The Tsihn captain did not invite me aboard its ship. It seemed to want to have as little to do with me as possible. Its orders had been to penetrate the area where I had jumped away from the Blood Hunter, find me and bring me back to the nearest Tsihn base. Its orders did not include hospitality or even civility.
The Tsihn base was not a planet, but a massive motile station nearly a hundred light-years from the Lunga region. It hung in the emptiness of interstellar space, outlined against a distant bright swirl of gas and dust glowing red and blue in fluorescence stimulated by a cluster of newborn hot, blue stars a few light-years away.
There was a human section to the station, and I was brought there by a Tsihn escort, not knowing whether I was going to receive a medal or a court-martial.
I got neither. The human chief of the section was a grizzled old brigadier named Uxley with prosthetic legs and a permanently bleary expression on his baggy, sagging face. I was brought to his office by my Tsihn guards, who wheeled about and left without a word or a salute. I stood before his desk at attention.
“You’re being put in charge of a battalion, Orion,” Brigadier Uxley told me, with no preliminaries. “Don’t ask me why. Somebody higher up in the chain of command must either have enormous faith in you or wants to see you dead. Maybe both.”
He was clearly unhappy over me. I had no rank, not even a record in his personnel files. As far as he was concerned I was the protégé of some high-ranking officer or politician, with no real military experience. He was, of course, more right than he could know.
“There’s a little piece of rock called Bititu,” he said, flashing an image of a black, pitted asteroid on his wall screen. “What its strategic value is, no one in the upper echelons has seen fit to tell me. But it’s to be taken by you and your thousand. And damned quick, too.”
“Sir,” I said, still at ramrod attention, “I would like to have the survivors of the Lunga mission as part of my command.”
He fixed me with a bloodshot eye. “Why?”
“I know them, sir, and they know me. We work well together.”
“Do you?” He looked down at the display screen on his desk for several moments. I could not see the screen, but from the reflection of light on his face I could tell he was paging through a considerable amount of data very quickly.
Finally he looked up at me. “You pulled them out of a Skorpis depot? Single-handed?”
“I negotiated for them, sir.”
His attitude softened appreciably. Leaning back in his padded chair, he pointed at me with a rock-steady finger. “You’re not regular army, are you?”
“No, sir.”
“Yet you went in there and got your troops away from the Skorpis.”
I said nothing.
“All right, you can have them with you. I’ll even add them to your command, since you’re already slated for a full battalion. The sergeant outside will show you where your quarters are. Better start spending every waking second on studying Bititu and the Hegemony’s defenses of it.”
“Yessir.” I saluted and left his office.
And went straight to the cryonics center where my troop was being revived. It was a big chamber very similar to the one where I had first awakened in this era. The medics had removed forty-nine of the chamber’s regular cryosleep units and placed my troopers’ capsules on their foundations. They were all plugged in to the chamber’s environmental controls and computer system. Frede was in one of those pods. And Quint, Jerron and the others. Frozen inside dull metal canisters inscribed with Skorpis symbols. The capsules looked old, heavily used. But I saw no vapor leaking from them; battered they might be, but they still worked as they should.
“They won’t be coming out of it for another six hours, at least,” said the medic on duty at the control station. Her voice echoed off the metal walls.
“It takes that long?” I asked.
She waggled one hand in the air. “Slower is better, once the body cells have been defrosted. Pump nutrients into them, stimulate their brains to restart, let them dream and sort out whatever memories were locked in short-term storage when they went under.”
Their short-term memories must be terrible, I thought. The last thing they would remember would be the Skorpis freezing them for their food larders. Did they struggle? Try to fight? Or go under resigned to their miserable fate, convinced that they had been abandoned by their leaders?
“And besides,” the medic added, “we just got orders to feed some new training into them. So while we’re letting them come back gradually we can program this new material into their neural systems.”
I didn’t bother to ask what the new training material was. I knew they were being programmed with everything the army thought they needed to know about Bititu. I decided to go back to the cubicle they called my quarters and start to study up on the asteroid, too. It wouldn’t do for my troops to know more about the operation than I did.
But first I asked the medic, “Could you call me when they wake up?”
“I’ll be off duty then,” she said.
“Well, how long will it take? What time will they start to come out of it?”
