THE ABOVE NAMED PERSONNEL WILL REPORT IMMEDIATELY TO GRIMALDI TRANSPORTATION BATTALION TO BE MANIFESTED TO STARGATE.
ISSUED STARGATE TACBD/1298-8684-1450/20 AUG 2019
SG:
BY AUTHO STFCOM Commander.
* * O R D E R S * * O R D E R S * * O R D E R S
'They didn't waste any time, did they?' Marygay said bitterly.
'Must be a standing order. Strike Force Command's light weeks away; they can't even know we've re-upped yet.'
'What about our…' She let it trail off.
'The guarantee. Well, we were given our assignment of choice. Nobody guaranteed we'd have the assignment for more than an hour.' 'It's so dirty.'
I shrugged. 'It's so army.'
But I couldn't shake the feeling that we were going home.
Lieutenant
Mandella
2024-2389 AD
'Quick and dirty.' I was looking at my platoon sergeant, Santesteban, but talking to myself. And anybody else who was listening.
'Yeah,' he said. 'Gotta do it in the first coupla minutes or we're screwed tight.' He was matter-of-fact, laconic. Drugged.
Private Collins came up with Halliday. They were holding hands unselfconsciously. 'Lieutenant Mandella?' Her voice broke a little. 'Can we have just a minute?'
'One minute,' I said, too abruptly. 'We have to leave in five. I'm sorry.'
Hard to watch those two together now. Neither one had any combat experience. But they knew what everybody did; how slim their chances were of ever being together again. They slumped in a corner and mumbled words and traded mechanical caresses, no passion or even comfort. Collins's eyes shone but she wasn't weeping. Halliday just looked grim, numb. She was normally by far the prettier of the two, but the sparkle had gone out of her and left a well-formed dull shell.
I'd gotten used to open female homosex in the months since we'd left Earth. Even stopped resenting the loss of potential partners. The men together still gave me a chill, though.
I stripped and backed into the clamshelled suit. The new ones were a hell of a lot more complicated, with all the new biometrics and trauma maintenance. But well worth the trouble of hooking up, in case you got blown apart just a little bit. Go home to a comfortable pension with heroic prosthesis. They were even talking about the possibility of regeneration, at least for missing arms and legs. Better get it soon, before Heaven filled up with fractional people. Heaven was the new hospital/rest-and-recreation planet.
I finished the set-up sequence and the suit closed by itself. Gritted my teeth against the pain that never came, when the internal sensors and fluid tubes poked into your body. Conditioned neural bypass, so you felt only a slight puzzling dislocation. Rather than the death of a thousand cuts.
Collins and Halliday were getting into their suits now and the other dozen were almost set, so I stepped over to the third platoon's staging area. Say goodbye again to Marygay.
She was suited and heading my way. We touched helmets instead of using the radio. Privacy.
'Feeling OK, honey?'
'All right,' she said. 'Took my pill.'
'Yeah, happy times.' I'd taken mine too, supposed to make you feel optimistic without interfering with your sense of judgment. I knew most of us would probably die, but I didn't feel too bad about it. 'Sack with me tonight?'
'If we're both here,' she said neutrally. 'Have to take a pill for that, too.' She tried to laugh. 'Sleep, I mean. How're the new people taking it? You have ten?'
'Ten, yeah, they're OK. Doped up, quarter-dose.'
'I did that, too; try to keep them loose.'
In fact, Santesteban was the only other combat veteran in my platoon; the four corporals had been in UNEF for a while but hadn't ever fought.
The speaker in my cheekbone crackled and Commander Cortez said, 'Two minutes. Get your people lined up.'
We had our goodbye and I went back to check my flock. Everybody seemed to have gotten suited up without any problems, so I put them on line. We waited for what seemed like a long time.
'All right, load 'em up.' With the word 'up,' the bay door in front of me opened – the staging area having already been bled of air – and I led my men and women through to the assault ship.
These new ships were ugly as hell. Just an open framework with clamps to hold you in place, swiveled lasers fore and aft, small tachyon powerplants below the lasers. Everything automated; the machine would land us as quickly as possible and then zip off to harass the enemy. It was a one-use, throwaway drone. The vehicle that would come pick us up if we survived was cradled next to it, much prettier.
