The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century

by Harry Turtledove

  And he had given her the ship and the signal code. Because of him she was on her way to the moon, to the Moon Base. He had made it possible.

  He had been right about the bomb, after all. It had been designed with knowledge of the other types, the David Type and the Wounded Soldier Type. And the Klaus Type. Not designed by human beings. It had been designed by one of the underground factories, apart from all human contact.

  The line of Tassos came up to him. Hendricks braced himself, watching them calmly. The familiar face, the belt, the heavy shirt, the bomb carefully in place.

  The bomb—

  As the Tassos reached for him, a last ironic thought drifted through Hendricks’s mind. He felt a little better, thinking about it. The bomb. Made by the Second Variety to destroy the other varieties. Made for that end alone.

  They were already beginning to design weapons to use against each other.

  Joe W. Haldeman

  Praised for its authentic portrayal of the emotional detachment and psychological dislocation of soldiers in a millennium-long future war, Joe Haldeman’s first science fiction novel, The Forever War, won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards when it was published in 1974 and was later adapted into a three-part graphic-novel series. Since then, Haldeman has returned to the theme of future war several times, notably in his trilogy Worlds, Worlds Apart, and Worlds Enough and Time, about a future Earth facing nuclear extinction, and Forever Peace, a further exploration of the dehumanizing potential of armed conflict. Haldeman’s other novels include Mindbridge, All My Sins Remembered, and the alternate-world opus The Hemingway Hoax, expanded from his Nebula Award–winning novella of the same name. Haldeman’s stories have been collected in Infinite Dreams and Dealing in Futures, and several of his essays are mixed with fiction in Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds. His powerful non– science fiction writing includes War Year, drawn from experiences during his tour of duty in Vietnam, and 1968, a portrait of America in the Vietnam era. He has also coedited the anthologies Body Armor 2000, Space-fighters, and Supertanks.

  Joe W. Haldeman

  1

  “TONIGHT WE’RE GOING to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.” The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn’t look five years older than I. Ergo, as they say, he couldn’t possibly ever have killed a man, not in combat, silently or otherwise.

  I already knew eighty ways to kill people, though most of them were pretty noisy. I sat up straight in my chair and assumed a look of polite attention and fell asleep with my eyes open. So did most everybody else. We’d learned that they never schedule anything important for these after-chop classes.

  The projector woke me up and I sat through a short movie showing the “eight silent ways.” Some of the actors must have been brainwipes, since they were actually killed.

  After the movie a girl in the front row raised her hand. The sergeant nodded at her and she rose to parade rest. Not bad-looking, but kind of chunky about the neck and shoulders. Everybody gets that way after carrying a heavy pack around for a couple of months.

  “Sir”—we had to call sergeants “sir” until graduation—“most of those methods, really, they looked…kind of silly.”

  “For instance?”

  “Like killing a man with a blow to the kidneys, from an entrenching tool. I mean, when would you actually just have an entrenching tool, and no gun or knife? And why not just bash him over the head with it?”

  “He might have a helmet on,” he said reasonably.

  “Besides, Taurans probably don’t even have kidneys!”

  He shrugged. “Probably they don’t.” This was 1997, and we’d never seen a Tauran: hadn’t even found any pieces of Taurans bigger than a scorched chromosome. “But their body chemistry is similar to ours, and we have to assume they’re similarly complex creatures. They must have weaknesses, vulnerable spots. You have to find out where they are.

  “That’s the important thing.” He stabbed a finger at the screen. “That’s why those eight convicts got caulked for your benefit…you’ve got to find out how to kill Taurans, and be able to do it whether you have a megawatt laser or just an emery board.”

  She sat back down, not looking too convinced.

  “Any more questions?” Nobody raised a hand.

  “O.K.—tench-hut!” We staggered upright and he looked at us expectantly.

  “Screw you, sir,” came the tired chorus.

  “Louder!”

  “SCREW YOU, SIR!”

  One of the army’s less-inspired morale devices.

