Infinite Stars

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  “A clerk. Recruiting office,” Miles replied sturdily.

  “I… see.”

  And if what she saw was the absurdity of someone claiming to be a rear-echelon clerk having worn combat armor often and long enough to have picked up its stigmata, he was in. Maybe.

  She coiled herself back up on her sleeping mat, and gestured toward its other end. “Sit down, chaplain. And keep talking.”

  * * *

  Suegar was genuinely asleep when Miles found him again, sitting up cross-legged and snoring. Miles tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Wake up, Suegar, we’re home.”

  He snorted to consciousness. “God, I miss coffee. Huh?” He blinked at Miles. “You’re still in one piece?”

  “It was a near thing. Look, this garments-in-the-river bit—now that we’ve found each other, do we have to go on being naked? Or is the prophecy sufficiently fulfilled?”

  “Huh?”

  “Can we get dressed now?” Miles repeated patiently.

  “Why—I don’t know. I suppose, if we were meant to have clothes, they’d be given to us—”

  Miles prodded and pointed. “There. They’re given to us.”

  Beatrice stood a few meters away in a hip-shot pose of bored exasperation, a bundle of gray cloth under her arm. “You two loonies want this stuff or not? I’m going back.”

  “You got them to give you clothes?” Suegar whispered in amazement.

  “Us, Suegar, us.” Miles motioned to Beatrice. “I think it’s all right.”

  She fired the bundle at him, sniffed, and stalked away.

  “Thanks,” Miles called. He shook out the fabric. Two sets of gray pajamas, one small, one large. Miles had only to turn up the bottoms of the pants legs one fold to keep them from catching under his heels. They were stained and stiff with old sweat and dirt, and had probably been peeled off a corpse, Miles reflected. Suegar crawled into his and stood fingering the gray fabric in wonder.

  “They gave us clothes. Gave us,” he muttered. “How’d you do that?”

  “They gave us everything, Suegar. Come on, I’ve got to talk to Oliver again.” Miles dragged Suegar off determinedly. “I wonder how much time we’ve actually got before the next chow call? Two in each twenty-four-hour cycle, to be sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s irregular, to increase your temporal disorientation—after all, it’s the only clock in here…”

  Movement caught Miles’s eye, a man running. It wasn’t the occasional flurry of someone outrunning a hostile group; this one just ran, head down, flat out, bare feet thumping the dirt in frantic rhythm. He followed the perimeter generally, except for a detour around the border of the women’s group. As he ran, he wept.

  “What’s this?” Miles asked Suegar, with a nod at the approaching figure.

  Suegar shrugged. “It takes you like that sometimes. When you can’t stand sitting in here anymore. I saw a guy run till he died, once. Around and around and around…”

  “Well,” Miles decided, “this one’s running to us.”

  “He’s gonna be running away from us in a second.”

  “Then help me catch him.”

  Miles hit him low and Suegar high. Suegar sat on his chest. Miles sat on his right arm, halving his effective resistance. He must have been a very young soldier when he was captured—maybe he had lied about his age at induction—for even now he had a boy’s face, ravaged by tears and his personal eternity inside this hollow pearl. He inhaled in sobbing gasps and exhaled in garbled obscenities. After a time he quieted.

  Miles leaned into his face and grinned wolfishly. “You a party animal, boy?”

  “Yeah…” His white-rimmed eyes rolled, right and left, but no rescue approached.

  “How ’bout your friends? They party animals too?”

  “The best,” the boy asserted, perhaps secretly shaken by the suspicion that he’d fallen into the hands of someone even crazier than himself. “You better clear off me, mutant, or they’ll take you apart.”

  “I want to invite you and your friends to a major party,” Miles chanted. “We gonna have a party tonight that’s an his-tor-i-cal event. You know where to find Sergeant Oliver, late of the 14th Commandos?”

  “Yeah…” the boy admitted cautiously.

  “Well, you go get your friends and report to him. You better reserve your seat aboard his ve-hic-le now, ’cause if you’re not on it, you gonna be under it. The Reformation Army is moving out. You copy?”

