Their Master's war

by Mick Farren

  "I think I'd rather go for double."

  At that moment, Vana put another juliet in front of him. He tetdn't actually asked for it, but he thumbed her sensor just the same. He didn't want to be too cheap. He put an arm round Zydell.

  "We'll go to your place as soon as I've finished this."

  "Sure." She didn't sound particularly enthusiastic.

  The first fight started before the drink was gone. As liberty fights went, it was a comparatively mild affair. A gang of crawler jockeys, some ten in number and in worse condition than any of the the men from the Anah 5, stumbled through the entrance. Clearly they were unaware that the booth with the phallic snake banner had already been taken. Inside the door, they stopped dead, those in the rear stumbling blindly into the leaders.

  "What?"

  "The goddamn place is full of ground monkeys."

  The troopers looked up, but nobody moved.

  "Ah, let's get out of here. We don't need no trouble."

  For a moment, it seemed as if this voice of reason might prevail and, despite the insult, the intrusion would come to nothing. Then a much more slurred voice piped up.

  "Hell, we can take 'em."

  Two more equally slurred voices joined in.

  "Sure, screw 'em."

  "Any crawler hump can take ground monkeys." This one seemed to fancy himself an orator. He glanced at his companions. "Am I right?"

  The response was the kind of bravado of which only the very drunk are capable.

  "Yeah, right!"

  "Screw 'em."

  The point of no return had been passed.

  Renchett and Dyrkin were on their feet, the woman in silver protesting as she slid from Renchett's lap to the floor. The other troopers were also rising. The women were scrambling for cover. Dyrkin faced the drop pilots.

  "You've got ten seconds to get out of here."

  "Screw you!"

  The crawler jockeys surged forward in a disorganized knot, but they really didn't stand a chance. Their reactions were slowed, and they hadn't had the same basic combat training as the troopers had. They weren't able to operate as a cohesive group. The troopers, on the other hand, drunk as they were, went to work together like a machine. Boots, fists, and the odd blackjack rained down a hail of blows. Renchett was swinging a chair in a wide circle. In less than a minute, it was all over. Four jocks were unconscious on the floor, and the rest had fled. Vana was inspecting the booth, totaling the damage in her head. The troopers were congratulating each other and calling for more booze. They had come through the incident virtually unscathed. Kendo had lost a tooth to a wild punch, and Dacker had been kicked in the groin, but that was all. Hark was one of the ones delegated to drag the unconscious jockeys outside and dump them in the corridor. He came back grinning and rubbing his hands with the air of a man who feels he's completed a well-done job. He had managed to get in a few licks of his own before the strangers had cut and run. His grin faded as he discovered that Zydell was nowhere to be seen. Damn. He'd been about to leave with her. All he could do was inwardly shrug and call for another drink. There were plenty more where she came from. At least, he hoped there were.

  The second fight came after about twenty minutes. The crawler crews returned in force, twenty-five of them or more, carrying clubs and pieces of broken furniture; it was obvious that their sole intention was to stomp the troopers from the Anah 5. The fourteen might have been taken by surprise had Kemlo not been outside the booth collecting his wits and nursing his bruised jaw. He spotted the gang marching determinedly down the corridor and darted into the booth to give the alarm.

  "Big team of jockeys coming at us!"

  Weapons were hastily pulled from their hiding places. Vana yelled at Dyrkin. "Take it outside, goddamm it! I don't want the whole place wrecked. There's stuff in here that I can't replace."

  The fourteen troopers boiled out of the booth. The pilots were almost on them. Renchett's knife flashed in the dim light. There were shouts and screams as the noninvolved struggled to get out of the way before the two gangs ran headfirst into each other. Dyrkin's voice rose above the general din.

  "Flying wedge! Hit it!"

