Glory Main (2 page)

Mortas handed it over with mounting annoyance, but this subsided slightly when the Spartacan jammed the dial into one end of the tube. It fit snugly, and curiosity got the better of him.

“What's that for?”

“No food, you die in weeks. No water, you die in days.”

“So it's a canteen of some kind?”

“Yep.” The short man drew his weathered boots up close to his buttocks and stood with surprising suddenness. The knife was still in his hand, long and thin and lethal, and Mortas took a step backward. The Spartacan noticed the movement, and glanced at the blade before reaching back to slide it into its scabbard. “Don't worry about that.”

The voice was distant, bled of emotion, but Mortas decided this was a good moment to introduce himself. “I'm Lieutenant Mortas. New to the zone and . . . wherever this is.”

By then the short man was sorting through his harvest, measuring the tubes against his outspread arms and discarding the ones he found wanting. Studying him, Mortas was dismayed to notice that he seemed to be a teenager like Gorman. The scout stopped working at that moment, and fixed him with a quizzical expression. “Death?”

“Excuse me?”

“Lieutenant Death. Your last name means death.
Mortis.
You know
—­rigor mortis.
”

“Oh, I see. Actually it's Mor-­
tas
, with an
a
. What's your name?”

“Cranther. Spartacan Scout.”

“What's your first name?”

“Corporal.”

Cranther finished sorting the tubing and began tying off one end of each of the hoses he'd kept. “Listen, Lieutenant. Can't interfere with me. Command will have your ass if you do. Stay out of my way, don't ask me questions, and don't follow me.”

There was no heat in the words, and for the briefest moment Mortas felt stymied. Bucking Command was unwise, and he knew so little of the Spartacans that he wondered if this busy little scout actually knew what he was talking about.

But that did it, of course; the Spartacan obviously knew a lot about survival and there was no way Mortas could just let him walk off. The group needed him, and the notion that their crash-­landing on this place was part of some secret mission was so absurd as to be almost laughable.

“Yeah, I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with you there.” Mortas spoke slowly, letting his voice take on the slightest timber of command. He'd heard this tone before, by officers and noncoms sure of their authority who were trying not to go directly to the yelling stage. He hoped it would be enough.

The short man's head came up slowly, and he seemed to be taking Mortas's measure for the first time. His hands were full of tubing and dials, but it wouldn't take him long to get to the knife if he decided to go that route. Instead, he locked eyes with the lieutenant and scowled.

“Any interference with a Spartacan Scout is a death-­penalty offense. You're new, so—­”

“Brand new, actually. Which means I don't know much and you know a lot. Right now I've got a psychoanalyst and a chartist, no food and no weapons, and no idea where we are.” He gestured toward the scout's makeshift canteens. “But you look like you might know what to do here, so you're not leaving us.”

That sounded a bit too direct, and he decided to take it down a notch. “Heck, where would you go, anyway?”

“Never mind where I go.”

“You got eyes in the back of your head? Never sleep? Who knows what could be out there? Might be nice to have someone watching your back.”

Cranther gave him a slight, ghostly smile. “Don't know much about how Spartacans operate, do you, Lieutenant?”

“No. Which is another reason why you have to stay with us.” He remembered Trent's words. “I'm declaring this an emergency survival situation.”

The Spartacan cocked his head to one side, still looking into his eyes. He pushed his lower lip up as if giving the whole thing serious thought, and then let it go slack. “It is that. So I'll help you out. Why not?”

He turned easily, corkscrewing downward to scoop up the discarded tubes and starting to drape them over his arm. Mortas headed for the hatch, pleased with his success and unwilling to push it, but still hearing what the scout muttered under his breath.

“We're all dead anyway.”

T
rent and Gorman were no longer in the adjoining compartment when he came back, but he could hear them in the cabin next door. They were obviously continuing the search for anything useful, and Mortas wondered bleakly if there was any chance that they might find some food. The scout's estimate of how long it took for a human being to die without nourishment seemed wildly optimistic to him, as he hadn't eaten since the moment they'd sealed him in his tube. Mortas knew that ­people emerged from the tubes in a state akin to low-­level shock, but that once it wore off they quickly became ravenous.

He let himself ponder just what that meant in terms of the “weeks” it would take for them to starve to death, and decided that the clock on that deadline had been running for quite some time. As if to confirm his finding, his intestines rubbed against each other and gave off a low growl. He reached out for the transit tube's lid to steady himself just as Trent and Gorman returned.

“Any luck?” he asked, straightening slowly as if he'd only been stretching.