“Another six hours. I already told you.”
I thanked her and hustled back to my quarters. I spent the six hours studying Bititu, grateful that I did not need sleep. What I learned of the asteroid was not encouraging.
Bititu was an asteroid in the Jilbert system, a seven-mile-long chunk of barren rock, roughly kidney-shaped. Jilbert itself was a dim red dwarf star with only one true planet, a gas giant orbiting so close to the star that they were almost a binary system. The rest of the system was nothing but asteroids, an unusual state for the planetary system of a dwarf star.
The Hegemony had apparently fortified Bititu heavily. According to the reports I scanned, the asteroid was honeycombed with tunnels defended by a full regiment of spiderlike creatures that the reports referred to only as the Arachnoids. Very little was known about them; even their intelligence was in some doubt. Some scientists believed that individual Arachnoids were not intelligent, in the sense of being self-aware and motivated, but were instead part of a collective hive mind, as many species of insects have proven to be.
The most discouraging part of the reports was the admission that not much was known about the Arachnoids because none had ever been taken alive. They always fought to the last member. Not a happy prospect for those who had to do battle against them.
Then I saw that the Commonwealth’s scientific community requested that we take as many of the Arachnoids prisoner as possible, for them to interrogate and study. The phrasing of their request made it clear that they thought we soldiers slaughtered all the Arachnoids deliberately.
“Despite their nonhumanoid appearance,” the scientists’ request read, “the Arachnoids are to be treated as fully sentient, intelligent beings. Indiscriminate killing of these creatures is punishable by military code.”
I turned off the video reader with a feeling almost of disgust. Bititu would be a bloody mess, it seemed. There was no way to take the asteroid except by direct assault, and the enemy was well entrenched and willing to fight to the bitter end. I doubted that the Arachnoids would willingly allow themselves to become prisoners and objects of our scientists’ eager investigations.
With my mind full of foreboding I went down the metal passageway of the station back to the cryonic center.
A different medic was on duty now, a gray-haired male whose face was also a grayish pallor, as if he had not seen the sun in years.
“They’re coming around,” he whispered as I looked out across the big room filled with the cryonic capsules. His attention was focused on the dozens of display screens set into the curving panel before his chair like the faceted eyes of a giant insect.
I felt the chill of cryonic cold seeping into my bones. “Shouldn’t it be warmer in here?” I asked.
He shot me a disapproving glance. “I know what I’m doing, soldier.”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”
“They’re going to be disoriented for a bit. The briefings they’ve been getting while we’re pulling them out will be mostly subconscious, until they’re brought to the surface by trigger phrases.”
The trigger phrase, I knew, was simply the name of the target asteroid: Bititu.
“The last real memories they’ll have will be whatever they saw when they were put under.”
Skorpis warriors forcing them into the cryo pods. Knowing that they were nothing more than food to their captors, that if they were ever awakened it would be for ritual execution.
“Isn’t there some way we can tell them they’re safe, that they’re not prisoners of the Skorpis anymore?”
The medic glared at me. “Is that what happened to these soldiers? They were frozen by those damned cats?”
“Yes.”
“Shit on a goddamned mother-loving sonofabitch sandwich,” he snarled, his fingers suddenly playing across the control keys. “Nobody tells me any pissing thing. Same old army. If there’s a way to screw things up…” His voice sank to a disgruntled mumble.
At last he looked up from the controls and displays. “It’s too pissing late. There’s nothing I can do. They’re going to start waking up in a few minutes and they’ll still be thinking that they’re prisoners. If we don’t have a couple of heart attacks among them it’ll be a pissing miracle.”
My mind raced. Was there anything I could do? Could I reach out to them mentally and assure them that they were safe, that they had nothing to fear?
Too late. A heard a click and a sighing sound. Looking across the chamber, I saw one of the capsules pop open, white vapor issuing from it like fog seeping across a graveyard at midnight. Another clicked and sighed. Then more.
Someone moaned. Someone began to sob like a motherless child. Which we all were, of course.
I rushed to the nearest capsule. I saw a trooper struggling to a sitting position, eyes wide with fright.
“It’s all right,” I shouted, my voice echoing off the chamber’s metal walls. “You’re safe. You’re not a prisoner anymore.”
