The Forever War Page 25

  I set up the shield in front of me—it had little extensions on the bottom to keep it upright—and with the first arrow I shot, I knew we had a chance. It struck one of them in the center of his shield, went straight through and penetrated his suit.

  It was a one-sided massacre. The darts weren’t very effective without the element of surprise—but when one came sailing over my head from behind, it did give me a crawly feeling between the shoulder blades.

  With twenty arrows I got twenty Taurans. They closed ranks every time one dropped; you didn’t even have to aim. After running out of arrows, I tried throwing their darts back at them. But their light shields were quite adequate against the small missiles.

  We’d killed more than half of them with arrows and spears, long before they got into range of the hand-to-hand weapons. I drew my sword and waited. They still outnumbered us by better than three to one.

  When they got within ten meters, the people with the chakram throwing knives had their own field day. Although the spinning disc was easy enough to see and took more than a half second to get from thrower to target, most of the Taurans reacted in the same ineffective way, raising up the shield to ward it off. The razor-sharp, tempered heavy blade cut through the light shield like a buzz saw through cardboard.

  The first hand-to-hand contact was with the quarterstaffs, which were metal rods two meters long that tapered at the ends to a double-edged, serrated knife blade. The Taurans had a cold-blooded—or valiant, if your mind works that way—method for dealing with them. They would simply grab the blade and die. While the human was trying to extricate his weapon from the frozen death-grip, a Tauran swordsman, with a scimitar over a meter long, would step in and kill him.

  Besides the swords, they had a bolo-like thing that was a length of elastic cord that ended with about ten centimeters of something like barbed wire, and a small weight to propel it. It was a dangerous weapon for all concerned; if they missed their target it would come snapping back unpredictably. But they hit their target pretty often, going under the shields and wrapping the thorny wire around ankles.

  I stood back-to-back with Private Erikson, and with our swords we managed to stay alive for the next few minutes. When the Taurans were down to a couple of dozen survivors, they just turned around and started marching out. We threw some darts after them, getting three, but we didn’t want to chase after them. They might turn around and start hacking again.

  There were only twenty-eight of us left standing. Nearly ten times that number of dead Taurans littered the ground, but there was no satisfaction in it.

  They could do the whole thing over, with a fresh 300. And this time it would work.

  We moved from body to body, pulling out arrows and spears, then took up places around the fighter again. Nobody bothered to retrieve the quarterstaffs. I counted noses: Charlie and Diana were still alive (Hilleboe had been one of the quarterstaff victims), as well as two supporting officers. Wilber and Szydlowska. Rudkoski was still alive but Orban had taken a dart.

  After a day of waiting, it looked as though the enemy had decided on a war of attrition rather than repeating the ground attack. Darts came in constantly, not in swarms anymore, but in twos and threes and tens. And from all different angles. We couldn’t stay alert forever; they’d get somebody every three or four hours.

  We took turns sleeping, two at a time, on top of the stasis field generator. Sitting directly under the bulk of the fighter, it was the safest place in the dome.

  Every now and then, a Tauran would appear at the edge of the field, evidently to see whether any of us were left. Sometimes we’d shoot an arrow at him, for practice.

  The darts stopped falling after a couple of days. I supposed it was possible that they’d simply run out of them. Or maybe they’d decided to stop when we were down to twenty survivors.

  There was a more likely possibility. I took one of the quarterstaffs down to the edge of the field and poked it through, a centimeter or so. When I drew it back, the point was melted off. When I showed it to Charlie, he rocked back and forth (the only way you can nod in a suit); this sort of thing had happened before, one of the first times the stasis field hadn’t worked. They simply saturated it with laser fire and waited for us to go stir-crazy and turn off the generator. They were probably sitting in their ships playing the Tauran equivalent of pinochle.

  I tried to think. It was hard to keep your mind on something for any length of time in that hostile environment, sense-deprived, looking over your shoulder every few seconds. Something Charlie had said. Only yesterday. I couldn’t track it down. It wouldn’t have worked then; that was all I could remember. Then finally it came to me.

  I called everyone over and wrote in the snow:

  Get nova bombs from ship.

  Carry to edge of field.

  Move field.

  Szydlowska knew where the proper tools would be aboard ship. Luckily, we had left all of the entrances open before turning on the stasis field; they were electronic and would have been frozen shut. We got an assortment of wrenches from the engine room and climbed up to the cockpit. He knew how to remove the access plate that exposed a crawl space into the bomb-bay. I followed him in through the meter-wide tube.

  Normally, I supposed, it would have been pitch-black. But the stasis field illuminated the bomb-bay with the same dim, shadowless light that prevailed outside. The bomb-bay was too small for both of us, so I stayed at the end of the crawl space and watched.

  The bomb-bay doors had a “manual override” so they were easy; Szydlowska just turned a hand-crank and we were in business. Freeing the two nova bombs from their cradles was another thing. Finally, he went back down to the engine room and brought back a crowbar. He pried one loose and I got the other, and we rolled them out the bomb-bay.

