Fire Time

FIFTEEN

They shipped Ensign Donald Conway to Mundomar in a large group of air corpsmen. The personnel carrier was old and overcrowded. You had to do everything by turns, by the numbers. To pigeonhole yourself in a bunk another fellow had been using, in the middle of a vast lattice of identical bunks, and lie there listening to your brothers in arms snore and smelling their farts somehow didn’t relate very well to crusades for rescuing gallant pioneers threatened by monstrous aliens and securing mankind’s future among the stars. Not that he had been naive, exactly—old Uncle Larreka was bluntspoken when he shared his memories—yet he had pictured himself as a kind of legionary. Was he, instead, a plug-in unit?

Well, he triumphed at the poker table, and refrained from admitting this was because he had learned the hard way. from his sister Jill. That made him wonder how she was doing, and Mother and Dad and Alice and her husband and their kids. He missed them more than anybody he had met on Earth.

Monotony became tension as the convoy neared its goal. In merely interplanetary space, it would certainly be detected by the Naqsans, whose fleet was likewise busy around that sun. If they decided on an assault—

Tension became terror. The Naqsans did attack. And the air corpsmen had nothing to do but crouch jammed together between blank bulwarks. If they took a direct hit, they would likely never know it. Conway learned how excellent was the American expression “sweating it out.” To judge from the stink and clamminess, his skin exuded every poison his body could make.

After many hours—mostly devoted to maneuvers and computations, then a swift burst of furies, then more hours when men must wait—the enemy evidently decided the price was too high, and withdrew. The convoy had suffered losses of its own. These included a ranger which had taken a near miss, peeling back half its hull. The crew was spacesuited, but a number of suits got ripped open, and all men took varying amounts of blast, heat, and hard radiation. The convoy rescued what casualties it could and divided them among the ships that remained.

Travelers on the personnel carrier gave up bunks and helped tend the wounded while the voyage proceeded through its last stages. Don Conway thus experienced men with pulverized bones, with faces cooked away and eyeballs melted, with vomiting and diarrhea and the sloughing off of hair, skin, flesh, intelligence. He had seen death before, in animals and a few sophonts; but the latter had been peaceful. Now he understood why, for a year after Aunt Ellen perished in the Dalag, Jill had had nightmares. He even guessed this was part of the reason for her closeness to Larreka.

But Aunt Ellen was the victim of a senseless accident. These men had died, were dying, would survive as cripples when cloning wasn’t feasible, in a great cause. Right?

At first his unit was stationed near Barton, the capital of Eleutheria, largest human settlement on Mundomar. Action was slight everywhere on the planet. The front had stabilized, which Conway read as “stalemated.” Desultory clashes occurred on land, in the air, at sea.

“Wait a while,” Eino Salminen warned. “The lull is mainly due to lack of supplies on either side. But Earth and Naqsa are pouring in materiel. Soon the fun begins.”

“Why can’t we blockade?” Conway inquired.

“They would try the same against us. We would get battles with heavy nuclear weapons at satellite altitudes, maybe in atmosphere. Bad enough to meet in deep space. Close-in fighting of that kind would probably ruin the planet we are supposed to be fighting about. Worse, it could provoke a full-scale war between the mother worlds.”

Conway guessed he understood this wisdom. Neither Eleutherians nor Tsheyakkans missiled each other’s towns. The latter, in their drive to regain Sigurdssonia, had occupied several communities of the former; but he learned to scoff [privately] at what atrocity stories he heard. If you checked, the proven horrors were incidental to combat—children got in the way of bullets, et cetera— and Tsheyakkan military governors, while strict, treated Eleutherians as humanely (!) as was the case where situations were reversed. Maybe more so, but censorship made it impossible to discover the truth of that.

He was glad to be out of the spaceship and able to stride about freely, in safety. However, he found little to do on leave. Barton had a few night clubs, live theaters, and whatnot. If you’d been on Earth, they seemed dull, crowded, overpriced. It was easier to stay on base and watch a 3V recording. A couple of philanthropic organizations made an effort to get the citizens and their new allies acquainted, by way of dances and invitations to homes. By and large, the results made Conway uncomfortable. These were good folks, no doubt; their courage and devotion were fantastic; but weren’t they, well, rather dour?

A girl asked while she danced with him: “Why have no more of you come?”

Another girl declined his suggestion of an evening out:

“I’m in war production, you know, working every day, No, please don’t feel sorry for me. This is what I want to do—serve. It’s different for you, of course. You’ve always been rich and safe.”

His host at dinner got a tad drunk and said: “Yes, I’ve lost one boy already. Two more are down there. Earth supplies weapons, we supply warm bodies.” He grew indignant when Conway remarked that this was equally true of Naqsa and the Tsheyakkans.

The countryside offered roads where a person might like. But Conway thought it unattractive. No matter how thoroughly terraformed, the district remained flat, hot, wet, almost always thickly overcast. Amidst regimented trees and fields, green though they were, he missed Ishtar’s wild red and gold; he missed a sight of sun, moons, stars. Naturally the Eleutherians were emotional about their homeland. But did he have to be?

