by David Drake
"Cease fire!" Ensign Brainard roared. "Cease fire!"
Bullets had blown flat, pale craters into the rock. The roots still waved in terrible eagerness. Wilding started to fall forward onto them.
Leaf grabbed the officer-trainee from behind. Bozman weighed down Wilding's arms.
"Let him go, for god's sake!" the motorman growled. "We can't help him."
Wilding thought the weight had slipped away, but he was no longer conscious of his body. All he could see was the face of Ensign Brainard, surveying the situation with a look of calm control.
* * *
June 4, 381 AS. 1147 hours.
Recruit (Officer) Wilding braced in a push-up position as Chief Instructor Calfredi boomed, "Right! Everybody keeps doing push-ups until fatboy gives me twenty more!"
Calfredi's boot probed the ribs of Recruit (Enlisted) Groves, a pudgy youth of sixteen at the oldest. Groves lay blubbering on the ground, unable to rise.
"I want all you guys to know," the instructor continued to the dozen recruit, "that the reason you're still doing push-ups is Groves here is a pussy."
Recruit (Officer) was not a rank, it was a statement of intent; but the scion of the Wilding Family did not need formal rank to act as anger dictated.
"No," Wilding said sharply. He would have liked to spring up with only a thrust of his arms, but fifty push-ups in the sun had cramped his muscles too. He rose to his knees, then lifted himself to his feet.
"No," he repeated, noticing that when he was angry his voice sounded thin and supercilious. "We're doing push-ups because you are a sadistic moron, Mr Calfredi. Except that I'm not doing push-ups any more. I'm going to take a shower."
The exercise yard was crushed coral that blazed brighter than the cloud-shrouded sun. Waves of dizziness quivered across Wilding's vision, making the chief instructor shrink and swell.
Calfredi stood motionless beneath his broad-brimmed hat. If there was an expression on his face, Wilding could not read it.
Wilding turned on his heel and strode toward the barracks. He expected an order—he imagined a plea—from Calfredi, but there was nothing.
Not a sound from the chief instructor. Gigantic pumps whined from the harbor, refilling a drydock now that repairs to the dreadnought Mammoth were complete. A mile away, railguns crashed and snarled at some creature trying to burst through the electrified perimeter of Hafner Base. A public address system croaked information which distance distorted into gibberish.
Just as he opened the door to the recruit barracks, Wilding heard Chief Instructor Calfredi's voice say, "Down and up and down. . . ."
Wilding slammed the door behind him, shutting out the hot, muggy atmosphere and the sounds of another portion of the universe which had decided it didn't need Hal Wilding.
He'd said he would shower, so he showered. The hot water massaged Wilding's aching muscles, and the dull pressure soothed what it could not wash away: the knowledge that he'd failed again. He had walked away from his commitment to Wysocki's Herd, and nobody even bothered to call him back.
Joining a Free Company had seemed the only way Wilding could express his utter disdain to the Callahan and the whole Twelve Families: disdain for them and for their entire way of life. But the Twelve Families didn't care, and now it was evident that Wysocki's Herd didn't care either.
Wilding supposed he could try to join another mercenary company now that he'd washed out on his first attempt, but that would be pointless. He hadn't wanted to be a Free Companion, he'd wanted to make a statement.
Besides, he might fail ignominiously in training with a second company, just as he had with the first.
It didn't bother Wilding that he wasn't suited to be a mercenary. The problem was that he wasn't suited to be anything except a drone . . . and if it came to that, none of the humans surviving on Venus was really more useful than Wilding was himself. There were ranks and places, but those were merely means of marking time until the holders died or the sun grew cold.
Wilding shut off the shower. He would pack his gear and report to Cinc Wysocki. With luck, the cinc would send him off immediately to Wyoming Keep. It would be embarrassing to wait a day or more for a scheduled run to the keep, sleeping in the recruit barracks with the men he had turned his back on.
The barracks door opened. It had been about time for the training cycle to end anyway. If Wilding had managed to restrain his arrogance for another ten minutes—twenty push-ups—he might not have expelled himself from what he had begun to imagine might be a brotherhood of equals.
