Their Master's War

Four

Hark woke with a gasp. He was lying in a pool of water. His face was wet, and his singlet was soaked through. For a moment, he had absolutely no idea where he was or even who he was. All he knew was that he couldn't feel his left shoulder. Then he moved his head, and he felt it with a vengeance. Pain surged through him, and for a moment he wondered if his neck had been broken. A ring of grinning faces were staring down at him, hard faces with scars and cold unfriendly eyes. He knew where he was. He was on the Gods' starship. Except all that had changed. The Gods weren't Gods at all, they were creatures called the Therem, and he was part of their army. He groaned. The grins broadened. Dyrkin, the giant with the prosthetic arm, stood right over him. His grin was the meanest of all.

"You learned your place now, new meat, or do you want to go around again?"

Hark tried to sit up. He felt as if he were going to vomit. "I…"

Renchett, the one who seemed to be in love with his knife, was holding a plastic container. He must have dumped the water over the fallen man.

Hark tried to speak again. "I…won't sit in your chair no more."

Dyrkin nodded. "You learn fast, new meat."

Beyond the grinning circle of old hands were the other four recruits from Hark's group. They weren't grinning. Their faces showed an unhappy combination of relief that they weren't the ones who'd been getting the treatment at the hands of Dyrkin and apprehension that they might be next. Renchett turned and glared at them.

"One of you get him up on his feet and into his coffin."

None of them moved. The four stood as if fear had rooted them to the spot.

Renchett scowled. "You hear me, you scumsucks?"

The four looked at each other as if each was unwilling to be the one to draw attention to himself by stepping through the ring of longtimers. Renchett didn't wait for a volunteer. He grabbed the nearest by the front of his singlet.

"You, asshole, get that man to his coffin! Move!"

Renchett assisted the movement with the steel toe of his boot. The recruit leaned over Hark, extended a hand, and hauled him to his feet. Despite the pain in his shoulder and the weakness in his legs, Hark had noticed something. Renchett had referred to him as a man. Not as new meat, scumsuck, or asshole but as a man. He wondered if he'd passed some sort of initial test. Hark swayed, and a second recruit moved quickly forward to support him from the other side. The two of them helped him from the rec room and along the row of silent coffins. As they lowered him down into the one assigned to him, he looked at them questioningly.

"We're all in this together, and we ought to know each other's names. I'm Hark."

"I'm Waed."

"I'm Morish."

Hark lay back with a groan. "It seems like we're going to have to stick together."

Waed and Morish stood in the narrow aisle between the rows of coffins as if they were uncertain whether they should go back to the rec room. Hark dropped the lid of the coffin and pulled the thin thermal-weave blanket around his shoulders. A sense of cold desolation crept over him, a helpless uncertainty as to what was in store for him in this strange, violent, alien place. Despite all his fears, though, within minutes he was fast asleep.

The period of sleep seemed to last no time at all. He felt as if he'd only just closed his eyes when horns started baying and the temperature in the coffin dropped close to freezing point. The lid of the coffin opened of its own accord, and he could hear the hectoring voice of Overman Elmo.

"Up, you scum! Everybody up! You want to die in bed?"

Topman Rance stood back in the entrance to the messdeck. Let Elmo roust them out of their pits-they were his battle unit and his babies. Rance had four units to worry about, and the whole damned combat coordinate. Elmo could scare the hell out of the recruits and take abuse from Renchett and Dacker. Rance noticed that one of the recruits, the one called Hark, was moving stiffly and that there was an ugly bruise running across his left shoulder blade. Dyrkin had been reinforcing the pecking order. Dyrkin had been maingun in this twenty for more than seven standards, and he was possessed of what had, so far, proved to be an unerring instinct. First time around, with a pickup of recruits, he always beat up on the most spirited of the bunch. The one he initially picked on usually rose in the pecking order but never challenged his position. Of course, in the end, there would be a challenger, and the challenger might well topple Dyrkin. Mainguns, if they weren't promoted, always took the fall in the end. There seemed to be a natural rule that ex-mainguns tended not to survive very long in combat after they'd been deposed.

