The Mammoth Book of SF Wars

by Ian Whates

  The monitors were to be fed information from flea-sized flying robots, each with a special purpose, and it would take several hours for them to wing into the city. We posted a one-man guard, one-hour shifts; the other two inside the ship until the monitors started clicking. But they never started.

  Being senior, I took the first watch. A spooky hour, the jungle making dark little noises all around, but nothing happened. Then Fred stood the next hour, while I put on the deepsleep helmet. Figured I’d need the sleep – once data started coming in, I’d have to be alert for about forty hours. We could all sleep for a week once we got off Anomaly and hit lightspeed.

  Getting yanked out of deepsleep is like an ice-water douche to the brain. The black nothing dissolved and there was Fred a foot away from my face, yelling my name over and over. As soon as he saw my eyes open, he ran for the open lock, priming his laser on the way (definitely against regulations, could hole the hull that way; I started to say something but couldn’t form the words). Anyhow, what were we doing in free fall? And how could Fred run across the deck like that while we were in free fall?

  Then my mind started coming back into focus and I could analyse the sinking, spinning sensation – not free-fall vertigo at all, but what we used to call snail-fever. The enemy was very near. Crackling combat sounds drifted in from outdoors.

  I sat up on the cot and tried to sort everything out and get going. After long seconds my arms and legs got the idea; I struggled up and staggered to the weapons cabinet. Both the lasers were gone, and the only heavy weapon left was a grenade launcher. I lifted it from the rack and made my way to the lock.

  Had I been thinking straight, I would’ve just sealed the lock and blasted – the presence in my mind was so strong that I should have known there were too many of the enemy, too close, for us to stand and fight. But no one can think while their brain is being curdled that way. I fought the urge to just let go and fall down that hole in my mind, and slid along the wall to the airlock. By the time I got there my teeth were chattering uncontrollably and my face was wet with tears.

  Looking out, I saw a smouldering grey lump that must have been Paul, and Fred screaming like a madman, fanning the laser on full over a 180° arc. There couldn’t have been anything alive in front of him; the jungle was a lurid curtain of fire, but a bolt lanced in from behind and Fred dissolved in a pink spray of blood and flesh.

  I saw them then, moving fast for snails, shambling in over thick brush towards the ship. Through the swirling fog in my brain I realized that all they could see was the light pouring through the open lock, and me silhouetted in front. I tried to raise the launcher but couldn’t – there were too many, less than a hundred metres away, and the inky whirlpool in my mind just got bigger and bigger and I could feel myself slipping into it.

  The first bolt missed me; hit the ship and it shuddered, ringing like a huge cathedral bell. The second one didn’t miss, taking off my left hand just above the wrist, roasting what remained of my left arm. In a spastic lurch I jerked up the launcher and yanked the trigger, holding it down while dozens of microton grenades popped out and danced their blinding way up to and across the enemy’s ragged line. Dazzled blind, I stepped back and stumbled over the med-robot, which had smelled blood and was eager to do its duty. On top of the machine was a switch that some clown had labelled emergency exit; I slapped it, and as the lock clanged shut the atomic engines muttered – growled – screaming into a life and a ten-gravity hand slid me across the blood-slick deck and slammed me back against the rear-wall padding. I felt ribs crack and something in my neck snapped. As the world squeezed away, I knew I was a dead man but it was better to die in a bed of pain than to just fall and fall …

  I woke up to the less-than-tender ministrations of the med-robot, who had bound the stump of my left arm and was wrapping my chest in plastiseal. My body from forehead to shins ached from radiation burns, earned by facing the grenades’ bursts, and the non-existent hand seemed to writhe in painful, impossible contortions. But numbing anaesthetic kept the pain at a bearable distance, and there was an empty space in my mind where the snail-fever had been, and the gentle hum told me we were at lightspeed; things could have been one flaming hell of a lot worse. Fred and Paul were gone but that just moved them from the small roster of live friends to the long list of dead ones.

