There Is No Darkness

  They woke us up before dawn and herded us aboard floaters. W didn’t go directly to the hill, but to a “staging area” about ten klicks from it. That was as close as floaters were allowed to go, to prevent aerial observation. We walked the rest of the way, pushing carts full of supplies.

  We were about a tenth of Sanctuary’s total army. The others had been on the hill for several days, setting things up. The war was to start at noon. We hauled the carts up the hill at about 1130, exhausted.

  Sergeant Meyer was fresh as a flower after our little hike, not having pushed a cart. “Stow your gear in that bunker,” he said, pointing at a hole in the ground, “and fill a few sandbags.” Sandbags? He walked briskly away without elaborating.

  When Pancho and I hauled our cart around to the bunker, we found two men filling plastic bags with mud. Wet sand, I suppose.

  “Here comes the green meat,” one of them said. “You got a shovel in that shize?”

  I found one. “You two fill; we’ll stack.” They talked as they built a wall over the hole, two sandbags thick. They were Tanner and Darty, veterans of more than a year of fighting, who had been given the privilege of helping us build our bunker. They already had a large pile of sandbags, and they stacked with speedy efficiency.

  The hole was sort of a cave, facing down the hillside. They explained that the sandbag wall would protect us against any amount of rifle or gatling fire, in theory, since a bullet could only penetrate a couple of centimeters. But there had to be ports to shoot through, and a lucky sniper or a rifleman who got too close could get a bullet through the port. If you were shooting out if it at the time, you would most likely get a head wound. Darty showed us a bald crease along the side of his head, and giggled.

  The shooting ports were wooden rectangular boxes two sandbags long, open-ended, with enough room to stick a rifle in and move it around a little. The end that pointed outward was covered with a flap of see-through gauze, the same color as the mud. That way, theoretically, no sniper could tell where the port was unless he was looking right at it, when you fired in his direction.

  More dangerous than bullets was the possibility of someone getting close enough to toss a grenade or firebomb over the wall. There was a “grenade well,” a deep hole, in the middle of the bunker floor. If a grenade came over the top, you could kick it into the well, which should channel all the fragments straight up. If it was a firebomb the only thing to do was to try and get out of the bunker as quickly as possible.

  The best strategy was not to let anyone get close enough to throw at you.

  “But listen,” Tanner said, “don’t shoot to kill unless you have to.”

  “Tanner …” Darty drawled.

  “Shut up, hard case. Shot for legs, arms, hips, shoulders. Those guys are the same as us, most of them, they just want to live through it. We get real bloodthirsty and they’re going to come back the same way. You can’t say it isn’t true, Darty. I’ve seen it.”

  Darty just scowled at him.

  “Unless you see Heller insignia. Crazy dighters all wanna die anyhow.” A whistle shrilled from above them. “Ammo call. Let’s go.”

  We clambered, slipping and falling, up to the top of the hill. Captain Forrestor and Sergeant Meyer were there, and about a dozen other Heller noncoms. Alegria came out of a bunker beside them, dressed in white, along with nine other white-clad medics, two of them women. She waved at me and Pancho and gave a weak smile.

  It got pretty crowded up there, five hundred people slipping around. They herded us into our ten companies, each area marked with a stack of boxes and a company flag. All three of us were Brave Company, though Miko was assigned a different bunker.

  When the whistle blew again it was 1200, time for the war to start. They gave us each two hundred rounds of rifle ammunition and five grenades and broke us down into squads of ten. Pancho and I were in D squad, led by an Earthie corporal named O’Connor.

  “We’ve got it lucky today,” O’Connor said. “We’re one of the defense squads, stay on the hill. Most of the fighting will be down in the valley for a while. You all have bunkers assigned?” We murmured yes.

  “Good. We’ll spend the next few hours one-on one-off. Sleep for an hour, keep watch for an hour. How many of you green meat?”

  Five of us raised our hands. He sighed. “I always get ‘em. Listen. You haven’t had much training and I know you aren’t ready for this. When it gets hot, you’re going to forget everything. One thing you don’t dare forget; always shoot to kill. You aren’t getting out of this alive unless we can weaken their forces enough to take that hill. You wound some cob, he’ll be back shooting at you next week. Always …”

  From across the valley drifted the faint tap-tap-tap of a gatling being fired.

