The Forever War Read online

  It was a pleasingly diverse jumble of various kinds of buildings, arranged around a lake, surrounded by trees. All of the buildings were connected by slidewalk to the largest place, a fullerdome with stores and schools and offices.

  We could have taken the enclosed slidewalk to Mom’s place, but instead walked alongside it in the good cold air that smelled of fallen leaves. People slid by on the other side of the plastic, carefully not staring.

  Mom didn’t answer her door, but she’d given me an entry card. Mom was asleep in the bedroom, so Marygay and I settled in the living room and read for a while.

  We were startled suddenly by a loud fit of coughing from the bedroom. I raced over and knocked on the door.

  “William? I didn’t—” coughing “—come in, I didn’t know you were…”

  She was propped up in bed, the light on, surrounded by various nostrums. She looked ghastly, pale and lined.

  She lit a joint and it seemed to quell the coughing. “When did you get in? I didn’t know…”

  “Just a few minutes ago…How long has this…have you been…”

  “Oh, it’s just a bug I picked up after Rhonda went to see her kids. I’ll be fine in a couple of days.” She started coughing again, drank some thick red liquid from a bottle. All of her medicines seemed to be the commercial, patent variety.

  “Have you seen a doctor?”

  “Doctor? Heavens no, Willy. They don’t have…it’s not serious…don’t—”

  “Not serious?” At eighty-four. “For Chrissake, mother.” I went to the phone in the kitchen and with some difficulty managed to get the hospital.

  A plain girl in her twenties formed in the cube. “Nurse Donalson, general services.” She had a fixed smile, professional sincerity. But then everybody smiled.

  “My mother needs to be looked at by a doctor. She has a—”

  “Name and number, please.”

  “Beth Mandella.” I spelled it. “What number?”

  “Medical services number, of course,” she smiled.

  I called into Mom and asked her what her number was. “She says she can’t remember.”

  “That’s all right, sir, I’m sure I can find her records.” She turned her smile to a keyboard beside her and punched out a code.

  “Beth Mandella?” she said, her smile turning quizzical. “You’re her son? She must be in her eighties.”

  “Please. It’s a long story. She really has to see a doctor.”

  “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “What do you mean?” Strangled coughing from the other room, the worst yet. “Really—this might be very serious, you’ve got to—”

  “But sir, Mrs. Mandella got a zero priority rating way back in 2010.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “S-i-r…” The smile was hardening in place.

  “Look. Pretend that I came from another planet. What is a ‘zero priority rating’?”

  “Another—oh! I know you!” She looked off to the left. “Sonya—come over here a second. You’d never guess who…” Another face crowded the cube, a vapid blonde girl whose smile was twin to the other nurse’s. “Remember? On the stat this morning?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “One of the soldiers—hey, that’s really max, really max.” The head withdrew.

  “Oh, Mr. Mandella,” she said, effusive. “No wonder you’re confused. It’s really very simple.”

  “Well?”

  “It’s part of the Universal Medical Security System. Everybody gets a rating on their seventieth birthday. It comes in automatically from Geneva.”

  “What does it rate? What does it mean?” But the ugly truth was obvious.

  “Well, it tells how important a person is and what level of treatment he’s allowed. Class three is the same as anybody else’s; class two is the same except for certain life-extending—”

  “And class zero is no treatment at all.”

  “That’s correct, Mr. Mandella.” And in her smile was not a glimmer of pity or understanding.

