by Joe Haldeman
‘It’s a deal.’ We shook on it solemnly.
2
The acceleration shells were something new, installed while we rested and resupplied at Stargate. They enabled us to use the ship at closer to its theoretical efficiency, the tachyon drive boosting it to as much as 25 gravities.
Tate was waiting for me in the shell area. The rest of the squad was milling around, talking. I gave him his coffee.
‘Thanks. Find out anything?’
‘Afraid not. Except the swabbies don’t seem to be scared, and it’s their show. Probably just another practice run.’
He slurped some coffee. ‘What the hell. It’s all the same to us, anyhow. Just sit there and get squeezed half to death. God, I hate those things.’
‘Maybe they’ll eventually make us obsolete, and we can go home.’
‘Sure thing.’ The medic came by and gave me my shot.
I waited until 1950 and hollered to the squad. ‘Let’s go. Strip down and zip up.’
The shell is like a flexible spacesuit; at least the fittings on the inside are pretty similar. But instead of a life-support package, there’s a hose going into the top of the helmet and two coming out of the heels, as well as two relief tubes per suit. They’re crammed in shoulder-to-shoulder on light acceleration couches; getting to your shell is like picking your way through a giant plate of olive drab spaghetti.
When the lights in my helmet showed that everybody was suited up, I pushed the button that flooded the room. No way to see, of course, but I could imagine the pale blue solution — ethylene glycol and something else — foaming up around and over us. The suit material, cool and dry, collapsed in to touch my skin at every point. I knew that my internal body pressure was increasing rapidly to match the increasing fluid pressure outside. That’s what the shot was for; keep your cells from getting squished between the devil and the deep blue sea. You could still feel it, though. By the time my meter said ‘2’ (external pressure equivalent to a column of water two nautical miles deep), I felt that I was at the same time being crushed and bloated. By 2005 it was at 2.7 and holding steady. When the maneuvers began at 2010, you couldn’t feel the difference. I thought I saw the needle fluctuate a tiny bit, though.
The major drawback to the system is that, of course, anybody caught outside of his shell when the Anniversary hit 25 GS would be just so much strawberry jam. So the guiding and the fighting have to be done by the ship’s tactical computer — which does most of it anyway, but it’s nice to have a human overseer.
Another small problem is that if the ship gets damaged and the pressure drops, you’ll explode like a dropped melon. If it’s the internal pressure, you get crushed to death in a microsecond.
And it takes ten minutes, more or less, to get depressurized and another two or three to get untangled and dressed. So it’s not exactly something you can hop out of and come up fighting.
The accelerating was over at 2038. A green light went on and I chinned the button to depressurize.
Marygay and I were getting dressed outside.
‘How’d that happen?’ I pointed to an angry purple welt that ran from the bottom of her right breast to her hipbone.
‘That’s the second time,’ she said, mad. ‘The first one was on my back — I think that shell doesn’t fit right, gets creases.’
‘Maybe you’ve lost weight.’
‘Wise guy.’ Our caloric intake had been rigorously monitored ever since we left Stargate the first time. You can’t use a fighting suit unless it fits you like a second skin.
A wall speaker drowned out the rest of her comment. ‘Attention all personnel. Attention. All army personnel echelon six and above and all navy personnel echelon four and above will report to the briefing room at 2130.’
It repeated the message twice. I went off to lie down for a few minutes while Marygay showed her bruise to the medic and the armorer. I didn’t feel a bit jealous.
The Commodore began the briefing. ‘There’s not much to tell, and what there is is not good news.
‘Six days ago, the Tauran vessel that is pursuing us released a drone missile. Its initial acceleration was on the order of 80 gravities.
‘After blasting for approximately a day, its acceleration suddenly jumped to 148 gravities.’ Collective gasp.
‘Yesterday, it jumped to 203 gravities. I shouldn’t need to remind anyone here that this is twice the accelerative capability of the enemy’s drones in our last encounter.
