Death smelled like a hospital, with cloying, antiseptic odors permeating everything. Distant noises were swamped by their own echoes, indistinguishable, unimportant, beyond full awareness. There were no sights, nothing but a dark limbo populated only by ghostly retinal images, or imaginings, flickering amorphous shapes in dark purples or greens, morphing from one fantastic appearance to the next, teasing the mind to find familiar silhouettes in the shapeless blobs.
This must be hell, trying to drive me crazy. That was the first coherent thought in Lon’s return from the abyss. Death was assumed, unquestioned. There was Self without non-Self There was only the thought, without accompanying images, abstractions beyond representation—a universe without matter, and with little energy.
Through subjective eons there was nothing more, not even cognition of passing time or wonder at the lack of substance to existence. Lon’s mind took no special notice of its own—apparent—survival. He gave no thought to future or past, for those concepts did not currently exist for him. Nor was he aware of the lacunae in his tightly circumscribed experience, the recurrent voids, each shorter than those that came before.
Slowly, there was one almost subconscious image. Lon was nearly aware of floating in liquid, secured in some sort of womb. After another passage of nontime, light entered his universe—harsh, bright light—and he felt the circulation of cool air against his cheeks. One layer of muffling was removed from the faraway sounds that he was finally, almost, aware of. Then he felt his chest move as he sucked in air. Awareness was not a flood but a growing trickle of sensory input.
There was an era of discovery as Lon’s body gradually made its presence known, encapsulating his awareness, his consciousness. Only slowly did outside referents intrude. Memory was the last constituent to arrive and find its place.
Memory … .
Lon found his mind catapulted back to the climax of the battle, to the last rush of Norbanker rebels. They were so close that he could almost have spit on them. And the rattle of Gatling gunfire, the roar of an attack shuttle passing overhead, low, fast, emptying thousands of rounds of ammunition in the few seconds that it could have been in range before roaring skyward on a burn-to-orbit and rendezvous with Long Snake.
Recalling the name of the ship triggered associations in Lon’s still-expanding mind-universe. He opened his eyes, intuitively certain that he had to be aboard the ship, in its dispensary, its hospital ward.
I’m alive. He experienced a feeling of wonder, surprise, at that revelation. It was impossible but undeniable. His view was restricted to what he could see directly in front of his eyes, above him. He could not move his head—or anything else—and his field of vision was bordered by a rectangular opening not far from his face. Ceiling lights surrounded by a light gray field—the color of walls and ceilings aboard Long Snake.
He blinked.
“Take it easy, son,” a voice said from behind, above Lon’s head. “You’re going to be fine. It’ll just take a few more seconds to flush the last of the repair units from your system. Just relax, and wait.”
Waiting was easy for Lon … since he had no choice. He could move only his eyelids and eyes, and the eyes did not seem inclined to obey directions. His mind was beginning to function at something near normal, though, and he had enough to think about. He was obviously in a trauma tube in the ship’s dispensary. He was also at the end of his treatment, which meant that he had likely been in the tube for at least two hours, more likely four. The molecular repair units had finished repairing whatever damage had been done to him in the firefight.
I was shot, he realized, and then, more than once. He recalled the first wound, in his arm, or shoulder. He had no memory at all of the second wound, the one that had robbed him of consciousness. It took a moment to reassemble his final memories of the battle, the nearness of the enemy, men falling on both sides of him—and the roar of an attack shuttle giving them belated support. At first Lon did not notice when the lid of the trauma tube was lifted and one side lowered. There were two men standing next to him, watching him. One wore the insignia of a surgeon. The other was an enlisted rating, a medical orderly.
“You can get up now,” the doctor said. “Good as new. There was no serious neurological damage.”
The orderly helped Lon to sit and then stand, and remained close, ready to catch the patient if he started to fall. There was often a brief period of disorientation and dizziness for a patient coming out of a tube. Lon felt the vertigo, but he had planted his feet well apart, and leaned back against the edge of the tube until it passed. He looked down at himself and saw that he was wearing nothing but a disposable hospital gown.