  Sergeant Anghelov was already working on them by the time we climbed back down. All you had to do to arm the bomb was to unscrew the fuse on the nose of it and poke something around in the fuse socket to wreck the delay mechanism and safety restraints.

  We carried them quickly to the edge, six people per bomb, and set them down next to each other. Then we waved to the four people who were standing by at the field generator’s handles. They picked it up and walked ten paces in the opposite direction. The bombs disappeared as the edge of the field slid over them.

  There was no doubt that the bombs went off. For a couple of seconds it was hot as the interior of a star outside, and even the stasis field took notice of the fact: about a third of the dome glowed a dull pink for a moment, then was gray again. There was a slight acceleration, like you would feel in a slow elevator. That meant we were drifting down to the bottom of the crater. Would there be a solid bottom? Or would we sink down through molten rock to be trapped like a fly in amber—didn’t pay to even think about that. Perhaps if it happened, we could blast our way out with the fighter’s gigawatt laser.

  Twelve of us, anyhow.

  How long?

  Charlie scraped in the snow at my feet.

  That was a damned good question. About all I knew was the amount of energy two nova bombs released. I didn’t know how big a fireball they would make, which would determine the temperature at detonation and the size of the crater. I didn’t know the heat capacity of the surrounding rock, or its boiling point. I wrote:

  One week, shrug?

  Have to think.

  The ship’s computer could have told me in a thousandth of a second, but it wasn’t talking. I started writing equations in the snow, trying to get a maximum and minimum figure for the length of time it would take for the outside to cool down to 500 degrees. Anghelov, whose physics was much more up-to-date, did his own calculations on the other side of the ship.

  My answer said anywhere from six hours to six days (although for six hours, the surrounding rock would have to conduct heat like pure copper), and Anghelov got five hours to four and a half days. I voted for six and nobody else got a vote.

  We slept a lot. Charlie and Diana played che
ss by scraping symbols in the snow; I was never able to hold the shifting positions of the pieces in my mind. I checked my figures several times and kept coming up with six days. I checked Anghelov’s computations, too, and they seemed all right, but I stuck to my guns. It wouldn’t hurt us to stay in the suits an extra day and a half. We argued good-naturedly in terse shorthand.

  There had been nineteen of us left the day we tossed the bombs outside. There were still nineteen, six days later, when I paused with my hand over the generator’s cutoff switch. What was waiting for us out there? Surely we had killed all the Taurans within several klicks of the explosion. But there might have been a reserve force farther away, now waiting patiently on the crater’s lip. At least you could push a quarterstaff through the field and have it come back whole.

  I dispersed the people evenly around the area, so they might not get us with a single shot. Then, ready to turn it back on immediately if anything went wrong, I pushed.

  Thirty-five

  My radio was still tuned to the general frequency; after more than a week of silence my ears were suddenly assaulted with loud, happy babbling.

  We stood in the center of a crater almost a kilometer wide and deep. Its sides were a shiny black crust shot through with red cracks, hot but no longer dangerous. The hemisphere of earth that we rested on had sunk a good forty meters into the floor of the crater, while it had still been molten, so now we stood on a kind of pedestal.

  Not a Tauran in sight.

  We rushed to the ship, sealed it and filled it with cool air and popped our suits. I didn’t press seniority for the one shower; just sat back in an acceleration couch and took deep breaths of air that didn’t smell like recycled Mandella.

  The ship was designed for a maximum crew of twelve, so we stayed outside in shifts of seven to keep from straining the life support systems. I sent a repeating message to the other fighter, which was still over six weeks away, that we were in good shape and waiting to be picked up. I was reasonably certain he would have seven free berths, since the normal crew for a combat mission was only three.

  It was good to walk around and talk again. I officially suspended all things military for the duration of our stay on the planet. Some of the people were survivors of Brill’s mutinous bunch, but they didn’t show any hostility toward me.

  We played a kind of nostalgia game, comparing the various eras we’d experienced on Earth, wondering what it would be like in the 700-years-future we were going back to. Nobody mentioned the fact that we would at best go back to a few months’ furlough and then be assigned to another strike force, another turn of the wheel.

  Wheels. One day Charlie asked me from what country my name originated; it sounded weird to him. I told him it originated from the lack of a dictionary and that if it were spelled right, it would look even weirder.

  I got to kill a good half hour explaining all the peripheral details to that. Basically, though, my parents were “hippies” (a kind of sub-culture in the late-twentieth-century America, that rejected materialism and embraced a broad spectrum of odd ideas) who lived with a group of other hippies in a small agricultural community. When my mother got pregnant, they wouldn’t be so conventional as to get married: this entailed the woman taking the man’s name, and implied that she was his property. But they got all intoxicated and sentimental and decided they would both change their names to be the same. They rode into the nearest town, arguing all the way as to what name would be the best symbol for the love-bond between them—I narrowly missed having a much shorter name—and they settled on Mandala.

