Their Master's war

Fifteen

The Anah 5 felt as if it were being torn apart, and maybe the whole universe along with it. The shields had already failed on two of the ships in the cluster, and those two were being battered to pieces by the guns of the Yal. The coordination that made the cluster a single entity had been lost. They were now thirteen solitary ships fighting for their individual survival. The Yal battleships had arrived ahead of schedule and before the cluster could jump to safety. The Anah 12 was slowly and majestically being turned into a shapeless cloud of gas and debris by a chain reaction of explosions. The shocks were felt on all the other ships. It was unlikely that there were survivors of any kind, but even if a few unfortunates remained drifting in space, nothing could be done for them. The green clouds of Yal fire came on relentlessly, and only three of the cluster ships had sufficient power to fire back.

None of the surviving troopers had thought much about what would happen when they actually arrived back on board. As they'd stormed onto the e-vac, gunning down three field police in the process, simply getting off the planet in one piece had been the all-consuming goal. It had remained so during the go-for-broke takeoff that had them running the gauntlet of a sudden storm of enemy ground fire. It was only when they were in space and could see the dozens of tiny craft shuttling in between the thirteen big ships that they started to remember that they might well have jetted from frying pan to fire. Collectively, the shuttles seemed to be moving with such a desperate frenzy that it was obvious that the cluster was in the throes of a major alert.

The bombardment began while Rance's troopers were just emerging from the blue room decontamination process. The ship shuddered, and the floor tilted. A number of men fell on their faces. There were muffled explosions in another part of the ship. Farther down the corridor, a duct burst and superheated steam roared from the breach. This in turn caused a short in a power transfer, and a shower of blue sparks cascaded through the clouds of swirling vapor. The ship lurched again, and there were more explosions. Smoke billowed down the corridor. Fire alarms were ringing. Rance clung to a doorjamb and tried to organize the men under his command. Their equipment was still on the conveyer, coming out of decontamination. Without a helmet, it was hard to make himself heard.

"Everyone suit up!"

The ship now seemed to be tilting steeply toward the bow. Rance knew that this was probably a localized illusion. The floor grav control in this sector had probably been jarred off line, and no one had yet managed to reset it. The knowledge didn't make the experience any easier to stand.

Dyrkin crawled up the sloping floor, dragging himself with one hand. His suit and helmet were tucked under his other arm. "So what are we supposed to do?"

"Get into your suit. The ship's going to jump before too long, and we've got to get back to our coffins. If we don't, we're going to be pulp."

Most of the survivors were at the bottom of the angled corridor, piled against an emergency bulkhead that had closed immediately after the first series of shocks. They were grazed and bruised, and a couple had been scalded by the steam, but otherwise the men seemed to be more or less intact. Rance clawed his way to the conveyer offload. He grabbed the first suit to emerge, slapped it against his chest, and let it crawl over his body. He fitted his helmet and then started sliding the rest of the suits and helmets down to the men.

"Dyrkin, get up here and help me!"

The floor righted itself, but the lights went out. A half dozen helmet lights came on in the gloom.

"Get that bulkhead open."

"Controls don't respond. It must have shorted out." "Somebody rig a bypass."

Hark's voice came over the communicator. "I got it."

The bulkhead rolled back. There were still lights in the next section of corridor. A public address was trilling urgently in nohan. The ship slammed sideways as if it had received a blow from a giant hammer. The men were thrown up against the left-hand wall. Those who were still struggling into their suits were thrown down on the deck.

"That's got to be a direct hit."

"You wouldn't know about a direct hit."

"The screens got to be buckling, though."

Rance hurried them along. "We've got to get back to the coffins if we don't want to make the jump on bare floor."

The men reached the next safety bulkhead. "This one's fused, too." "Hark…" "I got it."

The bulkhead opened on a sheet of flame that billowed out at them. It engulfed the trooper next to Hark. His suit was only half on, and he staggered back screaming with his underclothes on fire. Benset grabbed him and rolled him on the deck. Rance was yelling.

"Back! Back!"