“Just how bad was it, doctor?” he asked, turning his head toward the surgeon—slowly. “How close did I come?”
The doctor blinked once—quite deliberately, it appeared to Lon. “You want the full details?”
“As much as I can understand.”
“Very well. There were three separate bullets. The first creased your right arm here.” He traced a line across Lon’s arm.
I didn’t even know about that, Lon thought.
“That wound was … relatively insignificant. The other two were serious. One entered here.” The doctor tapped the left side of Lon’s chest, just below the collarbone. “It fractured the clavicle, then was deflected downward, causing the left lung to collapse, and exited below the fourth rib, about three centimeters to the left of your spine. The other bullet caught you in the side, slightly below the ribs.” He poked Lon again, in the left side. “That one damaged the liver, stomach, and small intestine. There was no exit wound. The bullet was lodged against the ilium on the right side—the upper part of the hipbone. We needed a surgical probe to extract that. And between the three wounds, you lost considerable blood. If help had been a little longer getting to you … ” He shook his head.
“The others with me. How many made it?” Lon asked.
“I don’t know,” the doctor said softly. “We treated nine men. How many were uninjured, treated dirtside, or killed, I don’t know. Sorry.”
“I’ll show you where your clothes are,” the orderly said, finally stepping away from Lon. “Then you get yourself to the mess hall for a meal. After that you can worry about getting back to your unit on the ground.”
Lon nodded, and let the orderly lead him away. Once they were leaving the ward, Lon asked, “Have you heard anything about how things are going on the ground?”
“Just rumors. All I know for certain is that we haven’t received any additional casualties since the group you came in with. I guess that counts as good news.”
They had entered a small locker room. The orderly pointed to one of the lockers. “You’ll find your stuff in there. Most of it’s new, except for the shoes and helmet. Your weapons are in the armory.”
Lon nodded, mumbled his thanks, and opened the locker.
“You know how to find your way to your mess hall from here?” the orderly asked.
Lon hesitated before he nodded. “I think I remember.” He shrugged. “If not, I know how to use the locators.”
“Good enough. Good luck.”
Thanks, Lon thought as the orderly left. Lon stared into the locker. The battledress, underwear, and socks were new, but that would not have surprised him even without the damage his clothes had to have taken. It was simpler to recycle uniform clothing than to clean it. The boots had been cleaned, somewhat.
Lon stripped off the hospital gown and dropped it on the floor. Methodically, he pulled on clothing, first donning everything he could while standing, then sitting to pull on socks and boots. When he was finished, he picked up the hospital gown and put it in a chute designated for that purpose. The last item that Lon took out of the locker was his helmet. He carried that under his left arm as he left the locker room.
In the passageway, he looked both ways, trying to make sure that he did know exactly where he was and how to get to the A Company mess hall. He had labored over plans of Long Snake, trying to memorize everything that he might need to know about it. The ship’s dispensary was a new point of departure for him, but novelty was not an insurmountable complication. At worst, he would only have to look at the wall, down by the hatch through the nearest gastight bulkhead, to see where he was—section, level, and corridor. But after a few seconds he turned left and started walking, striding along at a solid clip, knowing that he had more than a quarter mile to go to reach the mess hall.
The mess hall was staffed by men from Long Snake’s crew, not by soldiers. The ship and its crew were part of the DMC, but an ancillary branch, like the fighter wing and the noninfantry elements of the planetary defense forces. They came under the direct jurisdiction of the Council of Regiments.
Only one cook was present in the mess hall, but he welcomed Lon warmly. “Just grab a seat somewhere close,” the cook said. “Tell me what you’d like and I’ll bring it to you. You’re not the first guy to come through this watch. There’ve been a half dozen others, more or less, just enough to keep me awake till my relief shows up.”
