A quantum flux shunt circuit had burned out as the Kaibutsu Maru rode the blue currents between Sol and 26 Draconis. She’d felt the power levels fluctuating, felt her control slipping, but had known she could ride the crest and maintain control.
An entire damper rack had burned out, and Kaibutsu’s AI had jettisoned the starboard engine seconds before a power cascade had transformed five thousand tons of complex technology into starcore-hot plasma. The Kaibutsu had dropped out of the K-T Plenum, power systems dead, drives fused, the freighter ten light-years from home.
Still linked, Katya had stared into a star-dusted immensity, Blackness Absolute, an emptiness that she’d never had to cope with before. She’d viewed space directly, of course, aboard the space station and every time she’d maneuvered Aphrodite or one of her cargo haulers into or out of orbit. Always before, though, there’d been sun and planet filling part of the sky, convenient anchors that gave her particular location in space an identity, an address, with light enough to keep those lonely stars at bay.
This, however, was something completely different Through the starship’s senses, she’d seen nothing but stars and the faint frost-dusting of the Milky Way describing an unimaginably vast circle about the sky. For a horrible moment—it might have been seconds or hours or days—she’d felt as if she were falling into that horror of emptiness, and all the while the Dark was closing in. …
Their rescue had been a million-to-one shot. Ships could be detected within the godsea by the pulse-regular interference patterns their passage left against the random noise of the quantum energy fluctuations, a kind of orderly wake against chaos. The watchstanders of another ship, the free trader Andrew St. James, noticed when the Kaibutsu’s wake vanished. They logged the incident and reported it to New American space traffic control when they arrived at 26 Draconis ten days later. The Imperial destroyer Asagiri dropped into fourspace and picked up Kaibutsu’s distress beacon two weeks after that, while quartering the area with a small fleet of search and rescue vessels.
Katya had spent another week in the hospital. There’d been talk about psychoreconstruction and deliberate, selective amnesia. She’d been subjected to a hell of a shock, and dumping some of those memories might be the only way she’d be able to face the world again.
But she’d fought back.
She’d told Dev the truth that day in her office. Everyone had expected her to quit the service and go back to the farm.
Katya had refused, choosing instead to transfer to the infantry. With three sockets and experience jacking starships, she’d been accepted into the 2nd New American Minutemen.
Six months later, the Minutemen had been transferred. The Hegemony had a policy—one encouraged by the Imperials—of not letting a military unit remain too long attached to one world, a way of preventing too great an attachment between soldiers and civilians. Besides, Xenophobes had appeared on 36 Ophiuchi C II—Loki—and the Empire wanted to reinforce the local forces. The 2nd New American Minutemen became the 5th Loki Thorhammers, arriving just in time to take part in the campaign at Jotunheim.
Katya had been happy since, working up through the ranks, first to platoon leader, then to company commander just six months earlier. But she still remembered her unshielded look at the stars, enough that she was glad the nights on Loki were always cloudy.
And she still hated the dark.
She became aware that someone had spoken her name.
“I beg your pardon?”
Varney looked at Katya, one eyebrow creeping higher on his forehead. “I asked if there was anything you had to add in this case, Captain Alessandro.”
She paused, garnering her thoughts, retracing her memories of the proceedings so far. “Yes, Colonel. I’d like to remind the board that even if Cadet Cameron had been able to lock and fire, the outcome would not have been different. As you know very well, LaG-42 Ghostriders are no match for Cobras in combat mode. If anything, the fault was mine. Those two light striders should not have been so close to the tunnel mouth.”
“According to the action debriefs,” Varney said, “you had already twice ordered Lieutenant Lanier’s strider back off the crater rim. The other Ghostrider, commanded by Lieutenant Carlsson, did manage to escape, did it not?”
“Stomper sustained considerable damage, sir. But yes. Rudi managed to get clear. The rest of the company came up in support and destroyed both the Cobra and the Gamma attacking Rudi’s machine.”
“Cadet Cameron?” Varney said. “Is there anything you’d like to add to the record?”