The fleeing troopers ran headlong into a nohan fire-fighting crew in red ceramic armor. They were whistling in what sounded like the alien equivalent of panic, but at least they were headed for the fire.

"This way!"

They ran in single file down a narrow companionway. All around them, sirens were blaring, signifying widespread damage. There was a confused babble in their helmets. They came up against a third closed safety bulkhead. This time, the manual bypass refused to work, and Hark and Renchett had to crawl into the mechanism before they could get it to open. The others waited tensely.

"We ain't going to make it."

"Come on, you guys!"

"Will you shut the hell up and let us work? We're troopers, not riggers," Renchett called back tensely.

The bulkhead creaked open. It led to a free-fall shaft.

"If I remember right, this is the emergency shaft to one of the dropcraft bays," Dyrkin said.

As he spoke, the sound of the alarms changed.

"That's five minutes to jump."

"What do we do?"

"Into the shaft," Rance ordered.

"That's not the way to the messdecks."

"Don't argue, I got an idea."

The men ran to the end of the companionway and jumped. Even in their armor, they floated lightly down to a kneebend landing on the dropcraft launch deck. There were only two ships in a bay designed for five, but they had been locked down in preparation for the emergency. Rance pointed to the nearest craft.

"Inside, as fast as you can!"

"We can't fly that thing!"

"We're not going to fly it. We going to rack ourselves in and hope we can survive the jump in there. At least we'll be strapped down."

The ship reeled as it was hit repeatedly. Plasma cascaded down the far side of the bay, burning through anything it touched. There were more internal explosions.

"Are we capable of a jump?"

"Everybody inside! Now! There's no way we can make the coffins."

Dyrkin fell into step beside Rance as they ran for the grounded ship. "Is this going to work?"

"Your guess is as good as mine."

Training took over, and the troopers went to their places as if they were going on a mission. The restraint cages were snapped into place, and then the men waited. Renchett tried to strike a positive note in the terrifyi] communicator silence inside the ship.

"This may be almost as good as a coffin. At least we can't thrash around, and the suits should help some.

The calming voice was stretched out into an inhu scream. The damaged ship had gone into the jump.

The hallucinations were jagged and metallic, no doubt a result of the surroundings. Razor-sharp shards slice through tiny vulnerable figures as they scuttled through towering mazes of incredible pain. Steel jaws snapped and snarled and tore at naked flesh. Iron claws gouge^ 1 and ripped, spikes impaled, and needles slid through genitals and eyeballs. All the time they were falling, down toward other waiting rows of knives and teeth. Perhaps it was the noise that was the worst. A screeching, ripping scream, surface against surface, that con stantly rose in pitch and volume assaulted the ears and seared through the mind. Where the surfaces touched, sheets of flame and burning gas spiraled upward, broiling flesh and brain into red, raw, blind horror. The universe was a hollow steel drum being constantly pounded by some hammer of the gods. Metal. Metal. The prisoners of the hallucinations were chained to the interior of that drum. The vibrations rattled loose their teeth and caved in their chest cavities, shaking apart their very molecular structure. Ears and eyes and noses were bleeding. Blood ran down between their legs. It was oozing from their every pore. Hot blood was everywhere. They could taste it, boiling and angry against the background of the ever-present metal. As they drowned in blood, a terrible laughter started, a laughter so angry and mocking that it seemed to be a summation of all previous pain.

"At least it was a short jump."

Hark opened his eyes. He was no longer one with the pain of everyone around him. He was himself again, strapped in, inside the dropcraft. There was acrid smoke in the air from fires that flickered somewhere outside, but everything was real. It was Renchett who had spoken. He had unsnapped his restraint cage and removed his helmet. He was standing in the central aisle with a look of pure madness on his face. Abruptly, his eyes rolled back into his head, his legs gave way, and he crumpled to the deck. The laughter was still going on. That, too, was real and right in the ship with them. Hark unsnapped his own cage and tried to stand. His legs threatened to let him down, but he willed them to work for him. He tongued a whiff of pure oxygen from his helmet, and he felt a little better. He walked unsteadily to where Renchett had fallen. He knelt beside him, feeling his suit for some sign of life.

