Their Master's War

Seven

Naked, they filed into the blue room, carrying their equipment and weapons. The lock sealed. First the water jets came on and washed away the fine purple dust. Next it was the turn of the bright blue lights-the radiation would kill any native bacteria that they might have picked up. Hark noticed that some of the men had brought back small souvenirs of the battle. Helot had the severed metal claw-hand of a chiba gunner. He must have hacked it off one of the corpses in the gunpit while he was manning the captured PBA. It was being decontaminated along with everything else.

Dyrkin looked around at the others. There were thirteen of them. Of the nineteen who had gone down, five were dead; Kemlo, who had been snagged by the wire, had been taken to sick bay to be fitted with a prosthetic foot. They had been less badly hit than some of the other twenties.

"So now we get drunk."

"Polluted. I got to get rid of the taste."

Their ship clothes were laid out for them. They quickly dressed. The lights went out. The lock at the other end of the chamber opened. They filed out into the receiving hold and were somewhat surprised to find that it was a hive of activity. Lights were flashing, and sirens were blaring. Nohan damage-control parties were hurrying to their battle positions. Fault-trace robots, no bigger than a man's foot, skittered about the floor. A gang of human core jumpers, wearing yellow radiation armor, doubled away down a corridor. The PA was issuing orders and bulletins in human, the whistling trills of the nohan, and a wash-of-sound speech that Hark couldn't recognize.

Rance grabbed the first passing human. "What's going on?"

"A Yal battle wagon is closing with us, one of the big ones. We're going to engage."

Dyrkin spit on the deck. "That's all we need."

Rance quickly gathered his men.

"We go back to the mes§decks. We're ground troops. There's nothing we can do in a space battle except get in the way."

Dacker grunted. "We can get ourselves killed."

"That's taken as given around here."

Once on the messdeck, there was nothing to do but wait. The thirteen gathered in the downden. Within minutes, Dacker and Renchetrhad become involved in an argument with Elmo.

"The least you could do would be to issue the booze."

"I can't cut loose a booze issue when the cluster's on full action alert. They'd bust me to trooper or worse. We're going into combat, damn it."

"We've already seen our combat, and after combat, we get drunk. That's the rule."

"And talking of combat, Overman Elmo, we didn't see you down planetside."

"Rance took the command. There was no reason for me to stick my neck out."

"Some of us didn't have the option."

"What are you scum trying to say?"

"Just that we missed you, Overman Elmo."

"You all know that I've seen my share of fighting." He fingered the bald patches on his skull where the hair had long ago fallen out. "I've got a right to sit one out now and again."

Renchett wasn't prepared to let it go. He had absolute contempt for anyone who wasn't always in the thick of the action. It seemed to be the compensation for any second thoughts he might have about his own single-minded bloodletting. "Maybe you've seen too much," Overman Elmo."

"Why don't you just cut loose our booze, Overman Elmo? We're fighting men."

"You two are full of crap, and I'm not issuing booze until we're stood down. If you want to make any more of it, you'll find yourself on a field punishment."

Dacker and Renchett didn't say anything, but they stood their ground and glowered. They seemed to be trying to work out precisely how far the overman could be pushed. It took Dyrkin to step in and put a stop to the war of nerves.

"Why don't we get the screen going and see what's happening outside

After a few seconds' hesitation, Renchett and Dacker turned their attention from Elmo to the wall screen. The first image to appear was the same naked woman Helot and Wabst had been watching before the drop. This drew a halfheartedly ribald cheer from the men. Hark remembered that Wabst was among the dead. Dyrkin adjusted the "single control. The naked dancing girl was replaced by a high-resolution picture of the Yal battleship. There could not have been a greater contrast. Warm, inviting human flesh gave way to cold, deadly alien technology. It was hard to tell from the screen just how big the enemy ship was. Hark had to assume that the many small points of light circling around it were attendant space vessels. If they were only as large as the dropcraft, the Yal ship was very big indeed, larger than any ship in the cluster but not as big as the whole of the cluster together. It was also nothing like any of the ships in the cluster. It seemed to have been constructed from giant hexagonal crystals placed side by side and bonded together. It was not unlike an irregular bundle of translucent rods. Their pointed tips flashed and glittered. To Hark, it was a chill, threatening light. Four of the central rods extended far beyond the others to form a kind of prow, the tip of which glowed with a green light. It was the same green as the fire from the Yal weapons down on the planet.