  “That’s better. Don’t forget, predawn maneuvers tomorrow. Chop at 0330, first formation, 0400. Anybody sacked after 0340 gets one stripe. Dismissed.”

  I zipped up my coverall and went across the snow to the lounge for a cup of soya and a joint. I’d always been able to get by on five or six hours of sleep, and this was the only time I could be by myself, out of the army for a while. Looked at the newsfax for a few minutes. Another ship got caulked, out by Aldebaran sector. That was four years ago. They were mounting a reprisal fleet, but it’ll take four years more for them to get out there. By then, the Taurans would have every portal planet sewed up tight.

  Back at the billet, everybody else was sacked and the main lights were out. The whole company’d been dragging ever since we got back from the two-week lunar training. I dumped my clothes in the locker, checked the roster and found out I was in bunk 31. Damn it, right under the heater.

  I slipped through the curtain as quietly as possible so as not to wake up my bunkmate. Couldn’t see who it was, but I couldn’t have cared less. I slipped under the blanket.

  “You’re late, Mandella,” a voice yawned. It was Rogers.

  “Sorry I woke you up,” I whispered.

  “’Sallright.” She snuggled over and clasped me spoon-fashion. She was warm and reasonably soft. I patted her hip in what I hoped was a brotherly fashion. “Night, Rogers.”

  “G’night, Stallion.” She returned the gesture, a good deal more pointedly.

  Why do you always get the tired ones when you’re ready and the randy ones when you’re tired? I bowed to the inevitable.

  2

  “Awright, let’s get some back inta that! Stringer team! Move it up—move up!”

  A warm front had come in about midnight and the snow had turned to sleet. The permaplast stringer weighed five hundred pounds and was a bitch to handle, even when it wasn’t covered with ice. There were four of us, two at each end, carrying the plastic girder with frozen fingertips. Rogers and I were partners.

  “Steel!” the guy behind me yelled, meaning that he was losing his hold. It wasn’t steel, but it was heavy enough to break your foot. Everybody let go and hopped away. It splashed slush and mud all over us.

  “Damn it, Petrov,” Rogers said, “why didn’t you go out for Star Fleet or maybe the Red Cross? This damn thing’s not that damn heavy.” Most of the girls were a little more circumspect in their speech.

  “Awright, get a move on, stringers—Epoxy team! Dog ’em! Dog ’em!”

  Our two epoxy people ran up, swinging their buckets. “Let’s go, Mandella. I’m freezin’.”

  “Me, too,” the girl said earnestly.

  “One—two—heave!” We got the thing up again and staggered toward the bridge. It was about three-quarters completed. Looked as if the Second Platoon was going to beat us. I wouldn’t give a damn, but the platoon that got their bridge built first got to fly home. Four miles of muck for the rest of us, and no rest before chop.

  We got the stringer in place, dropped it with a clank, and fitted the static clamps that held it to the rise-beams. The female half of the epoxy team started slopping glue on it before we even had it secured. Her partner was waiting for the stringer on the other side. The floor team was waiting at the foot of the bridge, each one holding a piece of the light stressed permaplast over his head, like an umbrella. They were dry and clean. I wondered aloud what they had done to deserve it, and Rogers suggested a couple of colorful, but unlikely
possibilities.

  We were going back to stand by the next stringer when the Field First—he was named Dougelstein, but we called him “Awright”—blew a whistle and bellowed, “Awright, soldier boys and girls, ten minutes. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.” He reached into his pocket and turned on the control that heated our coveralls.

  Rogers and I sat down on our end of the stringer and I took out my weed box. I had lots of joints, but we weren’t allowed to smoke them until after night-chop. The only tobacco I had was a cigarro butt about three inches long. I lit it on the side of the box; it wasn’t too bad after the first couple of puffs. Rogers took a puff to be sociable, but made a face and gave it back.

  “Were you in school when you got drafted?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Just got a degree in Physics. Was going after a teacher’s certificate.”

  She nodded soberly. “I was in Biology….”

  “Figures.” I ducked a handful of slush. “How far?”

