The Forever War (21 page)

Five weeks or five hours, though, it was all the same as far as the tankee was concerned. Once the pressure got up to an operational level, you had no sense of the passage of time. Your body and brain were concrete. None of your senses provided any input, and you could amuse yourself for several hours just trying to spell your own name.

So I wasn't really surprised that no time seemed to have passed when I was suddenly dry, my body tingling with the return of sensation. The place sounded like an asthmatics' convention in the middle of a hay field: thirty-nine people and one cat all coughing and sneezing to get rid of the last residues of fluorocarbon. While I was fumbling with my straps, the side door opened, flooding the tank with painfully bright light. The cat was the first one out, with a general scramble right behind him. For the sake of dignity, I waited until last.

Over a hundred people were milling around outside, stretching and massaging out cramps. Dignity! Surrounded by acres of young female flesh, I stared into their faces and desperately tried to solve a third-order differential equation in my head, to circumvent the gallant reflex. A temporary expedient, but it got me to the elevator.

Hilleboe was shouting orders, getting people lined up, and as the doors closed I noticed that all of one platoon had a uniform light bruise, from head to foot. Twenty pairs of black eyes. I'd have to see both Maintenance and Medical about that.

After I got dressed.

We stayed at one gee for three weeks, with occasional pariods of free fall for navigation check, while the Masaiyk 11 made a long, narrow loop away from the collapsar Resh10, and back again. That period went all right, the people adjusting pretty well to ship routine. I gave them a minimum of busy-work and a maximum of training review and exercise-for their own good, though I wasn't naive enough to think they'd see it that way.

After about a week of one gee, Private Rudkoski (the cook's assistant) had a still, producing some eight liters a day of 95 percent ethyl alcohol. I didn't want to stop him-life was cheerless enough; I didn't mind as long as people showed up for duty sober-but I was damned curious both how he managed to divert the raw materials out of our sealed-tight ecology, and how the people paid for their booze. So I used the chain of command in reverse, asking Alsever to find out. She asked Jarvil, who asked Carreras, who sat down with Orban, the cook. Turned out that Sergeant Orban had set the whole thing up, letting Rudkoski do the dirty work, and was aching to brag about it to a trustworthy person.

If I had ever taken meals with the enlisted men and women, I might have figured out that something odd was going on. But the scheme didn't extend up to officers' country.

Through Rudkoski, Orban had juryrigged a ship-wide economy based on alcohol. It went like this:

Each meal was prepared with one very sugary dessert-jelly, custard or flan-which you were free to eat if you could stand the cloying taste. But if it was still on your tray when you presented it at the recycling window, Rudkoski would give you a Lencent chit and scrape the sugary stuff into a fermentation vat. He had two twenty-liter vats, one "working" while the other was being filled.

The tencent chit was at the bottom of a system that allowed you to buy a half-liter of straight ethyl (with your choice of flavoring) for five dollars. A squad of five people who skipped all of their desserts could buy about a liter a week, enough for a party but not enough to constitute a public health problem.

When Diana brought me this information, she also brought a bottle of Rudkoski's Worst-literally; it was a flavor that just hadn't worked. It came up through the chain of command with only a few centimeters missing.

Its taste was a ghastly combination of strawberry and caraway seed. With a perversity not uncommon to people who rarely drink, Diana loved it. I had some ice water brought up, and she got totally blasted within an hour. For myself, I made one drink and didn't finish it.

When she was more than halfway to oblivion, mumbling a reassuring soliloquy to her liver, she suddenly tilted her head up to stare at me with childlike directness.

"You have a real problem, Major William."

"Not half the problem you'll have in the morning, Lieutenant Doctor Diana."

"Oh not really." She waved a drunken hand in front of her face. "Some vitamins, some glu. . . cose, an eensy cc of adren. . . aline if all else fails. You.. . you. . . have... a real.. . problem."

"Look, Diana, don't you want me to-"

"What you need.. . is to get an appointment with that nice Corporal Valdez." Valdez was the male sex counselor. "He has empathy. Itsiz job. He'd make you-"

"We talked about this before, remember? I want to stay the way I am."

"Don't we all." She wiped away a tear that was probably one percent alcohol. "You know they call you the Old Qreer. No they don't."

She looked at the floor and then at the wall. "The 0l' Queer, that's what."

I had expected names worse than that. But not so soon. "I don't care. The commander always gets names."