  “Shize. They’re bein’ cute already. Get into your bunkers, up against the sandbags. I’ll be by later.”

  I looked at Pancho and opened my mouth to say something. Then there was a whipping sound and a flat splash; a bullet made a crater in the mud about three meters away.

  I guess I could slide faster than him. I was in the bunker a good three seconds before he fell on top of me.

  He wiped the mud off his arms. “Thought those things couldn’t go this far.”

  “Guess they just can’t aim them. Juts trying to throw a scare into us.” Succeeding, too; we could hear people shouting and scuffling. My heart was beating fast and Pancho didn’t look too tan.

  Our own gatling started to return fire. I stuck my rifle through the shooting port and cranked the telescopic sight up to its highest power (the aiming dot fell to the bottom of the field view and blinked red). Hill 905 was covered with scurrying ants.

  Experimentally, I aimed the rifle down the hill, toward the trenches at the base of it. The dot turned yellow and drifted back to the center.

  “Don’t you think we’re going to have enough of that later, amigo?” Pancho said. “And your rifle isn’t even loaded.” As if on cue, a rifle barked in a nearby bunker.

  “Save it,” someone shouted. “Can’t get halfway there.”

  “Who rests first?” Pancho said.

  “You go ahead. I couldn’t.”

  “Me neither. Odds or evens?”

  “Evens,” I said. He produced two fingers to my three.

  “Pleasant dreams,” he said, and slipped a cassette into his rifle. Suddenly there was an even greater commotion, as a crowd of men came bustling and sliding down the path by our bunker — armed, helmeted, carrying the small combat packs that held extra ammunition, grenades, and a little food — flying to the temporary safety of the trenches below. The assault squads, over two hundred men.

  One man pitched forward and slid ten or fifteen meters until he stopped, unmoving. Another skidded to a halt beside him, looked him over, then shouted “Medic! Concussion!” — and continued down the hill with redoubled speed.

  Two male medics rushed down and checked the man quickly, then grabbed him under the arms and carried him up over our bunker, and started lowering him inside. “Here, give us a hand.”

  We wrestled him down to the floor, gently as possible. One of the medics hopped down and selected a syrette from a case on his belt, and gave him a shot in the arm.

  The man groaned and shook his head. The medic unstrapped his helmet and set it next to him. “Where am … what th’ shize …”

  “Bullet bounced off your helmet, knocked you out,” the medic said. “Come up to the medic bunker when you can walk.” He started to lift himself out. “Or when it stops raining.” He followed the other medic uphill, fast.

  The man picked up his helmet and ran his fingers over the large dent in the top. Then he gingerly touched the egg-sized swelling that was growing on his crown, and stared at his fingers. “Close one.” He swallowed, turned pale.

  “You were lucky, amigo.”

  “I — I’ve never been hit before.”

  “How long have you been fighting?” I asked.

  “First couple of minutes, That
’s bad luck. What?”

  “I said, ‘How many wars have you been in, and not get wounded?’ “

  “Three shows,” he said, touching his head again, wincing. “Four months since I signed up.”

  “Signed up? You don’t look like a Heller.”

  He looked at his fingers again. “At least it’s not bleeding — no, I’m from Earth. Too dightin’ big for Earth. Made some money in the games and came here to open a liquor store. Got into debt.” He shook his head slowly. “Shoulda stayed on Earth, if I knew it’d come to this. Coulda made a fortune. Who cares if people stare.”

  “We were in the games,” I said. “Pancho here was bolo; I was on the quarterstaff.”

  “Well, damn me.” He smiled for the first time, and stuck out his hand. “Jake Newmann, vibroclub.”

  “I’m Carl —“ With a shower of dirt and mud, O’Connor, the little Earthie corporal, slid into the bunker. “What the hell is this,” he said. “Three men in one dightin’ bunker and no one on guard?”

  “Medical emergency, sir,” I said.