  “Thank you.” I disconnected. Marygay was standing behind me, crying soundlessly with her mouth wide open.

  ~~~

  I found mountaineer’s oxygen at a sporting goods store and even managed to get some black-market antibiotics through a character in a bar downtown in Washington. But Mom was beyond being able to respond to amateur treatment. She lived four days. The people from the crematorium had the same fixed smile.

  I tried to get through to my brother, Mike, on the moon, but the phone company wouldn’t let me place the call until I had signed a contract and posted a $25,000 bond. I had to get a credit transfer from Geneva. The paperwork took half a day.

  I finally got through to him. Without preamble:

  “Mother’s dead.”

  For a fraction of a second, the radio waves wandered up to the moon, and in another fraction, came back. He started and then nodded his head slowly. “No surprise. Every time I’ve come down to Earth the past ten years, I’ve wondered whether she’d still be there. Neither of us had enough money to keep in very close touch.” He had told us in Geneva that a letter from Luna to Earth cost $100 postage—plus $5,000 tax. It discouraged communication with what the UN considered to be a bunch of regrettably necessary anarchists.

  We commiserated for a while and then Mike said, “Willy, Earth is no place for you and Marygay; you know that by now. Come to Luna. Where you can still be an individual. Where we don’t throw people out the airlock on their seventieth birthday.”

  “We’d have to rejoin UNEF.”

  “True, but you wouldn’t have to fight. They say they need you more for training. You could study in your spare time, bring your physics up to date—maybe wind up eventually in research.”

  We talked some more, a total of three minutes. I got $1000 back.

  Marygay and I talked about it through the night. Maybe our decision would have been different if we hadn’t been staying there, surrounded by Mother’s life and death, but when the dawn came the proud, ambitious, careful beauty of Columbia had turned sinister and foreboding.

  We packed our bags and had our money transferred to the Tycho Credit Union and took a monorail to the Cape.

  ~~~

  “In case you’re interested, you aren’t the first combat veterans to come back.” The recruiting officer was a muscular lieutenant of indeterminate sex. I flipped a coin mentally and it came up tails.

  “Last I heard, there had been nine others,” she said in her husky tenor. “All of them opted for the moon…maybe you’ll find some of your friends there.” She slid two simple forms across the desk. “Sign these and you’re in again. Second lieutenants.”

  The form was a simple request to be assigned to active duty; we had never really gotten out of the Force, since they extended the draft law, but had just been on inactive status. I scrutinized the paper.

  “There’s nothing on this about the guarantees we were given at Stargate.”

  “That won’t be necessary. The Force will—”

  “I think it is necessary, Lieutenant.” I handed back the form. So did Marygay.

  “Let me check.” She left the desk and disappeared into an office. After a while we heard a printer rattle.

  She brought back the same two sheets, with an addition typed under our names: guaranteed location of choice [luna] and assignment of choice [combat training specialist].

  We got a thorough physical checkup and were fitted for new fighting suits, made our financial arrangements, and caught the next morning’s shuttle. We laid over at Earth-port, enjoying zero gravity for a few hours, and then caught a ride to Luna, setting down at the Grimaldi base.

  On the door to the Transient Officers’ Billet, some wag had scraped “abandon hope all ye who enter.” We found our two-man cubicle and began changing for chow.

  Two raps on the door. “Mail call, sirs.”

  I opened the door and the sergeant standing there saluted. I just looked at him for a se
cond and then remembered I was an officer and returned the salute. He handed me two identical faxes. I gave one to Marygay and we both gasped at the same time:

  **ORDERS**ORDERS**ORDERS

  The following named personnel:

  mandella, william 2lt [11 575 278] cocomm d co gritrabn and potter, marygay 2lt [17 386 907] cocomm b co gritrabn are hereby reassigned to:

  lt mandella: plcomm 2 pl stftheta stargate

  lt potter: plcomm 3 pl stftheta stargate.

  Description of duties:

  command infantry platoon in tet-2 campaign.

  The above named personnel will report immediately to grimaldi transportation battalion to be manifested to stargate.

  Issued stargate tacbd/1298-8684-1450/20 aug 2019

  sg:by autho stfcom commander.

  **ORDERS**ORDERS**ORDERS

  “They didn’t waste any time, did they?” Marygay said bitterly. “Must be a standing order. Strike Force Command’s light-weeks away; they can’t even know we’ve reupped yet.”