"I know but." She stood up suddenly and wobbled a little bit. "Too much t' drink. Lie down." She turned her back to me and stretched so hard that a joint popped. Then a seam whispered open and she shrugged off her tunic, stepped out of it and tiptoed to my bed. She sat down and patted the mattress. "Come on, William. Only chance."

"For Christ's sake, Diana. It wouldn't be fair."

"All's fair," she giggled. "And 'sides, I'm a doctor. I can be clin'cal; won't bother me a bit. Help me with this." After five hundred years, they were still putting brassiere clasps in the back.

One kind of gentleman would have helped her get undressed and then made a quiet exit. Another kind of gentleman might have bolted for the door. Being neither kind, I closed in for the kill.

Perhaps fortunately, she passed out before we had made any headway. I admired the sight and touch of her for a long time before, feeling like a cad, I managed to gather everything up and dress her.

I lifted her out of the bed, sweet burden, and then realized that if anyone saw me carrying her down to her billet, she'd be the butt of rumors for the rest of the campaign. I called up Charlie, told him we'd had some booze and Diana was rather the worse for it, and asked him whether he'd come up for a drink and help me haul the good doctor home.

By the time Charlie knocked, she was draped innocently in a chair, snoring softly.

He smiled at her. "Physician, heal thyself." I offered him the bottle, with a warning. He sniffed it and made a face.

"What is this, varnish?"

"Just something the cooks whipped up. Vacuum still."

He set it down carefully, as if it might explode if jarred. "I predict a coming shortage of customers. Epidemic of death by poisoning-she actually drank that vile stuff?"

"Well, the cooks admitted it was an experiment that didn't pan out; their other flavors are evidently potable. Yeah, she loved it."

"Well. . ." He laughed. "Damn! What, you take her legs and I take her arms?"

"No, look, we each take an arm. Maybe we can get her to do part of the walking."

She moaned a little when we lifted her out of the chair, opened one eye and said, "Hello, Charlee." Then she closed the eye and let us drag her down to the billet. No one saw us on the way, but her bunkmate, Laasonen, was sitting up reading.

"She really drank the stuff, eh?" She regarded her friend with wry affection. "Here, let me help."

The three of us wrestled her into bed. Laasonen smoothed the hair out of her eyes. "She said it was in the nature of an experiment."

"More devotion to science than I have," Charlie said. "A stronger stomach, too."

We all wished he hadn't said that.

Diana sheepishly admitted that she hadn't remembered anything after the first drink, and talking to her, I deduced that she thought Charlie had been there all along. Which was all for the best, of course. But oh! Diana, my lovely latent heterosexual, let me buy you a bottle of good scotch the next time we come into port. Seven hundred years from now.

We got back into the tanks for the hop from Resh-lO to Kaph-35. That was two weeks at twenty-five gees; then we had another four weeks of routine at one gravity.

I had announced my open door policy, but practically no one ever took advantage of it. I saw very little of the troops and those occasions were almost always negative: testing them on their training review, handing out reprimands, and occasionally lecturing classes. And they rarely spoke intelligibly, except in response to a direct question.

Most of them either had English as their native tongue or as a second language, but it had changed so drastically over 450 years that I could barely understand it, not at all if it was spoken rapidly. Fortunately, they had all been taught early twenty-first century English during their basic training; that language, or dialect, served as a temporal lingua franca through which a twenty-fifth century soldier could communicate with someone who had been a contemporary of his nineteen-times-great-grandparents. lf there had still been such a thing as grandparents.

I thought of my first combat commander, Captain Stott-whom I had hated just as cordially as the rest of the company did-and tried to imagine how I would have felt if he had been a sexual deviate and I'd been forced to learn a new language for his convenience.

So we had discipline problems, sure. But the wonder was that we had any discipline at all. Hilleboe was responsible for that; as little as I liked her personally, I had to give her credit for keeping the troops in line.

Most of the shipboard graffiti concerned improbable sexual geometries between the Second Field Officer and her commander.

From Kapb-35 we jumped to Samk-78, from there to Ayin-129 and finally to Sade138. Most of the jumps were no more than a few hundred light years, but the last one was 140,000-supposedly the longest collapsar jump ever made by a manned craft.

The time spent scooting down the wormhole from one collapsar to the next was always the same, independent of the distance. When I'd studied physics, they thought the duration of a collapsar jump was exactly zero. But a couple of centuries later, they did a complicated wave-guide experiment that proved the jump actually lasted some small fraction of a nanosecond. Doesn't seem like much, but they'd had to rebuild physics from the foundation up when the collapsar jump was first discovered; they had to rear the whole damned thing down again when they found out it took time to get from A to B. Physicists were still arguing about it.