  “Don’t-call-me-sir-I-work-for-a-living,” he said automatically. “You’re the one that got hit goin’ down the hill?”

  “Yeah, corporal, one of those gatling rounds. Bounced off my pot, knocked me out.”

  “So early,” he said, shaking his head. “Bad luck.” Were all soldiers this superstitious?

  He turned to me and Pancho. “You cobs don’t really have to look out for another hour or so. The Blues aren’t gonna come running across the valley.” We were the Reds; both sides wore identical mud-colored uniforms, but we had armbands to keep us from being killed by our own men in close quarters.

  “I just don’t want you to be slack then. See, they can send snipers around the flanks of our main assault bunch — bet yer bum we’re doin’ the same — and they could be here in an hour or so.”

  “Most likely, first thing we know of a sniper is when he kills his first man. He’s not gonna risk givin’ away his position until he’s sure of a kill. Everybody’s lookin’, then maybe we can see the muzzle flash or some smoke.”

  “S — corporal,” I said, “won’t we be able to see him, himself, when he shoots? I mean, there aren’t any bunkers down there, are there?”

  “No bunkers. But they’ve got PCU’s, portable camouflage units. Sort of like your shooting ports. If you don’t see him putting it up, and they’re hard to catch, then you won’t be able to tell it from the rest of the trench. Not unless you have all the ground memorized, down to the last pebble. That takes a couple of weeks. By then they’re only shootin’ at night.” I was glad the rules of the game didn’t allow night-glasses, like we used guarding the harvest at home. Snipers would be too powerful then.

  “You cobs green meat?” Jake Newmann asked.

  “They sure are,” O’Connor said. “Why don’t you stay with ‘em until your squad gets back — unless you wanna go catch up with ‘em.”

  “Sure thing, corporal, alone in nomanland.”

  “I’ll clear it with Sergeant Dubi; headed up that way. Shouldn’t be any problem.”

  “No place else to go,” Jake said. “Besides, we’re blood brothers. We were all gladiators, on Earth.”

  The corporal looked at us strangely. “This must seem pretty tame for you, then.” Pancho and I kept our mouths shut. “Just wait,” he said softly, and pulled himself up out of the bunker.

  “I got a feeling he don’t like gladiators much,” Jake said. “Why’d you come here? Get disbarred or something?”

  We explained to him about Starschool and the kidnapping. He wasn’t surprised, of course.

  “You’re sure the ship’s left by now?” he said.

  Pancho shrugged. “We were reported killed in training, in a remote area. I have the idea that Bruno has done this often enough to know how to cover his tracks.”

  “And the ship was scheduled to leave yesterday,” I added.

  “Still, these Starschool candies must be pretty sav,” Jake said. “Hell, even I’d see a skim job there. You might just see that whole damn ship set down in nomanland tomorrow.”

  “Never lands,” I said. Still, the Dean was nothing if he wasn’t thorough.

  “It may be that you are right, though. Perhaps we have been trained too much out of optimism, out of hoping.”

  “Sure. Just stay alive. They’ll come for you — look at it their way. Starschool’s way. They’re gonna go home and tell your folks that you got wiped on some damn training exercise? They ain’t. They just ain’t.”

  I was fighting against hope. “We signed releases with Starschool. They aren’t responsible for … Oh my God.”

  “What?” Jake said.

  “We signed up. We signed up as mercenaries, and had to say that we’d signed without coercion.”

  Jake laughed out loud. “That piece of paper ain’t worth bumfodder. Not with witnesses around, like your Dean. You ain’t Hellers! You’re offworlders — if you contest a contract it goes to the Confederación for adju’cation. They won’t let it.”

  “How is it that you know so much about these things?” Pancho asked.

  “Look at me!” He spread his arms wide. “I’m a merchant, not a soldier.” He laughed softly but a little crazy. “I had a liquor store on Earth, before I had to go to the games. Believe me, I know. I could have been a registered alien, but taking citizenship here gave me a ten percent tax advantage. Shize, I wish I could … go back. Better broke and deported than broke and drafted.” He laughed again. “But believe me, I know the law. I saw this coming, I saw it for a year or more.”

