To a man, the wounded from fourth platoon were anxious to get back to the surface and rejoin their unit. They did not speak of their pain, or fear. The trauma tubes and their nanotech medical robots had not left any scars on their bodies. Any wounds to the spirit remained hidden. If necessary, treatment was also available for those, counseling and therapy that could include both drugs and virtual reality sessions to help them integrate the experience.
They did speak of their friends, the ones who had not been lucky, but that pain too was muted, not to be shared. Not yet.
For a time, Lieutenant Taiters stayed with the group. He conducted an informal inspection—functional, dealing with the serviceability of helmets and weapons, and giving him a chance to see if anyone might need immediate counseling. Rifles were cleaned. Helmet electronics were checked and double-checked. Giving them work to do was standard therapy.
“Get a couple of hours’ sleep,” Taiters told his men when the last check had been completed, the last suspect electronic module replaced. “Then get in a good meal. I don’t know how much longer we’ll be up here. If we haven’t heard anything by the time you get done eating, sack out again.”
When the lieutenant left, the men from fourth platoon moved toward their bunks. Whether they felt the need for sleep or not, they would make the effort. On contract, sleep and meals had to be taken when they could be found. Lon stood and looked around. His own bunk was in the next bay, with third platoon. He hesitated to leave, though, not certain that he was ready for solitude. He felt better having others around, men who had gone through the same fight, and the same treatment, as he had.
Corporal Nace got up from his bunk and walked over to Lon. “You did good, Nolan,” he said. “All the way. I heard how you stood off the rebels after I got hit, maybe kept them from butchering the rest of us.”
“I just did what I had to do, Wil,” Lon replied.
“Don’t sell yourself short. I wouldn’t hesitate to go into combat with you at my side anywhere, anytime. And I’ll guarantee that the rest of the squads feel the same way.” He turned to look at the men in the room. “Those of us who are left,” he added, so softly that Lon barely heard.
“They’re not all this bad, are they?” Lon asked.
Nace shook his head. “Very few of them, thank God. You’d better go get some rest while you can.”
Lon took off his boots and stretched out on his bunk. Sleep did not come. But even with his eyes open, staring at the springs under the bunk above his, he could not avoid dreams. He had seen violent death before. The first time he had seen it, he had been no more than ten years old.
The Nolans had lived in North Carolina, within twenty miles of what had once been the Cherokee Indian Reservation in the Smoky Mountains. Lon’s father, George, had taught college. His students were in Durham, those who did not attend strictly by complink, and Professor Nolan had made the commute to the university campus three times each semester. His stipend provided the extras that BM—basic maintenance—did not. But the family was not wealthy. They lived within a mile of a circus—a slum occupied almost exclusively by families who had only BM. The Asheville circus was not the largest or roughest in the state, but to a curious ten-year-old it had been an irresistible magnet. His first foray into the circus had come two years before. It seemed a completely different universe from the one he knew. The children he met in the circus might almost have been a different species from those he knew from school and the carefully chosen social outings his parents arranged.
Different, and exciting. But it was not until Lon was ten that he found many chances to explore this alternate universe. He was large for his age, and well tutored in self-defense—an essential part of his school’s curriculum, the primary excuse for having students actually come in person to a classroom instead of taking all of their lessons on a complink web.
Over a period of several weeks, and through a series of fights, he had found his place in one gang of circus boys. Social standing was determined strictly through physical domination and strength, as purely as if they were not human but some extinct species of predators.
He had been running with the gang one afternoon in April, a school holiday. The sound of a gunshot had drawn them around a corner and down the alley. The boys, eight of them, had seen the culmination of a murder. The victim was on his knees, bleeding. His attacker stood three feet away, a revolver in his hand. The gun had seemed gigantic to Lon, and the blast it made when it was fired a second time sounded as loud as thunder from a lightning bolt that had struck very close. Blood had spurted from the forehead of the victim. He fell backward. Once he came to rest, he moved no more. His attacker went through his purse and pockets, grabbing what little money the victim had. Then he ran off, giving the gang of boys no more than a passing glance, obviously giving no thought to the possibility that they might identify him.
A siren sounded. “We gotta scram,” the leader of the pack said. But like the others, he had to get closer first, to see what death looked like. The boys had formed a circle around the dead man. Then a new blast from a police siren brought them out of their shared trance. “Run for it,” the leader said, and they ran, getting clear of the area before the police arrived.
With his eyes open, Lon could still almost see that body, smell the gunsmoke and the other odors of that neighborhood and a man who had died violently. He remembered not fear, but the thrill that he had felt, the excitement. Lon closed his eyes. The memories had caused his heart to beat faster. His breathing had become shallower, labored, as if he were running from that death again.