  A mandala is a wheel-like design the hippies had borrowed from a foreign religion, that symbolized the cosmos, the cosmic mind, God, or whatever needed a symbol. Neither my mother nor my father knew how to spell the word, and the magistrate in town wrote it down the way it sounded to him.

  They named me William in honor of a wealthy uncle, who unfortunately died penniless.

  The six weeks passed rather pleasantly: talking, reading, resting. The other ship landed next to ours and did have nine free berths. We shuffled crews so that each ship had someone who could get it out of trouble if the preprogrammed jump sequence malfunctioned. I assigned myself to the other ship, in hopes it would have some new books. It didn’t.

  We zipped up in the tanks and took off simultaneously.

  ~~~

  We wound up spending a lot of time in the tanks, just to keep from looking at the same faces all day long in the crowded ship. The added periods of acceleration got us back to Stargate in ten months, subjective. Of course, it was 340 years (minus seven months) to the hypothetical objective observer.

  There were hundreds of cruisers in orbit around Stargate. Bad news: with that kind of backlog we probably wouldn’t get any furlough at all.

  I supposed I was more likely to get a court-martial than a furlough, anyhow. Losing 88 percent of my company, many of them because they didn’t have enough confidence in me to obey the direct earthquake order. And we were back where we’d started on Sade-138; no Taurans there, but no base either.

  We got landing instructions and went straight down, no shuttle. There was another surprise waiting at the spaceport. Dozens of cruisers were standing around on the ground (they’d never done that before for fear that Stargate would be hit)—and two captured Tauran cruisers as well. We’d never managed to get one intact.

  Seven centuries could have brought us a decisive advantage, of course. Maybe we were winning.

  We went through an airlock under a “returnees” sign. After the air cycled and we’d popped our suits, a beautiful young woman came in with a cartload of tunics and told us, in perfectly-accented English, to get dressed and go to the lecture hall at the end of the corridor to our left.

  The tunic felt odd, light yet warm. It was the first thing I’d worn besides a fighting suit or bare skin in almost a year.

  The lecture hall was about a hundred times too big for the twenty-two of us. The same woman was there and asked us to move down to the front. That was unsettling; I could have sworn she had gone down the corridor the other way—I knew she had; I’d been captivated by the sight of her clothed behind.

  Hell, maybe they had matter transmitters. Or teleportation. Wanted to save herself a few steps.

  We sat for a minute and a man, clothed in the same kind of unadorned tunic the woman and we were wearing, walked across the stage with a stack of thick notebooks under each arm.

  The woman followed him on, also carrying notebooks.

  I looked behind me and she was still standing in the aisle. To make things even more odd, the man was virtually a twin to both of them.

  The man riffled through one of the notebooks and cleared his throat. “These books are for your convenience,” he said, also with perfect accent, “and you don’t have to read them if you don’t want to. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, because…you’re free men and women. The war is over.”

  Disbelieving silence.

  “As you will read in this book, the war ended 221 years ago. Accordingly, this is the year 220. Old style, of course, it is 3138 a.d.

  “You are the last group of soldiers to return. When you leave here, I will leave as well. And destroy Stargate. It exists only as a rendezvous point for returnees and as a monument to human stupidity. And shame. As you will read. Destroying it will be a cleansing.”

  He stopped speaking and the woman started without a pause. “I am sorry for what you’ve been through and wish I could say that it was for good cause, but as you will read, it was not.

  “Even the wealth you have accumulated, back salary and compound interest, is worthless, as I no longer use money or credit. Nor is there such a thing as an economy, in which to use these…things.”

  “As you must have guessed by now,” the man took over, “I am, we are, clones of a single individual. Some two hundred and fifty years ago, my name was Kahn. Now it is Man.

  “I had a direct ancestor in your company, a Corporal Larry K
ahn. It saddens me that he didn’t come back.”

  “I am over ten billion individuals but only one consciousness,” she said. “After you read, I will try to clarify this. I know that it will be difficult to understand.

  “No other humans are quickened, since I am the perfect pattern. Individuals who die are replaced.

  “There are some planets, however, on which humans are born in the normal, mammalian way. If my society is too alien for you, you may go to one of these planets. If you wish to take part in procreation, I will not discourage it. Many veterans ask me to change their polarity to heterosexual so that they can more easily fit into these other societies. This I can do very easily.”

  Don’t worry about that, Man, just make out my ticket.

  “You will be my guest here at Stargate for ten days, after which you will be taken wherever you want to go,” he said. “Please read this book in the meantime. Feel free to ask any questions, or request any service.” They both stood and walked off the stage.

  Charlie was sitting next to me. “Incredible,” he said. “They let…they encourage…men and women to do that again? Together?”

  The female aisle-Man was sitting behind us, and she answered before I could frame a reasonably sympathetic, hypocritical reply. “It isn’t a judgment on your society,” she said, probably not seeing that he took it a little more personally than that. “I only feel that it’s necessary as a eugenic safety device. I have no evidence that there is anything wrong with cloning only one ideal individual, but if it turns out to have been a mistake, there will be a large genetic pool with which to start again.”