We clamped in and the assault ship cast off from the Sangre y Victoria with twin spurts from the yaw jets. Then the voice of the machine gave us a short countdown and we sped off at four gees' acceleration, straight down.
The planet, which we hadn't bothered to name, was a chunk of black rock without any normal star close enough to give it heat. At first it was visible only by the absence of stars where its bulk cut off their light, but as we dropped closer we could see subtle variations in the blackness of its surface. We were coming down on the hemisphere opposite the Taurans' outpost.
Our recon had shown that their camp sat in the middle of a flat lava plain several hundred kilometers in diameter. It was pretty primitive compared to other Tauran bases UNEF had encountered, but there wouldn't be any sneaking up on it. We were going to careen over the horizon some fifteen klicks from the place, four ships converging simultaneously from different directions, all of us decelerating like mad, hopefully to drop right in their laps and come up shooting. There would be nothing to hide behind.
I wasn't worried, of course. Abstractedly, I wished I hadn't taken the pill.
We leveled off about a kilometer from the surface and sped along much faster than the rock's escape velocity, constantly correcting to keep from flying away. The surface rolled below us in a dark gray blur; we shed a little light from the pseudo-cerenkov glow made by our tachyon exhaust, scooting away from our reality into its own.
The ungainly contraption skimmed and jumped along for some ten minutes; then suddenly the front jet glowed and we were snapped forward inside our suits, eyeballs trying to escape from their sockets in the rapid deceleration.
'Prepare for ejection,' the machine's female-mechanical voice said. 'Five, four…'
The ship's lasers started firing, millisecond flashes freezing the land below in jerky stroboscopic motion. It was a twisted, pock-marked jumble of fissures and random black rocks, a few meters below our feet. We were dropping, slowing.
'Three – ' It never got any farther. There was a too-bright flash and I saw the horizon drop away as the ship's tail pitched down – then clipped the ground, and we were rolling, horribly, pieces of people and ship scattering. Then we slid pinwheeling to a bumpy halt, and I tried to pull free but my leg was pinned under the ship's bulk: excruciating pain and a dry crunch as the girder crushed my leg; shrill whistle of air escaping my breached suit; then the trauma maintenance turned on snick, more pain, then no pain and I was rolling free, short stump of a leg trailing blood that froze shiny black on the dull black rock. I tasted brass and a red haze closed everything out, then deepened to the brown of river clay, then loam and I passed out, with the pill thinking this is not so bad…
The suit is set up to save as much of your body as possible. If you lose part of an arm or a leg, one of sixteen razor-sharp irises closes around your limb with the force of a hydraulic press, snipping it off neatly and sealing the suit before you can die of explosive decompression. Then 'trauma maintenance' cauterizes the stump, replaces lost blood, and fills you full of happy-juice and No-shock. So you will either die happy or, if your comrades go on to win the battle, eventually be carried back up to the ship's aid station.
We'd won that round, while I slept swaddled in dark cotton. I woke up in the infirmary. It was crowded. I was in the middle of a long row of cots, each one holding someone who had been three-fourths (or less) saved by his suit's trauma
maintenance feature. We were being ignored by the ship's two doctors, who stood in bright light at operating tables, absorbed in blood rituals. I watched them for a long time. Squinting into the bright light, the blood on their green tunics could have been grease, the swathed bodies, odd soft machines that they were fixing. But the machines would cry out in their sleep, and the mechanics muttered reassurances while they plied their greasy tools. I watched and slept and woke up in different places.
Finally I woke up in a regular bay. I was strapped down and being fed through a tube, biosensor electrodes attached here and there, but no medics around. The only other person in the little room was Marygay, sleeping on the bunk next to me. Her right arm was amputated just above the elbow.
I didn't wake her up, just looked at her for a long time and tried to sort out my feelings. Tried to filter out the effect of the mood drugs. Looking at her stump, I could feel neither empathy nor revulsion. I tried to force one reaction, and then the other, but nothing real happened. It was as if she had always been that way. Was it drugs, conditioning, love? Have to wait and see.
