The attack ended as suddenly as it had begun. Four of my troopers were on the ground, dead or dying. None of the spiders was left alive.
Through the suit radio I could hear Frede gulping for air.
“Thanks,” she gasped. “It was going to set off a grenade, I think.”
“Suicide fighters,” I said. “We won’t have any prisoners for the scientists to study.”
Frede laughed bitterly. “Tough shit,” she said.
I was able at last to tell the Tsihn admiral that Bititu was secure, after four days of intense battle. My casualties were nearly eighty percent. I myself was burned in the chest and right arm.
The admiral congratulated me, although its image in my visor showed no sign of pleasure or even of approval.
“The Hegemony has not seen fit to attempt to reinforce Bititu,” it complained. “My fleet has waited here for nothing.”
As we were being ferried back to the troopship I wondered why the Commonwealth thought this barren chunk of rock was important enough to kill hundreds of troopers. Apparently the Hegemony did not want to hold on to Bititu badly enough to send help to its Arachnoid garrison.
I shook my head wearily. Was there some real strategic meaning to this fighting, or was it all a game that the Creators were playing among themselves, using us and the other alien races we had encountered as pawns for their entertainment?
What difference did it make? Sitting there in the shuttle craft on the way back to the troopship, grimy and bloody and utterly exhausted, I did what all the other troopers were doing. I leaned my head back against the bulkhead and dozed off.
“It is not a game, Orion.”
The Golden One appeared before me, radiating light so blindingly bright that I had to shield my eyes with my aching, weary hands.
He seemed deadly serious, none of his usual mocking tone in his voice, his face somber, almost grim.
“The balance of forces in this war is tilting the wrong way,” Aten told me. “Anya and her ilk are slowly overcoming my Commonwealth.”
“But we took Bititu,” I protested, like a child seeking its father’s approval. “Isn’t that something?”
“Not enough,” he said. “The Hegemony did not go for my feint. The fleet waited, but the enemy did not step into the trap we had prepared for them.”
“Feint? All that killing was nothing more than a feint?”
“Not quite, Orion. A good strategist always has more than one objective in sight.” Some of Aten’s old haughty self-importance crept back into his expression. “The military aspect of your exertions did not pay the dividends I expected, but the political consequences may yet bear fruit.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
He folded his arms across his chest. “You will see, in due time.”
I blinked and was back on the shuttle, amid my wounded, bone-tired, snoring troopers. The shuttle shuddered and thumped as it docked with the troopship, waking all but the most determined dozers.
“Home sweet home,” somebody cracked.
“You know,” said someone else, “that cryosleeper’s gonna look damned good to me.”
I frowned. Cryosleep? Is that what was in store for these troopers?
They let us rest for two whole days. The severely wounded were sent to sickbay while the rest of us were examined by medics, patched here and there, and allowed to return to our quarters. We slept, we ate and we slept some more.
On the third day we were handed dress uniforms and ordered to assemble in the ship’s biggest cargo bay. It had carried supplies and ammunition on the trip to Bititu; now it was empty. Human officers I had never seen before-all of them in magnificent spotless uniforms heavy with braid and decorations-put us through a marching drill and then paraded us around the big cargo bay to the tune of martial music piped in through the ship’s intercom.
They stood us at attention in front of a makeshift dais, and the human officers, together with a handful of Tsihn, made a series of speeches at us, praising our courage and loyalty. Even Brigadier Uxley was there, obviously reading his prepared speech from a screen built into the rostrum that he leaned upon. He had flown out from the sector base to rendezvous with us at one of our navigation points, where we slowed from superlight velocity for a few hours.
“They’re piping this ceremony back to Loris,” Frede whispered to me as we stood at attention through the long, boring speeches.
Loris. The Commonwealth’s capital planet, my memory told me. The only Earthlike planet of the Giotto system, 270 light-years from old Earth itself.
Then the Tsihn admiral read off a unit citation and handed out medals. It seemed like a miserably poor reward for such hard fighting, but the troopers were pitifully grateful for the recognition.
At the end of the ceremony Uxley smiled beamingly at us and announced, “You are relieved of all duties for the remainder of this trip back to sector base six. There you will be reassigned. Dismissed.”
Frede came up to me as the troop broke up into chatting, laughing little groups.
“Ready for some R and R?” she asked.
“Not much to do aboard this bucket,” I complained.
“We can grab some sack time.”
I caught the gleam in her eye. “For the whole trip back?”
Frede laughed. “That would be fun, Orion, but we’ve only got another twelve hours.”
Puzzled, I asked, “What do you mean? The commander said we’re relieved of all duties-”
“That means we’re going back into cryosleep,” Frede said, her tone sobering. “You don’t think they’re going to feed us the whole trip back, do you? A few watts of electricity to keep the nitrogen liquefied is a lot cheaper than having us underfoot.”
