Dealing in Futures Part 15

"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 . . . d.a.m.n 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 a.s.s."

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

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

2.

The acceleration sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l. It's all the same to us, anyhow. Just sit there and get squeezed half to death. G.o.d, 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 1950 and hollered to the squad, "Let's go. Strip down and zip up."

The sh.e.l.l is like a flexible s.p.a.cesuit; 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 sh.e.l.l 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 b.u.t.ton 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 pale 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 sh.e.l.l 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 b.u.t.ton 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 sh.e.l.l 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 probable 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 p.r.o.nounced. 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.ls with no more than ten minutes' notice. When we get within a thousand million kilometers of the enemy, you are to stand by your sh.e.l.ls. By the time we are within five hundred million ki- lometers, you will be in them, and all sh.e.l.l compounds flooded and pressurized. We cannot wait for anyone.

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

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

"Dismissed." And none of this "f.u.c.k 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 a get-together with the sub-major the next morning, where 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 that they would be able to handle us better than last time.

But that brings up an interesting point. In our only previous ground contact with the Taurans, we had a tremendous advantage: they seemed not to be able to understand exactly what was going on. As belligerent as they had been in s.p.a.ce, we had expected them to be real Huns on the ground . . . but instead they just lined up and allowed themselves to be slaughtered. One escaped and presumably described the idea of old-fashioned infighting to his fellows.

But that didn't mean the word had necessarily gotten out to this particular bunch.

The only way we know of to communicate faster than the speed of light is to physically carry a message through collapsar jumps. And there was no telling how many jumps there were between Yod-4 and the Taurans' home base so they could be just as pa.s.sive as the last bunch, or they might have been practicing infantry techniques for nearly 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 pa.s.sed the thousand-million kilometer mark and had to go up to the sh.e.l.ls.

We had about five hours to kill before we had to get in our coc.o.o.ns. I played a game of chess with Rabi and lost. Then Rogers led the platoon in some vigorous calisthenics, perhaps for no other reason than to get their minds off the prospect of having to lie half crushed in the sh.e.l.ls 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 b.u.t.toning everybody up. By the time my pressure dial read 2.7, we were 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 me and went round and round like a charge in a super-conductor: according to military formalism, the conduct of war divides neatly into two categories, tactics and logistics. Logistics has to do with just about everything but the actual fighting, which is (are?) tactics.

And now we're fighting, but we don't have a tactical computer to guide us through attack and defense. Just a huge, superefficient cybernetic grocery clerk of a logistic computer.

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

But the other side was obdurate and said that by that kind of reasoning, a man is only a hank of hair and a piece of bone and some stringy meat; and if you teach him well you can take a Zen monk and turn him into a warrior.

Then what the h.e.l.l are you/we, am I? answered the other side. A peace-loving vacuum-welding-specialist physics teacher s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 it anymore.

And the only reason they don't do it is because they think you'll kill better without it. That's logic.

Speaking of logic, the original question was, Why do they send a logistic computer to do a man's job? or something like that....

The light blinked green and I chinned the switch automatically. We were down to 1.3 before I realized that it meant we were alive, we had won the first skirmish.

I was only partly right.

We were standing in the hall, stretching and groaning, when Bohrs came staggering down the corridor. His face was gray. I took his shoulder.

"What's wrong, Bohrs?"

"Negulesco's squad. They're all dead."

"What?" He didn't nod or anything, just stared at the wall. "And the whole fourth platoon: Keating, Thomas, Chu, Fruenhauf . . . twenty-four in all, crushed to death."

I didn't know what to say. "At least they . . ." I let it trail off. I was going to say, At least they didn't feel anything, but who knows what you would feel?

"Attention, all personnel. Attention. All infantry personnel echelon six and above will a.s.semble in five minutes in the a.s.sembly room." The speaker crackled for a few seconds and a new voice came on, a weary voice: "This is the Commodore. We met and destroyed the enemy vessel at 0254. At 0252, the enemy launched a missile at us, and we expended seven drones intercepting it. It was destroyed . . less than five hundred kilometers from the Anniversary, and many of the ship's electronic systems have sustained ... considerable radiation damage. The life support units for squad bays Five, Six, Seven, and Eight went out while the bays were fully pressurized, and all of the occupants perished." He paused a long time. "There will be a memorial service at 0800 tomorrow. That is all."

The other voice came back on. "All medical personnel report immediately to sick bay. All maintenance personnel report immediately to your prime stations. Lieutenant Pastori report to sick bay."

Marygay and Ching and Rogers and I got dressed and went up to the a.s.sembly area in silence.

At the meeting they explained what had happened, very little that we didn't already know, and a.s.signed a burial detail. All squad leaders were on it, and we had to choose a person from each of our squads. I did it by casting dice, and Shockley went along with me. It wasn't too bad except for the ones whose suits had split.

4.