by Allan Cole
His eardrums crawled and spine twisted as the tank's maser came up to firing pressure. The wall above him sharded as the soundwaves battered it into nothingness. Sten stayed down as the tank rumbled past.
One tread chattered a meter away from him. Sten heard the long gurgling scream as someone—his team partner—was pulped under the three-meter-wide tracks.
Sten rolled to his feet as the tank passed, caught the dangling end of the track's towing harness, and pulled himself clear of the ground, almost level with the rear, unclipped another grenade and rolled it up between the turrets.
He dropped away and thudded to the pavement. The tank rolled on a few meters, far enough for Sten to be out of the sensor's dead zone.
An antipersonnel cupola spun toward him and the gun depressed, just as the grenade detonated. The blast ripped one main turret away. It cartwheeled through the air to squash two crouching guardsmen.
Sten lay motionless twenty meters behind the tank. Flame spouted from the crater in its top, then was smothered by the extinguishers. The second main turret ground back. Its AP gun sputtered fire, and bullets chattered toward Sten. He screamed as a white-hot wire burned through his shoulder, but came to his feet and dove forward, sliding across the pavement, under the track.
Pain. It hurts. Sten forced himself into the familiar aid mantra, and the nerve ending died, pain faded. His arm was useless. Sten awkwardly crawled from under the tank, then went flat as bullets spattered on the armor beside him.
A column of enemy infantry was infiltrating forward, through the ruins. They opened fire as Sten went around the tank's side.
The engine growled, and the tank rumbled forward. Sten edged along with it, keeping the tank between himself and the enemy troopers. He heard shouted commands, and bent down, peering through the track's idler wheels. He saw legs running toward the tank. Sten picked a bester grenade from its pouch and lobbed it over the tank. His flash visor blackened, covering the light explosion.
The soldiers went down. Stunned, their time sense destroyed, they'd be out of action for at least half an hour. Gears crashed, and the tank ground down the avenue, toward Sten's platoon headquarters. Sten grabbed a cleat and awkwardly swung himself up onto the tank's skirts. The tank's remaining main turret was firing half-power charges down the avenue. The AP capsules were reconning by fire—spraying the buildings on either side of the track.
Sten crawled across the tank, toward the turret. An eye flickered in an observation slit, and an AP gun swung toward him. Sten jumped onto the top of the tank's main turret. He blinked—
Sten was sitting in a room, a gleaming steel helmet over his head, blocking his vision. Transmission tendrils curled from the helmet. But Sten was riding the top of a heavy tank, in life-or-death battle on a nameless world somewhere.
Sten's fingernails ripped as the turret swung back and forth, trying to throw him off. A hatchway clicked, and Sten shot forward while pulling a combat knife from its boot sheath. He lunged toward the tankman coming out, pistol ready.
The knife caught the man in the mouth. Blood gouted around Sten's hand. The man dropped back inside the tank. Sten levered the hatch completely open then jerked back as bullets rang up from the interior.
Sten yanked off his equipment belt, thumbed into life a time-delay grenade on it, then dropped the whole belt down the hatch.
He jumped. Landed, feeling tendons rip and tear, went to one knee, pushed away again, over a low ruined wall as behind him the tank blew; a world-destroying, all-consuming ball of flame boiled up from the tank over the wall, catching Sten. He felt his body crackle black around him and sear down and down into death.
The recording switched off.
Sten tore the helmet off his head and threw it across the room.
A speaker keyed on.
"You just participated in the first assault wave when your regiment, the Guard's First Assault, landed on Demeter. The regiment suffered sixty-four percent casualties during the three-week operation yet took all assigned objectives within the operations plan timetable.
"To honor their achievement, the Guard's First Assault was granted, by the Eternal Emperor himself, the right to wear an Imperial fourragere in red, white, and green. The battle honors of Demeter were added to the division's colors.
"In addition, many individual awards for heroism were made, including the Galactic Cross, posthumous, to Guardsman Jaime Shavala, whose experiences you were fortunate enough to participate in as part of this test.