"Is he breathing?"

Hark looked up. Rance was standing behind him. The topman had also taken off his helmet. He looked green, and there was blood caked around his nose.

Hark shook his head. "I can't tell."

"Take off your helmet; the air's okay."

Hark put his ear to Renchett's mouth.

"Yeah, he's breathing."

"Okay, we'll see about his sanity later. Let's take a look at the others. Who's doing that goddamn laughing?" "It's down that way."

The laugher was clearly beyond help. His eyes had the vacancy of someone who had retreated into his own distant world and was never coming out. Hark wondered if the trooper was doomed to go on living in the hallucination for the rest of his life. Or maybe he had just seen the whole terrible joke. Hark was relieved that the man was a stranger to him. The next man was quite dead. His helmet had filled with blood. Hark started in momentary horror at the dark red faceplate. Had they been sharing a collective hallucination? How was that possible? Some of the others were coming to life. Cages were being unsnapped, and men were trying to stand. Most were going through the angry confusion that followed any jump. Renchett opened his eyes. He looked as sane as he had ever been.

"We made it?"

"We made it so far."

The final total of casualties was two dead, one insane, and one catatonic. Rance ordered them left where they were.

"We've no time to bury the dead. First we have to find out what our own prospects of life are."

Once all the survivors were back to normal, Rance led them out of the dropcraft. As they emerged onto the hangar deck, the Anah 5 let out a rumbling roar that ended in a drawn-out sigh. It was as if a part of the ship had just died.

"We'll head into the interior of the ship and try and hook up with whoever else is left. I don't have a clue what we're going to find."

At first, all they could find was death. The first corridor they walked down was nothing more than a burned-out shell. The troopers had to pick their way through the remains of an entire nohan damage-control party who had fried inside their armor. Farther on they came across three dead sluicers, huddled together in positions of mutual protection. They must have been caught out by the jump and succumbed to the heart-stopping horror of the hallucinations. In the final moments of terror they had clawed their lightweight radiation suits to shreds.

"Looks like we got lucky, holing up in that dropcraft."

Rance didn't bother to point out that their survival might have had more to do with his own quick thinking than with luck. "Let's keep on going."

Right from the start, it was obvious that the ship had taken a terrible pounding. Although there was still air and gravity throughout the ship, the lights had gone in a number of sections. Small fires burned all over, and there were major conflagrations in some of the larger compartments. Flares of energy arced across breaks in cables and the gaps in ruptured ducts. The decks were littered with debris, and repeatedly the squad had to climb over tangled barriers of wreckage. Their first encounter with life was less than encouraging. The two e-vac crewmen were wandering aimlessly. No one was home behind their blank eyes. So when the strange voice came over the communicators, it brought both shock and a release of fear. There was at least some kind of authority. For all their rebellious anger, the troopers still craved someone to tell them what to do.

"All uninjured personnel who are not engaged in repair or fire-fighting should proceed immediately to section eighty-two."

"What the hell is that?"

Although the voice had been speaking in their language, it was definitely not human.

"Section eighty-two is median country."

Rance halted and faced the men. "I think I know what that was."

"You don't look too happy about it."

"Anybody know what the interpreters are?"

"Some kind of alien, right?"

"We never see them. I heard they were ugly suckers, kind of blue globs with tentacles."

"Is it true they can talk everyone's language?"

"They're supposed to be part instinctive linguists and part telepaths. Their function is interspecies communication. If one of them is issuing orders, there can't be too many of us left alive on this hulk."

Section 82 was just inside the ship's hull. Its center was a transparent fire-control dome. Although most of the equipment was burned out and the dome was badly scarred, it was still intact and airtight. When Rance's squad arrived, there was already quite a big gathering in the large circular area. It was a gathering that only a few days earlier they would not have envisioned even in their wildest dreams. Almost every species on the ship was represented, including a number of aliens that the men had never seen before. The atmosphere was set for humans, and three of the alien species present were contained in their sealed environmental enclosures. The trooper who had described the interpreters as blue globs with tentacles had been very close to the truth. There were three of them in their tank, floating in a soup of methane and ammonia. One side of their mobile tank was covered in a complex of communication equipment. The lone lantere was still in its battle armor, as were the pair of wormlike dauquoi. Another tank contained a dim,' constantly changing shape.