  “There’s nothing you can do?” I said.

  “Live for ten years.” Suddenly grim. “Seems less likely than it did yesterday.”

  “This whole dightin’ planet doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Why don’t they just … well, on Springworld they’d send in a government manager, monitor your standard of living —“

  “Oh, my liquor store’s got a government manager. And no debts. You can’t sue the government here — who would dare to? When I get out, theoretically, I get back my store and my debts. Plus interest. Which ten years at private-and-corporal pay will exactly pay. Which is why I got drafted.”

  “I thought you said you’d signed up,” I said.

  “Sure. Like you boys did. I had the choice of enlisting or going to debtors’ prison. Nobody gets out of debtors’ prison, except they come out in a box.”

  “But wouldn’t you have …” Pancho realized what he was saying, but continued: “ … lived a natural life span?”

  “Yeah. Where were you when I needed your advice?” He stood up, leaned on the sandbag wall for support.

  “Why don’t all the unwilling ones simply refuse to fight?” asked Pancho. “Just sit down or something?”

  Jake laughed. “It’d be a toss-up to see who’d kill you first. There are a lot of Hellers out there that’d love to do the job. Some draftees, too. They start out hating it and end up loving it. Seen it happen lots of times.”

  I shuddered, remembering the arena. There were dark sides to every man.

  “I’d better go get my rifle,” said Jake. It was still in the mud where he’d fallen. “Before it gets dangerous out there.”

  “Stay here and rest, amigo. I’ll get it.”

  “Pancho —“ The gatling was still tapping away.

  “Before it gets dangerous,” he said, lifting himself out of the bunker. He was fast about it.

  “Thanks.” Jake took the rifle and started cleaning it carefully with a rag.

  “Like I say, you boys may only have to last a day or two, before they come get you. Just keep your heads down and don’t do anything stupid.” He waved at the shooting ports. “Put all your cassettes on the wooden shelf there; all facing the same way. You’re gonna have to reload in the dark. Put a couple grenades up there, too. Use ‘em when you don’t want to give away the position of the bunker at night. Try not to throw ‘em in the direction of the bunker below.??
?

  “Keep your sights clean; keep your gun clean. Might save your life.”

  “Do you shoot to kill?” I asked him.

  “I just shoot. Let the bullet decide.” He looked thoughtful. “If a certain Blue sergeant comes up the hill, though, I’m going to aim very careful.”

  “Do you think they will be coming up the hill tonight?” Pancho asked.

  “Probably not. My second show they did; took every dightin’ man off their hill and tried a mass attack. Didn’t work.”

  “Usually they’ll just get a few snipers down there. Each one of them has two or three PCU’s; that way they can keep shooting at us from different angles. Nighttime, they might try to move some sappers in, sneak up and drop some grenades in some bunkers. Likewise, after it gets dark, we’ll send a squad of commandos down after the snipers. That’s nasty work. Have to be real quiet about it. Sometimes the commandos goin’ down meet the sappers comin’ up. That’s a bloody mess.”

  “Think they’ll make us commandos?” I asked.

  “No. Those’re usually Hellers, or other real mercs. Like I say, they have to be quiet. That’s knife work.” I shuddered.

  He rubbed his face with both hands, hard. “Wonder if I oughta go see the medics.”

  “He said —“

  “Yeah. But I sure hate doctors.” He put his helmet on his head and flinched. “Guess I better. They might send me down the hill for a couple of days.”

  He pulled himself up out of the bunker and there was a sound like a hard slap. “Oh,” he said softly, and slid back down.

  I caught him before he hit the ground and eased him down on his back. I heard Pancho gasp.

  His skin was grey with shock and a dark red stain was spreading on the front of his shirt. He was staring at it. He said one word: “Didn’t.” Then he gurgled terribly and his neck went loose, his head dropped back to the ground, his eyes were dead.

  “Dios,” Pancho said. “Mierda.”

  My hands were shaking so I could hardly manage the slider on his shirt. When it opened I tasted acid vomit, stood up, and choked it back. I was not going to sticky my head over the parapet just to empty my jumpy stomach.