by Joe Haldeman
“As you know, you are not quite perfectly insulated. These rocks are about the temperature of the soles of your boots. If you try to stand on a slab of hydrogen, the same thing will happen to you. Except that the rock is already dead.
“The reason for this behavior is that the rock makes a slick interface with the ice—a little puddle of liquid hydrogen—and rides a few molecules above the liquid on a cushion of hydrogen vapor. This makes the rock or you a frictionless bearing as far as the ice is concerned, and you can’t stand up without any friction under your boots.
“After you have lived in your suit for a month or so you should be able to survive falling down, but right now you just don’t know enough. Watch.”
The captain flexed and hopped up onto the slab. His feet shot out from under him and he twisted around in midair, landing on hands and knees. He slipped off and stood on the ground.
“The idea is to keep your exhaust fins from making contact with the frozen gas. Compared to the ice they are as hot as a blast furnace, and contact with any weight behind it will result in an explosion.”
After that demonstration, we walked around for another hour or so and returned to the billet. Once through the airlock, we had to mill around for a while, letting the suits get up to something like room temperature. Somebody came up and touched helmets with me.
“William?” She had McCoy stenciled above her faceplate.
“Hi, Sean. Anything special?”
“I just wondered if you had anyone to sleep with tonight.”
That’s right; I’d forgotten. There wasn’t any sleeping roster here. Everybody chose his own partner. “Sure, I mean, uh, no…no, I haven’t asked anybody. Sure, if you want to…”
“Thanks, William. See you later.” I watched her walk away and thought that if anybody could make a fighting suit look sexy, it’d be Sean. But even she couldn’t.
Cortez decided we were warm enough and led us to the suit room, where we backed the things into place and hooked them up to the charging plates. (Each suit had a little chunk of plutonium that would power it for several years, but we were supposed to run on fuel cells as much as possible.) After a lot of shuffling around, everybody finally got plugged in and we were allowed to unsuit—ninety-seven naked chickens squirming out of bright green eggs. It was cold—the air, the floor and especially the suits—and we made a pretty disorderly exit toward the lockers.
I slipped on tunic, trousers and sandals and was still cold. I took my cup and joined the line for soya. Everybody was jumping up and down to keep warm.
“How c-cold, do you think, it is, M-Mandella?” That was McCoy.
“I don’t, even want, to think, about it.” I stopped jumping and rubbed myself as briskly as possible, while holding a cup in one hand. “At least as cold as Missouri was.”
“Ung…wish they’d, get some, fucken, heat in, this place.” It always affects the small women more than anybody else. McCoy was the littlest one in the company, a waspwaist doll barely five feet high.
“They’ve got the airco going. It can’t be long now.”
“I wish I, was a big, slab of, meat like, you.”
I was glad she wasn’t.
Six
We had our first casualty on the third day, learning how to dig holes.
With such large amounts of energy stored in a soldier’s weapons, it wouldn’t be practical for him to hack out a hole in the frozen ground with the conventional pick and shovel. Still, you can launch grenades all day and get nothing but shallow depressions—so the usual method is to bore a hole in the ground with the hand laser, drop a timed charge in after it’s cooled down and, ideally, fill the hole with stuff. Of course, there’s not much loose rock on Charon, unless you’ve already blown a hole nearby.
The only difficult thing about the procedure is in getting away. To be safe, we were told, you’ve got to either be behind something really solid, or be at least a hundred meters away. You’ve got about three minutes after setting the charge, but you can’t just sprint away. Not safely, not on Charon.
The accident happened when we were making a really deep hole, the kind you want for a large underground bunker. For this, we had to blow a hole, then climb down to the bottom of the crater and repeat the procedure again and again until the hole was deep enough. Inside the crater we used charges with a five-minute delay, but it hardly seemed enough time—you really had to go it slow, picking your way up the crater’s edge.
