Incredibly, the commodore sat down and kneaded his temples. 'All of you are at least squad or section leaders. Most of you have good combat records. And I hope that some of you will be rejoining the Force after your two years are up. Those of you who do will probably be made lieutenants, and face your first real command.
'It is to these people I would like to speak for a few moments, not as your … as one of your commanders, but just as a senior officer and advisor.
'One cannot make command decisions simply by assessing the tactical situation and going ahead with whatever course of action will do the most harm to the enemy with a minimum of death and damage to your own men and material. Modern warfare has become very complex, especially during the last century. Wars are won not by a simple series of battles won, but by a complex interrelationship among military victory, economic pressures, logistic maneuvering, access to the enemy's information, political postures – dozens, literally dozens of factors.'
I was hearing this, but the only thing that was getting through to my brain was that a third of our friends' lives had been snuffed out less than an hour before, and he was sitting up there giving us a lecture on military theory.
'So sometimes you have to throw away a battle in order to help win the war. This is exactly what we are going to do.
'This was not an easy decision. In fact, it was probably the hardest decision of my military career. Because, on the surface at least, it may look like cowardice.
'The logistic computer calculates that we have about a 62 percent chance of success, should we attempt to destroy the enemy base. Unfortunately, we would have only a 30 percent chance of survival – as some of the scenarios leading to success involve ramming the portal planet with the Anniversary at light speed.' Jesus Christ.
'I hope none of you ever has to face such a decision. When we get back to Stargate, I will in all probability be court-martialed for cowardice under fire. But I honestly believe that the information that may be gained from analysis of the damage to the Anniversary is more important than the destruction of this one Tauran base.' He sat up straight. 'More important than one soldier's career.'
I had to stifle an impulse to laugh. Surely 'cowardice' had nothing to do with his decision. Surely he had nothing so primitive and unmilitary as a will to live.
The maintenance crew managed to patch up the huge rip in the side of the Anniversary and to repressurize that section. We spent the rest of the day cleaning up the area; without, of course, disturbing any of the precious evidence for which the commodore was willing to sacrifice his career.
The hardest part was jettisoning the bodies. It wasn't so bad except for the ones whose suits had burst.
I went to Estelle's cabin the next day, as soon as she was off duty.
'It wouldn't serve any good purpose for you to see her now.' Estelle sipped her drink, a mixture of ethyl alcohol, citric acid and water, with a drop of some ester that approximated the aroma of orange rind.
'Is she out of danger?'
'Not for a couple of weeks. Let me explain.' She set down her drink and rested her chin on interlaced fingers. 'This sort of injury would be fairly routine under normal circumstances. Having replaced the lost blood, we'd simply sprinkle some magic powder into her abdominal cavity and paste her back up. Have her hobbling around in a couple of days.
'But there are complications. Nobody's ever been injured in a pressure suit before. So far, nothing really unusual has cropped up. But we want to monitor her innards very closely for the next few days.
'Also, we were very concerned about peritonitis. You know what peritonitis is?'
'Yes.' Well, vaguely.
'Because a part of her intestine had ruptured under pressure. We didn't want to settle for normal prophylaxis because a lot of the, uh, contamination had impacted on the peritoneum under pressure. To play it safe, we completely sterilized the whole shebang, the abdominal cavity and her entire digestive system from the duodenum south. Then of course, we had to replace all of her normal intestinal flora, now dead, with a commercially prepared culture. Still standard procedure, but not normally called for unless the damage is more severe.'
'I see.' And it was making me a little queasy. Doctors don't seem to realize that most of us are perfectly content not having to visualize ourselves as animated bags of skin filled with obscene glop.
'This in itself is enough reason not to see her for a couple of days. The changeover of intestinal flora has a pretty violent effect on the digestive system – not dangerous, since she's under constant observation. But tiring and, well, embarrassing.
'With all of this, she would be completely out of danger if this were a normal clinical situation. But we're decelerating at a constant 1-½ gees, and her internal organs have gone through a lot of jumbling around. You might as well know that if we do any blasting, anything over about two gees, she's going to die.'
'But … but we're bound to go over two on the final approach! What–'
'I know, I know. But that won't be for a couple of weeks. Hopefully, she will have mended by then.
'William, face it. It's a miracle she survived to get into surgery. So there's a big chance she won't make it back to Earth. It's sad; she's a special person, the special person to you, maybe. But we've had so much death … you ought to be getting used to it, come to terms with it.'
I took a long pull at my drink, identical to hers except for the citric acid. 'You're getting pretty hard-boiled.'
'Maybe … no. Just realistic. I have a feeling we're headed for a lot more death and sorrow.'
'Not me. As soon as we get to Stargate, I'm a civilian.'
'Don't be so sure.' The old familiar argument. 'Those clowns who signed us up for two years can just as easily make it four or–'
'Or six or twenty or the duration. But they won't. It would be mutiny.'
'I don't know. If they could condition us to kill on cue, they can condition us to do almost anything. Re-enlist.'
That was a chiller.
Later on we tried to make love, but both of us had too much to think about.
I got to see Marygay for the first time about a week later. She was wan, had lost a lot of weight and seemed very confused. Doc Wilson assured me that it was just the medication; they hadn't seen any evidence of brain damage.
She was still in bed, still being fed through a tube. I began to get very nervous about the calendar. Every day there seemed to be some improvement, but if she was still in bed when we hit that collapsar push, she wouldn't have a chance. I couldn't get any encouragement from Doc Wilson or Estelle; they said it depended on Marygay's resilience.
The day before the push, they transferred her from bed to Estelle's acceleration couch in the infirmary. She was lucid and was taking food orally, but she still couldn't move under her own power, not at 1-½ gees.
