which glowed with a green light. It was the same green as the fire from the Yal weapons down on the planet.
"Will you look at the size of that bastard!" "You think we can hold it?"
"The powers that be must, else they would have jumped us out of here." "Let's hope they're right."
The Yal battleship seemed hardly to be moving. Even Hark realized that this was a matter of its size and the relative distances involved. He could feel, however, that it was bearing down on them. A soft glow blossomed around the ship, a spectral halo that enveloped it from prow to stern.
"Shields up."
The green glow in the prow intensified into a single bright spot. The bright spot moved backward, down the crystal rod, toward the main body of the ship.
"Powering up the forward gun."
There was a slight distortion of the image on the screen.
"That's our shields."
"Are they going to give them the first shot?" "Looks like it."
The green spot rocketed down the rod. When it hit the tip, it diffused into a cloudy green energy field that floated directly toward the cluster. Before it even reached the cluster's screens, it dissipated and faded. There was congratulatory noise on the messdeck. Men exchanged handclasps. There was a satisfaction in knowing that whatever was in command of the enemy battleship had miscalculated on its first play. "It's out of range."
The scanner that was feeding the picture to the messdeck screen must have been in an extreme forward position. The first that Hark knew about the Anah cluster firing its own guns was when a stream of white fireballs drifted into the picture. Hark realized that a second or so earlier the lights in the messdeck had dimmed. The fireballs hit the Yal shield. There was a brief flash as the shield was suffused with the sphere's white light, and then it returned to normal. The Yal were powering up again. The green spot retreated down the crystal. This time, the energy field reached all the way to the cluster. For a moment, the screen distorted and snowed, and the floor under their feet trembled. Hark swallowed his heart. They were hit. Then the screen cleared. It was only their own shields deflecting the attack. The lights flickered; the white fireballs came again and again as the Yal shields seemed to cope easily with them.
As time passed, Hark discovered what a ponderous and protracted affair it was when two huge, shielded space complexes engaged each other. The tactic was rudimentary. Each ship or complex stood off, close to the limit of its fire envelope, and pounded the other. Unimaginable amounts of energy were expended on this process, both in firing on the enemy and in maintaining the shields. The loser was the first one to run out of power and drop its shields. Without shields, even something as big as the cluster could be vaporized in a matter of minutes. The moment of truth came when a complex had just enough power left to jump out of trouble. It was always possible that the enemyjiad lower power reserves, and if the side with greater reserves held firm, it would come out the winner. Wars, after all, were not won by running away. On the other hand, the decision not to jump would be fatal if the enemy proved to have more power.
The pounding went on and on. On the messdeck, the lights dimmed, the floor trembled, and among the troopers, an exhaustion set in. The battle outside was too crucial to ignore, but they were no longer the riveted spectators they had been at the start. Hark noticed that Overman Elmo was among the few who still seemed transfixed by the conflict on the screen. Hark was starting to wonder about Elmo. For the raw recruit, there had been something comforting about the overman's authority, but now that he knew more, it was starting to look as if that authority might be failing. Hark had been surprised that Elmo had needed to resort to threats of punishment in the matter of the booze issue and that it had been Dyrkin who had been the one to defuse the situation. The radiation scars on Elmo's head and neck bore testimony if not to his courage, at least to his capacity for survival. On the other hand, it was clear to a mere recruit that all was not well. Could it be as Renchett had suggested? Were Elmo's nerves really shot?
About 190 minutes into the engagement, the effects of the pounding on the messdeck became increasingly more noticeable. The lights dimmed reducing the downden to almost total darkness each time the cluster powered up to fire. The hits from the Yal ship caused more of a stagger than a tremble. The air began to smell stale and brackish.
"They're diverting power from life support to the guns and the shields." "We're running down."
On the screen, the Yal battleship fired again. This time the impact was more than just noticeable. The shock was enough to throw a couple of men off their feet. The lights went out altogether, leaving only the red emergency spots. The screen went dead. There was no mistaking the barely restrained terror in the gloom. Hark glanced toward Elmo. It was his place to take control of the situation. No control was forthcoming.
"Why don't we jump?" someone asked.
"A jump would probably kill us, the shape we're in."
Rance would have stomped this kind of talk with both feet. Elmo said nothing. Another Yal energy field slammed into the cluster. To a man, the troopers were down on the deck plates riding the shocks.
"The Yal must outpower us after everything we poured on those domes."
Still Elmo said nothing. There were three muffled explosions from somewhere deep inside the Anah 5.
"Something's burned out."
"We're dead."
To everyone's surprise, the screen came on again. The Yal ship was very close. "Why isn't it powering up?" There was no green glow in the ship's prow. "Maybe the bastards are playing with us." "Look at their shields!"
The Yal shields were a ghostly shadow of their former brilliance. The battleship began slowly to turn away. Thirteen troopers got cautiously to their feet. There was something about the way the room was lit by the screen that made it less than real. The ship was eerily quiet.
"They're breaking off the action."
"Why don't we fire?"
"We've run down. We can't power up the guns."
The Yal ship was shrinking in the screen and turning faster. The turquoise glow of its impulse exhaust was clearly visible.
"That was an expensive waste of time."
"At least we didn't have to jump."
"We will eventually."
"Yeah, but first we have to lay up for a couple of standards and recharge."
Renchett dropped into a chair. "Yo, Elmo. Think you can break out the booze now? There's got to be a stand-down any minute."
"Yo, Elmo?" That was what Renchett had said. The idea of talking to an overman that way was no longer unthinkable, and in terms of general unit morale, that was bad. Worse was that Elmo merely nodded.
"Yeah, I need a drink myself." He pointed to Morish and Voda. "You can carry it."
Nobody came to bother them, and the messdeck spent the next three hundred minutes or so getting blind and forgetfully drunk. Elmo had taken the full liquor issue for twenty men-ten one-liter containers of clear spirit among thirteen of them. It was traditional to drink up the rations of the dead. Also to eat their food. Elmo had loaded down the two rookies with twenty issues of concentrates. The ship was still uncannily quiet. The lights didn't come back on again, but that didn't seem to bother anyone very much. The booze burned raw, but that didn't seem to bother anybody, either. The first thing to cause trouble was the screen. In a very short time, the troopers proved that they were not the most amiable of drunks. The first argument was over the image at which the majority of them were staring. When thecal ship had dwindled to nothing, the exterior view remained, facing away from the cluster, an empty and threateningly bleak star scape.
"Can't we get rid of that thing?"
"I don't need to look at naked infinity."
Dyrkin got to his feet. It was the privilege of the maingun to mess with the screen. "Get some women up there."
