“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.