‘We launched a salvo of drones, four of them, intersecting what the computer predicted to be the four most probably future trajectories of the enemy drone. One of them paid off, while we were doing evasive maneuvers. We contacted and destroyed the Tauran weapon about ten million kilometers from here.’
That was practically next door. ‘The only encouraging thing we learned from the encounter was from spectral analysis of the blast. It was no more powerful an explosion than ones we have observed in the past, so at least their progress in propulsion hasn’t been matched by progress in explosives.
‘This is the first manifestation of a very important effect that has heretofore been of interest only to theorists. Tell me, soldier.’ He pointed at Negulesco. ‘How long has it been since we first fought the Taurans, at Aleph?’
‘That depends on your frame of reference, Commodore,’ she answered dutifully. ‘To me, it’s been about eight months.’
‘Exactly. You’ve lost about nine years, though, to time dilation, while we maneuvered between collapsar jumps. In an engineering sense, as we haven’t done any important research and development aboard ship … that enemy vessel comes from our future!’ He paused to let that sink in.
‘As the war progresses, this can only become more and more pronounced. The Taurans don’t have any cure for relativity, of course, so it will be to our benefit as often as to theirs.
‘For the present, though, it is we who are operating with a handicap. As the Tauran pursuit vessel draws closer, this handicap will become more severe. They can simply outshoot us.
‘We’re going to have to do some fancy dodging. When we get within five hundred million kilometers of the enemy ship, everybody gets in his shell and we just have to trust the logistic computer. It will put us through a rapid series of random changes in direction and velocity.
‘I’ll be blunt. As long as they have one more drone than we, they can finish us off. They haven’t launched any more since that first one. Perhaps they are holding their fire … or maybe they only had one. In that case, it’s we who have them.
‘At any rate, all personnel will be required to be in their shells with no more than ten minutes’ notice. When we get within a thousand million kilometers of the enemy, you are to stand by your shells. By the time we are within five hundred million kilometers, you will be in them, and all shell compounds flooded and pressurized. We cannot wait for anyone.
‘That’s all I have to say. Sub-major?’
‘I’ll speak to my people later, Commodore. Thank you.’
‘Dismissed.’ And none of this ‘fuck you, sir’ nonsense. The navy thought that was just a little beneath their dignity. We stood at attention — all except Stott — until he had left the room. Then some other swabbie said ‘dismissed’ again, and we left.
My squad had clean-up detail, so I told everybody who was to do what, put Tate in charge, and left. Went up to the NCO room for some company and maybe some information.
There wasn’t much happening but idle speculation, so I took Rogers and went off to bed. Marygay had disappeared again, hopefully trying to wheedle something out of Singhe.
3
We had our promised get-together with the sub-major the next morning, when he more or less repeated what the commodore had said, in infantry terms and in his staccato monotone. He emphasized the fact that all we knew about the Tauran ground forces was that if their naval capability was improved, it was likely they would be able to handle us better than last time.
But that brings up an interes
ting point. Eight months or nine years before, we’d had a tremendous advantage: they had seemed not quite to understand what was going on. As belligerent as they had been in space, we’d expected them to be real Huns on the ground. Instead, they practically lined themselves up for slaughter. One escaped and presumably described the idea of old-fashioned in-fighting to his fellows.
But that, of course, didn’t mean that the word had necessarily gotten to this particular bunch, the Taurans guarding Yod-4. The only way we know of to communicate faster than the speed of light is to physically carry a message through successive collapsar jumps. And there was no way of telling how many jumps there were between Yod-4 and the Tauran home base — so these might be just as passive as the last bunch, or might have been practicing infantry tactics for most of a decade. We would find out when we got there.
The armorer and I were helping my squad pull maintenance on their fighting suits when we passed the thousand million kilometer mark and had to go up to the shells.
We had about five hours to kill before we had to get into our cocoons. I played a game of chess with Rabi and lost. Then Rogers led the platoon in some vigorous calisthenics, probably for no other reason than to get their minds off the prospect of having to lie half-crushed in the shells for at least four hours. The longest we’d gone before was half that.