The cook seemed desperate for companionship. He scarcely stopped talking the whole time Lon was in the mess hall—while he was fixing the meal, while Lon ate it, and afterward, in the few minutes Lon took to relax before going to find out what to do next from whoever was handling things for the battalion aboard ship. Lon was content to let the cook carry the conversation, contributing only a word or two when it was inescapable. The cook did not seem to mind.
The battalion’s Charge of Quarters was an elderly captain who was serving out his final year before retirement as assistant adjutant. He was not frail, or unfit for combat duty. There were no sinecures in the DMC. But after more than thirty years in uniform, Captain Bowman was due the easy posting.
“Only one man left in hospital from your lot,” Bowman said when Lon reported, “and he’s probably out of the tube by now. For now, my advice is to go to your quarters and catch up on sack time. The general policy is that we don’t return casualties to full-duty status for eight hours after they come out of the tube, and it might be longer than that before we send the lot of you down. Depends on what’s going on, and whether or not we’ve got any other reasons to make the shuttle run.”
“Can you tell me anything about the others in the platoon I was with?” Lon asked. “How badly were we hurt?”
“You were with Alpha’s fourth platoon?”
Lon nodded. Captain Bowman leaned back. “I won’t lie to you. The platoon got hurt bad. The last figures I had were nineteen dead and one man missing, besides the wounded.”
“Who was missing?”
Bowman had to check his complink. “Lance Corporal Bantor.”
Lon shook his head. “He was dead before the fight, killed by a sniper. That’s what put the rest of the platoon in danger. Bantor and I were patrolling out away from the rest. Roy went out farther than I did and was killed. The platoon was moving to rescue me when we came under full attack. How about Lieutenant Taiters, Platoon Sergeant Jorgen, and Corporal Nace?”
The captain consulted his complink again. “Nace is the last one in hospital. Taiters was out an hour ago. Jorgen wasn’t injured. Anyone else you want to know about?”
Lon closed his eyes for an instant, then opened them again. “Can you read me the names of the dead?”
If I hadn’t suggested sending a couple of men out wide, Lon thought. He had returned to his squad bay and dropped onto his bunk to wait for orders. His first move had been to look for Lieutenant Taiters, but the platoon leader was off somewhere in the ship. If we hadn’t gotten so fired up about what we were doing. If Roy hadn’t gone out those extra yards. The Ifs. There were a lot of them, and twenty men had died.
I might as well have killed them myself. All I had to do was keep my mouth shut and obey orders. I didn’t have to make suggestions. No one would have thought the worse of me.
For a time, then, he managed to blank out conscious thought. He stared at the bottom of the bunk above his. He blinked rarely. The wounded from fourth platoon would be in the next bay over, but Lon could not bring himself to visit them. They had been hurt because of him. Their friends had died—40 percent of the platoon. Maybe they would not want to see him. Or, perhaps even worse, they might act as if it were not all Lon’s fault. Eventually, he slept. His slumber was almost as blank as the hours in the trauma tube had been—up until the last minutes before he had fully regained consciousness. Lon was wakened when his bed shifted as someone sat on the edge of it.
“How you doing, Nolan?” Lieutenant Taiters asked.
“I’ve been better,” Lon replied once his eyes were open. “I got a lot of men killed, didn’t I?”
“You didn’t get them killed. Get that nonsense out of your head right now. It was our job to find those rebels and keep them occupied so the shuttles could get in and out with our casualties. That’s what we were supposed to be doing.”
“Not like that. If I hadn’t come up with such a brilliant idea, maybe no one would have walked into that kind of hell, and nobody would have been killed.”
“Cut that shit. Don’t go feeling sorry for yourself, or for anyone else. You had a good idea. And we did fulfill our orders. Our casualties got out. We didn’t lose any shuttles. Anyway, if there was blame, it would be mine, not yours. All you did was make a suggestion. I vetted it. You’re not in the line of command. I am. It was my decision, not yours.”