“No.” Trent shook her head, and then lifted her chin toward the hatch behind him. “How about you?”

“He's on board.” Mortas took a step closer, inclining his head and speaking in a whisper. “I think he's waiting for a reason to ditch us, so go easy with the comments. It won't take much, and we need him.”

“Not sure about that.” The reply was also given in a whisper. “I've seen his type before, usually when casualties are coming in. Their buddies are all beat up, half of 'em FUAD, and all they want to know is where the hot food is.”

“FUAD?”

Trent's face took on a pained expression. “Oh, I didn't mean to say that. I promised myself I wouldn't pick up that kind of thing . . . it's an acronym the triage techs like to use. It stands for ‘Fucked Up and Dying' and I swore I'd never use it.”

“Captain, you don't know anything about my type.” Cranther stood in the hatch behind Mortas, a dozen hoses draped over his brown shirt. Again the words lacked heat, spoken as if proclaiming an unassailable truth. “If we don't locate something to eat right away, you'll find out why my ‘type' asks about the hot chow.”

Mortas was about to suggest that the scout busy himself with more important things, but Cranther had already moved on. He walked up to Gorman and held out the bundle of hoses. The chartist took them without protest, but seemed confused.

“What are these for?”

“You and I are gonna go fill them from the water heater's reservoir.”

Gorman selected one of the tubes and flipped it back and forth in one hand. “This is the best we can do? How are we going to carry them?”

“Nothing but water has flowed through these. If you wanna drink hydraulic residue, small holding tanks make great canteens.”

Gorman nodded. “I guess you know more about this than I do. Let's go.”

The scout turned to Mortas. “Don't know how long we've been here, but judging from the burn marks on the hull it's been at least a day. We need to get the water together, make one last sweep for anything worth taking, and get out of here.”

The sinister implication struck Mortas in a mix of both fear and embarrassment. This was his first trip to a war zone, and he'd completely forgotten the enemy. For all he knew, they'd landed on a Hab planet colonized by the Sims.

“You've been outside?”

“Of course. First thing I did. The place is mostly rock. We got lucky, the Insert's hidden pretty well. Between two hills, one a lot bigger than the other. Went up on the low one, didn't see much.”

Trent's face had switched from anger to concern as Cranther spoke. “Did you see
anything
?”

“Yeah. I told you. Lots of rocks.”

 

CHAPTER 2

T
hough winded from the climb, Mortas still took one last look at the Insert far below. Its reactive pigmentation had colored the fuselage to match the orange-­and-­brown environment, but the break midway along the giant cylinder still showed up clearly. He marveled at his own desire to return to it, and couldn't decide if that impulse came from a wish to maintain his only link with civilization or simple fear of the unknown.

Turning away, he looked across the rough plateau at the top of the ridge they'd just climbed and decided it was fear of the unknown. There was plenty of that.

Cranther had been right in that the entire planet seemed made of rock. Their ridge, and the smaller one next to it, represented the only high ground for many miles and gave them an excellent view of an appalling nothing. A flat plain stretched away on every side, ending on an empty horizon except for two dark elevations so distant that they could have been mountains or clouds. Or maybe a mountain chain with clouds. The rock beneath their boots was alternately red and orange, although it was covered in places by thin topsoil that was either brown or tan. Tiny vegetation in the form of yellow grass or sickly star-­shaped creepers clung to it, but in the ravine there had at least been some scrub.

“Water. Gotta be water somewhere.” Cranther had whispered, pointing at the bushes before they began the climb. He'd schooled the group in the need for silence before they'd left the Insert, after giving each of them three of the black water tubes. The material of the hoses hadn't distended after being filled, and Cranther had tied the two ends of each tube together with wire so that they could be slung, stopper-­end up, over a shoulder.

In addition to the hoses, Cranther had given Gorman a thin piece of pipe as tall as a man and handed Trent a plastic holding tank the size of a human head. When asked about the two items, he'd grunted something about being able to collect water from a stream without getting eaten by whatever lived in it, and Mortas had let the subject drop.

The sun had moved close to the horizon while they'd been walking, and Mortas mentally berated himself for not recording how long that had taken. Although he'd trained and traveled on worlds other than his native Earth, it was maddening to think he'd have to learn an entirely new planet without mechanical aid or prior briefing. Cranther appeared beside him as if reading his thoughts, his voice an airy murmur.

“Sun was about there”—­he pointed into the darkened sky at roughly a 45 degree angle—­ “when I first went out. Been about three hours since then.”

Mortas opened his mouth to ask how he'd estimated the time, but the scout pulled back the sleeve of his shirt to show the chronometer strapped there. “You gotta hide your important stuff from the loading crews.”

