Mercenary

by Piers Anthony

  “Would you have given him the job?”

  Smith laughed. “No way, sir! You can’t train men by breaking heads! But that’s the way some of the men see it. There’ll be discord, sir.”

  I called in Lieutenant Commander Repro. He had a spaced-out attitude, but he was functional. That addiction bothered me increasingly, and I knew I could not forever postpone taking action. “Are you familiar with the Heller/Valencia case?”

  “Certainly, sir.” Personalities were in his bailiwick.

  “What’s your advice?”

  “You’ll never satisfy Heller without giving him promotion and responsibility, and he’s not fit for it. You need to find a slot for him that has rank and responsibility without direct command of men. Is there such a spot?”

  I looked at Sergeant Smith. “Is there?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But you must also satisfy his pride,” Repro continued. “He’s so angry, and so are a number of others in the unit. They think you have been unfair, and they’re taking flak from their peers in other units about reverse discrimination. You’ve got to give them some satisfaction.”

  Leadership has its limitations. “How?”

  “A challenge match, sir.” Repro’s brow furrowed. “Odd, though, that Heller even made an issue, when he could simply have transferred out. Something’s not rebounding.”

  A steel ball not favoring the pattern; I knew what he meant. But his advice seemed good. That was why I arranged a challenge match with Corporal Heller.

  We took off our marks of rank and set it up as a public training exercise, with the rest of the unit watching. We started at the center of the ship, back to back in the fashion of a duel. We each carried a foil, a pugil stick, and a bomb in addition to our standard gear, attached by snap-free fasteners. They looked clumsy but added only about fifteen pounds to the thirty-five-pound suit assemblies. We could handle the weight, especially in free-fall and with suit-jets to propel us.

  This match was well refereed; just about every enlisted man wanted to see the old man defend his turf, so to speak. (Age has nothing to do with the designation; it is the slang for any unit commander.) It was not necessary for me to win to retain their respect; it was necessary for me to show the same qualities I required of them: skill, courage, stamina, and fighting spirit. But if I lost, I would have to appoint Heller squad leader, and that would be a minor disaster. There was also the matter of pride.

  Sergeant Smith gave the command: “Move out!”

  We bounced away from each other and floated toward opposite airlocks. I was the Raider, and Heller was the Defender; these roles had been chosen by lot. It was my job to disable the enemy ship, and his to protect it.

  I spun the wheels and worked the handles of the inner panel of the lock. Everything was manual, of course; airlocks are too important to trust to powered machines. There was an art to navigating an airlock swiftly, and it was important now; the first man out had a definite advantage.

  The portal opened; I jumped down in, for there was gee here at the rim of the ship. Gee, of course, is more than an abbreviation for gravity; it means weight in space, in whatever manner it occurs. I closed and secured the inner panel, then struck the pressure-release valve. The air of the lock bled out rapidly into space. This might be considered wasteful, but it was fast, and a powered air pump would be suspect during battle conditions, as well as slower. What use to save a little air and lose a ship? Simplicity and speed were of the essence.

  My suit became rigid as the pressure dropped, but the hinges in the limbs kept it flexible where it needed to be. Civilian suits are flexible all over, and the really good ones fit like a second skin; in fact, a healthy young woman can be spectacular in space, the more so because she’s untouchable. But the military suits were old-fashioned, bulbous-limbed, and heavy and rigid between the hinges. But they were cheap and reliable, and they provided a convenient cushion of air around the body that enabled a person to remain in space as long as his oxygen held out, and sometimes that was critically important.

  I dropped out as the outer panel opened, caught one of the external handholds, and flipped over to plant my magnetic boots against the hull. These boots certainly would have been useful when I was working on the hull of the refugee bubble, so long ago. Then I had had to depend on a tether to keep me from drifting free in space, and it had been nervous business.

  The panel slid back into place automatically, spring-loaded. I stepped on the fiber panel, where the force of magnetism was muted, and squatted. I waited for the buoy to come into sight; the spin of the ship brought me around to it in a few seconds. Then I leaped as hard as I could toward that buoy. I seemed to depart the ship at an angle, but this was mostly illusion, because the ship was spinning under me. Over me; I was falling away from it. I had compensated for the tangent of my centrifugal departure when I jumped; I was right on course for the buoy, which was two miles away. I was traveling at close to forty miles an hour, so would reach it in about three minutes. The buoy represented the halfway point in the course; in an actual mission I would make a jump correction here and home in on the enemy ship. This time it was trickier; I had to loop around the buoy and return to the Copperhead, now redesignated as the Enemy Craft. That meant using my suit-jets to kill my inertia and get me moving back. That could be awkward, but my officer training had prepared me well for this. I could make the loop with fuel to spare.

  Now I spotted Heller. He was way behind me and proceeding slowly, no more than twenty-five miles per hour. Good enough.

  I approached the buoy, oriented, and used my jet to decelerate. I may have mentioned that technically there is no such thing as deceleration, only acceleration, but the old concepts remain useful even when erroneous. Why say negative acceleration when deceleration makes it so much clearer? At any rate, I was braking, reducing my velocity relative to the buoy.