One by one the pods opened up and my troopers awoke. Many of them were ashen-faced, trembling. Others sat up with fists clenched and teeth gritted, ready for a fight. I saw that most of them were bruised, lips split, eyes swollen, clotted blood matting their hair. They had not gone into those pods peacefully.
I searched through the capsules for Frede’s pod. She was just opening her eyes when I found it.
“Orion?” she asked as I leaned through the vapor steaming out of her capsule. “They got you, too?”
A heavy blue-black bruise swelled her cheek. I saw slashes on her arms where her sleeves had been torn.
“No,” I told her. “I got you back from them. You’re safe. It’s all right.”
“Safe?”
“We’re in a Tsihn station. I got you back from the Skorpis.”
I helped her up to a sitting position. She seemed dazed, disoriented. “We’re not prisoners? Not…”
“You’re not prisoners anymore. You’re safe.”
She looked around, blinking her eyes. “Sheol, do I have a headache,” she muttered. Then she threw her arms around my neck and kissed me so hard that the rest of the barely revived troopers whooped and whistled.
And then someone screamed, as if in agony or mortal terror. I pulled away from Frede’s embrace and sprinted to the pod. It was Lieutenant Quint, screaming horribly, still lying on his back with his eyes squeezed shut, his hands raised defensively in front of him, his legs churning as if he were trying to run away.
“Quint, it’s all right!” I yelled into his contorted face. “You’re safe.”
He kept on screaming as if he could not hear me. I reached into the capsule and grabbed the front of his shirt, yanked him halfway up and shook him violently. Still he screeched, eyes closed, gibbering incoherently.
I slapped his face. Even as I did, I noticed that he was unbruised. Shaking him again, I shouted, “Wake up! It’s me, Orion. You’re safe.”
He was trembling uncontrollably, but he opened his eyes and stared at me.
“You’re not among the Skorpis,” I said, more gently. “It’s all right. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
A few of the other troopers had gotten shakily to their feet and gathered around Quint’s capsule. I smelled something foul, and realized that Quint had emptied his bladder and his bowels, either when the Skorpis had shoved him into the pod or just now, as he awoke.
I waved the other troopers away before they smelled it. “Fall in,” I said. “Give the lieutenant a minute to pull himself together.”
I had them line up, leaving Quint in his capsule. They were bruised, cut, uniforms tattered and dirty, but alive and grinning at me.
“There must be a sorrier-looking bunch of mongrels somewhere in the army,” I said to them, “but if there is, I hope I never have to look at them. Sergeants, get these mutts cleaned up, find their assigned quarters, and see that they’re issued fresh uniforms and kits. Officers, come with me.”
I knew that the remaining sergeants among my troop were experienced veterans who knew how to maneuver their squads through a camp, whether it was on some alien planet or an interstellar way station, such as this was. I wanted the troopers out of the chamber before I dealt with Quint.
He was a mess, both physically and mentally. Frede was the only other surviving lieutenant, and it took the two of us to coax Quint out of his pod and down to the medical rehab center. The gray-faced medic who had supervised the revival process came with us.
“I’ve seen this before,” he told me as a pair of robot nurses took Quint gently in their metal grips. “He won’t be fit for active duty until he’s been completely deprogrammed and retrained. Maybe not even then.”
“What will happen to him, then?” I asked.
The medic shifted his shoulders beneath his white jacket. “Oh, they’ll assign him to some desk job, I suppose. He’ll be perfectly adequate to send other troopers into battle; he just hasn’t got the stuff in him to face battle himself, anymore.”
I should have felt pity for Quint, I know. Instead I felt a smoldering resentment, almost anger.
Frede read my face. “He can’t help it,” she said. “He’s not goldbricking.”
“How do you know?”
She shrugged. “What difference would it make?”
I realized she was right. What difference would it make? Despite all the training, despite being gestated specifically to be a soldier, despite a lifetime of nothing but the military, Quint had taken all the fighting he was ever going to take. I should have seen it coming. I should have realized that while we were fighting for our lives on Lunga he was hiding in a hole somewhere, keeping his head down, unwilling or unable to face the death that the rest of us did not even think about in the heat of action.
“It’s not a good thing for soldiers to think too much,” Frede told me as we left Quint to the medics and went to find our quarters and the rest of the troop.
