Peace and War

  'I wish you people would relax for a while and just trust the ship's computer. The Tauran vessel at any rate will not be within strike range for another two weeks. Mandella!'

  He was always very careful to call me 'Sergeant' Mandella in front of the company. But everybody at this particular briefing was either a sergeant or a corporal: squad leaders. 'Yes, sir.'

  'You're responsible for the psychological as well as the physical well-being of the men and women in your squad. Assuming that you are aware that there is a morale problem aboard this vessel, what have you done about it?'

  'As far as my squad is concerned, sir?'

  'Of course.'

  'We talk it out, sir.'

  'And have you arrived at any cogent conclusion?'

  'Meaning no disrespect, sir, I think the major problem is obvious. My people have been cooped up in this ship for fourteen–'

  'Ridiculous! Every one of us has been adequately conditioned against the pressures of living in close quarters and the enlisted people have the privilege of confraternity.' That was a delicate way of putting it. 'Officers must remain celibate, and yet we have no morale problem.'

  If he thought his officers were celibate, he should sit down and have a long talk with Lieutenant Harmony. Maybe he just meant line officers, though. That would be just him and Cortez. Probably 50 percent right. Cortez was awfully friendly with Corporal Kamehameha.

  'Sir, perhaps it was the detoxification back at Stargate; maybe–'

  'No. The therapists only worked to erase the hate conditioning – everybody knows how I feel about that – and they may be misguided but they are skilled.

  'Corporal Potter.' He always called her by her rank to remind her why she hadn't been promoted as high as the rest of us. Too soft. 'Have you "talked it out" with your people, too?'

  'We've discussed it, sir.'

  The sub-major could 'glare mildly' at people. He glared mildly at Marygay until she elaborated.

  'I don't believe it's the fault of the conditioning. My people are impatient, just tired of doing the same thing day after day.'

  'They're anxious for combat, then?' No sarcasm in his voice.

  'They want to get off the ship, sir.'

  'They will get off the ship,' he said, allowing himself a microscopic smile. 'And then they'll probably be just as impatient to get back on.'

  It went back and forth like that for a long while. Nobody wanted to come right out and say that their squad was scared: scared of the Tauran cruiser closing on us, scared of the landing on the portal planet. Sub-major Stott had a bad record of dealing with people who admitted fear.

  I fingered the fresh T/O they had given us. It looked like this:

  I knew most of the people from the raid on Aleph, the first face-to-face contact between humans and Taurans. The only new people in my platoon were Luthuli and Heyrovsky. In the company as a whole (excuse me, the 'strike force'), we had twenty replacements for the nineteen people we lost from the Aleph raid: one amputation, four deaders, fourteen psychotics.

  I couldn't get over the '20 Mar 2007' at the bottom of the T/O. I'd been in the army ten years, though it felt like less than two. Time dilation, of course; even with the collapsar jumps, traveling from star to star eats up the calendar.

  After this raid, I would probably be eligible for retirement, with full pay. If I lived through the raid, and if they didn't change the rules on us. Me a twenty-year man, and only twenty-five years old.

  Stott was summing up when there was a knock on the door, a single loud rap. 'Enter,' he said.

  An ensign I knew vaguely walked in casually and handed Stott a slip of paper, without saying a word. He stood there while Stott read it, slumping with just the right degree of insolence. Technically, Stott was out of his chain of command; everybody in the navy disliked him anyhow.

  Stott handed the paper back to the ensign and looked through him.

  'You will alert your squads that preliminary evasive maneuvers will commence at 2010, fifty-eight minutes from now.' He hadn't looked at his watch. 'All personnel will be in acceleration shells by 2000. Tench … hut!'

  We rose and, without enthusiasm, chorused, 'Fuck you, sir.' Idiotic custom.

  Stott strode out of the room and the ensign followed, smirking.

  I turned my ring to my assistant squad leader's position and talked into it: 'Tate, this is Mandella.' Everyone else in the room was doing the same.

