I spent the intervening time visiting the platoon billets, talking with the sergeants who would actually be running the show, day by day. I’d seen their records but hadn’t met any of them except Cat Verdeur, who had been in physical therapy with me. We both had right-arm replacements, and as part of our routine we were required to arm wrestle every day, apologetic about the pain we were causing each other. She was glad to see me, and said she would have let me win occasionally if she’d known I was going to outrank her.
The officers’ lounge was also a plastic room, which I hadn’t known. It had been a utilitarian meeting place before, with machines that dispensed simple food and drink. Now it was dark wood and intricate tile; linen napkins and crystal. Of course the wood felt like plastic and the linen, like paper, but you couldn’t have everything.
Nine of us showed up on the hour, and the major came in two minutes later. She greeted everyone and pushed a button, and the cooks Jengyi and Senff appeared with real food and two carafes of wine. Aromatic stir-fried vegetables and zoni, which resembled large shrimp.
“Let’s enjoy this while we can,” she said. “We’ll be back on recycled Class A’s soon enough.” Athene had room enough for the luxury of hydroponics and, apparently, fish tanks.
She asked us to introduce ourselves, going around the table’s circle. I knew a little bit about everyone, since my XO file had basic information on the whole Strike Force, and extensive dossiers of the officers and noncoms. But there were surprises. I knew that the major had survived five battles, but didn’t know she’d been to Heaven four times, which was a record. I knew her second-in-command, Chance Nguyen, came from Mars, but didn’t know he was from the first generation born there, and was the first person drafted from his planet—there had been a huge argument over it, with separatists saying the Forever War was Earth’s war. But at that time, Earth could still threaten to pull the plug on Mars. The red planet was self-sufficient now, Chance said, but he’d been away for a century, and didn’t know what the situation was.
Lillian Mathes just came from Earth, with less than twenty years’ collapsar lag, and she said they weren’t drafting from Mars at that time; it was all tied up in court. So Chance might be the only Martian officer in service.
He had a strange way of carrying himself and moving, wary and careful, swimming through this unnaturally high gravity. He told me he’d trained for a Martian year, wearing heavier and heavier weights, before going to Stargate and his first assignment.
All of them were scholarly and athletic, but only Sid, Isidro Zhulpa, had actually been both a scholar and an athlete. He’d played professional baseball for a season, but quit to pursue his doctorate in sociology. He’d gotten his appointment as a junior professor the day before his draft notice. His skin was so black as to be almost blue; with his chiseled features and huge muscularity, he looked like some harsh African god. But he was quiet and modest, my favorite.
I mainly talked with him and Sharn through the meal, chatting about everything but our immediate future. When everything was done, the cooks came in with two carts and cleared the table, leaving tea and coffee. Garcia waited until all of us had been served and the privates were gone.
“Of course we don’t have the faintest idea of what’s waiting for us at Aleph-10,” the major said. “One thing we have been able to find out, which I don’t think any of you have been told, is that we know how the second Strike Force bought it.”
That was something new. “It was like a minefield. A matrix of nova bombs in a belt around the portal planet’s equator. We’re assuming it’s still there.”
“They couldn’t detect it and avoid it?” Risa asked.
“It was an active system. The bombs actually chased them down. They detonated four, coming closer and closer, until the fifth got them. The drone that was recording the action barely got away; one of the bombs managed to chase it through the first collapsar jump.
“We can counter the system. We’re being preceded by an intelligent drone squad that should be able to detonate all of the ring of nova bombs simultaneously. It should make things pretty warm on the ground, as well as protecting our approach.”
“We don’t know what got the first Strike Force?” Sid asked.
Garcia shook her head. “The drone didn’t return. All we can say for sure is that it wasn’t the same thing.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Aleph-10’s easily visible from Earth; it’s about eighty light-years away. They would have detected a nova bomb 120 years ago, if there’d been one. The assumption has to be that they attacked in a conventional way, as ordered, and were destroyed. Or had some accident on the way.”
Of course they hadn’t beamed any communication back to Earth or Stargate. We still didn’t. The war was being fought on portal planets, near collapsars, which were usually desolate, disposable rocks. It would only take one nova bomb to vaporize the Stargate station; perhaps three to wipe out life on Earth.
So we didn’t want to give them a road map back.
6
A lot of the training over the next eleven months had to do with primitive weapons, which explained why so much of my ALSC time had been spent practicing with bows and arrows, spears, knives, and so forth. We had a new thing called a “stasis field,” which made a bubble inside which you had to use simple tools: no energy weapons worked.
In fact, physics itself didn’t work too well inside a stasis field; chemistry, not at all. Nothing could move faster than 16.3 meters per second inside—including elementary particles and light. (You could see inside, but it wasn’t light; it was some tachyon thing.) If you were exposed to the field unprotected, you’d die instantly of brain death—no electricity—and anyhow freeze solid in a few seconds. So we had suits made of stuff like tough crinkly aluminum foil, full of uncomfortable plumbing and gadgets so that everything recycled. You could live inside the stasis field, inside the suit, indefinitely. Until you went mad.
But one rip, even a pinprick, in the fabric of the suit, and you were instantly dead.