  I came to a “halt” in space just beyond the buoy where three enlisted men, referees, perched in their suits. They saluted cheerfully, and I returned it, though no salutes were required in this circumstance. I nudged to the side, then accelerated again, having looped it. The enlistees waved. Heller was only now coming close.

  Then I remembered: He was the Defender. He didn’t have to loop the buoy; he just had to defend the ship he started from. He had come out slowly not to race me but to stop me, and he had saved all his fuel. Now he was meeting me, and my challenge had just begun. All he had to do was grab me and haul me out to space; if I used my jet to oppose his, my fuel would run out before his, and I would not be able to reach the target craft.

  My best bet was to outmaneuver him: to get past and accelerate so that he could not catch up. But now he used his jet, angling to intercept me. I could not stay on a straight-line course.

  I tilted my body and jetted to the side. Heller tilted and jetted, again on an interception course. Maneuvering in space in a suit takes skill; I had it, but so did he. In fact, he was better at it than most enlisted men were; he must have had more aptitude for this than our supervisory personnel had judged. Why hadn’t he transferred to a unit specializing in this sort of thing? Inexorably he closed on me.

  He had equivalent skill and more fuel remaining than I did; I could not avoid him. I would have to fight.

  I reached over my shoulder and drew my foil. This was a long, thin, round-bladed sword with a button on the end. On a real mission a rapier would be used, the sharp point being used to puncture the enemy’s suit. This was the manner that swords came to space, anachronistic as it might seem: There was hardly a more efficient method to dispatch a person in space than simply poking a hole in his suit. Small hand-lasers could be devastating on bare flesh, but the material of military space suits resisted this, spreading the heat rapidly and dissipating it harmlessly. A ship-mounted laser could readily take out a suited man, of course, but a hand-laser was a mere toy in comparison. It was not true that a mirrored surface could stop a laser, as many folk believed; the ray ignored the polish and m
elted the backing, as it was not strictly a visual phenomenon. A mirror might help deflect a glancing shot, and some suits were polished with this in mind. But only hand-lasers made glancing shots; a ship-laser could send a beam several feet in diameter, bathing the whole suit, and there was no defense. The heat had nowhere to dissipate. Of course, it was uneconomic to take out a single man with a ship-laser; such power is by no means cheap. So the net effect was to eliminate lasers from this action. Small projectile weapons were notoriously unreliable in a vacuum, even those supposedly designed for it. They tended to misfire or explode in the hand, and the recoil could set a man spinning wildly. Thrown knives or bombs depended on the accuracy of the throwers and could be dodged if any distance was involved. So it came down to the recoverable sword point, which had no permanent recoil and could be used as often as needed. Not the slashing type of sword; that was too easy to parry or blunt, and was too unbalancing to swing unless the user had good anchorage. But the direct thrust of a rapier was difficult to avoid or counter.

  So we did indeed have old-fashioned swordplay in modern space, and swordsmanship was a viable Navy skill.

  The foil, of course, had a blunted point. The button of the tip would, when depressed with sufficient force, complete an electrical circuit that registered as a score. A score anywhere on a space suit suggested a puncture, and that, in a real combat situation with sharp points, would be lethal. It did not have to be a vital area of the body, and no blood had to flow; a sleeve puncture was just about as fatal as a heart puncture. A pinhole leak could be patched before significant deflation occurred, but a sword puncture would blow out the suit too rapidly for remedy, and if it didn’t, surely the victim would be too busy trying to stop the leak to continue the fight and would be easy prey for the next strike.

  But this discussion becomes tedious. Heller had his sword out. He wasted no time; he jetted right at me, the sword point leading. I reacted automatically, countering his thrust and using the contact as leverage to move myself out of the way. I could have struck forward at his torso, but that would only have resulted in mutual scoring. Who won if both died? The suicide ploy was only for those who were dying, anyway. He shot past me harmlessly.

  Harmlessly? I realized that I had seen something alarming. Probably a misperception, but I wanted to be sure.

  He spun in space, using the catlike gyration needed to reorient when there was nothing to push against. It is an acquired skill, but military men are so often exposed to free-fall that most pick it up readily. The body had to be oriented so that the fixed suit-jet would aim in the desired direction; orientation plus thrust equaled motion.

  This time I jetted toward him, my point extended. The niceties of fencing don’t work well in free-fall, because the body is not braced. Heller did not seek to parry me; he extended his own weapon. We were ready to suffer mutual “death.”

  This time I saw the point, uncapped. He had a rapier, not a foil!

  This man really was out to kill me.

  Abruptly I parried, shoving him out of the way. I spun in place and jetted at him again immediately. The ship was now directly behind me, and my fuel was low; this was the last such maneuver I could make. I would lose this aspect of the match if I got stranded in space, but that was not my present concern. I had my life to protect!

  Heller spun to meet me, his sword coming at me. I parried it again-and grabbed it with my other hand. I let go my own weapon, putting both hands on his rapier, wrenching it from his grasp. He hadn’t expected this! I put my two boots up against his chest and shoved him violently away from me. He spun out toward the buoy, and the recoil sent me spinning toward the ship as I had planned.

