The shell hit and exploded. Farrell didn’t hear the blast, only the screams of his dying strikers. There was no cover, nowhere to run or hide.
“They’re going to kill us all, sir!” Leinsdorf said. He didn’t have any legs but he was standing anyway, staring with accusing eyes at the commander who let him die.
Another shell approached. It moved as slowly as a tachometer needle rising to redline.
Nowhere to run. All around the plain stood figures watching. They were not involved in any way; just watching.
The shell hit. Another silent blast and the screams. The screams came in pulses, pausing and then vibrating again through Farrell’s mind. He looked at blood and body parts and the staring faces of the betrayed.
“Major, why don’t you get us out? We trusted you!”
He heard the sound of a last shell diving toward him. All his strikers were dead. Everyone but Arthur Farrell was dead, and he had killed them.
The shriek of the incoming round was louder, closer. The shell throbbed with red light, again and again.
Farrell bellowed as he awakened. The room was dark except for the incoming message light on the communications set beside the bed.
He lifted the handset. “C41, Farrell,” he said. His throat was raw from shouting in his sleep. He heard the identifying background hiss of Dirac communication.
An interstellar message was so unlikely that Farrell wondered if he were still dreaming. He lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. The sheets were sweat-soaked and wrapped around his waist.
“Major Farrell,” said the female voice on the other end of a line light-years long, “this is Department One, 701st Regimental Command.”
Earth, operations office. For administrative purposes the Strike Force was listed on the Table of Organization as the 701st Regiment of the Unity Military Establishment. Operations were always conducted at company strength and tasked through theater commands, however. Nothing came from Earth HQ except pay, supply vouchers, and personnel assignments.
“This is a warning order,” the voice said.
Though the signals were relayed by a constellation of ordinary geosynchronous comsats, the interstellar transceiver itself was a satellite the size of a planetoid. It trailed Stalleybrass by three light-seconds in heliocentric orbit. The construction was so complex and expensive that only a dozen of the hundred-plus human-settled worlds had Dirac installations.
“Warning order?” Farrell repeated. The dream had disoriented him. Whenever he opened his eyes, the room spun. “Sir, there must be a mistake. C41 is on stand-down.”
“Major Farrell, there is no mistake,” the voice said. “Have your unit prepared for operational deployment in twenty-four hours. Hard copy will follow through Theater Base Headquarters.”
“Sir!” Farrell said. “We aren’t ready for action. We won’t be ready for, for . . .”
This was insane. Farrell’s head buzzed. He didn’t know if he was awake or dreaming. If he turned the lights on, would he find himself standing on a plain with the bodies of his people around him?
“Major Farrell,” the voice said, “I suggest you recall that in the Strike Force our tradition is to carry out orders, not to argue against them. Transmission ends.”
The hiss stopped. The air was dead, as dead as Nadia Broz.
Our tradition. You rear-echelon bitch.
Farrell felt the handset squirm in his grip. He cradled it. That was only an illusion, a part of his nightmare.
Farrell got up. The sheets dragged after him. He jerked them from the bed and hurled them into a corner of the room. He needed to put a uniform on. Then he had to go to the dayroom to tell whoever was on duty as Charge of Quarters to start alerting people.
Life was a nightmare.
Earth: The Next Step on the Road
As soon as C41’s command group got out at what was supposed to be a major starport on Earth, the aircar lifted again with a spray of gritty soil. The pilot hadn’t said a word to the three strikers during the flight from Oakland District to Emigration Port 10 on the Balcones Escarpment. Farrell wondered if the fellow had dropped them at the wrong place.
The hull of automated transport 10-1442 was complete. From inside, the whining of power wrenches, the angrier howl of saws, and extrusion equipment that sounded like lions vomiting indicated that construction continued. Sixteen similar vessels were spaced a quarter mile apart at decreasing levels of completion. The monorail that joined the sites in a racetrack pattern brought materials graduated by the stage of construction.