The unit was ordered to the front. Action was rising afresh.

Yet “the front” was nearly a meaningless noise. Tsheyakkans held parts of southern Sigurdssonia. Occasionally they would withdraw before an Eleutherian advance—or vice versa—whether as the consequence of a battle or as a phase in a larger plan. Humans had leap-frogged to a similar spotty occupation of western Hat’hara and islands near that continent. Besides those lands, the ocean and skies between saw engagements.

Conway’s squadron did on its first patrol. When his headset informed him that detectors registered hostile craft bound this way, he felt crazily that it couldn’t be real, he was trapped in a fever dream, nobody could want to kill him whom so many people loved. Meanwhile his fingers did what was needful with drilled-in skill. And that was strange too, being a passenger in his body. Then the Tsheyakkans arrived and the dogfight erupted. He forgot to be afraid.

He noticed himself enjoying what he did, as if this were a poker game for stakes higher than he could afford to lose—

—where he suddenly drew a fourth queen. The enemy flyers were mean-looking elongated teardrops, against lead sky and mercury sea; but they were no better than his Shark, and their pilots didn’t have even his hasty operant training. One plunged at him. He slipped aside from the rake of tracers, roiled about and got the bandit in his sights; automatons did the rest, fireworks and a long, long smoking spiral down into the drink. Accelerations made him giddy, quasi-drunk. He whooped his joy till the next opponent showed, whereupon he became strictly business.

He couldn’t swear that he made a second kill. He did know that his outfit won hands down and went jubilant back to an otherwise dismal base in the jungle. At small cost to themselves, they’d practically wiped out the croaker escadrille.

Small cost… Trouble was, it included Eino Salminen, who was Conway’s best friend in the service and who’d gotten married very shortly before leaving Earth. Twice Conway tried to write a letter to Finland. He never completed it. Each time, he’d start wondering if that pilot who burned under his guns had been married, too. Not that I feel like a murderer or anything. It was him or me, in a war. I only wonder about him.

Rain roared on the barrack. Its unconditioned interior was a steam bath full of swamp stenches. Men who huddled near the 3V were stripped to their skivvies. Nobody dared go nude, Conway suspected—at least, he himself would have been afraid the others might think he was projecting a proposition—or was that merely a quirk he’d acquired? An environment both womanless and weird did things to your mind. Ah, well, probably his bare ass wouldn’t like direct contact with a chair anyway.

Barton was ’casting the latest news tape to arrive. Mostly it reported Christmas and Chanukkah festivities on Earth, this year especially elaborate because the Universal Love movement had grown so popular. But there were stories as well on a complete Neanderthal skeleton discovered in North Africa, and almost the whole of Apollo turning out to rescue a little boy trapped in a broken-down mono shuttle, and Lima’s new fusion-power plant, and an acrimonious election campaign in Russia, and a spectacularly messy divorce in the Philippine royal family, and a riot in New York Welfare, and a Bangkok fashion czar decreeing triangular cloaks… Toward the end, it was announced that a skirmish had occurred between Terrestrial and Naqsan space forces in the Vega sector. As for Mundomar, nothing special—

Major Samuel McDowell, Eleutherian liaison officer, stirred. “Did you notice the date on that tape?” he asked. “Happens to be the day my brother-in-law got killed.”

“Huh?” somebody said. “Too bad. I’m sorry.”

“He wasn’t the only one,” McDowell said. “Enemy came out of the jungle and shot up the whole village where his unit was. Lot of civilians bought it too. Filthy terrorists.”

“You call your men in Hat’hara guerrillas,” Conway couldn’t help muttering.

McDowell gave him a whetted stare. “Where are your sympathies, Ensign?”

Against the inward-crowding heat, Conway felt his cheeks and ears flush. “I’m a combat flyer, Major,” he snapped. I don’t owe servility to a ranking officer of a foreign country, do I? He nearly added that they have a proverb on Earth about not looking gift horses in the teeth, but checked himself. If McDowell complained to Captain Jacobowitz, Ensign Conway might go on the carpet. Besides, the poor devil had suffered grief, and did see the war as a matter of survival. “No offense intended, sir.”

McDowell eased a trifle. “Oh, I’m not a fanatic,” he said. “If the croakers would be reasonable—but think. To Earth, what’s going on here is a sideshow’ Or less than that. Can’t they see we’re bleeding?”

In a quick and brilliant series of actions, human airmen cleared the skies. Tsheyakkans were no match for them.

After that it should have been easy to interdict supply lines and reduce cut-off invasion forces from above. Don Conway personally sent a surface water ship to the bottom and probably a submarine freighter. But the next time around, a missile speared his flyer, as was happening unexpectedly often to his corps. He ejected, and bobbed about in the sea till a rescue bug hooked him out.

This earned him a week’s R R in Barton. A polite gentleman from Earth phoned him at his hotel room, requested an interview, and treated him to the kind of dinner he had not guessed existed on Mundomar. In time, after numerous cordialities, the gentleman got to the point.