  “Copy,” he gasped, as Suegar pressed his fist into the boy’s solar plexus for emphasis.

  “Tell him Brother Miles sent you,” Miles called as the boy staggered off, glancing nervously over his shoulder. “You can’t hide in here. If you don’t show, I’ll send the Cosmic Commandos to find you.”

  Suegar shook out his cramped limbs, his new used clothes. “Think he’ll come?”

  Miles grinned. “Fight or flight. That one’ll be all right.” He stretched himself, recaptured his original orientation. “Oliver.”

  * * *

  In the end they had not twenty, but two hundred. Oliver had picked up forty-six. The running boy brought in eighteen. The signs of order and activity in the area brought in the curious—a drifter at the edge of the group had only to ask, “What’s going on?” to be inducted and promoted to corporal on the spot. Interest among the spectators was aroused to a fever when Oliver’s troops marched up to the women’s border—and were admitted within. They picked up another seventy-five volunteers instantly.

  “Do you know what’s going on?” Miles asked one such, as he fed them through a short gauntlet of inspection and sent them off to one of the fourteen command groups he had devised.

  “No,” the man admitted. He waved an arm eagerly toward the center of the women’s group. “But I wanta go where they’re going…”

  Miles cut the admissions off at two hundred total in deference to Tris’s growing nervousness at this infiltration of her borders, and promptly turned the courtesy into a card in his own hand in their still-continuing strategy debate. Tris wanted to divide her group in the usual way, half for the attack, half to maintain home base and keep the borders from collapsing. Miles was insisting on an all-out effort.

  “If we win, you won’t need guards anymore.”

  “What if we lose?”

  Miles lowered his voice. “We don’t dare lose. This is the only time we’ll have surprise on our side. Yes, we can fall back—regroup—try again—I for one am prepared—no, compelled—to keep trying till it kills me. But after this, what we’re trying to do will be fully apparent to any counter-group, and they’ll have time to plan counter-strategies of their own. I have a particular aversion to stalemates. I prefer winning wars to prolonging them.”

  She sighed, momentarily drained, tired, old. “I’ve been at war a long time, y’know? After a while even losing a war can start to look preferable to prolonging it.”

  He could feel his own resolve slip, sucked into the vortex of that same black doubt. He pointed upwards, dropping his voice to a rasping whisper. “But not, surely, to those bastards.”

  She glanced upwards. Her shoulders straightened. “No. Not to those.” She took a deep breath. “All right, chaplain. You’ll get your all-out effort. Just once…”

  Oliver returned from a circuit of the command groups and squatted beside them. “They’ve got their orders. How many’s Tris contributing to each group?”

  “Commandant Tris,” Miles quickly corrected for her as her brows beetled. “It’s gonna be an all-out shot. You’ll get every walking body in here.”

  Oliver made a quick calculation in the dirt with his finger for a stylus. “That’ll put about fifty in each group—ought to be enough… matter of fact, what say we set up twenty groups? It’ll speed distribution when we get the lines set up. Could make the difference between bringing this off, and not.”

  “No,” Miles cut in quickly as Tris began to nod agreement. “It has to be fourteen. Fourteen battle groups make fourteen l
ines for fourteen piles. Fourteen is—is a theologically significant number,” he added as they stared doubtfully at him.

  “Why?” asked Tris.

  “For the fourteen apostles,” Miles intoned, tenting his hands piously.

  Tris shrugged. Suegar scratched his head, started to speak—Miles speared him with a baleful glance, and he stilled.

  Oliver eyed him narrowly. “Huh.” But he did not argue further.

  * * *

  Then came the waiting. Miles stopped worrying about his uppermost fear—that their captors would introduce the next food pile early, before his plans were in place—and started worrying about his second greatest fear, that the food pile would come so late he’d lose control of his troops and they would start to wander off, bored and discouraged. Getting them all assembled had made Miles feel like a man pulling on a goat with a rope made of water. Never had the insubstantial nature of the Idea seemed more self-apparent.

  Oliver tapped him on the shoulder and pointed. “Here we go.”

  A side of the dome about a third of the way around the edge from them began to bulge inward.