Rance waited until Overman Elmo had run the twenty through the cleanoff and a fast workout on the hexagons. The longtimers were dispatched to their various work details. Keep the bastards busy and they won't have the spare time and energy to start cooking up nastiness. Finally, Elmo paraded the five recruits along the aisle in front of their respective coffins, standing at whatever approximation of rigid attention they could manage. When everything was to Elmo's satisfaction, he took a step back and deferred to Rance.

"Your recruits, Topman Rance."

"Thank you, Overman Elmo."

Rance walked slowly along the line of recruits. He stopped in front of the last.

"Name?"

"Morish 34103-301779."

Rance regarded him bleakly. "I have a name and a title, boy."

"Morish 34103-301779, Topman Rance."

"Just remember that, boy." He moved to the next man. "Name?"

"Voda 34103-301780, Topmari Rance."

"Good."

"Waed 34103-301781, Topman Rance."

"Hark 34103-301782, Topman Rance."

Rance probed the bruise on Hark's shoulder with his index finger. "Trouble, boy?"

"No trouble, Topman Rance."

The kid was smart. He had a swift grasp of the essentials.

"Name?"

"Eslay 34103-301783, Topman Rance."

Rance faced the pickup. He smiled coldly and rubbed his hands slowly together.

"Well, my children, my poor little lost sheep, now that you all know your name, your number, and, I-hope, for your sakes, your place, we come to the most important part of your initiation into the armies of the Therem Alliance." He glanced at Elmo. "Suits, boots, and helmets, Overman Elmo."

Elmo snapped his fingers. "Suits, boots, and helmets!"

The process was taking on aspects of a ritual. Rance was doing this deliberately. He wanted the recruits fully in his grip. There were some who spooked when the suits first touched them. A floating pallet drifted down the aisle. It carried five black and bulbous space helmets, five pairs of heavy-duty combat boots, and five shapeless blobs of what looked like opaque black jelly. Rance hefted one of the blobs.

"Puzzled, are we? Just dying to blurt out, 'But that isn't like any suit of clothes that I've ever seen, Topman Rance'?"

He paused. None of the recruits looked as if he was dying to blurt out anything.

"And you'd be quite right. These suits are like nothing you've even imagined. It wouldn't be putting it too strongly to say that this suit is almost as important as you are. It will be your friend, your partner, and your constant companion, and you will treat it accordingly. When you're not wearing it, you will store it in the specially designed environment in your lockers. You see, my children, these suits are living beings."

He scanned their faces as this fact sank in. Four of the recruits were impassively facing front, but Eslay was looking distinctly queasy. There was usually one. Rance knew that Elmo would be watching him.

"If you delve into your brand-new memories, my chil- dren, you will find the term 'symbiotic parasite.' That is exactly what these suits are. They are a form of animal life with their own minimal intelligence. The want nothing more than to guard and protect us. They were genetically tailored and selectively bred by our masters, the Therem, to interact with us humans. They can absorb massive amounts of radiation and impacts that would kill us."

Rance was holding the suit with one hand, and it had started to insinuate itself down his arm. Eslay's eyes had started to bulge. Rance hoped that Elmo had them all well in hand.

"These are our suits. They make us feel good, and in return, we love and cherish them." He tossed the suit he was holding directly at Hark. "Catch it, boy!"

Hark caught the suit and stood holding it awkwardly. The idea of wearing a living thing hardly appealed to him either, but he was doing his best not to show it.

"So put the suit on, boy."

Hark looked down at the blob in his hands. It was gently sliding around his fingers.

"How do I do that, Topman Rance?"

"It's the simplest thing in the world, boy. Strip off those shorts and singlet and stand on the suit."

Hark stripped off his clothes and gingerly placed one naked foot on the blob.

"Don't be shy, boy, stand right on it. It won't bite you."

Hark stepped up onto the suit. His feet sank into it, and it immediately started to flow up his legs, covering them with a thick second skin. Beside him, he heard Eslay gasp. It had reached his knees and was advancing up his thighs. The thing felt warm against his flesh. He almost gasped himself as it flowed around his genitals. As it got to his waist, the feeling subtly changed. The sense of revulsion melted away and was replaced by a pleasant tingling of well-being. Topman Rance was right; the suit was his friend.