  “What about our…” She let it trail off. “The guarantee. Well, we were given our assignment of choice.

  Nobody guaranteed we’d have the assignment for more than an hour.”

  “It’s so dirty.” I shrugged. “It’s so army.” But I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were going home.

  LIEUTENANT MANDELLA

  2024-2389 A.D.

  Twenty-seven

  “Quick and dirty.” I was looking at my platoon sergeant, Santesteban, but talking to myself. And anybody else who was listening.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Gotta do it in the first coupla minutes or we’re screwed tight.” He was matter-of-fact, laconic. Drugged.

  Private Collins came up with Halliday. They were holding hands unself-consciously. “Lieutenant Mandella?” Her voice broke a little. “Can we have just a minute?”

  “One minute,” I said, too abruptly. “We have to leave in five, I’m sorry.”

  Hard to watch those two together now. Neither one had any combat experience. But they knew what everybody did; how slim their chances were of ever being together again. They slumped in a corner and mumbled words and traded mechanical caresses, no passion or even comfort. Collins’s eyes shone but she wasn’t weeping. Halliday just looked grim, numb. She was normally by far the prettier of the two, but the sparkle had gone out of her and left a well-formed dull shell.

  I’d gotten used to open female homosex in the months since we’d left Earth. Even stopped resenting the loss of potential partners. The men together still gave me a chill, though.

  I stripped and backed into the clamshelled suit. The new ones were a hell of a lot more complicated, with all the new biometrics and trauma maintenance. But well worth the trouble of hooking up, in case you got blown apart just a little bit. Go home to a comfortable pension with heroic prosthesis. They were even talking about the possibility of regeneration, at least for missing arms and legs. Better get it soon, before Heaven filled up with fractional people. Heaven was the new hospital/rest-and-recreation planet.

  I finished the set-up sequence and the suit closed by itself. Gritted my teeth against the pain that never came, when the internal sensors and fluid tubes poked into your body. Conditioned neural bypass, so you felt only a slight puzzling dislocation. Rather than the death of a thousand cuts.

  Collins and Halliday were getting into their suits now and the other dozen were almost set, so I stepped over to the third platoon’s staging area. Say goodbye again to Marygay.

  She was suited and heading my way. We touched helmets instead of using the radio. Privacy.

  “Feeling okay, honey?”

  “All right,” she said. “Took my pill.”

  “Yeah, happy times.” I’d taken mine too, supposed to make you feel optimistic without interfering with your sense of judgment. I knew most of us would probably die, but I didn’t feel too bad about it. “Sack with me tonight?”

  “If we’re both here,” she said neutrally. “Have to take a pill for that, too.” She tried to laugh. “Sleep, I mean. How’re the new people taking it? You have ten?”

  “Ten, yeah, they’re okay. Doped up, quarter-dose.”

  “I did that, too; try to keep them loose.”

  In fact, Santesteban was the only other combat veteran in my platoon; the four corporals had been in UNEF for a while but hadn’t ever fought.

  The speaker in my cheekbone crackled and Commander Cortez said, “Two minutes. Get your people lined up.”

  We had our goodbye and I went back to check my flock. Everybody seemed to have gotten suited up without any problems, so I put them on line. We waited for what seemed like a long time.

  “All right, load ’em up.” With the word “up,” the bay door in front of me opened—the staging area having already been bled of air—and I led my men and women through to the assault ship.

  These new ships were ugly as hell. Just an open framework with clamps to hold you in place, swiveled lasers fore and aft, small tachyon powerplants below the lasers. Everything automated; the machine would land us as quickly as possible and then zip off to harass the enemy. It was a one-use, throwaway drone. The vehicle that would come pick us up if we survived was cradled next to it, much prettier.

  We clamped in and the assault ship cast off from the Sangre y Victoria with twin spurts from the yaw jets. Then the voice of the machine gave us a short countdown and we sped off at four gees’ acceleration, straight down.