“I have no excuse, sir.” His eyes locked with Katya’s. His voice sounded dead. “I screwed up. I’m sorry.”
“I remind you, Cadet, that we’re not here to judge you. I tend to agree with Captain Alessandro that the outcome would have been the same in regard to Lieutenant Lanier’s death even if you’d been able to access your weapons. In fact, you would almost certainly have died as well if you’d tried to fight the Cobra, rather than ejecting as you did. Once you discovered that you could not control your warstrider’s systems, you acted correctly.
“But it is not the correctness of your actions that we are discussing here. Sensei? Can you add anything?”
“Yes,” the Japanese Adept said. He was an old man, though the age resided more in and around his eyes than in wrinkled skin or sagging features. “If you would each palm your interface?” Katya laid her palm on the ’face panel in the table in front of her. Data began scrolling past her mind’s eye, as Sutsumi discussed the findings point by point.
“I have reviewed Cadet Cameron’s latest battery of tests. Rather than the technomegalomania rating that he exhibited before, he now seems to show a distinct tendency toward technophobia, point one, up from point zero two. His insecurity index is up three points, and that is coupled with a growing sense of persecution and an innate distrust of those in authority. I would guess that he feels as though his life is no longer his, that those in authority over him are arbitrarily interfering with it. Note, particularly, ambivalent feelings toward his father, pride and admiration on one hand, disappointment and a sense of being manipulated on the other. …”
Katya listened with growing embarrassment as the psychometrician continued to list his findings with a bluntness that seemed to assume that the subject of his analysis was not even in the room.
“It seems apparent,” Sutsumi concluded, “that Cadet Cameron has extreme difficulty concentrating under stress, that while he operates well under simulated conditions of reality, he may always, ah, ‘freeze up,’ in the vernacular, when faced with severe stress and the need to access data through his implanted linkage. He may now fear cephlinkage. He certainly feels alienation, persecution, and mistrust for authority figures. I, for one, would hesitate to allow him to link again, in any capacity.”
“Cadet Cameron? What do you have to say to that?”
Dev looked tired, so tired it seemed he might sway forward and collapse on the floor before them. Though his chair had a ’face pad on one arm, he’d not bothered palming it when Sutsumi had reviewed his test results.
“I have nothing else to say, Colonel,” he said. “I guess this pretty much finishes me, huh?”
“That remains to be seen.” But Varney did not sound confident.
The final vote was three to two, with Katya and Senior Lieutenant Hagan in the minority. The decision was to transfer Dev to the leg infantry rather than risk another incident with him linked to a warstrider. He would be assigned to the Second Regiment of the Ulvenvakt, the Wolfguard, stationed at Midgard. If possible, a noncombat position would be found for him. Varney suggested the regimental motor pool. He’d been good working on the silicarb-slicked guts of warstriders.
Dev Cameron accepted the verdict without expression, though his face was very pale. What’s he thinking? Katya wondered.
She was confused by her own reaction, her hurt and her sense of loss. Tami Lanier had been a friend, and she’d died a nightmare death when the Xenophobe had eat
en through the armor surrounding her module and gotten to her before she could eject. Katya had been furiously angry with the man who’d panicked and ejected and left her to die alone.
Now, though, her anger had drained away. It was, she supposed, one of her failings, this concern for the strays and the orphans. Maybe Dev Cameron had nudged her mother’s instinct; maybe it was the shared memory of the godsea, the blue light that held the Dark at arm’s length.
Or maybe—she forced herself to look at the possibility—maybe she genuinely liked the guy and wanted him to succeed.
She caught him in the passageway outside, shortly after the inquiry was closed. “Dev? Are you okay?”
He looked at her without expression.
“Look, Dev. It’s not over yet. I can still—”
“Forget it, Captain. I don’t want your help.”
“But—”
“I said forget it!” She glimpsed for a moment something behind his eyes, something dark and a little frightening. “I’m tired of fighting. Whatever you people want to do with me, that’s fine.”
You people. Suddenly he seemed so very much alone. “What will you do? What do you want to do?”