  A warning light on the control panel was blinking stroboscopically. We were getting near the hole – excuse me, “relativistic discontinuity” – and the computer had to know where I wanted to go. You go in one hole at lightspeed and you’ll come out of some other hole; which hole you pop out of depends on your angle of approach. Since they say that only about 1 per cent of the holes are charted, if you go in at any old angle you’re liable to wind up in Podunk, on the other side of the galaxy, with no ticket back.

  I just let the light blink, though. If it doesn’t get any response from the crew, the ship programs itself automatically to go to Heaven, the hospital world, which was fine with me. They cure what ails you and then set you loose with a compatible soldier of the opposite sex, for an extended vacation on that beautiful world. Someone once told me that there were over a hundred worlds named Hell, but there’s only one Heaven. Clean and pretty from the tropical seas to the Northern pine forests. Like Earth used to be, before we strangled it.

  A bell had been ringing all the time I’d been conscious, but I didn’t notice it until it stopped. That meant the information capsule had been jettisoned, for what little it was worth. Planetary information, very few espionage-type data; just a tape of the battle. Be rough for the next recon patrol.

  I fell asleep knowing I’d wake up on the other side of the hole, bound for Heaven.

  I pick up my drink – an old-fashioned old-fashioned – with my new left hand and the glass should feel right, slick but slightly tacky with the cold-water sweat, fine ridges moulded into the plastic. But there’s something missing, hard to describe, a memory stored in your fingertips that a new growth has to learn all over again. It’s a strange feeling, but in a way seems to fit with this crazy Earth, where I sit in my alcoholic time capsule and, if I squint with my mind, can almost believe I’m back in the twenty-first.

  I pay for the nostalgia – wood and natural food, human bartender and waitress who are also linguists, it all comes dear – but I can afford it, if anyone can. Compound interest, of course. Over four centuries have passed on Earth since I first went off to war, and my salary’s been deposited at the Chase Manhattan Credit Union ever since. They’re glad to do it; when I die, they keep the interest and the principal reverts to the government. Heirs? I had one illegitimate son (conceived on my first furlough) and when I last saw his gravestone, the words on it had washed away to barely legible dimples.

  But I’m still a young man (at lightspeed you age imperceptibly while the universe winds down outside) and the time you spend going from hole to hole is almost incalculably small. I’ve spent most of the past half millennium at lightspeed, the rest of the time usually convalescing from battle. My records show that I’ve logged a trifle under one year in actual combat. Not bad for 438 years’ pay. Since I first lifted off I’ve aged twelve years by my biological calendar. Complicated, isn’t it – next month I’ll be thirty, 456 years after my date of birth.

  But one week before my birthday I’ve got to decide whether to try my luck for the fourth trip out or just collect my money and retire. No choice, really. I’ve got to go back.

  It’s something they didn’t emphasize when I joined up, back in 2088 – maybe it wasn’t so obvious back then, the war only decades old – but they can’t hide it nowadays. Too many old vets wandering around, like animated museum pieces.

  I could cash in my chips and live in luxury for another hundred years. But it would get mighty lonely. Can’t talk to anybody on Earth but other vets and people who’ve gone to the trouble to learn Basic.

  Everyone in space speaks Basic. You can’t lift off until you’ve become fluent. Otherwise, how could you tak
e orders from a fellow who should have been food for worms centuries before your grandfather was born? Especially since language melted down into one Language.

  I’m tone deaf. Can’t speak or understand Language, where one word has ten or fifteen different meanings, depending on pitch. To me it sounds like puppy dogs yapping. Same words over and over; no sense.

  Of course, when I first lived on Earth there were all sorts of languages, not just one Language. I spoke Spanish (still do when I can find some other old codger who remembers) and learned English – that was before they called it Basic – in military training. Learned it damn well, too. If I weren’t tone deaf I’d crack Language and maybe I’d settle down.

  Maybe not. The people are so strange, and it’s not just the Language. Mindplugs and homosex and voluntary suicide. Walking around with nothing on but paint and powder. We had Fullerdomes when I was a kid, but you didn’t have to live under one. Now if you take a walk out in the country for a breath of fresh air, you’ll drop over dead before you can exhale.

