Their Master's war

by Mick Farren

  Rance not only worked the men hard on their weapons, he also pushed them toward the limit of their physical capabilities. He had them running and diving, crawling on their stomachs, all the time firing as they went, beating off the repeated attacks of the blips. He constantly reminded them that it was a matter of kill or be killed. He apparently had an uncompromisingly basic view of warfare.

  The disaster didn't occur until the exercise was almost over. Only one recruit from Hark's squad, Eslay, seemed unable either to cop the feel of the MEW or to keep up with the rest of the intake. When the blips started firing shocks, he was constantly being zapped. Finally he gave up and dropped to his knees with a sighing sob that was audible over everyone's communicator. Two blips hovered over him, hitting his body with repeated shocks. He was now babbling in a language that Hark didn't understand. Then, to the horror of the other recruits, the babbling turned to screams that reverberated inside their helmets. The seal between Eslay's helmet and his suit was opening. The suit was peeling back. Blood fountained from the exposed flesh as it went into explosive decompression. More blood splashed the inside of his helmet visor. As the suit retreated toward Eslay's waist, his lungs blew. The force of his chest rupturing lifted him clear off the surface. The suit snaked off his dead legs and, carried by the grav still running in his boots, dropped to the floor. Eslay's corpse, naked except for his helmet, continued to float upward. Rance quickly stepped up to the nearest recruit and took his weapon. He set it to blast, aimed it at the body, and held down the trigger until there was nothing left. He calmly turned and handed the weapon back to its owner, then he faced the stunned recruits.

  "Couldn't just leave him to float around, could we?"

  Hark was shocked by the blunt callousness. Surely a man's death deserved something, some kind of observation. Rance seemed to be well aware of the feeling.

  "Think we should have taken the time to give him a decent burial? Let me tell you something, getting a de cent burial can be a dangerous luxury. The first thing you learn is that a dead body is a worthless lump of organic garbage and isn't something you take risks for. Anything else is sentiment, and sentiment can get you killed. You're probably wondering how it was that the suit came off him and could the same thing happen to you. The answer is that it might, but it most likely won't, unless you cave in like he did. Not often, but now and again, a suit turns on its wearer if it feels he isn't giving one hundred percent. Eslay didn't like his suit, and apparently it didn't like him."

  Rance made a dismissive gesture, and the overmen began herding the recruits into ordered ranks preparatory to returning to the interior of the ship. Elmo picked up Eslay's suit, boots, and weapon. As they marched away, Rance didn't go with them. He needed a few moments to himself. Eslay's death was 3 damned nuisance. Now he'd have to make a report to the line officer.

  Five

  Hark was so terrified that he didn't care who knew it. In fifteen minutes the ship was due to make a jump. His new memory contained only the scantiest information about the jump. He knew that it was what moved the cluster from one point in the universe to another in a matter of minutes. There was the suggestion that it had something to do with the bending of the relationship between space and time, but there was nothing about the actual mechanics of the thing. It was either a closely guarded Therem secret or maybe just something that mere troopers didn't need to know. There was nothing about the terror of the jump in his new memory. He had learned about that on the messdeck during the last three days. Directly the jump had been announced, the whole messdeck had fallen into a deep gloom. Even the normally unshakable Dyrkin was affected. It started to appear as if the troopers hated the jump more than they hated combat. In combat, they were at least partially in control of their destiny. During the jump, they were completely helpless.

  It took a while for Hark to find out what exactly was so frightening about the jump. Before the gloom set in, things had improved a little on the messdeck. The newcomers hadn't been completely accepted, but they were being tolerated. Toleration, however, didn't extend to answering a lot of damn-fool questions. A full day had gone by before Hark got an answer out of a taciturn longtimer called Helot, who summed it up in just three sentences.

  "It's more pain than it's possible to imagine. You feel like you're being torn apart limb from limb. The worst part is that it seems to go on forever."

  When Hark had tried to ask more questions, Helot bad cut him off.

  "You'll find out."