  Dyrkin had no intention of running headfirst into anything. They were in combat again and back on their programmed reflexes. They formed a solid arrowhead and, with Renchett and Dyrkin himself at its point, charged the disorganized mob of jocks. The crawler crews split apart, and the troopers waded into them. Hark found himself in the second rank. When he'd followed the others out of the booth, he'd had no weapon, but almost immediately a jock had swung at him with a short length of ceram pipe. Conditioning took over, and Hark chopped down hard with the edge of his hand. He thought he heard the wrist snap. The pipe dropped, and he caught it before it hit the ground. Now he started to swing it. The moment took hold of him. He being was dedicated to knocking over crawler men. Bastards.

  At first, it was a surprisingly quiet fight. Nobody yelled or screamed; all that could be heard were grunts, curses, and the sounds of falling blows. The troopers started to fan out, pushing the jocks before them. The nature of the fight began to change. The crawler jockeys wanted to break and run, but the troopers were pressing them too hard, and they were being forced into the surrounding booths. This, in turn, caused a new phase of confusion. The occupants of the booths took exception to a crowd of bruised and bleeding men falling into their parties. Further fights started, with the crawler crews taking the brunt of it. Dyrkin's single sharp burst of organization had been more than enough. He relaxed. The troopers who still wanted to brawl followed them into the booths and added to the mayhem. Others stood and caught their breath and watched as the chain reaction got started.

  The fighting was threatening to spread all the way down the corridor. Men were thrown through the flimsy partitions that separated the booths. Crystal screens splintered and fragmented. Curtains billowed into strange shapes, were ripped down, and drunks staggered blindly, wrapped up in their folds. The walls around a jum-yum show collapsed, and the participants scrambled from the mudpit, reaching for their clothes. A sluicer on a private orgy of property damage ran headfirst into a stone column and stunned himself. A number of men were crawling on all fours clutching their heads. Other casualties simply leaned, and still more were stretched out cold. A small fire had started in a darkened booth. Somewhere else, a woman was yelling hysterical abuse. There was the first pop of an electrogun. It was quickly followed by the shrill of whistles and the crash of steel feet on the corridors. "Shore patrol!"

  Only the very, very drunk needed a second warning. Nobody wanted to be grabbed by the shore patrol. Such an unlucky offender automatically went back to his ship and maybe a field punishment. The fighting stopped instantly, and, to a man, the brawlers scattered. The sirens were coming down the corridor. There was no way that anyone could stand up to the shore patrol. The white-uniformed women in their heavy-duty servo rigs were stronger than any man. There were rumors that even without the rigs, the women of the shore patrol could incapacitate a man. Once those steel pincers locked onto one's arm, there was no escape. If the victim struggled, they'd crush the bone.

  Hark took off with the rest. He was running blindly, straight down the corridor. The sirens trilled, and the servo feet crashed behind him. He glanced back. The shore patrol servos were like huge parodies of humans with hulking counterbalanced shoulders and a flashing light where the head should logically be. They lurched relentlessly forward, exactly reproducing the movements of the small figures inside them. Someone near him was shouting with laughter. Hark could feel it, too. There was an exhilaration in the running. People stood in the entrances to booths and watched them pounding past. Some applauded and shouted encouragement.

  The sirens seemed to be falling back, but still he kept going. He stopped only when he was far ahead of them. By this time, he was completely winded. He had to bend double, hands on his knees, to force air into his straining lungs. Opposite him, in a similar position, was one of the jocks wh
o had been involved in the fracas. They looked at each other. The earlier fury seemed a little absurd. Slowly they straightened up and went off in different directions.

  Hark suddenly realized that he was lost. He turned around twice. Everyone who had run from the shore patrol had zigzagged and turned corners. He had simply followed suit. Now he didn't have a clue how to get back to the booth or to the rest of his messmates. There were people strolling by, but there was nothing that he could ask them. He didn't even know the name of the place. All he could remember was the phallic serpent banner.