  A tinny voice came out of the ring. 'Tate here. What's up?'

  'Get ahold of the men and tell them we have to be in the shells by 2000. Evasive maneuvers.'

  'Crap. They told us it would be days.'

  'I guess something new came up. Or maybe the Commodore has a bright idea.'

  'The Commodore can stuff it. You up in the lounge?'

  'Yeah.'

  'Bring me back a cup when you come, OK? Little sugar?'

  'Roger. Be down in about half an hour.'

  'Thanks. I'll get on it.'

  There was a general movement toward the coffee machine. I got in line behind Corporal Potter.

  'What do you think, Marygay?'

  'Maybe the Commodore just wants us to try out the shells once more.'

  'Before the real thing.'

  'Maybe.' She picked up a cup and blew into it. She looked worried. 'Or maybe the Taurans had a ship way out, waiting for us. I've wondered why they don't do it. We do, at Stargate.'

  'Stargate's a different thing. It takes seven cruisers, moving all the time, to cover all the possible exit angles. We can't afford to do it for more than one collapsar, and neither could they.'

  She didn't say anything while she filled her cup. 'Maybe we've stumbled on their version of Stargate. Or maybe they have more ships than we do by now.'

  I filled and sugared two cups, sealed one. 'No way to tell.' We walked back to a table, careful with the cups in the high gravity.

  'Maybe Singhe knows something,' she said.

  'Maybe he does. But I'd have to get him through Rogers and Cortez. Cortez would jump down my throat if I tried to bother him now.'

  'Oh, I can get him directly. We…' She dimpled a little bit. 'We've been friends.'

  I sipped some scalding coffee and tried to sound nonchalant. 'So that's where you've been disappearing to.'

  'You disapprove?' she said, looking innocent.

  'Well … damn it, no, of course not. But – but he's an officer! A navy officer!'

  'He's attached to us and that makes him part army.' She twisted her ring and said, 'Directory.' To me: 'What about you and Little Miss Harmony?'

  'That's not the same thing.' She was whispering a directory code into the ring.

  'Yes, it is. You just wanted to do it with an officer. Pervert.' The ring bleated twice. Busy. 'How was she?'

  'Adequate.' I was recovering.

  'Besides, Ensign Singhe is a perfect gentleman. And not the least bit jealous.'

  'Neither am I,' I said. 'If he ever hurts you, tell me and I'll break his ass.'

  She looked at me across her cup. 'If Lieutenant Harmony ever hurts you, tell me and I'll break her ass.'

  'It's a deal.' We shook on it solemnly.

  2

  The acceleration shells were something new, installed while we rested and resupplied at Stargate. They enabled us to use the ship at closer to its theoretical efficiency, the tachyon drive boosting it to as much as 25 gravities.

  Tate was waiting for me in the shell area. The rest of the squad was milling around, talking. I gave him his coffee.

  'Thanks. Find out anything?'

  'Afraid not. Except the swabbies don't seem to be scared, and it's their show. Probably just another practice run.'

  He slurped some coffee. 'What the hell. It's all the same to us, anyhow. Just sit there and get squeezed half to death. God, I hate those things.'

  'Maybe they'll eventually make us obsolete, and we can go home.'

  'Sure thing.' The medic came by and gave me my shot.

  I waited until 19
50 and hollered to the squad. 'Let's go. Strip down and zip up.'

  The shell is like a flexible spacesuit; at least the fittings on the inside are pretty similar. But instead of a life-support package, there's a hose going into the top of the helmet and two coming out of the heels, as well as two relief tubes per suit. They're crammed in shoulder-to-shoulder on light acceleration couches; getting to your shell is like picking your way through a giant plate of olive drab spaghetti.