"Feel okay, does it, boy?"

Hark grinned. He was close to euphoric.

"Yes, sir, Topman Rance. It feels great."

He was aware that the suit had to be doing something to him, but he didn't give a damn. He was in love with his suit. Rance tossed out the other four blobs of black jelly.

"Okay, the rest of you get suited up too."

Eslay made no attempt to catch the suit that was thrown at him. It thudded to the deck plates at his feet and just lay there. Hark was sure that it was his imagination, but somehow the blob seemed to look rejected. As the suits covered the other three recruits, they all started grinning. Eslay stood stock-still. He might have been afraid of Rance, but he was a lot more afraid of the suit. Rance advanced on him.

"Are you going to put on that suit, boy?"

Eslay looked as if he were about to strangle. "I… can't."

Rance's voice was hard and quiet. "Put on that suit, boy."

Eslay's mouth worked, but no sound came. Rance glanced at Elmo.

"Let's put him in his suit."

Together, they grabbed the recruit and, before he could put up a struggle, lifted him clear off the ground and dumped his feet into the black jelly. The suit, as if it could sense the urgency, flashed up his legs at high speed. They didn't put him down until it had covered him all the way up to the chest. Eslay swayed and then collected himself. He didn't look euphoric, and sweat stood out on his face, but at least he was calm.

"Do you have a grip on it now, boy?"

Eslay was still sweating, but he had found his voice. "Yes, Topman Rance. I've got a grip on it."

"Then we can move on to the next phase."

Elmo took the floor to explain how to adjust and lock the boots, seal the helmets, and use the tongue switch controls oh the air feed, lights, and communicator. As the information was already in the recruits' heads, he had only to go through it once.

"Now we issue your weapons."

The pallet that had brought in the suits and boots was replaced by one that carried a rack of five weapons. Rance removed one and held it up.

"Observe well, my children. What we have here is the standard weapon of the ground trooper. The Multipurpose Energy Weapon, the MEW. Next to your suit, this weapon is your best friend. Its function is very simple. It kills the enemy and, we hope, prevents the enemy from killing you."

Elmo passed out the weapons. The recruits handled them gingerly.

"You don't have to be afraid of them. The power packs haven't been loaded yet."

The MEW was slightly longer than a man's arm. I consisted of four parallel tubes that ran from a hemi spherical muzzle shield at one end into a cylindrical trigger control at the other. A folding stock fitted into the user's shoulder.

"All you need to know to operate the MEW has already been implanted in your brains. What we are going to do now is to take you out onto the outside of the ship and shake that information loose by practice."

Hark was surprised at how fast things were going. Rance and Elmo seemed to be giving them no time to stop and think. After less than a day on the ship, the recruits were armed and in fiill combat gear. They were practically soldiers already. Elmo was marshaling them to move out of the messdeck. As Elmo marched them for the second time through the complex and mysterious bowels of the ship, there was a whole different spirit among the recruits. They had come in as nervous newcomers with nothing but their underclothes to protect them. Now, with the sole exception of Eslay, who still looked less than comfortable in his suit, they were almost standing tall as they walked through the corridors and companionways carrying their weapons and helmets. Their boots crashed on the deck plates, and they no longer flinched at the ship's random groans and booms, the flares of plasma, and the flashes of static.

The spirit wilted slightly when they confronted the large circular air lock that led to the exterior of the ship. Beyond the thick double iris was an unknown infinity that was so awesome that not even the suit-induced euphoria could totally calm their fears. Rance continued to give them no time to panic. At his order, they put on their helmets. He and Elmo carefully checked the seals, then Elmo operated the air lock controls. The inner iris opened with a hollow, echoing sigh. They stepped inside. The iris closed behind them. As the air drained out of the lock, the suits began to alter. They ceased to be a smooth second skin and started to tuck and roll over the vulnerable parts of the men's bodies, providing ribbed protection for the knees and elbows, for the crotch and kidneys and the pit of the stomach.