The word grated. “Survive.”
Chapter 11
The sergeant came right down the line, he looked at us and swore
A sorrier bunch of rag-assed scuts he’d never seen before.
He said we’d never make it and he said it was a shame,
But at the fight at Morgan’s Hold, by God we won our name.
—“The Ballad of Morgan’s Hold”
Popular military folk song
C.E. 2518
Dev sat on the thinly padded seat in the low-ceilinged, red-lit chamber, surrounded by other combat-armored troops. The chamber lurched and swayed with a gentle, rhythmic motion set in time to the muffled hiss, creak, and thump of enormous leg drivers.
“Man oh man, you hear the latest who-was?” Leading Private Hadley clung to the barrel of the Interdynamics PCR-28 wedged between his knees, a 4-mm high-velocity rifle with a stock magazine holding two hundred caseless, armor-piercing rounds. “The Xenies popped up today a hundred klicks from Midgard!”
“Suck methane, Had.” A hard-looking woman opposite Hadley grinned. “Ain’t no Xenos within a thousand klicks of the place. Unless we count your brain.”
Dev leaned back in his seat and joined the answering chorus of chuckles and catcalls. Who-was—a corruption of the Nihongo word for rumor—was, as ever, among the enlisted man’s favorite pastimes, the topics monotonously predictable. Where are we going? When are we leaving? What’s happening in the world beyond our own tight circle?
There were twelve of them, Third Squad, First Platoon, Bravo Company of the Second Ulvenvakt Regiment. The platoon’s first, second, and fourth squads were packed away in separate chambers within the huge VbH Zo Armored Personnel Walker’s belly. The Zo—the word was Nihongo for elephant—had a swaying, four-legged gait, uncomfortable, but far smoother than those of any wheeled or tracked vehicle covering rough terrain at fifty kilometers per hour.
His transfer to the Ulvenvakt’s motor pool as a techie had lasted for just one week. He’d requested the assignment to a combat unit, for reasons that were only now becoming clear. Bravo Company had been only too glad to get him. Few of the men and women in the leg infantry had three-socket hardware, and C-sockets were necessary for jacking plasma guns.
Dev clung to his helmet and the long, complex bulk of his plasma gun and looked from face to face, studying his new companions, his kamerats as the native Lokans in the group called it. Fully armored except for helmets that they cradled in their laps, they sat in two rows of six facing one another, each trooper pressed against the legs and shoulders of the soldier to either side. Their faces showed a gamut of emotions, from fear to excitement to boredom to outright unconsciousness; two of his new squad mates were taking advantage of the experienced soldier’s ability to sleep anywhere and anytime to catch up on some sack time.
The most common expression, Dev decided, visible on six of the eleven faces around him, was boredom, feigned or real, he couldn’t tell. Two, Kulovskovic and Dahlke, looked excited, while one young man, Willis Falk, looked genuinely frightened.
Dev tried to analyze his own feelings. Fear, certainly, but excitement as well. And boredom. Mostly he wished they could get on with what had to be done. This tiny, steel-lined compartment would have been hell for a claustrophobe.
He took a deep breath of air tasting of oil, sweat, metal, and fear. It was strange. After four weeks, he felt more at ease, more at home, with the Wolfguard than he’d felt at any of his previous duty assignments. He’d been quickly accepted by the others in Bravo Company, by browns and greens alike. Browns were combat veterans, so-called for their khaki uniforms. The greens, who also wore khaki but were “green” by virtue of their lack of experience, were the trainees assigned to the company to complete their training and military indoctrination, newbies who would stay newbies until their first combat.
His position in this regard was unique; he’d been in combat—once—but he hadn’t been in combat with the members of Bravo Company. As a result, he would be a green until he proved himself, but he already enjoyed a greater degree of acceptance among the company’s old hands. The fact that he’d goked his one and only firefight seemed to matter not at all. Everybody screwed up their first time in combat, or so the old hands told him. He’d been there, and that was what counted.