  It wasn't that the previous three days had been spent sitting around the messdeck listening to scuttlebutt. Rance had worked them close to the point of exhaustion. The intake had gone through one more training session together, and then each group of five, four in the case of Hark's, had been integrated with the twenty to which they had been assigned. From that point on, the long-timers and the recruits had trained together as a complete combat team. Working alongside the veterans had at first filled Hark with a deep depression at how little he knew. As the sessions progressed he was quite amazed by the speed at which he was picking up the rudiments of ground fighting. On the other hand, he still had grave doubts as to whether he would ever be good enough to survive the real thing. The recruits' off-duty time was almost nonexistent, but the gloom on the messdeck was so deep that it couldn't help but affect them. They caught the longtimers' dread of the jump and amplified it with their own fear of the unknown.

  About an hour before jumptime, Rance visited the messdeck. He made a point of always being there just before a jump. The purpose was to reinforce control and authority at a moment when the men were at their most angry. The noncoms in the Alliance were never allow, to forget that the great trooper uprising of a quarter of century earlier had exploded immediately before a jump. The revolt had spread through almost half the ships* the fleet and had come close to crippling the campai^_ against the Yal. The presence of the new intake just made the situation more delicate. The longtimers, if they hadn't actually been telling horror stories, would at least have dropped a few sinister hints. He decided that the recruits could probably use a few reassuring words.

  "I won't lie to you. The jump is one of the most unpleasant experiences that a man can go through. While it lasts, you may think that you are actually dying. Get one thing straight. You will not die. The jump's awful, but it will do you no permanent harm. It's just one of the things you have to live with. By now, you've probably heard all kinds of wild tales about how bad the jump can be. I want you to put them out of your mind. It's bad, but you'll get over it. Someone may have tried to tell you that men have gone mad during their first jump. That's bull."

  A couple of the recruits looked up sharply. Rance cursed himself. They apparently hadn't heard the story, j He silently cursed again as Dacker raised his hand.; Dacker, along with Renchett, was one of the main trou-j blemakers in Elmo's twenty. He was undoubtedly trying to pull something.

  "Permission to speak, Topman Rance?"

  When Dacker was polite, it always meant that he was looking to score off a superior. It was a kind of reverse insolence.

  "What do you want, Dacker?"

  "Begging the topman's pardon, but the stories about rookies going mad during a jump isn't all bull. When I was back on the Yalna 7, there was this recruit who-"

  "Shut up, Dacker. Whatever you've got in your mind never happened. It's a mess monkey's tall story." "I saw it with my-" "Shut it, Dacker!"

  Dacker shut up, but the damage was done. The recruits looked green. There was one consolation. The newcomers' fear might provide sufficient amusement to the longtimers that it would take the edge off their resentment. Rance always felt like a fraud after these speeches. He hated the jumps as much as anyone, and he also hated lying to his men. Individuals did go mad on their first jump. Some not until their second, third, or twentieth. The idea that the jump was ultimately harmless was a heavily promoted piece of fiction. The truth was that the Therem had been frequently approached to try to get something done to mitigate the pain o
f the jump. They claimed that it was impossible. The pain was a side effect unique to humans. No other species suffered anything like it, and there was nothing that could be done.

  Rance's last job before he sealed himself in his coffin was to check in with his immediate superior, his line officer. If he shared anything with Dacker, it was a distaste for officers. The men despised them because they were almost never in combat. With Rance, who had more contact with them, the hate went deeper. The officers had blended. They were trying to be more Therem than the Therem themselves. At moments like this, just be fore a jump, there was something that particularly both ered him: The officers showed no sign of agitation. One of the hoariest stories in trooper legend was that the officers did have something to ease the pain, something that was denied to the rank and file. The story might be as old as the jump drive, but Rance had never totally been able to dismiss it.