The lights went off.
"Hello?" said Wilding.
Boots scuffled on the polished floor. There were several of them. He could hear their nervous breathing.
Calfredi hadn't been ignoring Wilding after all. He'd just waited to gather a couple of his fellow instructors.
Now they were going to give the smart-ass recruit a going away present, off the record.
Wilding ran to the side of the bunk room. His bare feet made only a slight squeal on the floor.
The barracks had a single door. If he could avoid the instructors in the dark, he might be able to duck outside. They wouldn't dare attack him in the open. There couldn't be more than three of them, so they might not have left a guard at the—
Wilding's foot slipped. He hit the floor with a thump. Two pairs of hands grabbed him before he could rise. He kicked with his bare feet, stubbing his toe on a booted shin.
More hands seized him. Many more hands. He tried to swing, but his wrists were pinioned.
"What do you bastards think you're doing?" Wilding demanded in a high, clear voice. He would have screamed if he'd thought there was any chance he could be heard outside the concrete walls of the barracks.
"I got the soap!" rasped an eager whisper. A moment after the words, something hard slammed Wilding in the ribs.
The whispering voice had been Groves.
There was a thump and a curse. "Well, back off!" another voice growled through a muffling towel. Panting, sweating bodies shuffled back, but the hands continued to grip Wilding's arms and legs as firmly as if they were preparing to crucify him.
A bar of soap in a sock whistled through the air and cracked against Wilding's right ear. A similar bludgeon caught him on the left side of the jaw as his mouth opened to scream with pain.
"Now listen, you jumped-up pissant," said the voice through the towel. It sounded like Hadion, the tall, intelligent-seeming recruit who bunked next to Wilding. "Some day we'll have to take orders from you—"
Hadion wasn't wielding one of the socks, because his voice didn't break as two more blows crunched into Wilding's ribs. The soap would deform instead of breaking bones, but the men swinging the bludgeons were putting all their strength into the project.
"—so we're gonna give you a lesson now, before you get somebody killed because you're pissed off."
"Stop, for God's—" Wilding wheezed.
But his fellow recruits didn't stop. Not until they had beaten him senseless.
12
May 18, 382 AS. 0156 hours.
Brainard looked at the body of the man he'd killed by incompetence. Bozman's corpse still writhed, animated by the roots which resumed their meal as soon as Wilding let the dead flesh fall.
Something knocked loudly in the forest: a warning, or perhaps merely an insect driving its sucking mouthparts into the veins of a tree.
Wheelwright knelt on the ground. He put his hands over his face and began to blubber. It must have been a general reaction. He and Bozman had barely been on speaking terms after trouble with a prostitute while they were on leave.
"S-stop . . . ," mumbled OT Wilding.
Leaf held Wilding upright, though the motorman himself was glassy-eyed. Fluids oozing from Wilding's back glued his shirt to the flesh. Rings of fungus—black at the edge, purple closer in, and bright scarlet at the center—were converting the pus-smeared fabric to food.
Brainard understood what Wilding was trying to mumble: We can'
t stop now.
"Right," the ensign said aloud. "Is everybody all right?"
Bozman twitched. Brainard's guts roiled. He gestured toward the corpse with his chin and added, "Everybody else."
Caffey wore a stunned expression. He put an hand on his striker's shoulder and said in a gentle voice, "S'okay, Wheelwright, it's all okay. Just put a sock in it, huh, buddy?"
Brainard looked up along his compass line, then back to the men he commanded. He should have known not to stay in one place for more than an hour. No place on Venus was safe if you gave the planet long enough to sight in on you.
"Right," he said aloud. "Fish, break up Bozman's pack and distribute the contents. We've had our rest. It's time to be moving on."
Wilding had saved them. Wilding, so tortured by pain that he could scarcely speak, had noticed the infiltrating roots. Wilding sounded the warning and, despite his injured leg, had tried to drag Bozman to safety.
A born leader. If Brainard were half the man his XO was, they'd have a real chance of survival.