I went to see her. 'Heard about the course change? We have to go through Aleph-9 to get back to Tet-38. Four more months on this damn hulk. But another six years' combat pay when we get back to Earth.'
'That's good.'
'Ah, just think of the great things we'll–'
'William.'
I let it trail off. Never could lie.
'Don't try to jolly me. Tell me about vacuum welding, about your childhood, anything. Just don't bullshit me about getting back to Earth.' She turned her face to the wall.
'I heard the doctors talking out in the corridor, one morning when they thought I was asleep. But it just confirmed what I already knew, the way everybody'd been moping around.
'So tell me, you were born in New Mexico in 1975. What then? Did you stay in New Mexico? Were you bright in school? Have any friends, or were you too bright like me? How old were you when you first got sacked?'
We talked in this vein for a while, uncomfortable. An idea came to me while we were rambling, and when I left Marygay I went straight to Dr Wilson.
'We're giving her a fifty-fifty chance, but that's pretty arbitrary. None of the published data on thi
s sort of thing really fits.'
'But it is safe to say that her chances of survival are better, the less acceleration she has to endure.'
'Certainly. For what it's worth. The commodore's going to take it as gently as possible, but that'll still be four or five gees. Three might even be too much; we won't know until it's over.'
I nodded impatiently. 'Yes, but I think there's a way to expose her to less acceleration than the rest of us.'
'If you've developed an acceleration shield,' he said smiling, 'you better hurry and file a patent. You could sell it for a considerable–'
No, Doc, it wouldn't be worth much under normal conditions; our shells work better and they evolved from the same principles.'
'Explain away.'
'We put Marygay into a shell and flood–'
'Wait, wait. Absolutely not. A poorly-fitting shell was what caused this in the first place. And this time, she'd have to use somebody else's.'
'I know, Doc, let me explain. It doesn't have to fit her exactly as long as the life-support hookups can function. The shell won't be pressurized on the inside; it won't have to be because she won't be subjected to those thousands of kilograms-per-square-centimeter pressure from the fluid outside.'
'I'm not sure I follow.'
'It's just an adaptation of – you've studied physics, haven't you?'
'A little bit, in medical school. My worse courses, after Latin.'
'Do you remember the principle of equivalence?'
'I remember there was something by that name. Something to do with relativity, right?'
'Uh-huh. It means that … there's no difference being in a gravitational field and being in an equivalent accelerated frame of – it means that when the Anniversary is blasting five gees, the effect on us is the same as if it were sitting on its tail on a big planet, on one with five gees' surface gravity.'
'Seems obvious.'
'Maybe it is. It means that there's no experiment you could perform on the ship that could tell you whether you were blasting or just sitting on a big planet.'
'Sure there is. You could turn off the engines, and if–'
'Or you could look outside, sure; I mean isolated, physics-lab type experiments.'
'All right. I'll accept that. So?'
'You know Archimedes' Law?'
'Sure, the fake crown – that's what always got me about physics, they make a big to-do about obvious things, and when it gets to the rough parts–'
'Archimedes' Law says that when you immerse something in a fluid, it's buoyed by a force equal to the weight of the fluid it displaces.'
'That's reasonable.'
'And that holds, no matter what kind of gravitation or acceleration you're in– In a ship blasting at five gees, the water displaced, if it's water, weighs five times as much as regular water, at one gee.'
'Sure.'
'So if you float somebody in the middle of a tank of water, so that she's weightless, she'll still be weightless when the ship is doing five gees.'
'Hold on, son. You had me going there, but it won't work.'
'Why not?' I was tempted to tell him to stick to his pills and stethoscopes and let me handle the physics, but it was a good thing I didn't.
'What happens when you drop a wrench in a submarine?'
'Submarine?'
'That's right. They work by Archimedes'–'
'Ouch! You're right. Jesus. Hadn't thought it through.'
'That wrench falls right to the floor just as if the submarine weren't weightless.' He looked off into space, tapping a pencil on the desk. 'What you describe is similar to the way we treat patients with severe skin damage, like burns, on Earth. But it doesn't give any support to the internal organs, the way the acceleration shells do, so it wouldn't do Marygay any good…'
I stood up to go. 'Sorry I wasted–'
'Hold on there, though, just a minute. We might be able to use your idea part-way.'
'How do you mean?'
'I wasn't thinking it through, either. The way we normally use the shells is out of the question for Marygay, of course.' I didn't like to think about it. Takes a lot of hypno-conditioning to lie there and have oxygenated fluorocarbon forced into every natural body orifice and one artificial one. I fingered the valve fitting imbedded above my hipbone.
'Yeah, that's obvious, it'd tear her – say … you mean, low pressure–'
'That's right. We wouldn't need thousands of atmospheres to protect her against five gees' straight-line acceleration; that's only for all the swerving and dodging – I'm going to call Maintenance. Get down to your squad bay; that's the one we'll use. Dalton'll meet you there.'
Five minutes before injection into the collapsar field, and I started the flooding sequence. Marygay and I were the only ones in shells; my presence wasn't really vital since the flooding and emptying could be done by Control. But it was safer to have redundancy in the system and besides, I wanted to be there.
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.'
6
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.
br /> '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.
'Some of you are smiling. I think you ought to reserve judgment. Earth is not the same place you left.'
He pulled a little card out of his tunic and looked at it, smiling. 'Most of you have something on the order of four hundred thousand dollars coming to you, accumulated pay and interest. But Earth is on a war footing and, of course, it is the citizens of Earth who are supporting the war. Your income puts you in a ninety-two-percent income-tax bracket: thirty-two thousand might last you about three years if you're careful.
'Eventually you're going to have to get a job, and this is one job for which you are uniquely trained. There are not that many jobs available. The population of Earth is nearly nine billion, with five or six billion unemployed.