  Line Officer Berref was one of the least appealing of his kind. There was a condescending limpness about him that grated on Rance. His pale blue uniform was a little too immaculate. The way his blond hair was combed into crisp waves was a little too elegant. The officer's ring that he wore on the little finger of his left hand was just too large and showy. Too much time had l^een spent on the perfection of his pencil mustache. These, however, were only the external symptoms of what Rance really loathed. Berref and, in Rance's experience, the majority of the officer corps approached the war as an exercise in morbid cynicism. The men were expendable cattle, battle fuel-there were plenty more where they came from. The only thing that had to be preserved was the war. It was inevitable that the two most powerful species in the galaxy should lock in perpetual combat from the moment they discovered each other. The Yal and the Therem existed, and therefore they warred. The officers gave the impression that they considered their duty to be the day-to-day and year-to-year management of that war.

  "Men bedded down for the jump, Topman?"

  "All in their coffins, sir."

  "Any trouble?"

  "Just the usual hostility."

  "But no actual trouble?"

  "No trouble."

  "Then you better get yourself sealed in, and I'll talk to you after the recovery."

  Rance watched the line officer walk away. He simply couldn't believe that anyone was able to remain so calm before a jump. The bastards had to have something that wasn't being given out to the men. Rance found that he had been gritting his teeth.

  "One day, you're finally going to go into combat, and I'm finally going to blow your forsaken head off."

  A siren wailed through the messdeck. The coffin lids slowly lowered. Hark found that his fists were clenching and unclenching. How would it start? What would be the first sign? Could it really be as bad as they said? The tongtimers on the messdeck didn't seem the kind to exaggerate. Inside the coffin, all Hark could hear was his own breathing. Through the transparent cover, he watched the lights on the messdeck go out. Only small red safety lamps remained. Cold sweat beaded his back. How would he endure it if it was as bad as they said? If he went mad, he didn't doubt that they would dispose of him as arbitrarily as they had disposed of Eslay.

  Hark waited, resigned to the coming agony, but for what seemed like an hour, nothing happened. The constant, muscle-tensing fear was exhausting. Let it start. At least end the suspense. Or maybe the jump had been postponed. Did he dare hope for a temporary reprieve? At that precise moment, a vibration ran through the coffin as if the ship had shifted or stretched. He continued to hope, but he knew in his heart that something was starting. For no logical reason, Hark had somehow imagined that the pain would start slowly and gradually increase in intensity. As the first shock seared through him, he knew that he had been completely wrong.

  There was molten fire in his bones. At the same time he was being twisted out of shape. It was worse than being twisted-he was losing his shape, he was being spread across space, smeared over the blackness of the void. He was falling and screaming. Every deformed nerve was being tortured; the teeth were being dragged from his gaping mouth. His own screams beat inside his head until his skull started to fragment. His brain boiled over in an eruption of excruciating color. This was worse even than the datashot. His surroundings gone, he was alone, a thing without form, constantly shifting and rending. All that remained was the pain. It was his very being, burning through eternity. The pain defined him.

  He was like a star made of constantly exploding and regenerating agony.

  To his surprise, he found that he could think inside the suffering. If anything, that made it worse. The capacity to think prevented him from losing himself in the howling hallucinations that racked his overloaded senses. He began to feel how the pain came in distinct phases. There was no respite, and each was as bad as the next. All the change of phase meant was a shift in emphasis. There was the blinding red-gold fire that burned and consumed his flesh. There were the icy razor bolts that ripped and gouged through the backs of his eyes. There was the terrible spatial distortion in which even his identity became unrecognizable. Worst of all, the hallucinations refused to stop. The cycle of torment went on and on, a spiraling loop on which he helplessly hung, twisted, and turned.

  At first, he couldn't believe that it had stopped. It had been everything. He was pressed hard against the side of the coffin, clawing at the lining and muttering to himself. His eyes were tightly shut, and the visions of horror lingered like an afterimage while his nervous system cringed, believing in nothing but the next stage in the cycle.

  "Let it stop, please. Let it stop! Let it stop?*

  When the messdeck siren started braying again, he thought that it was still his screaming.