Just about everybody had blown a double hole; everybody but me and three others. I guess we were the only ones paying really close attention when Bovanovitch got into trouble. All of us were a good two hundred meters away. With my image converter turned up to about forty power, I watched her disappear over the rim of the crater. After that, I could only listen in on her conversation with Cortez.
“I’m on the bottom, Sergeant.” Normal radio procedure was suspended for maneuvers like this; nobody but the trainee and Cortez was allowed to broadcast.
“Okay, move to the center and clear out the rubble. Take your time. No rush until you pull the pin.”
“Sure, Sergeant.” We could hear small echoes of rocks clattering, sound conduction through her boots. She didn’t say anything for several minutes.
“Found bottom.” She sounded a little out of breath.
“Ice or rock?”
“Oh, it’s rock, Sergeant. The greenish stuff.”
“Use a low setting, then. One point two, dispersion four.”
“God darn it, Sergeant, that’ll take forever.”
“Yeah, but that stuff’s got hydrated crystals in it—heat it up too fast and you might make it fracture. And we’d just have to leave you there, girl. Dead and bloody.”
“Okay, one point two dee four.” The inside edge of the crater flickered red with reflected laser light.
“When you get about half a meter deep, squeeze it up to dee two.”
“Roger.” It took her exactly seventeen minutes, three of them at dispersion two. I could imagine how tired her shooting arm was.
“Now rest for a few minutes. When the bottom of the hole stops glowing, arm the charge and drop it in. Then walk out, understand? You’ll have plenty of time.”
“I understand, Sergeant. Walk out.” She sounded nervous. Well, you don’t often have to tiptoe away from a twenty-microton tachyon bomb. We listened to her breathing for a few minutes.
“Here goes.” Faint slithering sound, the bomb sliding down.
“Slow and easy now. You’ve got five minutes.”
“Y-yeah. Five.” Her footsteps started out slow and regular. Then, after she started climbing the side, the sounds were less regular, maybe a little frantic. And with four minutes to go—
“Shit!” A loud scraping noise, then clatters and bumps. “Shit-shit.”
“What’s wrong, private?”
“Oh, shit.” Silence. “Shit!”
“Private, you don’t wanna get shot, you tell me what’s wrong!”
“I…shit, I’m stuck. Fucken rockslide…shit…DO SOMETHING! I can’t move, shit I can’t move I, I—”
“Shut up! How deep?”
“Can’t move my, shit, my fucken legs. HELP ME—”
“Then goddammit use your arms—push! You can move a ton with each hand.” Three minutes.
She stopped cussing and started to mumble, in Russian, I guess, a low monotone. She was panting, and you could hear rocks tumbling away.
“I’m free.” Two minutes.
“Go as fast as you can.” Cortez’s voice was flat, emotionless.
At ninety seconds she appeared, crawling over the rim. “Run, girl…You better run.” She ran five or six steps and fell, skidded a few meters and got back up, running; fell again, got up again—
It looked as though she was going pretty fast, but she had only covered about thirty meters when Cortez said, “All right, Bovanovitch, get down on your stomach and lie still.” Ten seconds, but she didn’t hear or she wanted to get just a little mor
e distance, and she kept running, careless leaping strides, and at the high point of one leap there was a flash and a rumble, and something big hit her below the neck, and her headless body spun off end over end through space, trailing a red-black spiral of flash-frozen blood that settled gracefully to the ground, a path of crystal powder that nobody disturbed while we gathered rocks to cover the juiceless thing at the end of it.
That night Cortez didn’t lecture us, didn’t even show up for night-chop. We were all very polite to each other and nobody was afraid to talk about it.
I sacked with Rogers—everybody sacked with a good friend—but all she wanted to do was cry, and she cried so long and so hard that she got me doing it, too.
Seven
“Fire team A—move out!” The twelve of us advanced in a ragged line toward the simulated bunker. It was about a kilometer away, across a carefully prepared obstacle course. We could move pretty fast, since all of the ice had been cleared from the field, but even with ten days’ experience we weren’t ready to do more than an easy jog.