Ten minutes before the five hundred million kilometer mark, we squad leaders took over and supervised buttoning everybody up. In eight minutes we were zipped and flooded and at the mercy of — or safe in the arms of — the logistic computer.
While I was lying there being squeezed, a silly thought took hold of my brain and went round and round like a charge in a superconductor: according to military formalism, the conduct of war divides neatly into two categories, tactics and logistics. Logistics has to do with moving troops and feeding them and just about everything except the actual fighting, which is tactics. And now we’re fighting, but we don’t have a tactical computer to guide us through attack and defense, just a huge, super-efficient pacifistic cybernetic grocery clerk of a logistic, mark that word, logistic computer.
The other side of my brain, perhaps not quite as pinched, would argue that it doesn’t matter what name you give to a computer, it’s a pile of memory crystals, logic banks, nuts and bolts … If you program it to be Genghis Khan, it is a tactical computer, even if its usual function is to monitor the stock market or control sewage conversion.
But the other voice was obdurate and said by that kind of reasoning, a man is only a hank of hair and a piece of bone and some stringy meat; and no matter what kind of a man he is, if you teach him well, you can take a Zen monk and turn him into a slavering bloodthirsty warrior.
Then what the hell are you, we, am I, answered the other side. A peace-loving, vacuum-welding specialist cum physics teacher snatched up by the Elite Conscription Act and reprogrammed to be a killing machine. You, I have killed and liked it.
But that was hypnotism, motivational conditioning, I argued back at myself. They don’t do that anymore.
And the only reason, I said, they don’t do it is that they think you’ll kill better without it. That’s logic.
Speaking of logic, the original question was, why do they send a logistic computer to do a man’s job? Or something like that … and we were off again.
The light blinked green and I chinned the switch automatically. The pressure was down to 1.3 before I realized that it meant we were alive, we had won the first skirmish.
I was only partly right.
4
I was belting on my tunic when my ring tingled and I held it up to listen. It was Rogers.
‘Mandella, go check squad bay 3. Something went wrong; Dalton had to depressurize it from Control.’
Bay 3 — that was Marygay’s squad! I rushed down the corridor in bare feet and got there just as they opened the door from inside the pressure chamber and began straggling out.
The first out was Bergman. I grabbed his arm. ‘What the hell is going on, Bergman?’
‘Huh?’ He peered at me, still dazed, as everyone is when they come out of the chamber. ‘Oh, s’you, Mandella. I dunno. Whad’ya mean?’
I squinted in through the door, still holding on to him. ‘You were late, man, you depressurized late. What happened?’
He shook his head, trying to clear it. ‘Late? Whad’ late. Uh, how late?’
I looked at my watch for the first time. ‘Not too—’ Jesus Christ. ‘Uh, we zipped in at 0520, didn’t we?’
‘Yeah, I think that’s it.’
Still no Marygay among the dim figures picking their way through the ranked couches and jumbled tubing. ‘Um, you were only a couple of minutes late … but we were only supposed to be under for four hours, maybe less. It’s 1050.’
‘Um.’ He shook his head again. I let go of him and stood back to let Stiller and Demy through the door.
‘Everybody’s late, then,’ Bergman said. ‘So we aren’t in any trouble.’
‘Uh—’ Non sequiturs. ‘Right, right — Hey, Stiller! You seen—’
From inside: ‘Medic! MEDIC!’
Somebody who wasn’t Marygay was coming out. I pushed her roughly out of my way and dove through the door, landed on somebody else and clambered over to where Struve, Marygay’s assistant, was standing over a pod and talking very loud and fast into his ring.