  "Let it…"

  The last word was a sob. He opened his eyes. Everything was back to normal. The lights were coming on, but none of it seemed real. The pain-that was real, that was everything. Except that the pain had gone. There was blood on the palms of his hands where his fingernails had dug in. His right shoulder hurt. He must have been banging it against the inside of the coffin. The cover opened. He experienced a fresh clutch of dread. The unreality was still there. Had he gone mad? There seemed to be something wrong with the light; things didn't look right. The cover was now fully open. Hark tentatively sat up. Immediately, his stomach revolted. He was racked by a spasm of dry retching, and sweat poured from his upper body. He felt dizzy and had to grab hold of the side of the coffin. Strangely, there was a kind of comfort in this violent physical reaction. If he could feel like this, he was probably still sane. The madness that he had felt back on the planet had been nothing like this. There was a certain safety in madness, and the last thing he felt was safe. Reality seemed to be returning. He waited until the spasm passed, wiped off his face, then tried to stand. His legs felt like rubber, but by concentrating hard, he managed it. Others on the messdeck were emerging from their coffins. To a man, they looked as bad as he felt. Most were verging on green, and most had dark circles under eyes that still stared in horror. It wasn't long, though, before the cursing started. "Shit."

  It was Dyrkin, as top man in the pecking order, who led the chorus of complaint.

  "I ain't never going to go through that again. They're going to have to burn me first."

  "There's got to be some other way."

  Renchett, who had recovered faster than most, spat on the deck. "Of course there's a better way. We all know that the officers and medians don't do the jump the hard way. They got something. They got drugs or shielding or implants or something. They don't have to feel it the way we do."

  Elmo had come into the messdeck. He looked almost as bad as the men did, but he was doing his best to pull his overman authority back together.

  "Curse it up, boys. Get really angry. That's the best way to get over a jump. Anyone in really bad shape?"

  Dyrkin scowled. "We're all in really bad shape. What did you expect?"

  "Don't get on my ass, Dyrkin. We ail went through the same shit."

  "Did we?"

&nb
sp; Elmo ignored the challenge. He wasn't in any mood to deal with the age-old bitch that came up with every jump.

  "If there are no casualties, you better eat and then get suited up." "What?"

  Everyone turned and looked at Renchett. He was a troublemaker and a mess monkey lawyer, but nobody yelled at an overman. His face was a mask of furious outrage.

  "What do you mean suit up?"

  Elmo was very calm. The aftermath of a jump could also be a potential flashpoint. "Are you talking to me, Renchett?"

  "I'm looking at you, ain't I?"

  "Under normal circumstances, your mouth would have earned you three days in a pod."

  "Under normal circumstances, we'd be getting a down day with all the food and booze we want. After a jump, the messdecks get drunk. That's the rule."

  "That's the tradition, and these aren't normal circumstances. We're in an A-plus combat zone, and we got a new intake to bring up to scratch."

  "Screw the new meat. Let them take care of themselves. I hurt all over."

  "You just ran out of chances, Renchett. One more word and you're in a pod."

  Elmo let Renchett glare defiance for a full fifteen seconds, then he gave him a final chance to save face.

  "Get your suit on, trooper."

  Renchett turned on his heel, ripped his suit from its environment, dumped it on the ground, and trod on it. The suit, as though sensing his anger, hesitated before climbing up his legs.

  "Do the rest of you have any objections to climbing into your suits?"

  The rest of the twenty turned away. There was some muttering, but they all started hauling out their equipment.

  Rance had decided that he wasn't going to go out on the hull for the training sessions. The new men were getting close to being as ready as they would ever be, and the overmen were more than capable of keeping the men running. The jump had been particularly unkind to him, and he wanted nothing more than to spend the day sleeping it off. Unfortunately, that wasn't going to be possible. The medians would be holding a briefing for noncoms and officers at 0700, and he had to be there. If anything, the medians were worse than the line officers. They'd done more than blended. They'd gone all the way over. They dealt directly with the Therem, and in doing so they had lost all but the faintest shreds of their humanity. They were cold and unworldly, with an attitude that came close to an alien mysticism. For them, the war against the Yal was a holy cause, now and forever, amen. They had become so emotionless that they couldn't even manage the cynicism of the line officers. Rance detested the line officers, but the medians gave him the chills. The single consolation was that a topman had only limited contact with them.