Brainard hefted his pack. The effort made him dizzy. The other men weren't moving.
He would be left alone to die. . . .
"Technician Caffey, what the hell are you waiting for?" Brainard snarled. "An engraved invitation? Wait a few more minutes and I'm sure the jungle 'll send you one. Just the way it did to Bozman."
The torpedoman blinked. He looked around for the dead man's pack. His limbs moved as if he were heavily drugged.
"Now!" Brainard said.
Leaf shook himself like a swimmer emerging from a pool. He bent over, still keeping one hand in contact with the officer-trainee. He groped for Wilding's makeshift crutch with the other.
Wheelwright helped Caffey rummage through Bozman's pack. They threw out the food packets and passed rifle magazines and chunks of barakite to the living personnel. Newton shrugged into his load with the stolid willingness of an ox.
"It's not far to the top, now," Brainard said.
True enough in terms of feet and inches, but the words sounded as flat in Brainard's own ears as they must in those of his subordinates. The peak was very possibly a lifetime away.
"Stop . . ." OT Wilding moaned.
Brainard helped Leaf fit the rifle butt into Wilding's hand. They had to wrap the injured man's fingers around the plastic for a moment until he could grip of his own accord.
"Don't worry, Hal," Brainard said. "We're not going to stop."
* * *
August 1, 381 AS. 1747 hours.
Officer-Trainee Brainard stared impassively toward the wall behind the table where the members of the Board of Review sat.
The Board was held in a lecture room with full holographic capability. The President of the Board, Captain Glenn, was the Officer in Charge of Screening Forces. He had set the rear-wall projectors to run a reconstruction of the previous week's battle, in which his units had wiped out the Seatiger ambush and set up the Herd's lopsided victory over the Seatiger main body.
Brainard's left arm was bandaged to the shoulder. He wasn't taking in the computer-generated images of heroic battle on the wall toward which his eyes were turned. His mind was too full of remembered terror.
"Though there's no further evidence—" Captain Glenn said.
Lieutenant Cabot Holman started to rise. He sat in the front row—but at the edge of the hall, as far as he could get from OT Brainard's seat in the center.
"Though as I say, there's no further evidence," Glenn continued heavily, "the Board has agreed to recognize Lieutenant Holman for a few remarks. Lieutenant?"
Captain Glenn was bandaged also. Behind the Board, a hologram of the cruiser Mouflon, Glenn's flagship, ripped the night with bottle-shaped yellow flashes from her 8-inch guns. The Mouflon's superstructure glittered: first with the white sparks of a Seatiger salvo hitting home, then burps of red flame as shells went off within the cruiser's armor.
Glenn was boastful, and he was rumored to have unpleasant sexual tastes; but he had paid his dues.
Cabot Holman saluted the Board, then turned to eye the audience. There were only thirty or thirty-five men within a hall that could have held ten times the number, but thousands of others watched the proceedings in hologram from their quarters.
"You all know what I'm here to say," Holman said. He stared at OT Brainard. Brainard did not turn his head—toward the glare or away from it, though he felt the pressure of Holman's eyes. "You all know what I'm saying is true."
Glenn grimaced. The other Board members were Lieutenant Dabney, from the hydrofoil squadron, and Commander Peewhit, captain of the dreadnought Buffalo. Dabney looked at Peewhit. Peewhit, nodding, said, "The Board will be obliged if you just say your piece, then, Lieutenant."
Holman jerked his chin and faced the Board. "Yes sir," he said, clipping the syllables. "The critical incident of last week's victory occurred when Air-Cushion Torpedoboat K44 blew up a Seatiger destroyer-leader, the Wiesel. That proved the Seatigers had divided their fleet to stage an ambush, and so permitted our forces to defeat the enemy in detail."
Either a director or unlikely chance set the holographic display to the portion of the battle which Holman described. A close-up of the Wiesel filled the back wall. The patrolling hovercraft had caught its target at the most inauspicious time possible. The destroyer-leader was entering the archipelago's main channel from a shallow cross-channel barely twice the vessel's own width. The Wiesel could not turn to comb the torpedo tracks.