"Will you look at the size of that bastard!" "You think we can hold it?"

"The powers that be must, else they would have jumped us out of here." "Let's hope they're right."

The Yal battleship seemed hardly to be moving. Even Hark realized that this was a matter of its size and the relative distances involved. He could feel, however, that it was bearing down on them. A soft glow blossomed around the ship, a spectral halo that enveloped it from prow to stern.

"Shields up."

The green glow in the prow intensified into a single bright spot. The bright spot moved backward, down the crystal rod, toward the main body of the ship.

"Powering up the forward gun."

There was a slight distortion of the image on the screen.

"That's our shields."

"Are they going to give them the first shot?" "Looks like it."

The green spot rocketed down the rod. When it hit the tip, it diffused into a cloudy green energy field that floated directly toward the cluster. Before it even reached the cluster's screens, it dissipated and faded. There was congratulatory noise on the messdeck. Men exchanged handclasps. There was a satisfaction in knowing that whatever was in command of the enemy battleship had miscalculated on its first play. "It's out of range."

The scanner that was feeding the picture to the messdeck screen must have been in an extreme forward position. The first that Hark knew about the Anah cluster firing its own guns was when a stream of white fireballs drifted into the picture. Hark realized that a second or so earlier the lights in the messdeck had dimmed. The fireballs hit the Yal shield. There was a brief flash as the shield was suffused with the sphere's white light, and then it returned to normal. The Yal were powering up again. The green spot retreated down the crystal. This time, the energy field reached all the way to the cluster. For a moment, the screen distorted and snowed, and the floor under their feet trembled. Hark swallowed his heart. They were hit. Then the screen cleared. It was only their own shields deflecting the attack. The lights flickered; the white fireballs came again and again as the Yal shields seemed to cope easily with them.

As time passed, Hark discovered what a ponderous and protracted affair it was when two huge, shielded space complexes engaged each other. The tactic was rudimentary. Each ship or complex stood off, close to the limit of its fire envelope, and pounded the other. Unimaginable amounts of energy were expended on this process, both in firing on the enemy and in maintaining the shields. The loser was the first one to run out of power and drop its shields. Without shields, even something as big as the cluster could be vaporized in a matter of minutes. The moment of truth came when a complex had just enough power left to jump out of trouble. It was always possible that the enemyjiad lower power reserves, and if the side with greater reserves held firm, it would come out the winner. Wars, after all, were not won by running away. On the other hand, the decision not to jump would be fatal if the enemy proved to have more power.

The pounding went on and on. On the messdeck, the lights dimmed, the floor trembled, and among the troopers, an exhaustion set in. The battle outside was too crucial to ignore, but they were no longer the riveted spectators they had been at the start. Hark noticed that Overman Elmo was among the few who still seemed transfixed by the conflict on the screen. Hark was starting to wonder about Elmo. For the raw recruit, there had been something comforting about the overman's authority, but now that he knew more, it was starting to look as if that authority might be failing. Hark had been surprised that Elmo had needed to resort to threats of punishment in the matter of the booze issue and that it had been Dyrkin who had been the one to defuse the situation. The radiation scars on Elmo's head and neck bore testimony if not to his courage, at least to his capacity for survival. On the other hand, it was clear to a mere recruit that all was not well. Could it be as Renchett had suggested? Were Elmo's nerves really shot?