For his part, Dev found the transfer carried with it a sense of profound relief. For two months, every part of his awareness had been focused on two primary concerns: Could he somehow manage to wangle a transfer to the navy, and could he survive the regimentation of Basic and avoid ending up as a legger?
He would never get his slot aboard a ship. He knew that now. Not only was his TM rating a problem, but the way he’d failed in harness when that Cobra had attacked had convinced him, once and for all, that he did not have what it took—call it discipline, the right stuff, grit, whatever—to jack a mobile canteen from Towerdown to Tristankuppel, much less a starship through the godsea.
And now he was a legger—though he’d quickly learned that his new comrades never referred to themselves by that name. Now that the raw and panicky edge of anticipation was gone, he was finding that life in the infantry was not nearly so bad as he’d imagined it. The striving for perfection, mental and physical, was over. He was a nito hei, a second-class private, and he was content. For the most part, Dev’s daily routine had fallen into the eternally grumbling hurry-and-wait and make-work routines of the combat infantryman, a constant at least since the time of Sargon the Great. If he wasn’t happy, at least Dev was at peace for the first time since his arrival on Loki.
Fear remained, of course, and guilt. He’d watched as they’d pulled Tami Lanier’s body from the wreckage of the High Stepper. Not much had been left—her upper torso, some scraps of clothing and bone, part of one leg fused with the padding of her couch; a piece of the Xeno had eaten its way into her compartment and turned most of her into smoke.
The shock of what had happened had so numbed him that he’d not even been able to speak in his own defense at the inquest. The facts—and the data downloaded from his own RAM—had spoken for themselves. Even after three weeks, it was still hard to remember the sight and the smell without gagging.
He’d reached a point where, intellectually at least, he did not blame himself for Lanier’s death, but the knowledge that he’d panicked and abandoned her to a hideous death, then ended up safe and secure in a stridertink techie platoon, was simply too much to face. Even knowing that he couldn’t have done a thing to save her didn’t help.
Only after volunteering for combat had the guilt been appeased somewhat. Somehow, accepting his worst fears had helped exorcise Lanier’s ghost.
Someone forward was humming something, a familiar tune. Dev tried to remember the words.
The who-was had been flying about the barra
cks for two days. A major Xeno breakout had occurred, it was said, somewhere to the north of Midgard. An attempt to stop them by another Lokan strider regiment, the Odinspears, had been brushed aside. The Xenos were said to be heading for Midgard and the sky-el, and attempts to hit them with heavily armed ascraft and hastily assembled strider teams had all failed. A series of defensive positions was being thrown up in the Xenophobes’ path. Farthest north, twenty kilometers from Asgard, was the Norway Line, supported by an airfield and nano manufacturing center called Norway Base. Ten klicks south of that was the Sweden Line. And behind that were the defenses at Midgard itself.
The big question, of course, was why foot soldiers were being thrown into it. So far, there’d been little use for leg infantry in a war that required the strength, speed, and firepower of warstriders.
Superior Private Lipinsky, a pretty, dark-haired girl, started singing the song aloud. By the second line, half of the men and women in the compartment had joined her.
The Xenos came from underground, they swarmed toward Argos town.
By God the plain was black with them, and Nagai had withdrawn.
But Morgan called us to his side, Hegemon infantry
And let us choose to stand and die, or choose instead to flee.
“The Ballad of Morgan’s Hold.” That was the name of it. He’d heard it a time or two before during Basic, though no striderjack would ever have sung the thing. Dev noticed that Falk, wide-eyed and with sweat beading his forehead, was singing along.
Morgan’s Hold was a battle fought against the Xenos years before, on Herakles. The third planet of Mu Herculis had been the site of a terraforming colony for three centuries. A Xenophobe incursion in 2515 had wiped out several outlying settlements and a nearby atmosphere plant. At that time, the Xenophobe menace was still new, and few worlds of the Shichiju had the troops or equipment to make a serious attempt at stopping them. The only military forces on Herakles were an Imperial Marine battalion and two companies of the 62nd Hegemony Infantry, foot soldiers from Earth tasked with keeping order in the panicked planetary capital of Argos.
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