  When the lights in my helmet showed that everybody was suited up, I pushed the button that flooded the room. No way to see, of course, but I could imagine the pale blue solution – ethylene glycol and something else – foaming up around and over us. The suit material, cool and dry, collapsed in to touch my skin at every point. I knew that my internal body pressure was increasing rapidly to match the increasing fluid pressure outside. That's what the shot was for; keep your cells from getting squished between the devil and the deep blue sea. You could still feel it, though. By the time my meter said '2' (external pressure equivalent to a column of water two nautical miles deep), I felt that I was at the same time being crushed and bloated. By 2005 it was at 2.7 and holding steady. When the maneuvers began at 2010, you couldn't feel the difference. I thought I saw the needle fluctuate a tiny bit, though.

  The major drawback to the system is that, of course, anybody caught outside of his shell when the Anniversary hit 25 G's would be just so much strawberry jam. So the guiding and the fighting have to be done by the ship's tactical computer – which does most of it anyway, but it's nice to have a human overseer.

  Another small problem is that if the ship gets damaged and the pressure drops, you'll explode like a dropped melon. If it's the internal pressure, you get crushed to death in a microsecond.

  And it takes ten minutes, more or less, to get depressurized and another two or three to get untangled and dressed. So it's not exactly something you can hop out of and come up fighting.

  The accelerating was over at 2038. A green light went on and I chinned the button to depressurize.

  Marygay and I were getting dressed outside.

  'How'd that happen?' I pointed to an angry purple welt that ran from the bottom of her right breast to her hipbone.

  'That's the second time,' she said, mad. 'The first one was on my back – I think that shell doesn't fit right, gets creases.'

  'Maybe you've lost weight.'

  'Wise guy.' Our caloric intake had been rigorously monitored ever since we left Stargate the first time. You can't use a fighting suit unless it fits you like a second skin.

  A wall speaker drowned out the rest of her comment. 'Attention all personnel. Attention. All army personnel echelon six and above and all navy personnel echelon four and above will report to the briefing room at 2130.'

  It repeated the message twice. I went off to lie down for a few minutes while Marygay showed her bruise to the medic and the armorer. I didn't feel a bit jealous.

  The Commodore began the briefing. 'There's not much to tell, and what there is is not good news.

  'Six days ago, the Tauran vessel that is pursuing us released a drone missile. Its initial acceleration was on the order of 80 gravities.

  'After blasting for approximately a day, its acceleration suddenly jumped to 148 gravities.' Collective gasp.

  'Yesterday, it jumped to 203 gravities. I shouldn't need to remind anyone here that this is twice the accelerative capability of the enemy's drones in our last encounter.

  'We launched a salvo of drones, four of them, intersecting what the computer predicted to be the four most probably future trajectories of the enemy drone. One of them paid off, while we were doing evasive maneuvers. We contacted and destroyed the Tauran weapon about ten million kilometers from here.'

  That was practically next door. 'The only encouraging thing we learned from the encounter was from spectral analysis of the blast. It was no more powerful an explosion than ones we have observed in the past, so at least their progress in propulsion hasn't been matched by progress in explosives.

  'This is the first manifestation of a very important effect that has heretofore been of interest only to theorists. Tell me, soldier.' He pointed at Negulesco. 'How long has it been since we first fought the Taurans, at Aleph?'

  'That depends on your frame of reference, Commodore,' she answered dutifully. 'To me, it's been about eight months.'

  'Exactly. You've lost about nine years, though, to time dilation, while we maneuvered between collapsar jumps. In an engineering sense, as we haven't done any important research and development aboard ship … that enemy vessel comes from our future!' He paused to let that sink in.

  'As the war progresses, this can only become more and more pronounced. The Taurans don't have any cure for relativity, of course, so it will be to our benefit as often as to theirs.

  'For the present, though, it is we who are operating with a handicap. As the Tauran pursuit vessel draws closer, this handicap will become more severe. They can simply outshoot us.

  'We're going to have to do some fancy dodging. When we get within five hundred million kilometers of the enemy ship, everybody gets in his shell and we just have to trust the logistic computer. It will put us through a rapid series of random changes in direction and velocity.