  The timing was perfect. His troops were at the peak of readiness. Too perfect… the Cetagandans had been watching all this; surely they wouldn’t miss an opportunity to make life more difficult for their prisoners. If the food pile wasn’t early, it had to be late. Or…

  Miles bounded to his feet, screaming, “Wait! Wait! Wait for my order!”

  His sprint groups wavered, drawn toward the anticipated goal. But Oliver had chosen his group commanders well—they held, and held their groups, and looked to Oliver. They had been soldiers, once. Oliver looked to Tris, flanked by her lieutenant Beatrice, and Tris looked to Miles, angrily.

  “What is it now? We’re gonna lose our advantage…” she began, as the general stampede throughout the camp started toward the bulge.

  “If I’m wrong,” Miles moaned, “I’m going to kill myself—wait, dammit! On my order. I can’t see—Suegar, give me a boost—” He clambered up on the thin man’s shoulders and stared toward the bulge. The force wall had only half twinkled out when the first distant cries of disappointment met his straining ears. Miles’s head swiveled frantically. How many wheels within wheels—if the Cetagandans knew, and he knew they knew, and they knew he knew they knew, and… He cut off his internal gibber as a second bulge began, on the opposite side of the camp from the first.

  Miles’s arm flung out, pointing toward it like a man rolling dice. “There! There! Go, go, go!”

  Tris caught on then, whistling and shooting him a look of startled respect, before whirling and dashing off to double-time the main body of their troops after the sprint groups. Miles slithered off Suegar and started limping after.

  He glanced back over his shoulder, as the rolling gray mass of humanity crashed up against the opposite side of the dome and reversed itself. He felt suddenly like a man trying to outrun a tidal wave. He indulged himself with one brief anticipatory whimper, and limped faster.

  One more chance to be mortally wrong—no. His sprint groups had reached the pile, and the pile was really there. Already they were starting to break it down. The support troops surrounded them with a wall of bodies as they began to spread out along the perimeter of the dome. The Cetagandans had outfoxed themselves. This time.

  Miles was reduced from the commander’s eagle overview to the grunt’s worm’s-eye as the tidal wave overtook him. Someone shoved him from behind, and his face hit the dirt. He thought he recognized the back of the surly Pitt, vaulting over him, but he wasn’t certain—surely Pitt would have stepped on, not over him. Suegar yanked him up by the left arm, and Miles bit back a scream of pain. There was enough howling already.

  Miles recognized the running boy, squaring off with another tough. Miles shoved past him with a shouted reminder—“You’re supposed to be yelling Get in line! NOT Get fucked!… The signal always gets degraded in combat,” he muttered to himself. “Always…”

  Beatrice materialized beside him. Miles clung to her instantly. Beatrice had personal space, her own private perimeter, maintained even as Miles watched by a casual elbow to somebody’s jaw with a quite sickening crack. If he tried that, Miles reflected enviously, not only would he smash his own elbow, but his opponent’s nipple would probably be quite undamaged. Speaking of nipples, he found himself face to—well, not face—confronting the redhead. He resisted the urge to cuddle into the soft gray fabric covering home base with a contented sigh on the grounds that it would certainly get both his arms broken. He uncrossed his eyes and looked up into her face.

  “C’mon,” she said, and dragged him off through the mob. Was the noise level dropping? The human wall of his own troops parted just enough to let them squeeze through.

  They were near the exit point of the chow line. It was working, by God it was working. The fourteen command groups, still bunched rather too closely along the dome wall—but that could be improved next run—were admitting the hungry supplicants one at a time. The expediters kept the lines moving at top speed, and channeled the already-supplied along the perimeter behind the human shield wall in a steady stream, to flow back out into the larger camp at the edge of the mob. Oliver had put his toughest-looking bravos to work in pairs, patrolling the outflow and making sure no one’s rat bar was taken by force.

  It was a long time since anyone here had had a chance to be a hero. Not a few of the newly appointed policemen were approaching their work with great enthusiasm—maybe some personal grudges being worked off there—Miles recognized one of the burly surlys prone beneath a pair of patrollers, apparently getting his face beaten in. Miles, remembering what he was about, tried not to find music in the meaty thunks of fist on flesh.