The second iris opened, and the blackness of space was above their heads. For a few moments, they had no chance to take in the view. There was the instant of disorientation as their horizontal perspective performed a ninety-degree turn, then a clutch of dizziness as they stepped from the floor of the air lock onto the subjectively vertical surface of the ship's hull. In that instant, the pseudograv built into their boots took over from the ship's internal gravity. Everything normalized, and the air lock became a rapidly closing hole in what was now the ground.

For once, Rance didn't hurry them. No one, not even a topman, could bully a recruit through his first contact with the emptiness of space and the different but equally frightening vastness of the battle cluster itself. They had to be given time to stand and stare. Hark and the others did exactly that. Even in the desert, when he had gazed up in wonder at the night sky, he had never felt so completely dwarfed. There were numbers in his head that attempted to make sense of the endless black and the cold light of the thousands of stars, but they didn't help any. There were also numbers for the battle cluster, but those were equally meaningless. Hark couldn't conceive how anything so vast could have been built even by Gods. Thirteen huge ships, each as large as the one on which he was standing and each having its unique if inexplicable design and form, hung together in an unidentifiable configuration, the relationships of which Hark knew that he would never begin to understand. The way the giant ships were clustered together reminded Hark of some strange, exotic flower. The parts added up to a unit that was somehow greater than the sum of the individual parts. Although the ships floated free of each other, there could be no mistaking the fact that the cluster was a fully integrated unit. There were continuous ship-to-ship exchanges of all kinds of raw energy. A faint rainbow aurora glowed in the space between two ships that were long tapering triangles and a third that was a bulky, irregular spheroid. A ship that appeared to be constructed of hexagonal crystals discharged cracks of purple ball lightning into empty space. Three other ships were linked by a vibrating web of plasma pseudopods. The overall impression was one of the battle cluster being so highly charged that it could scarcely contain its own impossible levels of power. All served to reinforce Hark's original feeling that the ship, and now the cluster, was more a living thing than a collection of soulless machines.

Rance allowed the recruits their moments of naked wonder, but eventually he snapped them back to the matter at hand. They were marched across the vast expanse of the Anah J's outer hull to where the other groups of five that made up the intake were waiting for them along with their overmen. Hark had somehow expected the surface of the ship's hull to be a featureless sheet of smooth metal. If anything, it was quite the reverse. It was covered by a deep patina of fine dust, pebbles, and even small rocks. It was pitted both by numerous small craters and by large washes of fused and blackened metal that were clearly legacies from previous battles. As they marched toward the others, the five passed a team of four humpbacked, suited nonhuman creatures performing a minor repair on the hull with vibrant red lasers. Their suits were jointed steel armor, not the living parasites issued to the troopers.

Waed and Morish paused to look more closely at the creatures, but Elmo chivvied them along.

"Keep it moving. You're going to have to get used to a lot of different species before you're through. There's nothing particularly interesting about the nohans."

When they reached the other squads of five, they were formed into parade ranks. Rance positioned himself in front of the whole intake.

"The overmen will now hand out the energy packs."

Of all the danger spots in the induction process, this was probably the most crucial. The recruits would now be armed and capable of the most terrible destruction if any of them decided to psych or serk. His hold on them had to be absolute.

"Do not load the energy packs until I give the word!"

Each recruit was handed the dull black pod, slightly larger than a clenched fist. It clipped into the underside of his weapon. Each had the specifications of the MEW and its energy source in his new memory, and only the dullest failed to experience a slight thrill of excited fear at the realization of the extent of the power he was holding in his hand.

"Take the energy pack in your left hand. Hold your weapon by its midsection with the underside pointing away from you."

He paused until all of the recruits had it right.

"Place the pack between the guide blocks but do not, I repeat, do not push it home."

Again he paused.

"On the command 'Load' you will load your weapons. At all times, you will keep your hands away from the triggers."

The overmen walked down the rows of recruits to make sure that they followed Rance's instructions to the letter. It was only when they were completely satisfied that the order was given.

"Intake… load!"

The energy packs were slammed home. There was no noise in the silence of space.

"Open formation, advance! Keep those hands away from the triggers!"

They spread out into one long, extended rank, each man some two meters from the next one.

"Weapons ready!"