Lon’s “Yes, sir” showed no conversion, no abandonment of the guilt he felt.
“If you’re going to be an officer in the Corps, you’ve got to get past this. There is only one constant about war. People die. It doesn’t matter if they’re good, evil, or indifferent. A bullet doesn’t ask if its victim is kind to his mother or kicks dogs. We try to minimize casualties, but there are always going to be some. As long as men have to go in harm’s way to fight, some of them won’t come back. If you let that tie you up in knots, you’ll be useless to the Corps—and to yourself.
“You’ve got all the tools, Nolan, skills, aptitudes, the things that can be taught and the things you have to find on your own, what you bring to the table. You’re a damned good soldier, and you should be a damned good officer. But your attitudes still have a way to travel. That’s the one weak spot I’ve noted. And the only person who can do anything about those is you.”
Lon sounded chastened when he said “Yes, sir” this time.
“The Corps doesn’t want officers who are going to be spendthrifts, men who’ll throw lives or equipment away carelessly. But the Corps also doesn’t want—can’t afford—officers who will let considerations of cost, in lives or money, tie them up so thoroughly that they can’t give any orders.”
“I’ll work on it,” Lon promised.
Taiters stared at him, then nodded. “It’s the hardest part of the job,” he said more softly. “You get to know your men. You give orders and some men don’t come back. It hurts. But if you can’t live with the pain, you can’t handle the job. I suspect that’s one of the reasons some men prefer to remain privates throughout their careers. All they have to do is take orders and risk their own lives. They don’t have to order other men to risk death.”
“I’ve wondered about that,” Lon said. He straightened up and lifted his head a little. “How are things going dirt-side? Have you heard anything?”
“Nothing recent. Why don’t we both take a hike up to CIC and see what we can learn.”
Long Snake’s Combat Information Center was forward of the soldiers’ section of the ship, at the rear of the command module. CIC was staffed by both ship’s personnel and specialists from the staff of the Council of Regiments. The center of the huge room was a nine-foot-diameter chart table. This was more than just a larger version of the mapboards that DMC officers and noncoms carried, although it was the master unit that linked those devices and updated them. The surface of the table could be used to show flat maps or charts, but the flat surface could also utilize holographic projections to give true topographical information. And, finally, 3-D globes or star fields could be projected in the space above the chart table to cover any planet in the DMC’s database or any known section of the galaxy.
A dozen complink monitors and work stations were set around the edge of the chart table, with fixed seats to allow CIC’s staff to work even during the short intervals when Long Snake was without its artificial gravity. Only four of the positions were occupied when Arlan and Lon arrived. Around the perimeter of the room, several other crew members sat at complink terminals, handling voice communications between the ship and the soldiers on the ground. The computers that managed all of the available data were not in this room. They were located elsewhere, under the care of technicians and their own sophisticated repair units.
Taiters and Nolan waited at the door for some response from inside, permission to enter or instructions to go away. After less than a minute, a lieutenant from ship’s crew came to them.
“What can I do for you, Lieutenant?” the sailor asked.
Taiters identified himself and his companion. “We’re just out of the infirmary. Any chance on finding out what’s been going on down there while we were out of action?”
“I’m Karl Osway, the duty officer here this watch,” the naval lieutenant said. “Come on in. You had the platoon that was chopped up last night?”
Lon winced at the verb, but Arlan showed no sign that it bothered him. “Yes,” Taiters said. “That was mine.”
“Sorry about the men you lost. That was a tough break. Come on over to the chart table and have a look.” Osway gestured and let the two visitors precede him. The current projection was topographical, with Norbank City slightly below the middle of the chart. The area shown was about twenty-five miles in diameter.
“Things have been fairly quiet since your set-to last night,” Osway said. “Your battalion hurt the rebels badly. They’ve pulled out to regroup, apparently, and they have even broken off the siege of the capital. We’ve been able to land the rest of the arms and ammunition for the government forces, as well as replenish supplies for the battalion, and the locals have started bringing in food and people from some of the outlying areas that were cut off before.”
