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CHAPTER 1

THE 1ST COMBINED REGIMENT RETURNED TO Earth after the bloody mess on Olviat, the living and the dead—at least, all the dead who left remains that could be retrieved—human, divotect, abarand, biraunta, porracci, ghuroh. According to the logic of the military, Earth was our home base, though not even all the humans in the regiment came from Earth, so that was the first stop for the dead. The dead humans and aliens who came from other worlds were either shipped home from Earth or buried there, with full military honors. Maybe that does mean something, to their survivors, if not to them. Right now, I can’t see what.

Those of us who had survived Olviat needed time to mend. Okay, not all of us had physical injuries, but that fight had wounded all of us, one way or another. The slight wound I had taken in the foot was nothing. By the time we got home, it was just a bad memory, when I thought of it at all. Even the scar was fading fast and would be gone within weeks.

For a few days after we returned to base—getting back to the routine of life in the barracks and preparing for some much-needed furlough time—I was okay, physically and mentally. We had been back at Fort Campbell for eight or nine days before the reaction set in. I have no idea whattriggered it, but I got to a point where I couldn’t eat anything without either gagging or throwing it back up before it got all the way down.

For a couple of days, I tried to fight it on my own—first by forcing myself to eat and trying in vain to restrain the need to vomit, then by not eating at all, so I wouldn’t have anything to puke back up. But it didn’t take long before I couldn’t even keep water down, and you get in trouble in a hurry if you can’t hydrate your system. All the fancy medical nanobots floating through my system couldn’t make water out of nothing. They had to take it from what stores my body already had, and there was nothing to replace what they took. I had no choice but to report for sick call, and the doctor put me in the hospital. I spent three days taking in everything through tubes while a team of … specialists got me to talk my way through the problem. Yes, it was all in my head. If it had been physical—say, an imbalance in brain chemicals—the medical nanoagents in my system would have kept it from getting so far out of hand.

Those doctors kept busy. I wasn’t the only one who needed a little tightening of the brain bolts after Olviat. I later learned that the percentage of men requiring post-trauma counseling was nearly 30 percent higher than normal after that campaign. It was Captain Fusik, our company commander, who told me that. You see, he spent three days getting his head straight again, too. Olviat had been that bad.

Every unit in 1st Combined Regiment had suffered heavy casualties. Ranger Battalion had lost the most men. That is considered normal. It’s the special operations units that always draw the most dangerous assignments in combat. That’s why we’re considered to be elite units. Sometimes I think that “elite” is a synonym for “stupid”—as in too stupid to know this job is going to kill you if you stay at it long enough.

THE FIRST MONTH WE WERE BACK ON EARTH WAS fairly well wasted—from the military point of view. It wasa time to let men get their heads back together and let off steam. We took furloughs and passes. Those men who were present and not in the hospital pulled the usual variety of fatigue details, just to keep them busy, whether the jobs they were stuck with were needed or not. The army can always find jobs for idle hands. And when we were off duty, evenings and weekends, we all let off steam however we could. That meant a lot of men got roaring drunk as often as they could, until they ran out of cash and friends to borrow from. Our officers and the military police cut everyone more than a little slack. A drunk was more likely to get helped back to his unit and given a medical patch to counteract the alcohol and detox his system than a ride to the stockade.

Replacements started arriving and were parceled out. The integration of species in the regiment complicated that somewhat, especially in Ranger Battalion, and there were transfers within the unit to help fill holes and meet the numbers and mix of species. Promotions were handed out, and medals, both part of the army scoring system. In B Company, Ranger Battalion, we all more or less expected Tonio Xeres, first platoon’s sergeant, to be promoted to company lead sergeant to fill the vacancy left after Lead Sergeant Halsey’s death on Olviat. Tonio had been filling the job on an interim basis and was the most senior platoon sergeant in the company by the time that campaign ended. That would have put me in line to succeed Tonio as platoon sergeant. Again, I was the senior squad leader in the platoon, the only human squad leader in the platoon, and I had a few more medals than any of the other possible contenders. Those came the hard way because I had been in the human Ranger Battalion that had been training on Dintsen when the Ilion Federation started the war with an invasion there.

It didn’t work that way. Tonio and I stayed right where we were. They brought in Herb Deelock from 1st Battalion and gave him the company lead sergeant job.