Hark whispered to Dyrkin. "You know what that is?"

"It's a navigator, boy. I doubt even the medians saw a navigator before. Nobody ever sees the navigators. Nobody. They live in the heart of the ship in their own sealed environment."

"What exactly do they do?"

"What their name says. They navigate. Don't ask me to explain it in detail. They navigate the cluster through jumpspace. They know instinctively where we are, and they sculpt the jumps accordingly."

"Weird."

"You said it."

Including Rance's troopers, there were some thirty humans in the room. Most were rank and file, other troopers, spacecrew, riggers, sluicers, a motley bunch who had managed simply to survive both the attack and the jump. The medians stood apart from the others of their kind. Rance noted that there wasn't a single officer present.

The interpreter's voice came again.

"We are in a unique position. The Therem on this ship are all dead." The alien's voice echoed strangely; somehow it was speaking in a number of languages at once. "We have also lost the other ships in the cluster."

Everything with eyes looked up through the dome. It was true-they were alone in space. Beyond the dome, there were no other ships, just the stars. The closest object was a glowing cloud of gas that hung in space like a furled silver flag. The emptiness seemed very close.

"What of the Yal?"

"It's unlikely that they are able to track or follow us. They probably believe that this ship was destroyed along with the others."

One of the medians had a question.

"How badly is the ship damaged?"

"A number of levels are out of commission. We have no weapons capacity, but the ship has spatial mobility, and it's capable of short jumps."

"Do we know where we are?"

A dim green light glowed in the navigator's tank. The interpreter's equipment translated.

"We know where we are. We are away from the normal avenues of combat. Do you require the coordinates?"

The median shook his head. "It would appear that our duty is clear. We should proceed, in short stages, to the nearest Alliance base and await orders."

The lantere made a noise that was a cross between a grunt and a bellow.

"That might be open to a certain amount of discussion," came the translation.

The median's voice was cold and particular. "Surely any such discussion might be construed as treason when our duty is so obvious."

This time the interpreter spoke for itself. "There are those of us who don't see it as quite so obvious. Some might say that fate has freed us from the Therem and our duty might, in fact, be to pursue that fate."

"We still belong to the Therem Alliance," the median argued.

There was a rumble from the dauquoi. "You mean we still belong to the Therem." "We still belong to the war."

The navigator blinked and bubbled. "Ah, yes, the war. It was never a war of our choosing."

"There is no escaping the war."

"Do the other humans share their median's devotion to our master's war?" the interpreter asked.

Rance looked around, wondering who was being addressed. Then he realized that everyone had turned in his direction.

"I… don't think we're crazy about going back to the war. Is there any alternative?"

The median cut him off. "There is no alternative."

"Let the humans speak for themselves."

The median took a step forward. His tone was now coolly threatening. "My men don't need to speak. They do what they're told."

Rance started receiving a telepathic image. It showed him and his men burning down the medians. He realized that the men were seeing it, too. They were looking to him for direction. The median must have also received the image. He started to draw a sidearm.

"You men will stay exactly where you are!"

Rance fired without thinking. The other men did the same. The three medians were cut down by a withering hail of MEW lire. The troopers kept on firing until the medians' bodies were nothing more than shapeless blackened stumps. The interpreter was making a high-pitched keening. Rance slowly lowered his weapon.

"What now?"

The interpreter got its voice back under control. "You must pardon me. I find it very distressing to be in close proximity to death."

"We've just committed grand mutiny. What are we supposed to do now?"

"You have killed all your remaining superiors. What you do now is your decision."

"There are no more medians and no officers?"

"The human officers' level was destroyed in one of the first explosions. No one survived. The other medians died later."

"What do you intend to do?"

"We have a plan that we will outline."