“What else do you have that the rest of us don't?”

The short man gave him a wintry smile and then moved off toward the spot where Trent and Gorman were standing. His voice was too low to hear, and Mortas was too overcome with weariness to follow. Not that he was physically tired; the climb up had been merely a good stretch of the legs and the planet's atmosphere had so far proved similar to Earth's in pressure and temperature. No, the fatigue was mental . . . and emotional, even if he didn't want to admit it.

The onslaught of such extreme revelations, one on top of another and each seeming to be worse than the ones before, was proving more than he could process. The shock of awakening to their dire circumstances had been abruptly displaced by fear of an enemy that might be approaching the Insert even as they tarried inside. That fear had abated quickly once they'd emerged to find nothing threatening them, but that was its own problem in itself: There didn't appear to be a single moving, living thing on the planet at all. Nothing flying in the air, nothing crawling on the dry ground, not so much as a breeze to carry a scent.

Starting the walk up the steep ridge, Mortas had felt his concern changing to a feeling of unreality. His companions were so unfamiliar, and their environment so hopeless, that it was easier to believe it wasn't actually happening. In short, it didn't fit his idea of war and so he rejected it. The training cadre had played their share of mind games on him and his fellow lieutenants in the pre-­deployment exercises completed not long before, and more than once he looked around in the hope of seeing hidden referees adjudicating his performance.

But now, having reached the deserted plateau in the gathering darkness, able to see just enough to know that they were truly marooned and that there might not be another living soul on the planet, Mortas could finally admit the crushing disappointment of it all. He'd come out here to serve humankind, to lead others like himself in combat, and to die if necessary in that effort.

Instead, it was beginning to look like he was going to die very slowly on a planet whose name he didn't even know. A planet that was so worthless that neither side had even bothered to claim it.

C
ranther produced yet another unexpected item, this one from one of the cargo pockets of his camouflage pants, and handed it to Gorman. He pointed over the edge of the ridge in the direction from which they'd come, and the mapmaker obediently walked away with his eyes fixed on whatever Cranther had provided.

For his part, the scout moved off toward a rock formation in the dead center of the plateau. It was twice the height of a man and many times that in width, and he vanished into the shadows while Mortas watched. Trent came over to stand next to him, her eyes on spot where the short man had disappeared.

“He's going to run off on us.”

“Not much we can do to stop him, is there?”

“I guess not.” She shifted her feet on the gravel. “Maybe talk to him? If he gets to know us, finds something about us that he likes, maybe he'll stick around.”

“Back at the Insert it sounded like you wanted him to leave.”

“I did. Like I told you, I've seen his kind before. Only out for their own skins. I've always avoided them because of that.” She cleared her throat. “Except now
my
skin's on the line.”

“That never happened before?”

“Of course not. My job's been aboard ship the entire three years I've been out here. We got attacked a ­couple of times, sure, but I've never been—­”

“What did he tell Gorman to do?”

“Gave him some paper and a marker. He's got him making a sketch of where we are in relation to the Insert and that high ground over there, so we don't get completely lost.”

“Sounds like he plans to stick around.”

“Or maybe he wants a clear conscience when he sneaks off. Wants to think he's not leaving us completely helpless.”

“Maybe.” He was finding the whole conversation depressing, and decided that if he did survive this and was ever feeling a little down he would never visit a Force counselor. “I think I'll go and see how Gorman's doing.”

The loose scree underfoot crunched as he walked, and night had fallen to the extent that Mortas had difficulty making out the edge of the plateau. He stopped in place, to let his eyes adjust further, but Gorman's voice came at him from close by.

“Over here, Lieutenant.” The mapmaker was kneeling with his hands pressed together in prayer.

“How's the sketch coming along?”

The light color of Gorman's flight suit allowed Mortas to see his hands part and swing to his sides as the other man gracefully rose to a standing position.

“Done. Not much to it, really, but the Corporal's right; with so few reference points we need to be sure of where they are in relation to each other.”

Mortas shook his head, glad no one could see his frustration. Here he had a man trained in stellar mapmaking, and the only equipment he could give him was a pen and paper.

“Too bad they can't tell you what planet we're on.”

The objector turned toward him and, even though he couldn't make out his features, Mortas could have sworn Gorman was smiling. The tan arm came up to point at the overhead sky.

“Have a little faith, Lieutenant. Sometimes you have to seek guidance from above.”

He tried to keep the discouraging words from coming out, but it proved impossible. “Somehow I don't think that's going to be quite enough, Gorman.”