"There will be thirty minutes of free time before the evening meal is served. Testing will recommence tomorrow. That is all. You may leave the test chamber."
Sten clambered out of the chair. Odd. He could still feel where that bullet had hit him. The door opened, and Sten headed for the messhall. So that's being a hero. And also that's becoming dead. Neither one of them held any attraction for Sten. Still, he thought to himself, thirty-six percent is a better survival rate than Exotic Section had. But he still wanted to know what valuable characteristics he could develop to qualify for Guard's First Assault Way Behind the Lines Slackers Detachment.
He sat on the edge of a memorial to some forgotten battle and waited for the long line of prospective recruits to shorten up.
Sten took a deep breath of nonmanufactured air and was mildly surprised to find himself feeling happy. He considered. Bet? That wasn't something he was over. Any more than he had recovered from the death of his family. He guessed, though, that that kind of thing got easier to deal with with practice. Practice, he suddenly realized, he might get a lot of in the Guard.
Ah well. He stood and strolled toward the end of the line. At least he was off Vulcan. And he'd never have to go back. Although he did have dreams about what Vulcan would look like with a sticky planet buster detonated just above The Eye.
Very deliberately he shut the idea off, and concentrated on being hungry.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
RYKOR, TOO, WAS happy. Wild arctic seas boomed in her mind. Waves climbed toward the gray, overcast sky as glaciers calved huge bergs.
She rolled as she surfaced, exultantly spouting, then crashed her flukes against the water, and leapt free from wave to wave in powerful, graceful dives. There was a gentle tap on her shoulder.
Rykor rolled one eye open and sourly looked up at Frazer, one of her assistants. "You want?" she rumbled.
"There's a vid for you. From Prime World."
Rykor whuffled through her whiskers and braced both arms on the sides of the tank. She levered her enormous bulk up and over into the gravchair. Folds of blubber slopped over the sides until the frantic chair tucked them all safely in place. She tapped controls, and the chair slid her across the chamber to the main screen. Frazer fussed beside her.
"It's in reference to that new Guards recruit. The one you put the personal key on."
"Figures," Rykor muttered. "Now I'll get more walrus jokes. Whatever a walrus is."
The screen was blank, except for a single line of blinking letters. Rykor was mildly surprised, but touched the CIPHER button, and added the code line. She motioned Frazer away from the screen.
It cleared, and Mahoney beamed out at her.
"Thought I'd take a moment of your time, Rykor, and ask you to check on one of my lads."
Rykor touched a button, and a second screen lit. "Sten?"
"Now that'd be a good guess."
"Guess? With your personal code added to the computer key?"
"That's always been my problem. Never known for bein' subtle."
Rykor didn't bother with a retort. Too easy a target. "You want his scores?"
"Now would I be bothering a chief psychologist if all I needed was a clerk to recite to me? You know what I'd like."
Rykor took a deep breath. "Overall, he should be what I've heard you call a ‘nest of snakes.'" Mahoney looked puzzled, but decided to let it pass. "Exceptionally high intelligence level, well integrated into temporal planning and personnel assessment.
"Which does n
ot compute. He should be either catatonic or a raving psychopath. Instead, he's far too sane. We can test more intensively, but I believe he's primarily functional because his experiences are unassimilated."
"Explain."
"Analysis—bringing these problems, and his unexpressed emotions into the open—would be suggested."
"Suggested for what," Mahoney said. "We're not building a poet. All I want is a soldier. Will he fall apart in training?"
"Impossible to predict with any certainty. Personal feeling—probably not. He's already been stressed far beyond our limits."
"What kind of soldier will he be?"
"Execrable."'
Mahoney looked surprised.
"He has little emotional response to the conventional stimuli of peer approval, little if any interest in the conventional rewards of the Guard. A high probability of disobeying an order he feels to be nonsensical or needlessly dangerous."
Mahoney shook his head mournfully. "Makes one wonder why I recruited him. And into my own dearly beloved regiment."
"Very possibly," Rykor said dryly, "it's because his profile is very similar to your own."