Her eyes opened suddenly and I knew she had been awake for some time, had been giving me time to think. 'Hello, broken toy,' she said.
'How – how do you feel?' Bright question.
She put a finger to her lips and kissed it, a familiar gesture, reflection. 'Stupid, numb. Glad not to be a soldier anymore.' She smiled. 'Did they tell you? We're going to Heaven.'
'No. I knew it would be either there or Earth.'
'Heaven will be better.' Anything would. 'I wish we were there now.' 'How long?' I asked. 'How long before we get there?'
She rolled over and looked at the ceiling. 'No telling. You haven't talked to anybody?'
'Just woke up.'
'There's a new directive they didn't bother to tell us about before. The Sangre y Victoria got orders for four missions. We have to keep on fighting until we've done all four. Or until we've sustained so many casualties that it wouldn't be practical to go on.'
'How many is that?'
'I wonder. We lost a good third already. But we're headed for Aleph-7. Panty raid.' New slang term for the type of operation whose main object was to gather Tauran artefacts, and prisoners if possible. I tried to find out where the term came from, but the one explanation I got was really idiotic.
One knock on the door and Dr Foster barged in. He fluttered his hands. 'Still in separate beds? Marygay, I thought you were more recovered than that.' Foster was all right. A flaming mariposa, but he had an amused tolerance for heterosexuality.
He examined Marygay's stump and then mine. He stuck thermometers in our mouths so we couldn't talk. When he spoke, he was serious and blunt.
'I'm not going to sugarcoat anything for you. You're both on happyjuice up to your ears, and the loss you've sustained isn't going to bother you until I take you off the stuff. For my own convenience I'm keeping you drugged until you get to Heaven. I have twenty-one amputees to take care of. We can't handle twenty-one psychiatric cases.
'Enjoy your peace of mind while you still have it. You two especially, since you'll probably want to stay together. The prosthetics you get on Heaven will work just fine, but every time you look at his mechanical leg or you look at her arm, you're going to think of how lucky the other one is. You're going to constantly trigger memories of pain and loss for each other… You may be at each other's throats in a week. Or you may share a sullen kind of love for the rest of your lives.
'Or you may be able to transcend it. Give each other strength. Just don't kid yourselves if it doesn't work out.'
He checked the readout on each thermometer and made a notation in his notebook. 'Doctor knows best, even if he is a little weird by your own old-fashioned standards. Keep it in mind.' He took the thermometer out of my mouth and gave me a little pat on the shoulder. Impartially, he did the same to Marygay. At the door, he said, 'We've got collapsar insertion in about six hours. One of the nurses will take you to the tanks.'
We went into the tanks – so much more comfortable and safer than the old individual acceleration shells – and dropped into the Tet-2 collapsar field already starting the crazy fifty-gee evasive maneuvers that would protect us from enemy cruisers when we popped out by Aleph-7, a microsecond later.
Predictably the Aleph-7 campaign was a dismal failure, and we limped away from it with a two-campaign total of fifty-four dead and thirty-nine cripples bound for Heaven. Only twelve soldiers were still able to fight, but they weren't exactly straining at the leash.
It took three collapsar jumps to get to Heaven. No ship ever went there directly from a battle, even though the delay sometimes cost extra lives. It was the one place besides Earth that the Taurans could not be allowed to find.
Heaven was a lovely, unspoiled Earth-like world; what Earth might have been like if men had treated her with compassion instead of lust. Virgin forests, white beaches, pristine deserts. The few dozen cities there either blended perfectly with the environment (one was totally underground) or were brazen statements of human ingenuity; Oceanus, in a coral reef with six fathoms of water over its transparent roof, Boreas, perched on a sheared-off mountaintop in the polar wasteland; and the fabulous Skye, a huge resort city that floated from continent to continent on the trade winds.
We landed, as everyone does, at the jungle city. Threshold. Three-fourths hospital, it's by far the planet's largest city, but you couldn't tell that from the air, flying down from orbit. The only sign of civilization was a short runway that suddenly appeared, a small white patch dwarfed to insignificance by the stately rain forest that crowded in from the east and an immense ocean that dominated the other horizon.