  “Six years, bachelor’s and technical.” She slid her boot along the ground, turning up a ridge of mud and slush the consistency of freezing ice milk. “Why the hell did this have to happen?”

  I shrugged. It didn’t call for an answer, least of all the answer that the UNEF kept giving us. Intellectual and physical elite of the planet, going out to guard humanity against the Tauran menace. It was all just a big experience. See whether we could goad the Taurans into ground action.

  Awright blew the whistle two minutes early, as expected, but Rogers and I and the other two stringers got to sit for a minute while the epoxy and floor teams finished covering our stringer. It got cold fast, sitting there with our suits turned off, but we remained inactive, on principle.

  I really didn’t see the sense of us having to train in the cold. Typical army half-logic. Sure, it was going to be cold where we were going; but not ice-cold or snow-cold. Almost by definition, a portal planet remained within a degree or two of absolute zero all the time, since collapsars don’t shine—and the first chill you felt would mean that you were a dead man.

  TWELVE YEARS BEFORE, when I was ten years old, they had discovered the collapsar jump. Just fling an object at a collapsar with sufficient speed, and it pops out in some other part of the galaxy. It didn’t take long to figure out the formula that predicted where it would come out; it just traveled along the same “line”—actually an Einsteinian geodesic—it would have followed if the collapsar hadn’t been in the way—until it reaches another collapsar field, whereupon it reappears, repelled with the same speed it had approaching the original collapsar. Travel time between the two collapsars is exactly zero.

  It made a lot of work for mathematical physicists, who had to redefine simultaneity, then tear down general relativity and build it back up again. And it made the politicians very happy, because now they could send a shipload of colonists to Fomalhaut for less than it once cost to put a brace of men on the Moon. There were a lot of people the politicians would just love to see on Fomalhaut, implementing a glorious adventure instead of stirring up trouble at home.

  The ships were always accompanied by an automated probe that followed a couple of million miles behind. We knew about the portal planets, little bits of flotsam that whirled around the collapsars; the purpose of the drone was to come back and tell us in the event that a ship had smacked into a portal planet at .999 of the speed of light.

  That particular catastrophe never happened, but one day a drone did come limping back alone. Its data were analyzed, and it turned out that the colonists’ ship had been pursued by another vessel and destroyed. This happened near Aldebaran, in the constellation Taurus, but since “Aldebaranian” is a little hard to handle, they named the enemy Taurans.

  Colonizing vessels thenceforth went out protected by an armed guard. Often the armed guard went out alone, and finally the colonization effort itself slowed to a token trickle. The United Nations Exploratory and Colonization Group got shortened to UNEF, United Nations Exploratory Force, emphasis on the “force.”

  Then some bright lad in the General Assembly decided that we ought to field an army of footsoldiers to guard the portal planets of the nearer collapsars. This led to the Elite Conscription Act of 1996 and the most rigorously selected army in the history of warfare.

  So here we are, fifty men and fifty women, with IQ’s over 150 and bodies of unusual health and strength, slogging elitely through the mud and slush of central Missouri, reflecting on how useful our skill in building bridges will be, on worlds where the only fluid will be your occasional standing pool of liquid helium.

  3

  About a month later, we left for our final training exercise; maneuvers on the planet Charon. Though nearing perihelion, it was still more than twice as far from the sun as Pluto.

  The troopship was a converted “cattlewagon,” made to carry two hundred colonists and assorted bushes and beasts. Don’t think it was roomy, though, just because there were half that many of us. Most of the excess space was taken up with extra reaction mass and ordnance.

  The whole trip took three weeks, accelerating at 2 Gs halfway; decelerating the other half. Our top speed, as we roared by the orbit of Pluto, was around one twentieth of the speed of light—not quite enough for relativity to rear its complicated head.