Mortas walked away quickly, annoyed at himself, but still certain that the other man was smiling at him.

M
ortas found his way to the rock formation and sat down with his back against it. Too dark to move around, and no food. Cranther and Trent were nowhere to be seen, even if his eyes could penetrate the darkness, and Gorman had no doubt returned to his prayers. A sensation of guilt swept across him as he realized he hadn't posted a guard, but his eyes were heavy and he allowed them to shut.

Guard? Against what?

“T
hough physiologically almost identical to humans, the Sims are different in several key aspects.” The instructor at the front of the class spoke in a clipped, rapid manner that suggested he'd given this block of instruction many times before. His uniform showed none of the ser­vice badges or medals associated with the war, but he was an intelligence officer assigned to the training of new lieutenants and presumably knew his stuff. On the screen behind him, a succession of color photos depicted the enemy in various stages of battle, surrender, and decay. Sitting in the audience, Mortas admitted to himself that the photos could have easily been pictures of humans.

“First, the Sims are biologically incapable of reproduction. Though the enemy population separates by gender into males and females, and they do possess the same genitalia as humans, none of the reproductive functions of these organs actually work. No one has ever encountered a Sim, male or female, who was not at least in late adolescence, and just how the Sims reproduce is currently unknown. With that said, the status of females in Sim culture is presumed to be quite high. The enemy has not utilized females in combat roles to date, and very few of them have been available for capture when enemy settlements have been overrun.

“Which leads us to another difference between Sims and humans: They can't derive nourishment from the food we consume. Their nutritional requirements are still a mystery to us, even though we have captured large quantities of preserved food which serve as their field rations. Analysis of Sim foodstuffs has been inconclusive, as whatever makes up those nutrients is of an origin that is completely alien to us. Sims are seldom captured alive, but even when they are, they don't stay alive for long. Even fed with their own rations, Sim prisoners expire within days in captivity. Command suspects that either the rations require special handling in order to remain potent, or that the Sims require something more than those rations to live.

“And of course they can't tell us about that, as the Sims are physically incapable of forming the syllables of any known human speech. Their language, such as it is, consists of a collection of chirps, peeps, and squeaks—­” the assembled lieutenants tittered at this, reinforcing Mortas's suspicion that many of his fellow young officers considered the Sims a bit of a joke “—­and so far it has resisted the efforts of any of our translation technology.”

The instructor punched a button on the podium, switching off the projected images on the screen behind him. “Are there any questions regarding the material I've just covered?”

Mortas knew better than to raise any of the obvious issues presented by this shallow dive into the nature of their opponents, so he sat still. As was always the case, somebody just couldn't keep his hand down. Luckily it was one of his more intelligent classmates, a lieutenant named McVries who was popular with both the students and their training cadre.

“So if they can't make little Sims themselves, where did they come from, sir?”

“You know the answer already. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

“Excuse me, sir, but that's not an answer. That's a question.” The students laughed at this, partly in mirth and partly in support of the young man's point.

“The truth is we don't know where they came from, but it hardly matters.” The intelligence officer gave a nervous glance toward the back of the auditorium, where a long row of mirrored windows hid whoever might be sitting in the monitoring rooms. “They're taking planets we need, they fight us whenever we encounter them, and there's one heck of a lot of them.”

“I understand that, sir. In fact, I think I've heard those exact words somewhere before.” More laughter ensued, as the briefer's response was a verbatim recitation of the government line. “It's just that it strikes me as odd that they can't eat our food, can't talk to us, and die off after they've been with us for any time at all. They can't make little Sims, and even though they haven't yet mastered the Step, they've traveled across an awful lot of space to snap up those planets you mentioned.”

“What's your point, Lieutenant?”

“My point is that they're identical to us with the exception of those traits that keep them from spending any time with us.” An earnest expression replaced the humorous one that he'd worn through much of the exchange. “They're tailor-­made to fight us without any possible way of joining us. So the real question is, who's making them?”

M
ortas awoke with a start much later, to see the plateau bathed in a dull blue light. The stars had come out while he'd slept, showing through the blackness arched over his head. Having so recently come from that void, he stared up at it for a long time as if looking at a picture of home.

Nature called after a short while, though, and he stood up and walked across the hard ground to where he could clearly make out the edge of the ridge. The floor below was too far away to be seen, but he took himself out and pissed on it anyway. The lack of sound, which he'd earlier considered so disturbing, now seemed to comfort him personally. The stillness created a similar sensation within him, and the slightest hint of a breeze finally played across his face as if a hand were gently ruffling his hair.