“Are the rebels retreating toward their own territory?” Lon asked.
“We’re not certain, Cadet, but it doesn’t look like it. It appears more that they’re regrouping, and maybe waiting for reinforcements. They’ve moved off, here, toward the northeast, to some pretty rough country, but we haven’t seen any signs of them moving any farther.” He indicated an area at the edge of the chart table, ten miles from Norbank City and six miles from where a patch of green blips showed that the majority of second battalion was.
“Any current estimates on rebel numbers?” Taiters asked.
Osway shook his head. “None that you’d want to bank on. This main force here—a consolidation of the troops that were besieging the capital, the remnants of those who fought the battalion, and some of the reinforcements we knew were coming—may number anywhere between nine hundred and sixteen hundred. They chose good ground. It’s rough, heavily wooded, and there seem to be scores of caves in those hills. Frankly, they could conceal a couple of regiments in there. And we think that there are still more rebel troops moving in from their region, but we can’t be certain or get any kind of reliable estimate on numbers. They’re moving in small bands and taking damn good care to avoid detection. My own personal guess is that they’ve had professional training in guerrilla tactics.”
“Well, we know they’ve gotten military weapons in from somewhere,” Taiters said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve bought teachers as well, even if they couldn’t afford to bring in mercenaries to strengthen their case.”
“That’s the guess,” Osway acknowledged. He looked around, then said, more softly, “Look, I may be out of line, but there’s something the two of you might be interested in seeing.” He moved to one of the complink consoles at the chart table and keyed in a command. “Have a look,” he invited when he had what he wanted on the monitor. Arlan and Lon moved closer to read the screen, a selection from one of Colonel Flowers’ log entries.
“The men of fourth platoon, A Company, this battalion, under the command of Lieutenant Arlan Taiters, showed exceptional courage and ability while faced with overwhelming numbers of enemy soldiers, holding their position against at least two companies of rebel troops, buying time for the battalion to land shuttles to evacuate wounded men successfully. I want to especially take notice of the heroism, courage, dedication, and ability of the men of the first squad of that platoon, and of Officer Cadet Lon Nolan, who was with them during this action. This squad, which initially faced the entire enemy force, held on at terrible cost to themselves until the rest of their platoon could reach them. Without the efforts and sacrifice of these men, the cost to Second Battalion would have been far greater.”
“Mentioned in dispatches,” Taiters whispered. Then he turned to Osway and said, “Thanks, Lieutenant. I appreciate it.”
“Yeah, thanks, Lieutenant,” Nolan echoed. He was shaking his head, surprised by the praise.
Osway smiled. “Just don’t let anyone know I spilled the beans before you get your copies through channels. Like I said, it’s a bit out of line for me, but—what the hell—I figure heroes deserve special treatment now and then.”
“Any idea when we’re going to get a ride back down to the surface?” Taiters asked. “Me and my men?”
“You’re not on the schedule yet,” Osway said. “Sometime tonight, most likely, maybe even tomorrow. I imagine it depends on how things are going.”
• • •
“And you thought you had screwed up?” Taiters said as he and Nolan were walking back toward the troop area of Long Snake. “I told you that you did good. Even the colonel thinks so, enough to mention you in dispatches. Back on Earth, you’d get a big medal to hang off your dress uniform for it.” The DMC did not, as a general rule, award medals for heroism, only small ribbons for each contract that a soldier was part of.
“It’s still going to take some getting used to,” Lon said.
“Don’t ever get to the point where it doesn’t bother you to lose men. You may have to fight the emotions every time, but you’ve got to control it. I lost those men too. I knew most of them since I first joined the Corps. But you’ve got to partition the pain, not let it take over everything. Save it for when we’re back on Dirigent. Then there’ll be time to deal with it.”
If we get back, Lon thought, but he was learning. He would not let even Lieutenant Taiters see that fear.