  Three weeks of carrying around twice as much weight as normal…it’s no picnic. We did some cautious exercises three times a day, and remained horizontal as much as possible. Still, we had several broken bones and serious dislocations. The men had to wear special supporters. It was almost impossible to sleep, what with nightmares of choking and being crushed, and the necessity of rolling over periodically to prevent blood pooling and bedsores. One girl got so fatigued that she almost slept through the experience of having a rib rub through to the open air.

  I’d been in space several times before, so when we finally stopped decelerating and went into free fall, it was nothing but a relief. But some people had never been out, except for our training on the Moon, and succumbed to the sudden vertigo and disorientation. The rest of us cleaned up after them, floating through the quarters with sponges and inspirators to suck up globules of partly-digested “Concentrate, High-protein, Low-residue, Beef Flavor (Soya).”

  A shuttle took us down to the surface in three trips. I waited for the last one, along with everybody else who wasn’t bothered by free fall.

  We had a good view of Charon, coming down from orbit. There wasn’t much to see, though. It was just a dim, off-white sphere with a few smudges on it. We landed about two hundred meters from the base. A pressurized crawler came out and mated with the ferry, so we didn’t have to suit up. We clanked and squeaked up to the main building, a featureless box of grayish plastic.

  Inside, the walls were the same inspired color. The rest of the company was sitting at desks, chattering away. There was a seat next to Freeland.

  “Jeff—feeling better?” He still looked a little pale.

  “If the gods had meant for man to survive in free fall, they would have given him a cast-iron glottis. Somewhat better. Dying for a smoke.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You seemed to take it all right. Went up in school, didn’t you?”

  “Senior thesis in vacuum welding, yeah, three weeks in Earth orbit.” I sat back and reached for my weed box, for the thousandth time. It still wasn’t there, of course. The Life Support Unit didn’t want to handle nicotine and THC.

  “Training was bad enough,” Jeff groused, “but this crap—”

  “I don’t know.” I’d been thinking about it. “It might just all be worth it.”

  “Hell, no—this is a space war, let Star Fleet take care of it…they’re just going to send us out and either we sit for fifty years on some damn ice cube of a portal planet, or we get….”

  “Well, Jeff, you’ve got to look at it the other way, too. Even if there’s only one chance in a thousand that we’ll be doing some good, keeping the Taurans….

  “TENCH-HUT!” WE stood up in a rag
gety-ass fashion, by twos and threes. The door opened and a full major came in. I stiffened a little. He was the highest-ranking officer I’d ever seen. He had a row of ribbons stitched into his coveralls, including a purple strip meaning he’d been wounded in combat, fighting in the old American army. Must have been that Indochina thing, but it had fizzled out before I was born. He didn’t look that old.

  “Sit, sit.” He made a patting motion with his hand. Then he put his hands on his hips and scanned the company with a small smile on his face. “Welcome to Charon. You picked a lovely day to land; the temperature outside is a summery eight point one five degrees Absolute. We expect little change for the next two centuries or so.” Some of us laughed half-heartedly.

  “You’d best enjoy the tropical climate here at Miami Base, enjoy it while you can. We’re on the center of sunside here, and most of your training will be on darkside. Over there, the temperature drops to a chilly two point zero eight.

  “You might as well regard all the training you got on Earth and the Moon as just a warm-up exercise, to give you a fair chance of surviving Charon. You’ll have to go through your whole repertory here: tools, weapons, maneuvers. And you’ll find that, at these temperatures, tools don’t work the way they should, weapons don’t want to fire. And people move v-e-r-y cautiously.”

  He studied the clipboard in his hand. “Right now, you have forty-nine women and forty-eight men. Two deaths, one psychiatric release. Having read an outline of your training program, I’m frankly surprised that so many of you pulled through.

  “But you might as well know that I won’t be displeased if as few as fifty of you graduate from this final phase. And the only way not to graduate is to die. Here. The only way anybody gets back to Earth—including me—is after a combat tour.

  “You will complete your training in one month. From here you go to Stargate collapsar, a little over two lights away. You will stay at the settlement on Stargate I, the largest portal planet, until replacements arrive. Hopefully, that will be no more than a month; another group is due here as soon as you leave.