  A nearby drinking booth looked inviting. It was a low, faceted dome, and a warm red glow shone through the translucent hexagonal panels. He ducked through the low entrance, thumbing the sensor as he moved inside. A couple of people glanced up at him, but there was no overt hostility-in fact, the place was strangely subdued. The patrons there came from all the functions on a cluster and seemed to share two things in common: Almost all of men were veteran longtimers, and a high proportion were fitted with prosthetic limbs. They lounged on cushions that covered practically the entire floor. There was very little conversation, a noise generator filled the booth with quiet ambient sound. There was a drifting dreaminess to the interior of the dome that was like nothing Hark had previously encountered. Drinks were being served from a low half-moon bar, but they were largely ignored. Instead, attentions were focused on the small, pink ceramic cylinders, each about the size, of a man's forearm, that were being passed from hand to hand. Each man in turn opened the valve on the neck of the cylinder and drew deeply on the molded plastic nozzle. One lungful seemed to be enough. The valve was closed, the cylinder passed on, and then the man who had just used it flopped back on the cushions. Escaping gas filled the place with a sweet, almost sickly smell that made Hark feel a little queasy.

  There were surprisingly few women in the dome, and the ones who were lying on the cushions looked much the same age as the men. They were certainly much older than Zydell and the other women who'd been at the "phallic serpent." The only exception was a very young woman who was sitting on a stool in the center of the floor. Naked to the waist, wearing only a pair of very tight cut-off shorts, she leaned back, one knee raised, arms braced against the back of the stool. She was staring dreamily at the ceiling. Blond curls cascaded down her shoulders. Although the pose was deliberately sexy, the girl seemed totally oblivious to the rest of the room. She looked like a living statue.

  Hark squatted down on a cushion next to the half-moon bar. He wasn't sure how one was supposed to behave in this place. He glanced at the bartender.

  "Could I get a juliet?"

  "What the hell's a juliet?"

  "I don't know." Maybe the juliet was something exclusive to the "phallic serpent." "So what's your special?';

  A longtimer with a steel hand leaned over and spoke to him. His voice was slow and slurred and grated from deep in his throat. "You're in the wrong place, kid." I m sorry.

  "You're too young. You need to be out fighting and whoring. You'll get to be like us soon enough. If you ain't killed first."

  "I don't understand."

  "Of course you don't. You're too young and green." "Do you know a place that has a serpent banner?"

  The longtimer leaned closer. His breath reeked of the sweet gas. "Look into my eyes, boy. What do you see there?"

  The eyes were heavy-lidded and bloodshot from the gas, but there was something else, a deadness that didn't come from anything but a lifetime of combat horror.

  "That's the light-year stare, boy. It means you don't care no more. All you want to do is blot it out. How long you think any of us in here has got?"

  "Get out of here, boy. Take all your energy someplace else and leave us alone."

  Hark stood up so fast that he almost hit his head on the domed roof. He scrambled through the exit with all the clumsiness of headlong drunken panic. He didn't want to be one of those old men. Suddenly an idea beckoned. Couldn't he hide out there? Never go back to the Anah 5? The thought evaporated. They'd get him on his thumbprint. All he could do was go and look for his messmates. They were all he had. He chose a direction at random and started walking, hoping to see something that looked familiar. Nothing did. He knew that he ought to ask someone, but he held off after his experience in the dome. More than anything, he wanted to walk. He'd walk until he found a really rowdy booth, and then he'd ask someone about the phallic serpent banner. It was right at that moment that he heard the voice.

  "Harkaan? Is that you?"

  He turned and faced complete unreality. Her clothes were black and skintight, her face was heavily painted, and her hair had been bleached white and fluffed out, but there was no mistake.

  "Conchela?"

  Conchela, the witch girl who had ridden with him to the Valley of the Gods. He looked at what she had become and wondered how he appeared to her.

  "Do they still call you Conchela?"

  She nodded. "They still call me that."

  Nine

  "Of course, they do a job on you. Mindshot, implants, hormone runrounds, and probably stuff we don't even know about. And there's the constant Therem psych. It goes on and on until you can't even think straight. All you've got in your head are the slogans. We are the servants of our fighting men, we're here to please, it's our contribution to the Alliance, our part in the war effort, and all the rest of the eternal crap. From the waist down you're on a perpetual burn, but inside your brain there's this cold, furious knot of truth. We're slaves on this hunk of rock, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it."