The aliens' plan was a relatively simple one. They would take the Anah 5 and get as far away from both the Yal and the Therem as possible. Their offer to the troopers and the other humans still on board was a free ride to the planet of their choice. The best choice, as the aliens saw it, was a planet in a system three jumps away. It had recently been terraformed by a party from the Anah cluster.

"The existence of the planet would only have been recorded in the cluster's brain net. Now that has been destroyed; only we know that it's there. It's a bleak, bare place where it rains a lot of the time, but over the years," conditions will improve. The important thing is that the odds against being discovered are astronomical."

Rance shook his head. "I don't know if the surviving men can stand up to three jumps in quick succession."

"Di-trexane."

"What?"

"Di-trexane. It was issued to the medians and officers to ease them through the jump. It wasn't issued to you."

The anger among the men was like a physical presence.

"I fucking knew they had something."

There was real disappointment that nobody was left to kill. The jumps had been bad enough when they'd seemed unavoidable. Not it was like some hideous conspiracy of pain.

"But why?"

"The Therem move according to strange logic." "Don't they just."

There was one other major flaw in the aliens' plan. It was Renchett who voiced it. "We don't have no women." "I beg your pardon?"

"Women. We don't have none. It going to be a pretty sad little colony with just a bunch of old soldiers getting older."

"I'm sorry, I don't understand you." "Seems simple to me."

Rance stepped in. "Without females, our species cannot reproduce."

"We didn't know that."

Renchett was getting angry. "Everybody knows that."

"We are all specialists. None of us have a grounding in comparative biology."

"That's as may be. The question still remains. What are we going to do about it?"

The interpreter moved an unhappy tentacle. "There seems to be nothing we can do about it."

Renchett bristled. "There damn well is."

"There is?"

"We could head back to the last recstar and liberate the women there."

There was a murmur of agreement from the humans. Then the lantere boomed.

"That's impossible. Even if this ship had operational weapons and shields, it couldn't take 6n an asteroid base."

The other aliens signified agreement.

"We can't go back into combat space."

"And we ain't sitting around on some mudball waiting to be the last one to die."

Rance held up a hand. "Wait a minute. There could be a way to do this. How many fighting men could the ship muster if it really came to it?"

"Perhaps two hundred if we armed the technical personnel."

"We could take a recstar with two hundred motivated troops."

Renchett grinned. "And we'd sure as hell be motivated."

The navigator emitted bubbles. "It's impossible."

"No, it's not. Listen, we could approach the recstar pretending to be exactly what we are, the lone crippled survivor of a destroyed cluster. They must know by now that the Anah was wiped out in the JD4 system, and they won't suspect anything. We limp in, and we dock. While we're docking, the ground troops drop to the surface of the asteroid. We hit 'em hard before they know what's happening. The women will join with us. We'll have the ship ready-powered so we can jump immediately everyone's back on board."

The interpreter conjured an image of men silently floating down across the asteroid's rocky terrain. "It has a certain plausibility."

The dauquoi didn't agree. "The rest of us can't risk our new freedom for the comfort of one species." The lantere rumbled agreement.

Rance looked meaningfully at his weapon. "As a representative of that species, I can assure you all that we take our comfort very seriously."

Topman Benset moved up beside Rance. "It's more than comfort. It's the continuing freedom of our species. We're prepared to fight for that."

There was a sudden tension in the dome. The interpreter started pumping out calming abstracts, but they had little effect on the increasingly belligerent lantere.

"Are you threatening us?"

"We're trying not to, but if we don't do this our way, I think you're going to have problems with our future cooperation. We do have the firepower."

Weapons were being hefted to emphasize the point. The interpreter seemed to accept the situation.

"I think we have to go along with the humans' proposal."

The lantere was still being stubborn.

"If we were to attack the asteroid base, I could find myself fighting against my own kind."

Rance nodded grimly at the charred bodies of the medians.

"That can sometimes be the price of your freedom."

There was a long silence. Finally the lantere gave in.

"Very well, I will agree to this foolhardy expedition, but I still have grave doubts."

Renchett whooped and spun his weapon. "Let's get ourselves some girls!"

Rance looked at him. He wasn't smiling.

"This may not be that easy."