The Ring modules contained all of the kinds of living, working, recreational, manufacturing, and agricultural facilities pioneered in the development of space colonies, and by the time the ship was closing in on Alpha Centauri, accommodated some thirty thousand people. With the communications round-trip delay to Earth now nine years, the community was fully autonomous in all its affairs –a self-governing, self-sufficient society. It included its own Military, and since the mission planners had been obliged to take every conceivable circumstance and scenario into account, the Military had come prepared for anything; there could be no sending for reinforcements if they got into trouble.
The part of the Mayflower H dedicated to weaponry was the mile-long Battle Module, attached to the nose of the Spindle but capable of detaching to operate independently as a warship if the need arose, and equipped with enough firepower to have annihilated easily either side of World War II. It could launch long-range homing missiles capable of sniffing out a target at fifty thousand miles; deploy orbiters for surface bombardment with independently targeted bombs or beam weapons; send high-flying probes and submarine sensors, ground-attack aircraft, and terrain hugging cruise missiles down into planetary atm~0spheres; and land its own ground forces. Among other things, it carried a lot of nuclear explosives.
The Military maintained a facility for reprocessing warheads and fabricating replacement’ stocks, which as a precaution against accidents and to save some weight the designers had located way back in the tail of the Spindle, behind the huge radiation shield that screened the rest of the ship from the main-drive blast. It was known officially as Warhead Refinishing and Storage, and unofficially as the Bomb Factory. Nobody worked there. Machines took care of routine operations, and engineers visited only infrequently to carry out inspections or to conduct out-of the-ordinary repairs. Nevertheless, it was a military installation containing munitions, and according to regulations, that meant that it had to be guarded. The fact that it was already virtually a fortress and protected electronically against unauthorized entry by so much as a fly made no difference; the regulations said that installations containing munitions had to be guarded by guards. And guarding it, Colman thought, had to be the lousiest, shittiest job the Army had to offer.
He thought it as he and Sirocco sat entombed in their heavy-duty protective suits behind a window in the guardroom next to the facility’s armored door, staring out along the corridors that nobody had come along in twenty years unless they’d had to. Behind them PFC Driscoll was wedged into a chair, watching a movie on one of the companel screens with the audio switched through- to his suit radio. Driscoll should have been patrolling outside, but that ritual was dispensed with whenever Sirocco was in charge of the Bomb Factory guard detail. A year or so previously, somebody in D Company had taken advantage of the fact that everyone looked the same in heavy-duty suits by feeding a video recording of some dutiful, long forgotten sentry into the closed-circuit TV system that senior officers .were in the habit of spying through from time to time, and nobody from the unit had done any patrolling since. The cameras were used instead to afford early warning of. unannounced spot checks.
“You never know. The chances might be better after we reach Chiron,” Sirocco said. Colman’s transfer application had been turned down by Engineering. “With the population exploding like crazy, there might be all kinds of
prospects. That’s what you get.””What’s what I get?”
“For being a good soldier and a lousy citizen.”
“Not. liking killing people makes a good soldier?”
“Sure.” Sirocco tossed up a gauntleted hand as if the answer were obvious. “Guys who don’t like it but have to do it get mad. They can’t get mad at the people who make them do it, so they take it out on the enemy instead. That’s what makes them good. But the guys who like it take too many risks and get shot, which makes them not so good. It’s logical.”
“Army logic,” Colman murmured.
“I never said it had to make sense.” Sirocco brought his elbows up level with his shoulders, stretched. for a few seconds, and sighed. After a short silence he cocked a curious eye in Colman’s direction. “So… what’s the latest with that cutie from Brigade?”