  Miles and Beatrice and Suegar bucked the stream of rat bar-clutching prisoners back toward the distribution piles. With a slightly regretful sigh, Miles sought out Oliver and dispatched him to the exit to restore order among his order-keepers.

  Tris had the distribution piles and their immediate lines under tight control. Miles congratulated himself on having the women hand out the food. He had definitely tuned into a deep emotional resonance there. Not a few of the prisoners even muttered a sheepish “thank you” as their rat bars were shoved into their hands, and so did the ones in line behind them, when their turns came.

  Nyah! Miles thought upward to the bland and silent dome. You don’t have the monopoly on psychological warfare anymore, you bastards. We’re gonna reverse your peristalsis, and I hope you barf your bowels out—

  An altercation at one of the food piles interrupted his meditations. Miles’s lip curled with annoyance as he saw Pitt in the middle. He limped hastily toward it.

  Pitt, it appeared, had repaid his rat bar not with a “thank you” but with a leer, a jeer, and a filthy remark. At least three of the women within hearing were trying to rip him apart, without success; he was big and beefy and had no inhibitions about fighting back. One of the females, not much taller than Miles himself, was knocked back in a heap and didn’t get up again. In the meantime, the line was jammed, and the smooth civilized flow of would-be diners totally disrupted. Miles cursed under his breath.

  “You, you, you, and—you,” Miles tapped shoulders, “grab that guy. Get him out of here—back to the dome wall—”

  Miles’s draftees were not terribly pleased with their assignment, but by this time Tris and Beatrice had run up and led the attack with rather more science. Pitt was seized and pulled away, behind the lines. Miles made sure the rat bar distribution pile was running again before turning his attention to the savage, foul-mouthed Pitt. Oliver and Suegar had joined him by this time.

  “I’m gonna rip the bastard’s balls off,” Tris was saying. “I command—”

  “A military command,” Miles interrupted. “If this one is accused of disorderly conduct, you should court martial him.”

  “He is a rapist and a murderer,” she replied icily. “Execution’s too good for him. He’s got to die slowly.”


  Miles pulled Suegar aside. “It’s tempting, but I feel real uneasy about handing him over to her just now. And yet… real uneasy. Why is that?”

  Suegar eyed him in respect. “I think you’re right. You see, there’s—there’s too many guilty.”

  Pitt, now in a foaming fury, spotted Miles. “You! You little cunt-licking wimp—you think they can protect you?” He jerked his head toward Tris and Beatrice. “They ain’t got the muscle. We’ve run ’em over before and we’ll run ’em over again. We wouldn’ta lost the damn war if we’d had real soldiers—like the Barrayarans. They didn’t fill their army with cunts and cunt-lickers. And they ran the Cetagandans right off their planet—”

  “Somehow,” Miles growled, drawn in, “I doubt you’re an expert in the Barrayarans’ defense of their homeworld in the First Cetagandan War. Or you might have learned something—”

  “Did Tris make you an honorary girl, mutant?” jeered Pitt in return. “It wouldn’t take much—”

  Why am I standing here bandying words with this low-life crazy? Miles asked himself as Pitt raved on. No time. Let’s finish it.

  Miles stepped back and folded his arms. “Has it occurred to any of you yet that this man is clearly a Cetagandan agent?”

  Even Pitt was shocked to silence.

  “The evidence is plain,” Miles went on forcefully, raising his voice so all bystanders could hear. “He is a ringleader in your disruption. By example and guile he has corrupted the honest soldiers around him, set them one against another. You were Marilac’s best. The Cetagandans could not count on your fall. So they planted a seed of evil among you. Just to make sure. And it worked—wonderfully well. You never suspected—”

  Oliver grabbed Miles’s ear and muttered, “Brother Miles—I know this guy. He’s no Cetagandan agent. He’s just one of a whole lot of—”

  “Oliver,” Miles hissed back through clenched teeth, “shut up.” And continued in his clearest parade-ground bellow, “Of course he’s a Cetagandan spy. A mole. And all this time you thought this was something you were doing to yourselves.”