For that reason, we didn’t practice with the primitive weapons inside the field. And if you had a training accident that caused the smallest scratch, on yourself or anyone else, you got to meditate on it for a day in solitary confinement. Even officers; my carelessness with arrow points cost me a long anxious day in darkness.
Only one platoon could fit in the gym at a time, so at first I trained with whoever was using it when I got a few hours off from my other duties. After a while I arranged my schedule so that it was always the fourth platoon. I liked both Aurelio Morales, the squad leader, and his staff sergeant, Karl Hencken. But mainly I liked Cat Verdeur.
I don’t remember a particular time when the chumminess suddenly turned into sex; there was nothing like a proposition and a mad fling. We were physically close from the beginning, because of our shared experience at Threshold. Then we were natural partners for hand-to-hand combat practice, being about the same physical age and condition. That was a rough kind of intimacy, and the fact that officers and noncoms had a shower separate from the other men and women gave us another kind. Aurelio and Karl took one side, and Cat and I took the other. We sort of soaped each other’s backs, and eventually fronts.
Being a sergeant, Cat didn’t have her own billet; she slept in a wing with the other women in her platoon. But one night she showed up at my door on the verge of tears, with a mysterious problem we’d both been dealing with: sometimes the new arm just doesn’t feel like it belongs. It obeys your commands, but it’s like a separate creature, grafted on, and the feeling of its separateness can take over everything. I let her cry on my shoulder, the good one, and then we shared my narrow bed for the night. We didn’t do anything that we hadn’t done many times in the shower, but it wasn’t playful. I lay awake thinking, long after she fell asleep with her cheek on my breast.
I still loved William, but barring a miracle I would never see him again. What I felt for Cat was more than just friendship, and
by her standards and everyone else’s there was nothing odd about it. And there was no way I could have had a future with Sid or any of the other men.
When I was young there’d been a sarcastic song that went “If I can’t be with the one I love, I’ll love the one I’m with.” I guess that sort of sums it up.
I went to Elise Durack, the Strike Force psychologist, and she helped me through some twists and turns. Then Cat and I went together to Octavia Poll, the female sex counselor, which wound up being a strange and funny four-way consultation with Dante Norelius, the male counselor. That resulted in a mechanical contrivance that we giggled about but occasionally used, which made it more like sex with a man. Cat sympathized with my need to hold on to my past, and said she didn’t mind that I was remembering William when I was with her. She thought it was romantic, if perverse.
I started to bring the subject up with the major, and she brushed it off with a laugh. Everyone who cared aboard ship knew about it, and it was a good thing; it made me seem less strange to them. If I had been in Cat’s platoon, above her in the direct chain of command, she would be routinely assigned to another platoon, which had been done several times.
(The logic of that is clear, but it made me wonder about Garcia herself. If she became in love with another woman, there wouldn’t be any way to put that woman someplace outside of her command. But as far as I knew, she didn’t have anybody.)
Cat more or less moved in with me. If some people in her platoon resented it, more were just as glad not to have their sergeant watching over them every hour of the day. She usually stayed with them until first lights-out, and then walked down the corridor to my billet—often passing other people on similar missions. Hard to keep secrets of that sort in a spaceship, and not many tried.
There was an element of desperation in our relationship, doomed souls sharing a last few months, but that was true of everybody’s love unless they were absolutely myopic one-day-at-a-timers. If the numbers held, only 34 percent of us had any future beyond Elephant, which is what everybody called Aleph-10 by the time we angled in for our second collapsar jump.
William had tried in a resigned way to explain the physics of it all, the first time we did a jump, but math had defeated me in college long before calculus kicked me permanently into majoring in English. It has to do with acceleration. If you just fell toward a collapsar, the way normal matter does, you would be doomed. For some reason you and the people around you would seem to be falling forever, but to the outside world, you would be snuffed out instantly.
Well, sure. Obviously nobody ever did the experiment.
Anyhow, you accelerate toward the collapsar’s “event horizon,” which is what it has instead of a surface, at a precalculated speed and angle, and you pop out of another collapsar umpty light-years away—maybe five, maybe five million. You better get the angle right, because you can’t always just reverse things and come back.
(Which we hoped was all that happened to the first Elephant Strike Force. They might be on the other side of the galaxy, colonizing some nice quiet world. Every cruiser did carry a set of wombs and a crèche, against that possibility, though the major rolled her eyes when she described it. Purely a morale device, she said; they probably didn’t work. I wondered whether, in that case, people might be able to grit their teeth and try to make babies the old-fashioned way.)
Since we were leaving from Heaven, we were required to make at least two collapsar jumps before “acquiring” Elephant. That soaked up two centuries of objective time, if such a thing exists. To us it was eleven fairly stressful months. Besides the training with the old-fashioned weapons, the troops had to drill with their fighting suits and whatever specialized weapon system they were assigned to, in case the stasis field didn’t work or had been rendered useless by some enemy development.
Meanwhile, I did my executive officer work. It was partly bookkeeping, which is almost trivial aboard ship, since nothing comes in and nothing goes out. The larger part was a vague standing assignment to keep up the troops’ morale.