“But I thought-”
She gripped my arm, making me wince slightly.
“Oh, I’m sorry! I forgot your arm is still healing.”
“You mean that after all the fighting we’ve done they’re going to pop us back into the freezers?”
Frede gave me a sad smile. “We got a unit citation and individual medals and congratulations from the admiral. They beamed the ceremony back to the capital for all the civilians to see. We’re official heroes. What more can a trooper ask for?”
I shook my head. “I guess you’ve got to be born to it.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Come on, let’s make out while we’re still warm.”
Chapter 21
I was an officer, and not a regular army officer at that. I received special treatment. I was allowed to remain awake for the trip back to sector base six.
There was a handful of other human officers on the ship, but they seemed to deliberately avoid me. They were staff officers, not line. I got the feeling that they regarded fighting soldiers as beneath their dignity. Or perhaps they were inwardly ashamed of their soft jobs and did not wish to be reminded that the memos and charts and requisitions they dealt with represented real, living, bleeding men and women who were sent into battle at the touch of a keystroke.
Brigadier Uxley remained on board, riding with us back to the sector base. Uxley was cut from a different cloth than the staff officers. He had been a frontline soldier; lost both his legs in battle. He was a gruff old buzzard who drank too much and liked to talk far into the night. We became friends, of a sort. I could drink with him because my metabolism neutralized the effects of alcohol almost as quickly as I digested it. And I needed very little sleep, after resting several days from Bititu.
We spent the long nights of the flight back to sector base six in the brigadier’s quarters, drinking his favorite liquor. The Tsihn quartermaster complained about using the ship’s limited supplies of energy to make unauthorized refreshments with the matter-transceiving equipment. Uxley overrode the reptilian’s objections.
“Damned lizards think they own this sector just because their fleet is operating here,” he grumbled to me as we drank the night away.
He liked to tell war stories, and his memory for them became better with each glass of whisky he downed. Unfortunately, he seemed to forget that he had told me several of his favorite stories more than once. He repeated them, night after night, although each retelling was slightly different.
“You’re lucky,” he said one evening, slurring his words as he poured himself another drink and refilled my glass.
“Lucky?” I asked.
Bobbing his reddened face up and down, Uxley said, “You fought those damned spiders. And the Skorpis before that.”
“I wouldn’t call that lucky,” I said.
Waving a finger in the air, he explained, “You don’t understand. You haven’t had to fight humans. It’s easier to kill aliens. Humans-even those bastards of the Hegemony-that’s a little tougher, believe me.”
I grimaced inwardly. I had fought humans, killed them face-to-face with swords and knives, fought for the Greeks at Troy, for the Israelites at Jericho, fought in a thousand different times back on distant Earth.
“I fought humans,” Uxley said, leaning close enough for me to smell his alcoholic breath. “That’s where I lost these.” He thumped on his prosthetic legs.
“It must have been very painful,” I said.
“You don’t feel the pain. Not at first. Shock. I had both m’legs burned out from under me and I never knew it. Just flopped down on my belly and kept on firing at those Hegemony bastards. Bastards took my legs. I wanted to kill ’em all, every one of them. I got a bunch of ’em, don’t think I didn’t. When the battle was over I was surrounded by piles of enemy dead. I held my position and killed ’em by droves.”
I sipped at my whisky.
“I can still hear ’em,” he said, his voice sinking to a whisper. “At night, when I go to sleep. I can still hear the wounded moaning and screaming. Every night.”
One evening he asked me if I would like to see the recording of our ceremony, as it was shown to the populace of Loris and all the other Commonwealth worlds. When I hesitated, he laughed.
“Don’t worry, you won’t have to sit through all the speeches. The news media trimmed our ceremony quite a bit.”
I really had no choice. I pulled up a chair next to his as he ordered the voice-activated screen to show the news recording from Loris.
I saw my troop, looking clean and fresh in the dress uniforms they had issued us. Instead of being in the cargo hold of a troopship, we appeared to be out on the surface of an Earthlike planet, beneath a bright blue sky, flags and pennants snapping in a brisk breeze. And we were only one tiny unit on a parade ground that held massed ranks by the tens of thousands. The ground was black with Commonwealth soldiery that had been added to the scene by computer.
I glanced at the colonel. “They make it look good, don’t they,” he muttered.
The computer-created band played stirring martial music while a commentator identified my unit as the group that “annihilated the defenders of a key planet in a conquest that took only four days.”
Only four days, I thought. Four days in hell.
The entire show was over in less than ninety seconds.
“What do you think?” Uxley asked me as the screen went dark.
I felt anger simmering inside me. “A kernel of fact wrapped in a big phony sugar coating,” I said.
He nodded and began to pour his first drink of the evening. “Got to keep the civilians happy, Orion. Got to keep up their morale.”
“Really?”
He looked at me through bloodshot eyes. “Hell, man, most of ’em don’t even realize there’s a war going on unless we show them stuff like this.”