Weapons were pushed forward by nervous hands.

"In this first phase of the exercise, lighted targets will appear in front of you. They will move toward you. The object is to shoot them down before they reach you. You will use all of the functions of your weapons, and I will call the changes of function."

Now that the weapons were energized, Rance was brutal efficiency. All the "my children" mockery had gone from his voice.

"Targets up!"

A blip of yellow light appeared from nowhere and floated a couple of meters above the surface of the hull. At first there was just the one, then it subdivided into a whole line of blips, maybe twenty in all. They advanced on the troopers at about the speed of a man walking.

"Set to blast and fire at will!"

There was a moment of hesitation, as if none of the recruits wanted to be the first to fire.

"The idea is to shoot them down. They're the enemy, and they want to kill you."

The recruits' weapons went off almost as one. A number of the blips vanished, but by no means was every shot a hit. Rance raised his hand.

"Targets down."

The yellow blips vanished.

"That was uniformly pathetic. In combat, you'll rarely have an enemy moving as slowly as that. Targets up!"

For the next four hours, they practiced with their weapons. The speed of the blips increased, and their movement became trickier; they ducked and weaved, and toward the end, they fired bolts of green light that delivered a severe but not incapacitating shock to whomever they hit. Rance had the men constantly switching functions on their weapons. They jumped from laser-trace to blast, from blast to heat ray to concussion, and back to lasertrace. Very early in the exercise, Hark realized that the multiple triggers on the MEW were almost identical to the prayer levers with which he'd worshiped back on his planet. This left him with a growing feeling that his former life had been a cruel deceit.

Rance not only worked the men hard on their weapons, he also pushed them toward the limit of their physical capabilities. He had them running and diving, crawling on their stomachs, all the time firing as they went, beating off the repeated attacks of the blips. He constantly reminded them that it was a matter of kill or be killed. He apparently had an uncompromisingly basic view of warfare.

The disaster didn't occur until the exercise was almost over. Only one recruit from Hark's squad, Eslay, seemed unable either to cop the feel of the MEW or to keep up with the rest of the intake. When the blips started firing shocks, he was constantly being zapped. Finally he gave up and dropped to his knees with a sighing sob that was audible over everyone's communicator. Two blips hovered over him, hitting his body with repeated shocks. He was now babbling in a language that Hark didn't understand. Then, to the horror of the other recruits, the babbling turned to screams that reverberated inside their helmets. The seal between Eslay's helmet and his suit was opening. The suit was peeling back. Blood fountained from the exposed flesh as it went into explosive decompression. More blood splashed the inside of his helmet visor. As the suit retreated toward Eslay's waist, his lungs blew. The force of his chest rupturing lifted him clear off the surface. The suit snaked off his dead legs and, carried by the grav still running in his boots, dropped to the floor. Eslay's corpse, naked except for his helmet, continued to float upward. Rance quickly stepped up to the nearest recruit and took his weapon. He set it to blast, aimed it at the body, and held down the trigger until there was nothing left. He calmly turned and handed the weapon back to its owner, then he faced the stunned recruits.

"Couldn't just leave him to float around, could we?"

Hark was shocked by the blunt callousness. Surely a man's death deserved something, some kind of observation. Rance seemed to be well aware of the feeling.

"Think we should have taken the time to give him a decent burial? Let me tell you something, getting a de- cent burial can be a dangerous luxury. The first thing you learn is that a dead body is a worthless lump of organic garbage and isn't something you take risks for. Anything else is sentiment, and sentiment can get you killed. You're probably wondering how it was that the suit came off him and could the same thing happen to you. The answer is that it might, but it most likely won't, unless you cave in like he did. Not often, but now and again, a suit turns on its wearer if it feels he isn't giving one hundred percent. Eslay didn't like his suit, and apparently it didn't like him."

Rance made a dismissive gesture, and the overmen began herding the recruits into ordered ranks preparatory to returning to the interior of the ship. Elmo picked up Eslay's suit, boots, and weapon. As they marched away, Rance didn't go with them. He needed a few moments to himself. Eslay's death was damned nuisance. Now he'd have to make a report to the line officer.