But she could shoot. The hologram erupted with salvoes from both triple turrets and from the dozens of multi-barreled automatic weapons on the destroyer-leader's port side.
Brainard found the image eerily unreal. There had been nothing so crisply visible on the morning of July 24; only smoke and glare and the stench of feces oozing from Lieutenant Tonello's bullet-ripped environmental suit.
"K44 drove in to close range to be sure of her kill," Holman said forcefully. "But she had to go it alone!"
The computer-generated hologram illustrated his words. Hovercraft K44, occasionally masked by crisp, ideally-cylindrical waterspouts, drove through the maelstrom from the left foreground.
K44 cut away to the right, pursued by flashing lines of explosive bullets. The computer drew glowing tracks to indicate the hovercraft's torpedoes jinking to negate the Wiesel's attempt to maneuver. There was no attempt to follow K44 trying vainly to escape.
Nothing was known of K44's end. The computer could have supplied the single bright flash of a shell, killing the hovercraft's crew instantly at the moment of victory. But—
All the small-craft men in the audience knew that something more lingering was also the more probable: a bullet-shattered hull sinking slowly in black water, while wounded men screamed and their blood drew the sea's fanged harvesters.
Better to show nothing. . . .
"If K67 had supported Ted—" Holman continued.
He caught himself, swallowed, and resumed, "If K67 had supported K44, the pair of targets might have confused the Wiesel's gunners so that they both escaped."
He pointed at Brainard. "Instead, this trainee—" Holman's voice made the word a curse "—turned tail and ran, leaving m—k-K44 to take all the fire herself. This coward left my brother to die!"
The holographic destroyer-leader expanded into an orange fireball. The glare mounted until its reflection from the cloud layer lighted the night for ten miles in every direction. It was the perfect beacon to summon the Herd's strength against an ambushing squadron that was to have struck from the flank unawares.
But again, the image was too perfect to mesh with Brainard's memory. In his mind's eye:
Objects were outlined against the yellow-orange mushroom. A gun tub. Twenty square yards of decking which fluttered like a bat's wings. A spread-eagled man who burst into flame at the top of his arc and tumbled toward the sea as a human torch. . . .
"Lieutenant Holman," said Captain Glenn, "I promised you an opportunity to speak your mind. I appreciate your personal
loss, but—"
Glenn's voice thinned. After the battle, the medics had taken a shell-splinter three inches long from Glenn's shoulder. Its jagged tip had been deep in the bone. His temper, never mild, had stretched as far as it was going to go with the need to show understanding for a junior lieutenant.
"—the Board will confer now and determine its findings."
Holman sat down abruptly. He flushed with anger.
"I don't think we need to adjourn, do we?" said Commander Peewhit. "I have an O-Group scheduled aboard the Buffalo at nineteen hundred that I'd like to get to."
Captain Glenn glared at the hall. Holman bit his lips but said nothing.
"No," said Glenn. "We'll just talk here for a moment."
The members of the Board of Review slid their chairs into a trefoil. A privacy screen sprang up around them to distort the passage of light and sound waves. Their figures were ghost images on the other side of a gray discontinuity.
The audience began to whisper among itself. Most of those present in the hall had some connection with the proceedings. The other surviving members of K67's crew formed a tight group two rows behind Brainard.
Cabot Holman stared at the officer-trainee with the fixity of a weasel for a rabbit. Brainard looked toward the computer panorama. His mind sorted through disconnected images, all of them terrifying.
The privacy screen dissolved. The Board members faced around. Dabney stifled a yawn. Glenn tried to scratch his bandaged shoulderblade with his good hand, but he couldn't stretch far enough.
"Right," said Glenn, glaring at the audience again.
The wall behind Glenn showed an overhead view of the Gehenna Archipelago as Herd vessels concentrated their fire against the hopelessly outnumbered ambush squadron. Glenn's screening forces were supported by a squadron of dreadnoughts. Every time a Seatiger ship was spotted or revealed itself by firing, salvoes of 18-inch shells blew the victim to scrap.