  I reoriented and used the last of my fuel to accelerate toward the ship. I now had a head start, but Heller had plenty of fuel. Would he come after me without his rapier?

  He did. He gained on me and would have intercepted me before I reached the ship, but now I had his rapier, and I menaced him with it, keeping him at bay. Rather than risk my thrust, he avoided me and preceded me to the ship. I could not prevent that; he would have the advantage of being set on the hull as I arrived. I had no choice except to continue my course; I was out of fuel. If I missed the ship, I would be helpless.

  But I had faced death before and had seen my family and friends die. I had no liking for violent death, but this immediate threat only galvanized me to better performance.

  As I moved toward the ship, I pondered. Why was Heller trying to kill me? He had a grudge, true; but he could settle that by defeating me in this match and getting his promotion. He was throwing that away, for he had to know he faced court-martial and summary execution the moment he tried seriously to kill his commander. His life was on the line now, and he hadn’t had to put it there. There was a missing element.

  There were more witnesses floating beside the ship. I could signal them at any time, but they did not know how this contest had changed and might only get hurt themselves, so I let them be. This was my own fight.

  Someone must have put Heller up to this. His insistence on staying with my unit, and trying for a position for which he was unsuited, now fell into place as part of a more insidious plot. But who or what could have caused him to go to this extreme? Well, if there were some understanding within the Navy, so that he would face a lenient court, and if he claimed he hadn’t known his weapon was pointed—an error by Supply—and I were not alive to refute him, he just might get off with a nominal punishment. A year in detention, reduction in grade, a general discharge from the service. Then he could collect his private reward: perhaps enough money to make the risk worthwhile.

  Heller was surely a tool. Who was behind this? Who had sufficient money and influence to arrange this—the murder and the nominal punishment? Who had motive to eliminate me?

  There was an answer: QYV.

  QYV had left me alone for years, ever since Chiron. It seemed his activity had resumed. He still wanted that key and knew I would not yield it while I lived. So he was trying to kill me and somehow recover the key from my body, gambling that it was the original. It made a certain sense.

  I experienced two reactions, of roughly equal and opposite nature. The first was curiosity. Who was QYV, and how did he wield so much power? What secret did the magnetic coding of the key unlock, that was at once so quiescent as to be able to wait for years for recovery, yet so important that people could be killed for it?

  My other reaction was anger. Twice QYV had set traps for me, and twice I had survived them. Now he was doing it a third time. I fancy myself an intelligent rather than a vindictive man, but there are limits. It was time to deal with QYV.

  These thoughts took only a moment. Now I was sailing in toward the ship, and Heller, the agent of this annoyance, was waiting for me with his pugil stick.

  The pugil stick is a training device dating back six or seven centuries. Surely the name derives from the English word pugilism, itself derived from the Latin pugil, a boxer. In other words, it was a boxing stick. It was originally designed to resemble, in mass and length, the primitive projectile weapon of historical Earth called the rifle. You see, the liability of all projectile weapons is that they constantly require new projectiles, the old ones being lost by use. When the ammunition is exhausted—as might happen when a unit is surrounded or has its supplies interrupted, or when the press of battle prevents timely reloading—the empty rifles, laser pistols, blasters, or whatever become clubs or swords. A knife could be affixed to the end of the ancient rifle, so it came to resemble a crude spear, and in that condition was called a bayonet. Unfortunately bayonets were not ideal for training, being too clumsy and deadly. So the pugil stick became a mock-up of the bayonet, padded and rounded so that it was difficult to actually harm an opponent. The center was narrow, for a handy grip, while the ends were cylindrical masses; the whole vaguely resembled an ancient barbell. Protective helmets were worn for such practice, and heavy gloves, and crotch armor. Still, it was possible to inflict quite savage punishment w
ith such a device; a blow solid enough to knock down an opponent was not lightly dismissed. On occasion, in the early days, men were beaten to death with the pugil sticks, and on occasion, such pugilism had been banned. But I had instructed Sergeant Smith to train my men with it, and the present case was an example why.

  In the Jupiter Navy we used the sticks in new ways. They were, of course, useful for inculcating an aggressive attitude in trainees; it might fairly be said that there are no pacifists with pugil sticks. The man who hesitates to strike is doomed to be struck; he soon learns to fight back. The exercises are competitive with squad, platoon, and company champions. I had become a platoon champion in my day, using my talent to comprehend the nature of an opponent. All this had been standard in military training since the pugil stick was developed, but in space and/or free-fall, there is a new dimension. The stick is no longer a substitute for a more effective weapon; it is a weapon itself.

  I could tell by the way Heller held his stick, and by his stance on the hull, that he was expert in this form of combat. He was large and strong; there he had a natural advantage over me, for I am of average dimension. But already I was coming to grasp his nature—as I should have done before this match ever started— and this would enable me to compensate. There is more to pugilism than mass and strength. This would be a fairer match than he supposed.