Captain Fusik told Tonio and me that we had been screwed, only that wasn’t the precise word he used. He had asked a few questions at regimental headquarters and found out why. I should have guessed. Major Josiah Wellman, the man who had volunteered me for the regiment in the first place, had managed to blackball the promotions because he wasn’t going to let me get promoted no matter what—so long as he had any say in the matter.

Then, as if to add insult to injury, Wellman was promoted to lieutenant colonel days later. The only redeeming piece of the whole pile of crap was that the promotion brought a transfer for Wellman. He went from assistant operations officer on the regimental staff to commander of 1st Battalion. That took him out of the direct chain of command above me. The next time promotions were handed out, he wouldn’t be in line to veto it.

Tonio and I shared a few beers in the noncom club, to drown our disappointment, after Captain Fusik let us know why we had been gypped. “Heaven help that man”—Wellman—”if he’s ever too close when the bullets are flying,” I mumbled, not sure if Tonio could hear me—and drunk enough not to give a damn. I laughed. “Even if he gets shot in the back, nobody’ll ever be sure who shot him. He hasn’t got the balls to stand and fight.”

“He’s not worth the bother, Dragon,” Tonio said, his voice a dead, don’t-give-a-damn monotone. “He’s gotta live with himself, an’ that’s a worse punishment than anything you could do to him.”

“Hell, I’m not so much pissed at him screwing me. I expected that. But you deserve to be lead sergeant. He’s screwing you just to make sure he gets me.”

“Don’t make me no never mind. I told you right off I wouldn’t get the job. Too many other guys around deserve it.”

Well, Tonio always was too modest for his own damned good. I owed him my life, and so did everyone else who made it off Dintsen alive after that first fight of the war. We were caught with our pants down and bent over, and the tonatin of the Ilion Federation did us up royally.

People on Earth have never given the tonatin half the credit they deserve. Just because they look so much like the Neanderthals of our prehistory, folks write them off as perhaps only marginally sentient, certainly no match for humans. But the tonatin aren’t Neanderthals; we’ve just been slow learning that. They have larger brains than we do, and the sad truth is they might just be smarter than us, as well as bigger and stronger. They’ve managed to dominate the Ilion Federation, even though it contains worlds populated by nearly all of the other spacefaring species. There are even a few human worlds in that federation.

“Just forget about Wellman,” Tonio advised as he drained the beer in front of him and got to his feet, pushing himself up with both hands on the bar. Even supporting himself like that, he swayed. “He’s not worth the grief.”

“Maybe not, but it doesn’t hurt to dream about it.” If ever there was an officer destined to get blasted by one of his own men, it was Josiah Wellman, but I wouldn’t be the one to do it. But I also knew that I wouldn’t “see” anything if it happened while I was around.

THE REGIMENT HAD BEEN ON EARTH MORE THAN five weeks before we got back into a serious training regimen. Ranger Battalion had all its replacements, and everyone who was being transferred had already moved. There were only two men in the battalion still in the hospital having limbs regenerated. Well, that’s really begging the question. There were several others still in the hospital, but they had been transferred out of the unit, to be reassigned elsewhere once they were fit for duty.

Since the military prides itself on logical actions, we started training on a Monday, the start of a new work week. It goes almost without saying that after three beautiful weeks the weather was miserable once we had to be out in it. We started our morning calisthenics in a light snow, with the temperature a couple of degrees below freezing. It was near the end of February, and winter wanted to get inone last lick before it gave way to spring. Maybe exercise does warm you up, but you can’t go constantly, and every time we took a few seconds’ rest, there was a sharp north wind hitting sweat and trying to make us feel like icicles.

Of course, not everyone suffered equally from the cold. Toniyi Ooyayni, the divotect in my squad, didn’t feel it at all. Divotect have a reptilian sort of ancestry. They’re cold-blooded—exothermic. They function at whatever the temperature is, though they get sluggish when it’s cold; or they use heated clothing to keep them from shutting down altogether.

Neither Corporal Souvana nor Lance Corporal Kiervauna showed any discomfort either. As usual for porracci, they did their exercise in the nude, trusting their thick fur and heavy layers of fat under the skin to keep them warm. Weighing more than three hundred pounds apiece, they’ve got plenty of insulation.

Fur alone doesn’t always do the job though. Our two biraunta—Oyo, who had been with the squad from the beginning, and Ala Vel Nuff, who was one of the replacements—had thick fur but only weighed about seventy-five pounds each. They shivered as much as the humans.

The ghuroh—Claw, one of the originals in the squad, and Razor, another replacement—were somewhere in between in their reaction to the cold. They’re almost hairless but don’t show the effects of cold as much as humans or biraunta do.