  'I'll be blunt. As long as they have one more drone than we, they can finish us off. They haven't launched any more since that first one. Perhaps they are holding their fire … or maybe they only had one. In that case, it's we who have them.

  'At any rate, all personnel will be required to be in their shells with no more than ten minutes' notice. When we get within a thousand million kilometers of the enemy, you are to stand by your shells. By the time we are within five hundred million kilometers, you will be in them, and all shell compounds flooded and pressurized. We cannot wait for anyone.

  'That's all I have to say. Sub-major?'

  'I'll speak to my people later, Commodore. Thank you.'

  'Dismissed.' And none of this 'fuck you, sir' nonsense. The navy thought that was just a little beneath their dignity. We stood at attention – all except Stott – until he had left the room. Then some other swabbie said 'dismissed' again, and we left.

  My squad had clean-up detail, so I told everybody who was to do what, put Tate in charge, and left. Went up to the NCO room for some company and maybe some information.

  There wasn't much happening but idle speculation, so I took Rogers and went off to bed. Marygay had disappeared again, hopefully trying to wheedle something out of Singhe.

  3

  We had our promised get-together with the sub-major the next morning, when he more or less repeated what the commodore had said, in infantry terms and in his staccato monotone. He emphasized the fact that all we knew about the Tauran ground forces was that if their naval capability was improved, it was likely they would be able to handle us better than last time.

  But that brings up an interesting point. Eight months or nine years before, we'd had a tremendous advantage: they had seemed not quite to understand what was going on. As belligerent as they had been in space, we'd expected them to be real Huns on the ground. Instead, they practically lined themselves up for slaughter. One escaped and presumably described the idea of old-fashioned in-fighting to his fellows.

  But that, of course, didn't mean that the word had necessarily gotten to this particular bunch, the Taurans guarding Yod-4. The only way we know of to communicate faster than the speed of light is to physically carry a message through successive collapsar jumps. And there was no way of telling how many jumps there were between Yod-4 and the Tauran home base – so these might be just as passive as the last bunch, or might have been practicing infantry tactics for most of a decade. We would find out when we got there.

  The armorer and I were helping my squad pull maintenance on their fighting suits when we passed the thousand million kilometer mark and had to go up to the shells.

  We had about five hours to kill before we had to get into our cocoons. I p
layed a game of chess with Rabi and lost. Then Rogers led the platoon in some vigorous calisthenics, probably for no other reason than to get their minds off the prospect of having to lie half-crushed in the shells for at least four hours. The longest we'd gone before was half that.

  Ten minutes before the five hundred million kilometer mark, we squad leaders took over and supervised buttoning everybody up. In eight minutes we were zipped and flooded and at the mercy of – or safe in the arms of – the logistic computer.

  While I was lying there being squeezed, a silly thought took hold of my brain and went round and round like a charge in a superconductor: according to military formalism, the conduct of war divides neatly into two categories, tactics and logistics. Logistics has to do with moving troops and feeding them and just about everything except the actual fighting, which is tactics. And now we're fighting, but we don't have a tactical computer to guide us through attack and defense, just a huge, super-efficient pacifistic cybernetic grocery clerk of a logistic, mark that word, logistic computer.

  The other side of my brain, perhaps not quite as pinched, would argue that it doesn't matter what name you give to a computer, it's a pile of memory crystals, logic banks, nuts and bolts… If you program it to be Genghis Khan, it is a tactical computer, even if its usual function is to monitor the stock market or control sewage conversion.

  But the other voice was obdurate and said by that kind of reasoning, a man is only a hank of hair and a piece of bone and some stringy meat; and no matter what kind of a man he is, if you teach him well, you can take a Zen monk and turn him into a slavering bloodthirsty warrior.

  Then what the hell are you, we, am I, answered the other side. A peace-loving, vacuum-welding specialist cum physics teacher snatched up by the Elite Conscription Act and reprogrammed to be a killing machine. You, I have killed and liked it.

  But that was hypnotism, motivational conditioning, I argued back at myself. They don't do that anymore.