It wasn’t nearly as bad as the normal routine; none of the crushing-bloating sensation. You were just suddenly filled with the plastic-smelling stuff (you never perceived the first moments, when it rushed in to replace the air in your lungs), and then there was a slight acceleration, and then you were breathing air again, waiting for the shell to pop; then unplugging and unzipping and climbing out- Marygay’s shell was empty. I walked over to it and saw blood.
“She hemorrhaged.” Doc Wilson’s voice echoed sepulchrally. I turned, eyes stinging, and saw him leaning in the door to the locker alcove. He was unaccountably, horribly, smiling.
“Which was expected. Doctor Harmony’s taking care of it. She’ll be just fine.”
Marygay was walking in another week, “Confraternizing” in two, and pronounced completely healed in six.
Ten long months in space and it was army, army, army all the way. Calisthenics, meaningless work details, compulsory lectures-there was even talk that they were going to reinstate the sleeping roster we’d had in basic, but they never did, probably out of fear of mutiny. A random partner every night wouldn’t have set too well with those of us who’d established more-or-less permanent pairs.
All this crap, this insistence on military discipline, bothered me mainly because I was afraid it meant they weren’t going to let us out. Marygay said I was being paranoid; they only did it because there was no other way to maintain order for ten months.
Most of the talk, besides the usual bitching about the army, was speculation about how much Earth would have changed and what we would do when we got out. We’d be fairly rich: twenty-six years’ salary all at once. Compound interest, too; the $500 we’d been paid for our first month in the army had grown to over $1500.
We arrived at Stargate in late 2023, Greenwich date.
The base had grown astonishingly in the nearly seventeen years we had been on the Yod-4 campaign. It was one building the size of Tycho City, housing nearly ten thousand. There were seventy-eight cruisers, the size of Anniversary or larger, involved in raids on Tauran-held portal planets. Another ten guarded Stargate itself, and two were in orbit waiting for their infantry and crew to be outprocessed. One other ship, the Earth’s Hope II, had returned from fighting and had been waiting at Stargate for another cruiser to return.
They had lost two-thirds of their crew, and it was just not economical to send a cruiser back to Earth with only thirty-nine people aboard. Thirty-nine confirmed civilians.
We went planetside in two scoutships.
7
General Botsford (who had only been a full major the first time we met him, when Stargate was two huts and twenty-four graves) received us in an elegantly appointed seminar room. He was pacing back and forth at the end of the room, in front of a huge holographic operations chart.
“You know,” he said, too loud, and then, more conversationally, “you know that we could disperse you into other strike forces and send you right out again. The Elite Conscription Act has been changed now, five years’ subjective in service instead of two.
“And I don’t see why some of you don’t want to stay in! Another couple of years and compound interest would make you independently wealthy for life. Sure, you took heavy losses-but that was inevitable, you were the first. Things are going to be easier now. The fighting suits have been improved, we know more about the Taurans’ tactics, our weapons are more effective. . . there’s no need to be afraid.”
He sat down at the head of the table and looked at nobody in particular.
“My own memories of combat are over a half-century old. To me it was exhilarating, strengthening. I must be a different kind of person than all of you.”
Or have a very selective memory, I thought.
“But that’s neither here nor there. I have one alternative to offer you, one that doesn’t involve direct combat.
“We’re very short of qualified instructors. The Force will offer any one of you a lieutenancy if you will accept a training position. It can be on Earth; on the Moon at double pay; on Charon at triple pay; or here at Stargate for quadruple pay. Furthermore, you don’t have to make up your mind now. You’re all getting a free trip back to Earth-I envy you, I haven’t been back in fifteen years will probably never go back-and you can get the feel of being a civilian again. If you don’t like it, just walk into any UNEF installation and you’ll walk out an officer. Your choice of assignment.