  My mind keeps dragging me back to Heaven. I’d retire in a minute if I could spend my remaining century there. Can’t, of course; only soldiers allowed in space. And the only way a soldier gets to Heaven is the hard way.

  I’ve been there three times; once more and I’ll set a record. That’s motivation of a sort, I suppose. Also, in the unlikely event that I should live another five years, I’ll get a commission, and a desk job if I live through my term as a field officer. Doesn’t happen too often – but there aren’t too many desk jobs that people can handle better than cyborgs.

  That’s another alternative. If my body gets too garbaged for regeneration, and they can save enough of my brain, I could spend the rest of eternity hooked up to a computer, as a cyborg. The only one I’ve ever talked to seemed to be happy.

  I once had an African partner named N’gai. He taught me how to play O’wari, a game older than Monopoly or even chess. We sat in this very bar (or the identical one that was in its place two hundred years ago) and he tried to impress on my non-Zen-oriented mind just how significant this game was to men in our position.

  You start out with forty-eight smooth little pebbles, four in each one of the twelve depressions that make up the game board. Then you take turns, scooping the pebbles out of one hole and distributing them one at a time in holes to the left. If you dropped your last pebble in a hole where your opponent had only one or two, why, you got to take those pebbles off the board. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it?

  But N’gai sat there in a cloud of bhang-smoke and mumbled about the game and how it was just like the big game we were playing, and every time he took a pebble off the board, he called it by name. And some of the names I didn’t know, but a lot of them were on my long list.

  And he talked about how we were like the pieces in this simple game; how some went off the board after the first couple of moves, and some hopped from place to place all though the game and came out unscathed, and some just sat in one place all the time until they got zapped from out of nowhere …

  After a while I started hitting the bhang myself, and we abandoned the metaphor in a spirit of mutual intoxication.

  And I’ve been thinking about that night for six years, or two hundred, and I think that N’gai – his soul find Buddha – was wrong. The game isn’t all that complex.

  Because in O’wari, either person can win.

  The snails populate ten planets for every one we destroy.

  Solitaire, anyone?

  THE WAKE

  Dan Abnett

  To hold a wake for a comrade fallen in battle against aliens might seem like a worthy plan …

  Dan Abnett has written best-selling novels for Games Workshop in their Warhammer 40,000 universe, and for the BBC in parallel to their Torchwood series (“Torchwood” being an anagram of “Doctor Who”, an organization beyond the law set up by Queen Victoria to combat intrusions by aliens). Abnett’s 40,000 novel Prospero Burns was a New York Times bestseller, and topped the SF charts in the UK and the USA. Oxford-educated, Abnett lives in Kent, England, with blog and website at www.danabnett.com, or follow him on Twitter @VincentAbnett.

  WE WERE GOING to miss Mendozer.

  He’d been with us, what, four tours? Five, Klubs reckons. Five. Well anyway, we were going to miss him. Mendozer was like a tin target. You know the kind? You knock them down, but the motor pops them up again, time after time.

  Mendozer had a tin target quality about him. You get blokes like that. I don’t mean immortal, indestructible fireproof angels of death like Boring, ’cause blokes like Boring, they’re a whole other deal entirely. No, Mendozer’s type, they’re just reliable, like they’re always going to be around, and if something knocks them down they’ll soon be right back up again, thank you, banging away, making a joke.

  Like a tin target on the practice deck. Bang! Down he goes. Then up he pops again.

  When Mendozer got knocked down and didn’t pop back up, we grabbed him and got him to the extract. Moke and me, we hoiked him under the armpits and ran with him, dragging his legs. Moke was yelling “medic”, but I was pretty confident that Mendozer was dogfood already. None of us actually saw what got him, due to the fact that it had all gone a bit cack-yourself-and-keep-shooting nutty at the time, but it looked like he’d run onto a pitchfork. There was wet everywhere. The stuff was all over us, soaking our sleeves and hips.