"Mmm. Perhaps that's why I try to stay away from my own beloved regiment. Except at Colors Day."
Rykor suddenly laughed. It rolled out like a sonic boom, and her body moved in undulating waves, almost driving the chair into a breakdown. She shut the laugh off.
"I get the feeling, Ian, that you are tapping the Old Beings Network."
Mahoney shook his head.
"Wrong. I don't want the boy coddled through training. If he doesn't make it. . ."
"You'd send him back to his homeworld?"
"If he doesn't make it," Mahoney said quietly, "he's of no interest to me."
Rykor moved her shoulders.
"By the way. You should be aware that the boy has a knife up his arm."
Mahoney picked his words carefully. "Generally the phrase is knife up his sleeve, if you'll permit me."
"I meant what I said. He has a small knife, made of some unknown crystalline material, sheathed in a surgical modification to his lower right arm."
Mahoney scratched his chin. He hadn't been seeing things back on Vulcan.
"Do you want us to remove it?"
"Negative." Mahoney grinned. "If the instructors can't handle it—and if he's dumb enough to pull it on any of them—that gives a very convenient escape hatch. Doesn't it?"
"You will want his progress monitored, of course?"
"Of course. And I'm aware it's not a chief psychologist's duties, but I'd appreciate it if his file was sealed. And if you, personally, were to handle him."
Rykor stared at the image. "Ah. I understand." Mahoney half smiled. "Of course. I knew you would."
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
"MY NAME is Lanzotta," the voice purred. "Training Master Sergeant Lanzotta. For the next Imperial Year, you may consider me God."
Sten, safely buried in the motley formation of recruits, glanced out of the corner of his eye at the slender middle-aged man standing in front of him. Lanzotta wore the mottled brown uniform of a Guards Combat Division and the pinned-up slouch hat of Training Command. The only decoration he wore, besides small black rank tabs, was the wreathed multiple stars of a Planetary Assault Combat Veteran.
He was flanked by two hulking corporals.
"Bowing and burnt offerings are not necessary," Lanzotta went on. "Simple worship and absolute obedience will make me more than happy."
Lanzotta smiled gently around at the trainees. One man, who wore the gaily colored civilian silks of a tourist world, made the mistake of returning the smile.
"Ah. We have a man with a sense of humor." Lanzotta paced forward until he was standing in front of the man. "You find me amusing, son?"
The smile had disappeared from the boy's face. He said nothing.
"I thought I asked the man a question," Lanzotta said. "Didn't I speak clearly enough, Corporal Carruthers?"
One hulk beside him stirred slightly. "I heard you fine, sergeant," she said.
Lanzotta nodded. His hand shot forward and grabbed the recruit by the throat. Seemingly without effort, he lifted the trainee clear of the ground and held him, feet dangling. "I do like to have my questions answered," he mused. "I asked if you found me amusing."
"N-no," the boy gurgled.
"I much prefer to be addressed by my rank," Lanzotta said. He suddenly hurled the recruit away. The trainee fell heavily to the ground. "You'll find a sense of humor very useful," Lanzotta added.
"There are one hundred of you today. You've been chosen to enter the ranks of the Guard's First Assault Regiment.
"I welcome you.
"You know, our regimental screening section is very proud. They tell me that less than one out of a hundred thousand qualify for the Guard.
"Under those conditions, you men and women might consider yourselves elite. Corporal Halstead, do these—whatever they are—look like they're elite to you?"
"No, Sergeant Lanzotta," the second behemoth rumbled. "They look like what's at the bottom of a suit recycler."
"Umm." Lanzotta considered. "Perhaps not that low."
He walked down the motionless ranks, looking at the trainees closely. He paused by Sten, looked him up and down, and smiled slightly. Then walked down a few more ranks. "My apologies, corporal. You were right."
Lanzotta went back to the head of the formation, shaking his head sorrowfully. "The Imperial Guard is the finest fighting formation in the history of man. And the Guard's First Assault is the best of the Guard. We have never lost a battle and we never will."