“Maybe not,” I muttered, thinking of Randa, who did not really believe soldiers were capable of thinking at all.
“You’re now my second-in-command,” I told her as we walked along the metal passageways, guided by the computer displays on the bulkheads. Most of the others in the passageways in this section of the station were humans, although we passed several Tsihn and even a few other species.
She nodded. “Are we going to stay here on this station, or will they ship us to an R-and-R center?”
“No R-and-R,” I said. “We’ve got a new assignment.”
“Without a rest and refit from the last one?” She was immediately indignant.
I suddenly realized that it was my fault. “I asked for you,” I said, “when I got the assignment.”
“What assignment?”
“Bititu. It’s an asteroid in the-”
I stopped. Frede’s eyes seemed to glaze over for a moment. The trigger word. I could have kicked myself. All the data from the subconscious briefing came surging up into her awareness.
“Sheol,” she murmured. “They don’t give you the easy ones, do they?”
“I shouldn’t have asked for you,” I started to apologize. “Maybe I can get you released for R and R.”
“Not now. Not once we’ve been briefed. They’ll either ship us out or freeze us.”
We started walking along the passageway again. I didn’t know what to say. It had never occurred to me that the troopers deserved a spell of rest and recreation after their ordeal on Lunga. Bititu promised to be even worse.
“There’s one glitch in the planning that I’ll have to fix,” Frede told me as we approached the section where we would be quartered.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The sleeping arrangements. They’ve paired each of us off with other people.”
“That’s standard procedure, isn’t it? The army doesn’t want us forming emotional attachments that are too close.”
“Right. But you’re battalion commander now and rank has its privileges.”
“I don’t know if I should-”
“Not you,” Frede said, her eyes twinkling mischievously. “If I’m your second, then I can pull my rank to supersede the bitch they’ve assigned to you.”
Chapter 19
So when we boarded a Tsihn troopship for the flight to Bititu, Lieutenant Frede was my second-in-command and my bunk-mate.
Our ship joined a sizable battle fleet of cruisers and dreadnoughts. The plan was to make the run to the Jilbert system at superlight velocity, so we could not be detected until the very last moment, when we slowed to relativistic speed. Navigation was going to be tricky, but the Tsihn admiral assured me that they could get us to within a few light-hours of Jilbert.
“In that way,” it told me at one of our conferences in its quarters, “the Hegemony will have no warning time to reinforce the system.”
Its conference room was hot and dry; like being in a sunbaked desert, except that we were seated around an uneven conference table. Half of the table was set at a height to make humans comfortable, the other half several centimeters higher for the comfort of the big senior officers among the reptilians. The admiral, of course, was the biggest of them all: nearly three meters tall when standing, the dun-colored scales of its chest almost completely covered with symbols of rank and distinction.
The walls of the conference room were filled with holograms of arid rocky country and a blazing bronze sky. I was tempted to shield my eyes from the sun, but the brightness actually was never high enough to cause real glare.
“The nearest Hegemony base to Bititu is in the Justice system,” I pointed out. “That’s only a dozen light-years away. The enemy could send a battle fleet to Bititu before we’ve secured the asteroid.”
The admiral flicked its forked tongue in and out almost faster than the eyes could follow, its way of working off nervous energy.
“We will remain in the Jilbert system until you have secured the asteroid, never fear,” said the admiral. “My fleet is powerful enough to take care of any Hegemony attempt to reinforce Bititu.”
I remembered the way the Tsihn fleet had bolted from Lunga and stranded us.
“In point of fact,” said the admiral, tongue flicking blurrily, “we are hoping that the Hegemony will attempt to interfere. It will give us an opportunity to destroy one of their fleets.”
I was glad to hear that it was so confident. Glancing along our end of the conference table to Frede and my other officers, I saw that none of us humans shared its opinion.
My battalion spent most of the flight in training. We converted the troopship’s passageways and compartments into mock-ups of the tunnels and caves we expected to find on Bititu and practiced storming through heavily defended positions, day after day. There was no room for subtlety in our tactics. It was just brute force and firepower. I knew the casualties would be high.
“Why doesn’t the fleet just blow the goddamned asteroid out of existence?” Frede asked one night in our bunk. “Why do we have to take it?”