About 190 minutes into the engagement, the effects of the pounding on the messdeck became increasingly more noticeable. The lights dimmed reducing the downden to almost total darkness each time the cluster powered up to fire. The hits from the Yal ship caused more of a stagger than a tremble. The air began to smell stale and brackish.

"They're diverting power from life support to the guns and the shields." "We're running down."

On the screen, the Yal battleship fired again. This time the impact was more than just noticeable. The shock was enough to throw a couple of men off their feet. The lights went out altogether, leaving only the red emergency spots. The screen went dead. There was no mistaking the barely restrained terror in the gloom. Hark glanced toward Elmo. It was his place to take control of the situation. No control was forthcoming.

"Why don't we jump?" someone asked.

"A jump would probably kill us, the shape we're in."

Rance would have stomped this kind of talk with both feet. Elmo said nothing. Another Yal energy field slammed into the cluster. To a man, the troopers were down on the deck plates riding the shocks.

"The Yal must outpower us after everything we poured on those domes."

Still Elmo said nothing. There were three muffled explosions from somewhere deep inside the Anah 5.

"Something's burned out."

"We're dead."

To everyone's surprise, the screen came on again. The Yal ship was very close. "Why isn't it powering up?" There was no green glow in the ship's prow. "Maybe the bastards are playing with us." "Look at their shields!"

The Yal shields were a ghostly shadow of their former brilliance. The battleship began slowly to turn away. Thirteen troopers got cautiously to their feet. There was something about the way the room was lit by the screen that made it less than real. The ship was eerily quiet.

"They're breaking off the action."

"Why don't we fire?"

"We've run down. We can't power up the guns." The Yal ship was shrinking in the screen and turning faster. The turquoise glow of its impulse exhaust was clearly visible.

"That was an expensive waste of time."

"At least we didn't have to jump."

"We will eventually."

"Yeah, but first we have to lay up for a couple of standards and recharge."

Renchett dropped into a chair. "Yo, Elmo. Think you can break out the booze now? There's got to be a stand-down any minute."

"Yo, Elmo?" That was what Renchett had said. The idea of talking to an overman that way was no longer unthinkable, and in terms of general unit morale, that was bad. Worse was that Elmo merely nodded.

"Yeah, I need a drink myself." He pointed to Morish and Voda. "You can carry it."

Nobody came to bother them, and the messdeck spent the next three hundred minutes or so getting blind and forgetfully drunk. Elmo had taken the full liquor issue for twenty men-ten one-liter containers of clear spirit among thirteen of them. It was traditional to drink up the rations of the dead. Also to eat their food. Elmo had loaded down the two rookies with twenty issues of concentrates. The ship was still uncannily quiet. The lights didn't come back on again, but that didn't seem to bother anyone very much. The booze burned raw, but that didn't seem to bother anybody, either. The first thing to cause trouble was the screen. In a very short time, the troopers proved that they were not the most amiable of drunks. The first argument was over the image at which the majority of them were staring. When thecal ship had dwindled to nothing, the exterior view remained, facing away from the cluster, an empty and threateningly bleak star scape.

"Can't we get rid of that thing?"

"I don't need to look at naked infinity."

Dyrkin got to his feet. It was the privilege of the maingun to mess with the screen. "Get some women up there."

"Hell, no. What's the point of looking at women when there ain't none around? There's no use in beating it into the ground."

"We could bring out the suits."

"Give me a break."

"There don't seem to be any women anyway, and not much of anything else either."

Dyrkin was stroking the control surface, but the exterior view stubbornly remained. Finally he hit something. It was a slowly changing and wholly abstract pattern of color.

"What the hell is that supposed to be?" "Maybe it's supposed to be soothing." "Maybe it makes perfect sense to some other species."

"It's all we got." "Shee-it."