‘—and blood God yes we need—’
It was Marygay still lying in her suit she was
‘—got the word from Dalton—’
covered every square inch of her with a uniform bright sheen of blood
‘—when she didn’t come out—’
it started as an angry welt up by her collarbone and was just a welt as it traveled between her breasts until it passed the sternum’s support
‘—I came over and popped the—’
and opened up into a cut that got deeper as it ran down over her belly and where it stopped
‘—yeah, she’s still—’
a few centimeters above the pubis a membraned loop of gut was protruding
‘—OK, left hip. Mandella—’
She was still alive, her heart palpitating, but her blood-streaked head lolled limply, eyes rolled back to white slits, bubbles of red froth appearing and popping at the corner of her mouth each time she exhaled shallowly.
‘—tattooed on her left hip. Mandella! Snap out of it! Reach under her and find out what her blood—’
‘TYPE O RH NEGATIVE GOD damn … it. Sorry—Oh negative.’ Hadn’t I seen that tattoo ten thousand times?
Struve passed this information on and I suddenly remembered the first-aid kit on my belt, snapped it off and fumbled through it.
Stop the bleeding — protect the wound — treat for shock, that’s what the book said. Forgot one, forgot one … clear air passages.
She was breathing, if that’s what they meant. How do you stop the bleeding or protect the wound with one measly pressure bandage when the wound is nearly a meter long? Treat for shock, that I could do. I fished out the green ampoule, laid it against her arm and pushed the button. Then I laid the sterile side of the bandage gently on top of the exposed intestine and passed the elastic strip under the small of her back, adjusted it for nearly zero tension and fastened it.
‘Anything else you can do?’ Struve asked.
I stood back and felt helpless. ‘I don’t know. Can you think of anything?’
‘I’m no more of a medic than you are.’ Looking up at the door, he kneaded a fist, biceps straining. ‘Where the hell are they? You have morph-plex in that kit?’
‘Yeah, but somebody told me not to use it for internal—’
‘William?’
Her eyes were open and she was trying to lift her head. I rushed over and held her. ‘It’ll be all right, Marygay. The medic’s coming.’
‘What … all right? I’m thirsty. Water.’
‘No, honey, you can’t have any water. Not for a while, anyhow.’ Not if she was headed for surg
ery.
‘Why is all the blood?’ she said in a small voice. Her head rolled back. ‘Been a bad girl.’
‘It must have been the suit,’ I said rapidly. ‘Remember earlier, the creases?’
She shook her head. ‘Suit?’ She turned suddenly paler and retched weakly. ‘Water … William, please.’
Authoritative voice behind me: ‘Get a sponge or a cloth soaked in water.’ I looked around the saw Doc Wilson with two stretcher bearers.
‘First half-liter femoral,’ he said to no one in particular as he carefully peeked under the pressure bandage. ‘Follow that relief tube down a couple of meters and pinch it off. Find out if she’s passed any blood.’
One of the medics ran a ten-centimeter needle into Marygay’s thigh and started giving her whole blood from a plastic bag.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ Doc Wilson said tiredly. ‘Business is booming. What’d you say about the suit?’
‘She had two minor injuries before. Suit doesn’t fit quite right, creases up under pressure.’
He nodded absently, checking her blood pressure. ‘You, anybody, give—’ Somebody handed him a paper towel dripping water. ‘Uh, give her any medication?’
‘One ampoule of No-shock.’
He wadded the paper towel up loosely and put it in Marygay’s hand. ‘What’s her name?’ I told him.
‘Marygay, we can’t give you a drink of water but you can suck on this. Now I’m going to shine a bright light in your eye.’ While he was looking through her pupil with a metal tube, he said, ‘Temperature?’ and one of the medics read a number from a digital readout box and withdrew a probe. ‘Passed blood?’
‘Yes. Some.’
He put his hand lightly on the pressure bandage. ‘Marygay, can you roll over a little on your right side?’
‘Yes,’ she said slowly, and put her elbow down for leverage. ‘No,’ she said and started crying.
‘Now, now,’ he said absently and pushed up on her hip just enough to be able to see her back. ‘Only the one wound,’ he muttered. ‘Hell of a lot of blood.’