I was not well qualified for that; perhaps less qualified than anybody else aboard. Their music didn’t sound like music to me. Their games seemed pointless, even after they’d been relentlessly explained. The movies were interesting, at least as anthropology, and the pleasures of food and drink hadn’t changed much, but their sex lives were still pretty mysterious to me, in spite of my affection for Cat and the orgasms we exchanged. If a man and a woman walked by, I was still more interested in the man. So I did love a woman, but as an actual lesbian I was not a great success.
Sometimes that gave me comfort, a connection to William and my past. More often it made me feel estranged, helpless.
I did have eight part-time volunteers, and one full-time subordinate, Sergeant Cody Waite. He was not an asset. I think the draft laws on Earth, the Elite Conscription Act, were ignored on Heaven. In fact, I would go even further (to make a reference that nobody on the ship would understand) and claim that there was a Miltonian aspect to his arrival. He had been expelled from Heaven, for overweening pride. But he had nothing to be proud of, except his face and muscles. He had the intelligence of a hamster. He did look like a Greek god, but for me what that meant was that every time I needed him to do something, he was down in the gym working out on the machines. Or off getting his rectum reamed by some adoring guy who didn’t have to talk with him. He could read and write, though, so eventually I found I could keep him out of the way by having him elaborate on my weekly reports. He could take “This week was the same as last week,” and turn it into an epic of relentless tedium.
I was glad to be out of the chain of command. You train people intensively for combat and then put them into a box for eleven months of what? More training for combat. Nobody’s happy and some people snap.
The men are usually worse than the women—or, at least, when the women lose control it tends to be a shouting match rather than fists and feet. Cat had a pair who were an exception, though, and it escalated to attempted murder in the mess hall.
This was ten days before the last collapsar jump—everybody on the ragged edge—between Lain Mayfair and “Tiny” Keimo, who was big enough to take on most of the men. Lain tried to cut her throat, from behind, and Tiny broke her arm at the elbow while everybody else was diving for cover, and was seriously strangling her—trying to kill her before she herself bled to death—when the cook, J. J., ran over and brained the big woman with a frying pan.
While they were still in the infirmary there was a summary court-martial. With the consistent testimony of forty witnesses, Major Garcia didn’t have any choice: she sentenced Lain Mayfair to death for attempted murder. She administered the lethal injection herself.
I was required to be a witness, and more, and it was not the high point of my day. Mayfair was bedridden and, I think, slightly sedated. Garcia explained the reason for the verdict and asked Mayfair whether she would prefer the dignity of taking the poison herself. She didn’t say anything, just cried and shook her head. Two privates held her down by the shoulders while Garcia took her arm and administered the popper. Mayfair turned pale and her eyes rolled up. She shook convulsively for a few seconds and was dead.
Garcia didn’t show any emotion during the ordeal. She whispered to me that she would be in her quarters if anybody really needed her, and left quickly.
I had to supervise the disposal of the body. I had two medics wrap her tightly in a sheet and put her on a gurney. We had to roll it down the main corridor, everybody watching. I helped the two of them carry her into the airlock. She was starting to stiffen, but her body wasn’t even cold.
I had a friend read a prayer in Mayfair’s language, and asked the engineer for maximum pressure in the airlock, and then popped it. Her body spun out into its lonely, infinite grave.
I went back to the infirmary and found Tiny inconsolable. She and Mayfair had been lovers back on Stargate. Everything had gone wrong, nothing made sense, why why why why? My answer was t
o have Sharn give her a tranquilizer. I took one myself.
7
We came tearing out of the Elephant’s collapsar about one minute after the defense phalanx, the ten high-speed intelligent drones that had multiple warheads, programmed to take out the portal planet’s nova-bomb minefield.
The first surprise was that the minefield wasn’t there. The second surprise was that the Taurans weren’t, either. Their base seemed intact but long deserted, cold.
We would destroy it with a nova bomb, but first send a platoon down to investigate it. Garcia asked that I go along with them. It was Cat’s platoon. It would be an interesting experience to share, so long as a booby trap didn’t blow us off the planet. The deserted base could be bait.
We would have a nova bomb with us. Either Morales or I could detonate it if we got into a situation that looked hopeless. Or Garcia could do it from orbit. I was sure Garcia could do it. Not so sure about me or Aurelio.
But while we were down in the prep bay getting into our fighting suits, there came the third surprise, the big one. I later saw the recording. The main cube in the control room lit up with a two-dimensional picture of a young man in an ancient uniform. He popped in and out of three dimensions while he spoke: “Hello, Earth ship. Do you still use this frequency? Do you still use this language?”
He smiled placidly. “Of course you won’t respond at first; neither would I. This could be a trap. Feel free to investigate at long range. I am calling from a different portal planet. I’m currently 12.23 million kilometers from you, on the plane of the ecliptic, on an angle of 0.54 radians with respect to the collapsar. As you probably know by now.
“I am a descendant of the first Strike Force, nearly half a millennium ago. I await your questions.” He sat back in his chair, in a featureless room. He crossed his legs and picked up a notebook and began flipping through it.