“That was a long time ago, and a lot of light-years away,” Lon whispered. He sat up, trying to banish the childhood ghosts. Of the seven boys he had run with that year, two had died violently before their sixteenth birthday, and two had simply disappeared—run off or abducted. Kidnappings in the circuses were never for ransom. No one in them had the money to make that attractive to even the most desperate of criminals. Kidnappings were to find prostitutes, or victims for snuff movies.
“It’s a wonder anyone ever lived long enough to reproduce,” Lon mumbled. He got up and headed for the latrine. The circuses never faded away to ghost towns. The population always seemed to increase. Kids started having sex as soon as they were physically able, and puberty often occurred when they were ten or eleven years old. Girls often had their first baby—or their first abortion—before their twelfth birthday. Lon had been twelve when he had sex for the first time. It had cost him four bits, half his weekly allowance. That had bought him ten minutes with a girl who was two years older than him, and who already had two children. She had been nursing the younger of the two when Lon was brought to her. The baby had cried the whole time his mother was with Lon. The girl was thin, almost emaciated, and—even through the fog of distant memory—extraordinarily plain-looking, but Lon had visited her almost every week for six months, saving as much as he could from his allowance to give him those few minutes of … not-quite-pleasure.
“Hey, Nolan! We’re going to eat.” Corporal Nace had just come into the third platoon’s bay. Lon was sitting on the edge of his bunk again—had been for most of the past two hours. He had not tried to sleep again after his waking dream.
Lon nodded slowly and got to his feet. Now he was tired, his mind almost numb enough for sleep. But that would have to wait—if there was still time for sleep after a protracted meal. The way my luck’s going, the lieutenant will tell us it’s time to go back to the surface, Lon thought as he followed Wil Nace to where the men from fourth platoon were waiting.
They sat together but ate in comparative silence. There was none of the free exchange of jokes and gossip that had marked meals in garrison, or on the voyage out. The little conversation there was was conducted in low tones, with minimal words. Lieutenant Taiters came in twenty minutes after they started. He asked how everyone was feeling and said that there was still no word on when they might be shipped back to the surface, so they could get at least a couple of more hours of sleep. There were no cheers, nothing more than nods from a few men.
“I’m going to head back and sack out now,” Lon announced shortly after the lieutenant left. “I haven’t got the energy to lift another forkful of food to my mouth.” He was slow to get to his feet, though. His exhaustion was real, and more pronounced once he had mentioned it.
Halfway back to the barracks bay, Lon stopped and leaned against the wall. Continuing felt … futile. He toyed with the idea of sliding to the deck and resting, maybe even sleeping. Only the thought of Nace and the others coming along and finding him asleep on the floor in the hall made it possible for Lon to resume his walk. When he got to his bunk, he collapsed across it, face first, asleep before he stopped bouncing. This time there were no dreams, or nightmares.
“Nolan!”
Lon felt himself being shaken, but even that could not wake him quickly. He had to fight his way through a stupor. Only when his mind placed him back on the surface of Norbank, perhaps in imminent danger, did he snap all of the way back from sleep. The transition then was abrupt.
“I’m awake!” he announced, too loudly.
“Relax, Lon. It’s just me.” Lon recognized Lieutenant Taiters’ voice then and sat up.
“Sorry.” Lon rubbed at his eyes. “I guess I was pretty deep.”
“I was beginning to think I’d have to throw cold water on you to wake you.”
“What time is it?” Lon looked around as if trying to reassure himself that he was still in the safety of Long Snake.
“Oh-two-hundred,” Taiters said.
“Wow, I guess I’ve been out for close to nine hours.” He shook his head. “I must have been more unconscious than asleep.”
Arlan smiled. “It happens. You go for a few days with little or no sleep and then when you get the chance, your body demands all it can get … especially after time in the tube.”
“What’s up? Are we going back to the surface?”
The lieutenant nodded. “We’ll be leaving in a little more than an hour. Time to get cleaned up and get in one last shipboard meal before it’s back to battle rations.”
Lon got to his feet and spent a moment yawning and stretching. “Any change in conditions dirtside?”
“There’s been no major fighting, but CIC thinks that the rebels are gearing up to risk everything on one throw of the dice. It looks as if they’re marshaling all of their forces for one pitched battle. Don’t worry about that yet. Go get your shower and do whatever else you need to do. I’ll wait.”
When Nolan returned from the latrine, Taiters was sitting on the next bunk, leaning forward, forearms on his thighs, head down. But he looked up when he heard Lon coming. Lon went to his locker and started dressing.