I carried a grenade launcher loaded with tenth-microton practice grenades. Everybody had their laser-fingers set at a point oh eight dee one, not much more than a flashlight. This was a simulated attack—the bunker and its robot defender cost too much to use once and be thrown away.
“Team B, follow. Team leaders, take over.”
We approached a clump of boulders at about the halfway mark, and Potter, my team leader, said, “Stop and cover.” We clustered behind the rocks and waited for Team B.
Barely visible in their blackened suits, the dozen men and women whispered by us. As soon as they were clear, they jogged left, out of our line of sight.
“Fire!” Red circles of light danced a half-klick downrange, where the bunker was just visible. Five hundred meters was the limit for these practice grenades; but I might luck out, so I lined the launcher up on the image of the bunker, held it at a forty-five degree angle and popped off a salvo of three.
Return fire from the bunker started before my grenades even landed. Its automatic lasers were no more powerful than the ones we were using, but a direct hit would deactivate your image converter, leaving you blind. It was setting down a random field of fire, not even coming close to the boulders we were hiding behind.
Three magnesium-bright flashes blinked simultaneously about thirty meters short of the bunker. “Mandella! I thought you were supposed to be good with that thing.”
“Damn it, Potter—it only throws half a klick. Once we get closer, I’ll lay ’em right on top, every time.”
“Sure you will.” I didn’t say anything. She wouldn’t be team leader forever. Besides, she hadn’t been such a bad girl before the power went to her head.
Since the grenadier is the assistant team leader, I was slaved into Potter’s radio and could hear B team talk to her.
“Potter, this is Freeman. Losses?”
“Potter here—no, looks like they were concentrating on you.”
“Yeah, we lost three. Right now we’re in a depression about eighty, a hundred meters down from you. We can give cover whenever you’re ready.”
“Okay, start.” Soft click: “A team, follow me.” She slid out from behind the rock and turned on the faint pink beacon beneath her powerpack. I turned on mine and moved out to run alongside of her, and the rest of the team fanned out in a trailing wedge. Nobody fired while A team laid down a cover for us.
All I could hear was Potter’s breathing and the soft crunch-crunch of my boots. Couldn’t see much of anything, so I tongued the image converter up to a log two intensification. That made the image kind of blurry but adequately bright. Looked like the bunker had B team pretty well pinned down; they were getting quite a roasting. All of their return fire was laser. They must have lost their grenadier.
“Potter, this is Mandella. Shouldn’t we take some of the heat off B team?”
“Soon as I can find us good enough cover. Is that all right with you? Private?” She’d been promoted to corporal for the duration of the exercise.
We angled to the right and lay down behind a slab of rock. Most of the others found cover nearby, but a few had to hug the ground.
“Freeman, this is Potter.”
“Potter, this is Smithy. Freeman’s out; Samuels is out. We only have five men left. Give us some cover so we can get—”
“Roger, Smithy.” Click. “Open up, A team. The B’s are really hurtin’.”
I peeked out over the edge of the rock. My rangefinder said that the bunker was about three hundred fifty meters away, still pretty far. I aimed a smidgeon high and popped three, then down a couple of degrees, three more. The first ones overshot by about twenty meters; then the second salvo flared up directly in front of the bunker. I tried to hold on that angle and popped fifteen, the rest of the magazine, in the same direction.
I should have ducked down behind the rock to reload, but I wanted to see where the fifteen would land, so I kept my eyes on the bunker while I reached back to unclip another magazine—
When the laser hit my image converter, there was a red glare so intense it seemed to go right through my eyes and bounce off the back of my skull. It must have been only a few milliseconds before the converter overloaded and went blind, but the bright green afterimage hurt my eyes for several minutes.
Since I was officially “dead,” my radio automatically cut off, and I had to remain where I was until the mock battle was over. With no sensory input besides the feel of my own skin (and it ached where the image converter had shone on it) and the ringing in my ears, it seemed like an awfully long time. Finally, a helmet clanked against mine.