  The planet, which we hadn’t bothered to name, was a chunk of black rock without any normal star close enough to give it heat. At first it was visible only by the absence of stars where its bulk cut off their light, but as we dropped closer we could see subtle variations in the blackness of its surface. We were coming down on the hemisphere opposite the Taurans’ outpost.

  Our recon had shown that their camp sat in the middle of a flat lava plain several hundred kilometers in diameter. It was pretty primitive compared to other Tauran bases UNEF had encountered, but there wouldn’t be any sneaking up on it. We were going to careen over the horizon some fifteen klicks from the place, four ships converging simultaneously from different directions, all of us decelerating like mad, hopefully to drop right in their laps and come up shooting. There would be nothing to hide behind.

  I wasn’t worried, of course. Abstractedly, I wished I hadn’t taken the pill.

  We leveled off about a kilometer from the surface and sped along much faster than the rock’s escape velocity, constantly correcting to keep from flying away. The surface rolled below us in a dark gray blur; we shed a little light from the pseudo-cerenkov glow made by our tachyon exhaust, scooting away from our reality into its own.

  The ungainly contraption skimmed and jumped along for some ten minutes; then suddenly the front jet glowed and we were snapped forward inside our suits, eyeballs trying to escape from their sockets in the rapid deceleration.

  “Prepare for ejection,” the machine’s female-mechanical voice said. “Five, four…”

  The ship’s lasers started firing, millisecond flashes freezing the land below in jerky stroboscopic motion. It was a twisted, pockmarked jumble of fissures and random black rocks, a few meters below our feet. We were dropping, slowing.

  “Three—” It never got any farther. There was a too-bright flash and I saw the horizon drop away as the ship’s tail pitched down—then clipped the ground, and we were rolling, horribly, pieces of people and ship scattering. Then we slid pinwheeling to a bumpy halt, and I tried to pull free but my leg was pinned under the ship’s bulk: excruciating pain and a dry crunch as the girder crushed my leg; shrill whistle of air escaping my breached suit; then the trauma maintenance turned on snick, more pain, then no pain and I was rolling free, short stump of a leg trailing blood that froze shiny black on the dull black rock. I tasted brass and a red haze closed everything out, then deepened to the brown of river clay, then loam and I passed out, with the pill thinking this is not so bad…

  ~~~

&
nbsp; The suit is set up to save as much of your body as possible. If you lose part of an arm or a leg, one of sixteen razor-sharp irises closes around your limb with the force of a hydraulic press, snipping it off neatly and sealing the suit before you can die of explosive decompression. Then “trauma maintenance” cauterizes the stump, replaces lost blood, and fills you full of happy-juice and No-shock. So you will either die happy or, if your comrades go on to win the battle, eventually be carried back up to the ship’s aid station.

  We’d won that round, while I slept swaddled in dark cotton. I woke up in the infirmary. It was crowded. I was in the middle of a long row of cots, each one holding someone who had been three-fourths (or less) saved by his suit’s trauma maintenance feature. We were being ignored by the ship’s two doctors, who stood in bright light at operating tables, absorbed in blood rituals. I watched them for a long time. Squinting into the bright light, the blood on their green tunics could have been grease, the swathed bodies, odd soft machines that they were fixing. But the machines would cry out in their sleep, and the mechanics muttered reassurances while they plied their greasy tools. I watched and slept and woke up in different places.

  Finally I woke up in a regular bay. I was strapped down and being fed through a tube, biosensor electrodes attached here and there, but no medics around. The only other person in the little room was Marygay, sleeping on the bunk next to me. Her right arm was amputated just above the elbow.

  I didn’t wake her up, just looked at her for a long time and tried to sort out my feelings. Tried to filter out the effect of the mood drugs. Looking at her stump, I could feel neither empathy nor revulsion. I tried to force one reaction, and then the other, but nothing real happened. It was as if she had always been that way. Was it drugs, conditioning, love? Have to wait to see.