  The Surge did his best. Credit for that. Tried everything. Split Mendozer’s body jacket off, cracked the sternum, tried to patch the internal punctures, tried to get the slack heart to restart. We ended up soaking wet up to our armpits, kneeling either side of Mendozer in a blood slick the size of a fish pond, with dozens of spent injector vials and wadding tear-off strips floating around in it.

  End of. Somebody find him a box.

  The Surge put him in the fridge. We stayed on site four more days, expending our remaining munitions at anything that came inside the floodlit perimeter. It was not the light-hearted fun and frolics we’d been hoping for.

  There was a technical problem with our extract, so we had to layover at Relay Station Delta for a week. All of us knew Relay Delta, because we stopped there every time on the way in to Scary Land, and none of us cared for it. Dark, pokey, rank, no light except artificial, no food except recyc. It was about as roomy and inviting as Mendozer’s casket.

  The trick was to recognize the up-side. A week’s layover meant a week added to resupply turnaround, and a week extra before we’d get deployed back to Scary Land. That was fine by us, even if it meant seven days of breathing farts in the dark at Relay Delta.

  We were all pretty sick of Scary Land, to tell you the truth. We were all pretty sick of banging away at the Scaries. We’d lost sixteen on seven tours, including Mendozer, and that was light compared to some platoons. The Middlemen, best of the best and all that, but banging away at the Scaries was beginning to feel like banging our heads against the proverbial. We’ve tangled with all sorts over the years, no word of a lie, but there was something relentless about the Scaries. Something cack yourself. Something shadow-under-the-bed spooky. I swear even Boring was beginning to get creeped out by them.

  “Bosko,” he says to me, “Scary Land is starting to make me miss Suck Central.”

  Which was saying something, specially coming from Juke Boring, shit-kicking fireproof god of war. Suck Central, as the name suggests, had not been a family bucket of fun and frolics either.

  Anyway, there’s us, Relay Delta, a bit of downtime. So we’re all in the Rec, just dossing around, and in comes Boring carrying a large carton pack, and behind him comes the Surge trundling a shiny plastic casket on a gurney from the ward. It rattles its castors as it comes in over the door trim. It takes us all of no seconds flat to realize this is Mendozer’s bloody box. Everyone gets up. Everyone says a few choice words, the same choice word in most instances.

  Boring, he points with his chin and directs Surge to park Mendozer in the middle of the Rec. The Surg
e does so, and heels the brake-lock on the gurney’s wheelbase. Boring walks over to a side table, indicates by a narrowing of his eyes that Klubs should instantly remove the hand of clock patience spread out on it, and then dumps the carton. It clinks. Glass.

  “We’re holding a wake,” he announces.

  He opens the carton. It had been a stores pack for cans of rice pudding in a previous life. His big hands scoop out sets of chunky shot glasses, a digit in each, five at a time. Cripes only knows where he managed to scare up real-glass glasses.

  Then came the best bit. Twenty-four bottles of the good stuff. Litre bottles, actual glass. Boring twists the top off the first one, and I can’t remember how long it’s been since I heard the fresh metal collar of a screw cap strip open like that.

  He starts filling the glasses. Generous measures. It takes more than one bottle. We’re all wary. Juke Boring has a history of playing cruel tricks in the name of character building experience. The stuff he was pouring might just have been cold tea. We’re all braced for a metaphorical smack round the ear and a lecture on taking things at face value.

  But this isn’t a trick. You can’t fake the smell of fifteen-year-old malt.

  “Where’d you get this stuff?” asks Neats, the platoon sergeant.

  “Station commander owed me a million favours,” Boring says. “Now he owes me a million minus one.”

  He picks up a glass. He doesn’t hand the others out, but there’s a wordless instruction for us all to go help ourselves. We take a glass each, and form a loose circle around the gurney. Twenty-eight men: twenty-four, plus Boring, Neats, the Surge and Mendozer in his box.