He paused.
"Some general or other said a soldier's job is not to fight, but die. If any of you fungus scrapings live to graduate, you'll be ready to help the soldier on the other side die for his country. We aren't interested in cannon fodder in the Guard. We build killers, not losers.
"You'll be in training for one full year here at the regimental depot. Then if I pass you, you'll be shipped to the field assault regiment.
"Now you beings have three choices for that year. You can quit at any time, and we'll quite happily wash you out into a scum general duty battalion.
"Or else you can learn to be soldiers."
He waited.
"Are any of you curious as to the third alternative?"
There was no sound except the wind blowing across the huge parade ground.
"The third option is that you can die." Lanzotta smiled again. "Corporal Halstead, Corporal Carruthers, or myself will quite cheerfully kill you if we think for one moment that you would endanger your teammates in combat, and there's no other way to get rid of you.
"I believe, people. I believe in the Empire and I serve the Eternal Emperor. He took me off the garbage pit of a world that I was born on and made me what I am. I've fought for the Empire on a hundred different worlds and I'll fight on a hundred more before some skeek burns me down." Lanzotta's eyes glittered.
"But I'll be the most expensive piece of meat he ever butchered."
Lanzotta, as if unconsciously, touched the assault badge on his breast.
"Now, I will give you the first four rules for staying alive and happy. First, you should think of yourselves as two stages below latrine waste. I will let you know when I think you are qualified to consider yourselves sentient beings. Right now, I don't think that will ever happen.
"Second, when a cadreperson addresses you, you will come to attention, you will salute, you will address him by his rank, and you will do exactly what he tells you to do."
He nodded sideways to Carruthers. The corporal ran forward to one recruit. "YOU!" she shouted.
"Yes."
The corporal's fist sank into the trainee's stomach, and he collapsed to his knees, retching. Carruthers took one step to the side. "YOU!" she screamed at the trembling woman.
"Yes. . .corporal," the trainee faltered.
"JUMP!"
The girl gaped. Carruthers' fist blurred into her
chin, and she went down.
"THEY AREN'T LISTENING, SERGEANT." She sidestepped. "YOU!"
"Yes, corporal," the third trainee managed.
"JUMP!"
"Yes, corporal!"
The recruit started bounding up and down. "THATS NOT HIGH ENOUGH!" The trainee jumped higher.
Carruthers watched, then shook her head in satisfaction. She rank back to her position beside Lanzotta.
"Third," Lanzotta went on as if nothing had happened. "You will run everywhere except inside a building or when otherwise ordered.
"And fourth—" Lanzotta stopped. "The fourth rule is that everything you can do is wrong. You walk wrong, you talk wrong, you think wrong, and you are wrong. We are here to help you start doing things right" Lanzotta turned to Halstead.
"Corporal. Take this trash out of my sight and see if there's anything you can do to improve them."
"YES, SERGEANT." The corporal snapped a salute, then ran to one side of the formation. "Right. . .face!" he shouted.
Sten blinked as he found his body responding to hypno conditioning he'd been programmed with in the sleep lectures.
"Forward. . .harch!. . .double-time. . .harch!" The formation of trainees stumbled forward.
"This is your home, children," Halstead's voice boomed down the long squad barracks. Sten and the other recruits each stood next to a bunk.
"We give you a bed, which you'll be lucky to see four hours a night," Halstead went on. "You got one cabinet to put your equipment in. We will show you how to store it.
"I know most of you were brought up in a sewer works. You will keep this barracks clean. But it will never be clean enough."
Halstead walked to the door. "You have two minutes to gape around. Then fall outside to draw clothing and equipment."
The barracks door slammed shut. There was silence for a moment, then the excited buzz of conversation. Sten looked around the room at his fellow trainees. They looked fit, healthy, and terrified. He wasn't quite the smallest of the group, but close.
"Farmers. All farmers," the trainee beside the next bunk said. Sten looked at him. It was the young man from the tourist world. He held out a vertical palm to Sten. "Gregor."