But we had more pressing problems as we flashed out of Sade-1 38's collapsar field at three-quarters of the speed of light. There was no way to tell immediately whether the Taurans had beat us there. We launched a preprogrammed drone that would decelerate at 300 gees and take a preliminary look around. It would warn us if it detected any other ships in the system, or evidence of Tauran activity on any of the collapsar's planets.

The drone launched, we zipped up in the tanks and the computers put us through a three-week evasive maneuver while the ship slowed down. No problems except that three weeks is a hell of a long time to stay frozen in the tank; for a couple of days afterward everybody crept around like aged cripples.

If the drone had sent back word that the Taurans were already in the system, we would immediately have stepped down to one gee and started deploying fighters and drones armed with nova bombs. Or we might not have lived that long: sometimes the Taurans could get to a ship only hours after it entered the system. Dying in the tank might not be the most pleasant way to go.

It took us a month to get back to within a couple of AUs of Sade138, where the drone had found a planet that met our requirements.

It was an odd planet, slightly smaller than Earth but more dense. It wasn't quite the cryogenic deepfreeze that most portal planets were, both because of heat from its core and because S Doradus, the brightest star in the cloud, was only a third of a light year away.

The strangest feature of the planet was its lack of geography. From space it looked like a slightly damaged billiard ball. Our resident physicist, Lieutenant Gim, explained its relatively pristine condition by pointing out that its anomalous, almost cometary orbit probably meant that it had spent most of its life as a "rogue planet," drifting alone through interstellar space. The chances were good that it had never been struck by a large meteor until it wandered into Sade138's bailiwick and was captured-forced to share space with all the other flotsam the collapsar dragged around with it.

We left the Masaryk Ii in orbit (it was capable of landing, but that would restrict its visibility and getaway time) and shuttled building materials down to the surface with the six fighters.

It was good to get out of the ship, even though the planet wasn't exactly hospitable. The atmosphere was a thin cold wind of hydrogen and helium, it being too cold even at noon for any other substance to exist as a gas.

"Noon" was when S Doradus was overhead, a tiny, painfully bright spark. The temperature slowly dropped at night, going from twenty-five degrees Kelvin down to seventeen degrees-which caused problems, because just before dawn the hydrogen would start to condense out of the air, making everything so slippery that it was useless to do anything other than sit down and wait it out. At dawn a faint pastel rainbow provided the only relief from the black-and-white monotony of the landscape.

The ground was treacherous, covered with little granular chunks of frozen gas that shifted slowly, incessantly in the anemic breeze. You had to walk in a slow waddle to stay on your feet; of the four people who would die during the base's construction, three would be the victims of simple falls.

The troops weren't happy with my decision to construct the antispacecraft and perimeter defenses before putting up living quarters. That was by the book, though, and they got two days of shipboard rest for every "day" planetside-which wasn't overly generous, I admit, since ship days were 24 hours long, and a day on the planet was 38.5 hours from dawn to dawn.

The base was completed in just less than four weeks, and it was a formidable structure indeed. The perimeter, a circle one kilometer in diameter, was guarded by twenty-five gigawatt lasers that would automatically aim and fire within a thousandth of a second. They would react to the motion of any significantly large object between the perimeter and the horizon. Sometimes when the wind was right and the ground damp with hydrogen, the little ice granules would stick together into a loose snowball and begin to roll. They wouldn't roll far.

For early protection, before the enemy came over our horizon, the base was in the center of a huge mine field. The buried mines would detonate upon sufficient distortion of their local gravitational fields: a single Tauran would set one off if he came within twenty meters of it; a small spacecraft a kilometer overhead would also detonate it. There were 2800 of them, mostly lOO-microton nuclear bombs. Fifty of them were devastatingly powerful tachyon devices.

They were all scattered at random in a ring that extended from the limit of the lasers' effectiveness, out another five kilometers.

Inside the base, we relied on individual lasers, microton grenades, and a tachyon-powered repeating rocket launcher that had never been tried in combat, one per platoon. As a last resort, the stasis field was set up beside the living quarters. Inside its opaque gray dome, as well as enough paleolithic weaponry to hold off the Golden Horde, we'd stashed a small cruiser, just in case we managed to lose all our spacecraft in the process of winning a battle. Twelve people would be able to get back to Stargale.