  Hark ran an uncomfortable hand down Conchela's back. Her skin was so smooth, all he wanted to do was make love to her again. He wanted to repeat the sensation of losing himself in her body. He had no idea how to cope with her sudden anger.

  "Come on, now, it can't be that bad."

  She slowly turned to look at him. He wanted to put his hands on her breasts, but suddenly he didn't dare.

  "It can't be that bad? You troopers are so damned ignorant. It can't be anything but that bad. That's how it's been designed. They keep you stupid, and they seduce you with power, the power to run all over the universe and stomp and smash and blow up anything that gets in your way. It doesn't matter that you die somewhere along the line, you've got to die anyway."

  Hark thought of the jumps and the dry, bitter taste of fear going down in the dropcraft. "You don't really know."

  "Sure we know. We know better than you do. We've seen thousands of you. We've screwed thousands of you. It's a lifelong line on the old recstar."

  Her mood was changing. The anger had diminished to bitterness.

  "The only way to keep yourself from the stare is to not see the faces. The men come through, but you don't know them."

  She shook her head. "Why the hell did you have to come here, Hark?"

  Hark propped himself up on one elbow. He simply couldn't follow her mood swings. "Maybe it was our destiny."

  "You men still believe all that. That's what keeps you ignorant. There is no destiny. Our destiny was sold to the Therem Alliance centuries ago."

  Bitterness gave way to a terrible sadness. Her arms slid around his neck, and she pulled him to her. His face was between her breasts. He felt her sigh.

  "Why the hell did you have to come here, Harkaan?"

  Before they made love again, she gave him a small whiff of sweet gas from a tiny vial, only a fraction of the size of the ones they'd been passing around in the-dome. It wasn't enough to make him dizzy; it just slowed everything. The previous desperate, rushing need was reduced to warm, easy desire. With so much more time, it seemed that she was able to aid and abet his pleasure in a dozen ways, ways that Hark hadn't imagined were possible. Her hands and mouth played games with his body. His eyes closed, and his breathing became deep and labored. He began to groan. His nerves spasmed. He found that he was talking to Gods that he'd thought were long forgotten. He was perfectly ready to die at any point except that the floods of sensation kept build
ing and building. Why the hell did men have to fight when they could spend their time doing this? She was right. Men were ignorant.

  At the finish, they were grunting and screaming and clawing at each other. In the afterglow, they clung for a long time, but eventually they had to fall apart. Hark lay on his back with his outstretched arm under Conchela's shoulders. He opened his eyes. Hers were closed. Could she be asleep? He turned his head and looked at the place where Conchela lived. It was nothing more than a cubicle, but compared to the messdeck, it was a haven of privacy. The bed took up exactly half of the chamber. It was draped with multicolored fabric hangings, irregularly shaped silks and satins that looked like offcuts from the manufacture of flags, banners, and decorative clothing. They turned the bed space into a shadowy, mysterious cave. The other half of the chamber was a complete contrast. It was stark and functional. There was a small workbench with a tiny lathe, a quartz arc, a bench-top anvil, and a miniature welding ring. In addition to her basic duties as a thumbprint prostitute, Conchela designed and made metal jewelry, which she bartered with the other women for clothes, cosmetics, extra food, and small luxuries such as alcohol and sweet gas.

  "It's the only thing that keeps me sane," she had explained.

  Alongside the workbench there were the survival basics of the Therem system: a water spigot, a diet gooper, and a waste swallow. These, at least, were the same as on the cluster. In a maze of shelves, there were jars and bottles, bunches of herbs, and vials of chemicals. There were the raw materials of her trade, the rolls of metal shim that she turned into small works of art. Hark envied her the ability to direct her own time even in this very minimal way. On the ship and in combat, there was always someone to tell one what to do.

  Conchela opened her eyes and looked at Hark. "What are you thinking about?"

  "Me?"

  "There's no one else here."

  Hark stared at the patchwork canopy above his head.