“It doesn’t seem very smart for the rebels to risk everything on one battle,” Lon said when he was half dressed. “I mean, wouldn’t the smart thing be for them to, you know, melt into the woods and just stall? They have to figure that we’re not here forever. All they’d have to do is wait until we pull out and come back out. Even if we trained government forces, they wouldn’t have us to worry about.”
“You don’t have to convince me. But maybe they’re not using just their brains. It’s a civil war. They’re making emotional decisions. Maybe they want revenge for what we did to them last night. Maybe they figure their support will erode if they don’t force the issue now. Hell, I don’t know. Maybe they’ve got some pickled soothsayer giving orders. Come on, finish dressing and leave the strategy to others. Let’s go get that meal.”
The men from fourth platoon had already started toward the mess hall. Lon and Arlan caught up with them. The group was still quiet, but not as completely as before. Sleep and time away from danger had loosened the straps of silence. The table talk was still scanty, but not absent. Mostly they talked about rejoining the company and getting back to business.
“The sooner we get this fight over, the sooner we can get on to the training phase of the contract, and the sooner we’ll get home,” Wil Nace said.
“We’ve got scores to settle first,” Tarn Hedley, one of the privates in Nace’s squad, said.
“Can that, now!” Nace said. “You’re no rookie. Don’t let emotion screw you up. We’ve got a contract to fulfill. Period.”
Hedley did not respond, but Owl Whitley, from the platoon’s second squad, did. “Don’t build a monument out of that ‘business first, last, and always,’ Corp. This ain’t recruit training back home, with by-the-book questions and answers. You feel this as much as we do. We lost good mates down there. Ain’t no way in hell we can forget them, and there’s no reason we should.”
“Every man who joins the Corps knows the price he may have to pay,” Nace said, setting down his knife and fork. “It goes with the job. And there’s nothing in the Articles of Charter about vengeance. You get to thinking about hating the other side, and that leads to nothing but trouble. You been in the Corps long enough to see anyone punished for war crimes, Whitley?”
“Yes, but that was some loser who thought rape and murder of a noncombatant were okay. This is different.”
“Before we head out to the hangar, you’d best take a few minutes to reread Section Three of the Articles, Whitley. There are damn good reasons why we have strict codes of conduct and severe punishments for violations. It’s not just a matter of morality, of philosophical notions of right and wrong, though that’s an important part of it. The Corps trades on its reputation—not just our reputation for military ability but also for the honorable behavior of our people. A lot of people wouldn’t want to invite a horde of Visigoths to their world. If they think we’re worse than what they’ve got, it’s no sale, no matter the danger they think they’re in.”
“No one’s saying you should just forget fallen friends,” Lieutenant Taiters said. “But you’ll honor their memory more by not losing sight of why we’re here, what we’re all about. The Corps puts a lot into earning respect. One black mark can take ages to erase. There are still places where what the Corps did on Wellman, nearly a hundred years ago, is remembered and held against us. That was the one time when the Council of Regiments lost sight of what we’re about, what we’re supposed to be about.
“Now, enough of this. We’ve got about time for dessert and another drink before we head to the armory for weapons and then go on to the hangar. Let’s save the philosophy for garrison.”
“What was that about Wellman?” Lon asked the lieutenant after they left the mess hall. The enlisted men were farther ahead, walking to the armory.
“It’s why there’s no Ninth Regiment anymore,” Taiters said. “Didn’t they cover that in your recruit training lectures?”
“I don’t remember hearing about it,” Lon said. Arlan shook his head. “I thought they made sure everyone heard about that. They did when I joined the Corps.” “Well, what was it?”
“Wellman was a small colony world, I guess not much more populous than Norbank. We were hired by off-worlders to go in and make it possible for our employers to exploit a natural product that existed nowhere else, some sort of organic compound that was a natural superconductor. That was bad enough, against the code of ethics of the Articles. But beyond that, the contract was bungled from start to finish. The Ninth Regiment was virtually destroyed by the farmers of Wellman. Then the Council of Regiments compounded the problem by sending in more forces—ostensibly to fulfill the contract, but more to get revenge.” Taiters shook his head. “A few men from the Ninth had been taken prisoner. Most went over to Wellman’s side. They helped train the world’s population and they stood the Corps off again. The Corps’ General was removed by unanimous vote of the Council of Regiments, which then resigned en masse after ordering courts-martial for themselves and the deposed General.”
“I’m sure nothing was said about that in training. I wouldn’t have forgotten that.”
“I hope we’re not forgetting that lesson,” Taiters said, more to himself than to his companion.