Once under the arboreal cover, the city was very much in evidence. Low buildings of native stone and wood rested among ten-meter-thick tree trunks. They were connected by unobtrusive stone paths, with one wide promenade meandering off to the beach. Sunlight filtered down in patches, and the air held a mixture of forest sweetness and salt tang.
I later learned that the city sprawled out over 200 square kilometers, that you could take a subway to anyplace that was too far to walk. The ecology of Threshold was very carefully balanced and maintained so as to resemble the jungle outside, with all the dangerous and uncomfortable elements eliminated. A powerful pressor field kept out large predators and such insect life as was not necessary for the health of the plants inside.
We walked, limped and rolled into the nearest building, which was the hospital's reception area. The rest of the hospital was underneath, thirty subterranean stories. Each person was examined and assigned his own room; I tried to get a double with Marygay, but they weren't set up for that.
'Earth-year' was 2189. So I was 215 years old, God, look at that old codger. Somebody pass the hat – no, not necessary. The doctor who examined me said that my accumulated pay would be transferred from Earth to Heaven. With compound interest, I was just shy of being a billionaire. He remarked that I'd find lots of ways to spend my billion on Heaven.
They took the most severely wounded first, so it was several days before I went into surgery. Afterwards, I woke up in my room and found that they had grafted a prosthesis onto my stump, an articulated structure of shiny metal that to my untrained eye looked exactly like the skeleton of a leg and foot. It looked creepy as hell, lying there in a transparent bag of fluid, wires running out of it to a machine at the end of the bed.
An aide came in. 'How you feelin', sir?' I almost told him to forget the 'sir' bullshit, I was out of the army and staying out this time. But it might be nice for the guy to keep feeling that I outranked him.
'I don't know. Hurts a little.'
'Gonna hurt like a sonuvabitch. Wait'll the nerves start to grow.' 'Nerves?'
'Sure.' He was fiddling with the machine, reading dials on the other side. 'How you gonna have a leg without nerves? It'd just sit there.'
'Nerves? Like regular nerves? You mean I can just think "move" and the thing moves?'
"Course
you can.' He looked at me quizzically, then went back to his adjustments.
What a wonder. 'Prosthetics has sure come a long way.'
'Pross-what-ics?'
'You know, artificial–'
'Oh yeah, like in books. Wooden legs, hooks and stuff.'
How'd he ever get a job? 'Yeah, prosthetics. Like this thing on the end of my stump.'
'Look, sir.' He set down the clipboard he'd been scribbling on. 'You've been away a long time. That's gonna be a leg, just like the other leg except it can't break.'
'They do it with arms, too?'
'Sure, any limb.' He went back to his writing. 'Livers, kidneys, stomachs, all kinds of things. Still working on hearts and lungs, have to use mechanical substitutes.'
'Fantastic.' Marygay would be whole again, too.
He shrugged. 'Guess so. They've been doing it since before I was born. How old are you, sir?'
I told him, and he whistled. 'God damn. You musta been in it from the beginning.' His accent was very strange. All the words were right but all the sounds were wrong.
'Yeah. I was in the Epsilon attack. Aleph-null.' They'd started naming collapsars after letters of the Hebrew alphabet, in order of discovery, then ran out of letters when the damn things started cropping up all over the place. So they added numbers after the letters; last I heard, they were up to Yod-42.
'Wow, ancient history. What was it like back then?'
'I don't know. Less crowded, nicer. Went back to Earth a year ago – hell, a century ago. Depends on how you look at it. It was so bad I re-enlisted, you know? Bunch of zombies. No offense.'
He shrugged. 'Never been there, myself. People who come from there seem to miss it. Maybe it got better.'
'What, you were born on another planet? Heaven?' No wonder I couldn't place his accent.
'Born, raised and drafted.' He put the pen back in his pocket and folded the clipboard up to a wallet-sized package. 'Yes, sir. Third-generation angel. Best damned planet in all UNEF.' He spelled it out, didn't say 'youneff' the way I'd always heard it.