“I gather you’ve been on the Shka coast. It’s devilish hard to collect any real information about that area. The Eleutherian authorities sit on everything and—Well, see here, Ensign. You’re not an Eleutherian, you’re a… m-m-m, you’re under the jurisdiction of the World Federation. Think of that as your nationality, where your loyalty belongs. And people, important people in the Federation would definitely like to know if their suspicions are right, about the oil in Shka.”

“Oil?” Conway was astounded.

“Yes. I’m not a scientist, but it works like this. Mundomar had an unusual evolution, starting when the whole system was a condensing dust cloud and going on through a mess of complicated planetology and biochemistry. Its petroleum contains several pretty unique materials. Extremely valuable as starting points for organic syntheses, like medicines, you know? Sure, we can manufacture the stuff from scratch, but pumping it out of the ground here and shipping it home is a hell of a lot cheaper. (Say, do you care for another drink?) The question is, when peace comes and the planet’s parceled out, will the rich sources be in friendly hands, or the hands of ungrateful sons of bitches who’ll screw us on price, or even the hands—flippers—of croakers? If Earth knew for sure, confidentially, what territories have these deposits, well, we could better plan our military campaigns and make our political deals. I don’t imagine you have the complete information; but every scrap helps. Helps the Federation, that is.”

Conway almost said he had none, and if he did would still have seen no particular reason to contribute to the profits of producers or the kudos of commissioners. He halted his larynx in time, and spoke according to a swiftly devised plan. Item for item, he bought drinks with hints, and finally a night’s worth of delightful girl with an outright work of his imagination.

He didn’t think the Earthling would mind too much, being after all on expense account. Anyway, his furlough was soon over and he returned to combat.

For a while, that consisted of runs over wilderness. He blackened the areas he was told to blacken, and got no more reply than rifle bullets. The trouble was the job had no end.

“They don’t quit, the slimy bastards,” said a captain of armored infantry. Conway had burned out a generator and landed for help at an advanced Eleutherian post. It was a village lately recaptured, ruins in the rain, full of a rotten-sweet odor. Humans rarely bothered to bury Naqsans, whose corpses couldn’t infect them. The captain spat on one. “They can live off this country better than we can. And their mother world’s getting war supplies through to them—”

His gaze went to a fence which confined a number of prisoners. They weren’t mistreated; but nobody here spoke any language of theirs, and physicians who knew their ailments were in short supply. The big seal-shapes comforted each other as best they might. “We’ll collect plenty more like those, though,” the captain said, “A hard push is in the works. You’ll be busy yourself, Ensign.”

Conway flew high above the clouds, far into the stratosphere. Beneath him shone whiteness, around him deep blue and his companion warriors, above him the sun and a few brightest stars. But mostly he saw Ishtar.

And felt it, heard it, smelted it, tasted it. When he was little, how infinitely tall his father was, and how beautiful his mother. And Jill and Alice were pests be couldn’t have done without. When Larreka came around, he’d smoldered with jealousy at the way the soldier favored Jill; but he took overnight boat trips on the Jayin with Dad, just the two of them waking up in an enormous misty morning… He remembered woods and seas, his early discovery of the arts of Earth, an eo-sweetheart, O God, a triple daybreak seen from climbed heights in the Thunderhead Range…

His earphones alerted him. What? Were any bandits left?

Their speed into his vision was terrifying. They were not the kind he had encountered before. Gaunt delta wings, these bore a wheel emblem whose recognition struck like a fist, Naqsa’s. The League itself. Yonder pilots weren’t half-trained colonists stuffed into unfamiliar machines. Naqsa had followed Earth’s lead and sent air corps regulars.

“Hang onto your scalps, boys,” said Conway’s commander; and the two squadrons penetrated.

It was raining when he got his consciousness back. Jungle crowded the wreckage of his flyer. He had no memory of being hit or of a crash landing.

Mainly he knew pain. Blood was all over everything. His left leg was crimson pulp from which jutted bone splinters. He thought dimly that he must have broken ribs too, because each shallow breath bun so. The universe had a scratch across it that he discovered was in his right eye.

He fumbled at his radio. Nothing happened. The canopy was burst open. Rain hammered and stammered over him. Where was his first aid kit? Where the fuck was his God damned first aid kit?

He found it at last and tried to prepare a hypospray, to dull the pain enough that he could think. His shaky hands kept dropping the apparatus. Presently he quit, since it hurt too much to bend over in his harness and grope after the stuff.

Later he began feeling warm and numb. The crack in creation faded, along with the rest of everything. Go away, death, he thought somewhere afar. You’re not welcome here.

Why not? asked the gentle dark.

Because I… I’m busy, that’s why.

All right, I’ll wait till you’ve finished.

KILLED IN ACTION: Lt. Cmdr. Jan H. Bameveldt, Ens. Donald R. Conway, Ens. James L. Kamekona…

MOURN FOR: Keh’t’hiw-a-Suq of Dzuaq, Whiccor the Bold, Nowa Rachari’s Son…