Dacker heaved an empty liquor container into the corner. It bounced hollowly and lay on its side. A tiny fault-trace robot scuttled between the twin lines of coffins. It entered the downden, hesitated by the discarded container, and then ran up the wall and across the ceiling. When it was almost over his head, Renchett pinned it with his knife, a fast underhand throw. The robot squealed, a high metallic sound, and shorted out. Renchett reached up, pulled the knife out of the composition ceiling, and the robot along with it.

"Not bad, considering the light."

"What did you do that for?"

"I hate these forsaken things and the way they scuttle about."

He put the fault tracer down and stamped on it, then he dumped its crushed body into the waste hopper. Mor- ish, in what for a rookie was a spectacular display of drunken bravado, wouldn't let it go. "How can you hate a robot? They don't do any harm."

"I can hate anything I want to hate." Renchett's voice was taking on a dangerous edge. He looked to Dyrkin for support. "Can't I?"

"Sure you can. Hate any damn thing you want."

Morish blearily shook his head. "You gotta be crazy to hate a functioning part offhe ship."

Renchett was suddenly in front of Morish, the tip of his blade making small side-to-side snake movements in front of the rookie's eyes.

"You want to make something of it, new meat?"

Morish wasn't accustomed to drink, but even he could see that he'd gone too far. He dropped his gaze and mumbled. "I don't want to make nothing."

Renchett backed off. What passed for his honor seemed to be satisfied. Morish reached for a liquor container and took a long drink. When he was through, his eyes were watering.

"I don't think I feel so good."

All through the exchange, Helot had been sitting and watching. He was as drunk as anyone else, but he didn't make a noise about it. He was holding the chiba claw that he had brought back from the mission. Renchett, whose foul mood had in no way dissipated, turned on him.

"What are you doing with that thing?" "Don't start with me, Renchett. I ain't no rookie." "I just want to know what you want that fucking thing for."

"I always bring something back from a mission if I can. I got a whole collection. I've even got the ear off a scaly. You want to see it?"

"You're out of your mind."

"That's what the rookie just said about you."

Renchett's hand was on his knife. "You want to say that over?"

"Get off my ass, Renchett. If you go for that knife, I'll break your arm. You know I can."

"And if he don't, I will. You're giving me a headache." Once again Dyrkin was maintaining order. "And stow that goddamn knife. You're too mean a drunk to be waving that thing around."

Renchett had to go on performing. "You going to make me?"

"Don't be dumber than you have to be."

Renchett shrugged. He wasn't going to mess with Dyrkin. He got up and went to put the knife in his kit. His walk wasn't quite steady.

The incident had effectively killed conversation. The thirteen had turned in on themselves. Stress reaction and alcohol had blurred into a somber depression. Some had actually passed out. At least three were staring blankly at the patterns on the screen and might as well have been dead to the world. Hark was somewhere between sleeping and waking. He was no more used to booze than Morish was. Deep inside the haze, he became aware that someone nearby was talking to him. He opened his eyes. He had a difficulty focusing, but after a few moments Elmo's face swam partway into place. His mouth was moving.

"… and I never saw anything like it. Nothing. That thing today. Right?" "Huh?"

"That little skirmish you bastards were in."

"What about it?"

"It was nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing."

"You weren't even there… Overman Elmo."

"I didn't have to be there. I saw how many of you bastards came back. At Seven Walls, I was the only one of my twenty to come back. That's how I got to be overman."

A slurred voice came from the other side of the room. "Why don't you put a cover on it, Elmo. We all heard about you at Seven Walls."

Elmo swayed around, peering into the gloom. "Who said that?"

There were a couple of drunken laughs.

"Listen, you slime, the new meat ain't heard it, and they gotta respect me."

"They ain't new meat anymore. They've seen combat."

"They still got to respect me."

Hark was drunkenly horrified. He had always respected Elmo. It was only now that the respect was starting to fragment. Hark wished that the overman would shut up and fall over. He was in no condition for a conflict of original loyalties. Elmo, however, was made of sterner stuff. He put a hand on Hark's shoulder, leaned close, and lowered his voice. Hark could smell the liquor on his breath.