“You okay, Mandella?” Potter’s voice.
“Sorry, I died of boredom twenty minutes ago.”
“Stand up and take my hand.” I did so and we shuffled back to the billet. It must have taken over an hour. She didn’t say anything more, all the way back—it’s a pretty awkward way to communicate—but after we’d cycled through the airlock and warmed up, she helped me undo my suit. I got ready for a mild tongue-lashing, but when the suit popped open, before I could even get my eyes adjusted to the light, she grabbed me around the neck and planted a wet kiss on my mouth.
“Nice shooting, Mandella.”
“Huh?”
“Didn’t you see? Of course not…The last salvo before you got hit—four direct hits. The bunker decided it was knocked out, and all we had to do was walk the rest of the way.”
“Great.” I scratched my face under the eyes, and some dry skin flaked off. She giggled.
“You should see yourself. You look like—”
“All personnel, report to the assembly area.” That was the captain’s voice. Bad news, usually.
She handed me a tunic and sandals. “Let’s go.” The assembly area-chop hall was just down the corridor. There was a row of roll call buttons at the door; I pressed the one beside my name. Four of the names were covered with black tape. That was good, only four. We hadn’t lost anybody during today’s maneuvers.
The captain was sitting on the raised dais, which at least meant we didn’t have to go through the tench-hut bullshit. The place filled up in less than a minute; a soft chime indicated the roll was complete.
Captain Stott didn’t stand up. “You did fairly well today. Nobody killed, and I expected some to be. In that respect you exceeded my expectations but in every other respect you did a poor job.
“I am glad you’re taking good care of yourselves, because each of you represents an investment of over a million dollars and one-fourth of a human life.
“But in this simulated battle against a very stupid robot enemy, thirty-seven of you managed to walk into laser fire and be killed in a simulated way, and since dead people require no food you will require no food, for the next three days. Each person who was a casualty in this battle will be allowed only two liters of water and a vitamin ration each day.”
We knew enough not to groan or anything, but there were some pretty
disgusted looks, especially on the faces that had singed eyebrows and a pink rectangle of sunburn framing their eyes.
“Mandella.”
“Sir?”
“You are far and away the worst-burned casualty. Was your image converter set on normal?”
Oh, shit. “No, sir. Log two.”
“I see. Who was your team leader for the exercises?”
“Acting Corporal Potter, sir.”
“Private Potter, did you order him to use image intensification?”
“Sir, I…I don’t remember.”
“You don’t. Well, as a memory exercise you may join the dead people. Is that satisfactory?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Dead people get one last meal tonight and go on no rations starting tomorrow. Are there any questions?” He must have been kidding. “All right. Dismissed.”
I selected the meal that looked as if it had the most calories and took my tray over to sit by Potter.
“That was a quixotic damn thing to do. But thanks.”
“Nothing. I’ve been wanting to lose a few pounds anyway.” I couldn’t see where she was carrying any extra.
“I know a good exercise,” I said. She smiled without looking up from her tray. “Have anybody for tonight?”
“Kind of thought I’d ask Jeff…”
“Better hurry, then. He’s lusting after Maejima.” Well, that was mostly true. Everybody did.
“I don’t know. Maybe we ought to save our strength. That third day…”
“Come on.” I scratched the back of her hand lightly with a fingernail. “We haven’t sacked since Missouri. Maybe I’ve learned something new.”
“Maybe you have.” She tilted her head up at me in a sly way. “Okay.”
Actually, she was the one with the new trick. The French corkscrew, she called it. She wouldn’t tell me who taught it to her, though. I’d like to shake his hand. Once I got my strength back.
Eight
The two weeks’ training around Miami Base eventually cost us eleven lives. Twelve, if you count Dahlquist. I guess having to spend the rest of your life on Charon with a hand and both legs missing is close enough to dying.