“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Most of us have already figured out that this mission is some fucked-up brainchild of the higher echelons. Why else would they have replaced our regular captain?”
“Was he your regular partner?”
Her eyes widened. “You are a stranger, aren’t you? Soldiers don’t have regular partners. The army decides who you pair with, just like the army decides everything else in life.”
I began to understand. These soldiers are created by the army, to serve in the army. They know no other life. No parents, no families. Nothing but the military way of life. Nothing but serving in the army.
“I wonder why,” I mused aloud, “the army didn’t do away with the sex drive altogether. Or even make its soldiers sexless.”
Frede made a noise that sounded like an angry snort. “Might as well ask why they don’t use robots instead of cloned humans.”
“Well, why not?”
“Because we’re cheaper, that’s why! And better, too. Because we have emotions. Ever see a robot charge in where it’s hopeless? Yeah, sometimes we get scared, sometimes we even run—but more often we stand and fight and kill our enemies even when we’re dying ourselves.”
I took a deep breath, considering all that. Then I said, “So the army allows sex as a form of reward, then.”
For an instant I thought she was going to slap me. Her eyes blazed with fury. “Where are you from? The army allows sex because without it we don’t fight as well. The sex drive is intimately entangled with human aggression and human protectiveness—both of them—at the deepest genetic levels. Don’t you understand that? Don’t you know anything?”
“Guess I don’t,” I admitted.
“By damn, I hope you know more about fighting than you do about the army.”
“I know about fighting,” I said softly.
“Do you?”
I nodded, then got to my feet again and left her standing in the middle of her tent, looking more troubled than angry. I knew about fighting, from the Ice Age battles against the Neanderthals to the sweeping conquests of the Mongol hordes. From the war against Set’s dinosaurs and intelligent reptilians to the sieges of Troy and Jericho.
I knew about fighting. But what did I know about leading a hundred soldiers in a war that spanned the galaxy, a nexus in space-time that would decide the existence of the continuum?
I began to find out.
Outside Frede’s medical tent, most of my troopers were busy assembling the transceiver that would be the hub of our base on planet Lunga. I could see from the number of modules they had already uncrated that we would have to knock down some of the trees to make room for the assembly. Two of the sergeants already had a team working on that, on the other side of what I now considered to be our base camp.
One squad was setting up the antimissile lasers, the only heavy weaponry that had been sent down with us.
“Nice of the big brass to send this down with us,” one of the troopers was saying as she connected cables from the power pack to the computer that directed the lasers.
“Yeah, sure,” groused the man working alongside her. “They don’t want their nice shiny transceiver bombed into a mushroom cloud.”
“Well, the lasers protect us, too, you know.”
“Yeah, sure. As long as we’re close to the transceiver we’ll be safe from nuclear missiles.”
“That’s something, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, sure. The brass loves us. They stay up nights worrying about our health and safety.”
The young woman laughed.
Other troopers were setting up bubble tents and stacking our supplies. All of them had shed their armor in the morning warmth and were working in their fatigues, which were rapidly becoming stained with sweat. The insects that had plagued us during the night had disappeared with the dappled sunlight filtering through the canopy of leaves high above us. The little camp sounded busy, plenty of grunts and grumbles and swearing. In the background I could hear birds trilling and chirping. Then the cracking, rushing roar of a giant tree coming down. A thunderous crash. The ground shuddered and everything went quiet. But only for a moment. The birds started in again, the soldiers returned to their chores.