"It was this huge Yal redoubt, see? Seven concentric walls maybe four meters thick. Whole standard of blanketing it with neutrino charges. Thought we were going to go blind from the afterflash. Finally, they sent in us ground monkeys. We were told it'd be a walk… a piece of cake… right? The walls were breached, and we assumed that it was going to be a fish kill. Some piece of cake… We got inside, and they hit us with everything they had. They'd darksided a whole strike force on a moon where nobody had bothered to look. The heavy punishers came in first… By the time they hit, we made it down into bunkers. They were full of dead chibas and scalies and some things we'd never seen before… the chibas are rotting off their frames while there's an earth- quake going on all around us… You never seen anything like it…"

Maybe it was just that Elmo was one of the first authority figures Hark had seen. Maybe that was the reason for the trust at first sight. Maybe it was just another part of the programming. Was he going to find out that Rance also had feet of clay?

"When I say earthquake… I mean a goddamn earthquake. The ceilings are coming in, and guys are getting crushed by chunks of plasteel. I'm lying facedown in a mess of chiba goop and expecting to die at any minute. It's black as pitch, and the noise is like one continuous explosion. There's somebody screaming in my ear, and I don't know if it's me or the monkey next to me."

Elmo was no longer talking to Hark. He was staring blindly into nowhere, reliving the time in the bunker.

"Yeah, and then the pounding stops, and for a few moments, there's complete silence. We're still lying there, not daring to breathe, wondering what they're going to throw at us next. The punishers are only the first stage. We wait… and after a while there's this quiet little sound from way down in the tunnels… a clicking. There ain't a man down in that bunker that didn't know what it was and what it meant. It's that noise the scalies' exoskeletons make when they move. We lined our red-scopes in a goddamn hurry and there they were… an assault line of the bastards things… with tom-tom guns in front of them… coming up through the lower tunnels."

Elmo shuddered at the memory.

"It's hand to hand… or hand to tentacle… or whatever those things have at the end of their arms. The tomtoms are going off right in among us, and we're falling back from the get go. It's a goddamn slaughter… casualties all the way to the surface. We should have known something was wrong when the scalies stopped pressing. Those of us who were left came out into the light and immediately got it by batwings, sweeping us with hard radiation. That's where I lost my hair…just one e-vac managed to get in… and I was one of the lucky ones."

Elmo leaned forward and reached for one of the remaining bottles. He missed it by a matter of centimeters and toppled over. He had another try for the bottle from a prone position. This time he was a little more successful. He got the bottle to his mouth, and after spilling a good deal, he managed a swallow, only to gag. Hark stared in bleary disgust as Overman Elmo, an individual whom he had previously looked up to, lay on his side with drool hanging from the corner of his mouth.

"Yeah… I was one of… the… lucky… ones…"

Overman Elmo's eyes closed. Hark was filled with a massive sense of relief.

It was maybe two hours later when Rance came into the messdeck. He had expected to find the men passed out drunk. That was as it should be. They had been damn lucky to get off that battery planet with such minimal casualties. It could have been a whole lot worse. The additional stress of the prolonged exchange of fire must have been close to the last straw. He had half expected to find Elmo passed out among the men, but that wasn't as it should be. Noncoms didn't get falling-down drunk on the messdecks, particularly a noncom who had sat out the mission. He'd been watching Elmo for some time. There was little doubt that the overman had run out of road. By the program, Rance should take the matter to the line officer, but he'd already decided that he'd hold off for a while. It was a matter of loyalty. Elmo had been a good man. Most of the other survivors from Seven Walls had gone crazy. If Rance reported Elmo,

Berref would undoubtedly have the overman termed. It would be better at least to let Elmo keep his dignity. These things had a habit of taking care of themselves. When a man ran out of road, he didn't last much longer in combat.