“Then why don’t they show them combat scenes? Why don’t they show some of the tapes our helmet recorders took on Bititu? Then they’d see there’s a war being fought!”
Uxley shook his head. “Don’t want to scare them, Orion. The deep thinkers upstairs, the psychotechs and politicians, they don’t want to upset the civilians with blood and pain. Just tell ’em that we’re winning, but there’s a long haul ahead. Light at the end of the tunnel. That’s what they feed the civilians.”
“Crap,” I said.
“I suppose it is,” Uxley agreed calmly. Then he took a big swallow of whisky. “I believed in this war, Orion. I really believed it was important to fight for the Commonwealth. That’s why I joined up. Volunteered. No one forced me. I left my family as soon as I graduated university and joined the army.”
“What did your family think of that?”
He shrugged, his sorrowful eyes looking into the past. “Father was proud. Mother cried. My sisters thought I was crazy.”
“And now?” I avoided looking at his legs.
“Who knows? Haven’t seen any of them in years. We would hardly recognize each other, I suppose. Too much has happened, we’ve moved too far apart.”
“Wouldn’t you like to go home?”
He gulped at his whisky. “The army’s my home, Orion. I have no other home now. Just the army.”
Another night we got onto the subject of his legs.
“They tried regeneration, but something in my metabolism fouled up the process. These plastic jobs are all right, though. I can get around just fine and they only hurt if I have to be on my feet for more than an hour or so.”
Then he started once again on the story of how he lost his legs.
“Training, Orion,” he told me. “That’s the important thing. Training. It’s not rational to expect a man to stand and fight when he’s being shot at. A sane man would turn and run for safety. Takes training to make him fight.”
“Even our cloned troopers?” I asked.
“Yes, of course. They’re humans. They want to live, cloned or not. Got to train them to stand up to battle, not to run when all hell’s breaking loose on them.”
“And train them to kill,” I said.
“Oh, yes, killing’s an important part of it. No one’s figured out how to win a battle without killing, despite all the scientists and computers.”
“Brigadier, what’s going to happen to my troop?”
“Happen?” He blinked his bleary eyes. “They’ll be reassigned, what else?”
“Don’t they get any time for R and R? Furloughs?”
Uxley sat up straighter in his chair. “You’re talking about troopers, Orion. They were made to fight. That’s what they’re for. They’re not real people, like you and me. We’ve got families and friends and a life back home. They don’t. They’re nothing but soldiers. What would they do with a furlough? They’ve got no place to go, no families, no home except the army.”
“But you said you’ve drifted apart from your family, your home,” I pointed out.
“So what? I’ve still got ’em. They’re still there if I decide to go back to them. You’ve got a family and home, don’t you?”
I wondered what to say, finally decided on, “No, I don’t. I’m-an orphan.”
“Too bad. But the troopers, they’re just clones. We made ’em to fight, not to mix with society.”
“There’s nothing in their lives except battle and training for battle.”
“We let ’em have sex, don’t we?” he countered with a broad wink.
“Because some psychotechs decided they’d fight better if their aggressive/protective instincts were reinforced by sexual relationships. Is that all they mean to you? A bunch of instincts to be trained and used like weapons?”
Uxley began to look uncomfortable, his face flushing slightly. “Listen to an old veteran, Orion. Being a soldier consists of long months of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror. We’ve eliminated the boredom for them. They ought to be grateful.”
“And left them nothing but the terror. Is that fair to them?”
“Fair?” His face reddened even more. I didn’t know whether he was going to burst out laughing or roar with anger. “Fair? We’re fighting a war, man! We need the biggest number of troops we can generate. And the cheapest. We can’t go around worrying about their feelings. It’d make them soft, lower their fighting morale.”
I tried to make him see the troopers as human beings, fully as human as he himself was, or as he thought I was. But it was useless. Night after night we talked about it, and he always came down to the same statement. “They were made to fight. Otherwise they would never have been made at all. They ought to be grateful that they’re alive and able to serve the Commonwealth.”
Yes, I thought. Just as I should be grateful that I have been given life after life, all for the privilege of serving Aten and the other Creators.
“What will their next assignment be?” I asked one night.
Uxley shrugged. “Headquarters hasn’t decided yet. Or at least, I haven’t been informed.”
“Aren’t they being retrained while they’re in cryosleep?”
“Not yet,” he told me. “Not as far as I know.”
I began to wonder. And to think. As I lay awake in my bunk after bidding the colonel good night, I began to consider what the Golden One had told me and what I had seen with my own eyes of this era, this time of interstellar war, this battle among the Creators themselves.
The Golden One had told me that Anya had rejected me, rejected human form, that she was leading the fight against him. I was programmed to believe him, but deep within me there was a shadow of doubt. Anya and I had loved one another through the eons, in every era to which I had been sent. Why would she change now?