The other two humans in my squad, Lance Corporal Robbie McGraw and Private Neville St. John, shivered as much as I did. Maybe more: I’ve had more years to get used to it.

My squad. Except for the most recent replacements, we had been through hell together. Only five of us had been together from the beginning. I was surprised that there were still three humans in the squad. I would have offered odds that either McGraw or St. John would have been transferred, replaced by an abarand to get the mix within the squad back to what it had been at the start. But …

well, that’s the army. Three humans, two porracci, two biraunta, two ghuroh, and one divotect.

I’m starting to get a little self-conscious at repeating the traditional descriptive analogies about the other species—porracci look something like orangutans, biraunta like five-foot-tall spider monkeys, ghuroh like mastiffs, divotect like iguana, tonatin like Neanderthals. It feels somehow wrong, even racist, to repeat the stereotypes, but if you’re not familiar with how they look, that’s the closest I can come to giving you the flavor of their appearance. If you see a holograph of one of them, the descriptions are good enough that you’ll know which species the individual belongs to.

THE FIRST WEEK OF TRAINING WAS DESIGNED TO get us back in top physical condition. That meant a lot of calisthenics, long marches, and plenty of running. When you’ve been sloughing off for a month or more, it’s like starting all over in boot camp. You’ve got to build up the muscles and endurance again, shed the extra fat that has settled in.

I pushed my men hard, and I pushed myself even harder. Those of us who had been around and seen combat didn’t need much prompting. When you know what combat is like, you want to be in the best possible condition the next time you face it. Every noncom in the battalion was pushing the replacements extra hard, and every officer was urging us not to let up. Even though some of the new men had just come from basic training or Ranger School, and most thought they were in pretty good shape, they had farther to go. Men die in war, but I’d be damned if any of my men were going to die because I didn’t push them hard enough in training.

Maybe you’re thinking, Why not just pump everybody full of specialized nanobots to go in and build all the muscle mass and nerve connections they could possibly need?

Turn everyone into a frigging superhero. You could shortcut the training and make an invincible army.

There was a time when I wondered about that myself. A medtech in my first company told me that it was possible. “We could turn everyone in the army into Titans,” he told me. “Eight feet tall, three hundred pounds, able to lift half a ton and run a mile in three minutes, ten seconds.” But we’re still pretty much the same as we were. The short answer is that physical strength and stamina aren’t enough. You’ve got to train the mind and reflexes, and there are no shortcuts for that. A lot of the moves have to become automatic, and the only way to ensure that is through endless repetitions, drills, exercises. Besides, nobody wants to build an army of freaks—different from the rest of our kind. There was one other argument against it—probably the defining argument as far as the army was concerned. Those extralarge superhumans would eat more, and their uniforms would have to be larger. Food and fabric cost money that could be “better” used for weapons, ammunition, and training.

I’m sure there are high-level staff types somewhere who dream of an army of “superior” beings who can stomp through any opposition. And—maybe—somewhere along the line there have been experiments, tests. I can’t say for a fact that there have been, but I’ve heard rumors. It wouldn’t surprise me. But, then, eggheads and moldy staff types have never been high on my list of personal favorites.

“HEY, SARGE! CAPTAIN’S ON HIS WAY.” ROBBIE McGraw stuck his head through the open doorway of my room just long enough to pass the word. Then he headed back out to his place in the squad bay.

It was half past ten, Saturday morning, the end of our first week of training. We were on a five-and-a-half-day work week, and the end of that week was an inspection. Like most soldiers, I usually consider barracks inspections to be a pain in the rump, but in this case it gave us our firstbreak in the heavy physical demands that had been dumped on us. Once the inspection was over, assuming we passed, we would be free until Reveille on Monday morning.

I scanned my room one last time to make sure that nothing was out of place, that the bed was neatly made, and that there was nothing that would prompt the captain to give the room anything more than the most cursory of glances. Squad leaders are supposed to set a good example for their men, and if my area was screwed up, the rest of the squad would get a more thorough examination. Then I went out to the space between my room and the door to the latrine. The captain would pass between them coming into the squad bay.

For my money, George Fusik was an okay officer. The war had given him a chance for military redemption, only it hadn’t been his fault that he needed it. Years back, he had been part of the force that had put down the Bunyan Rebellion in the Pacific Northwest. One of his superiors had screwed up an operation and gotten men killed, but Captain Fusik—then a senior lieutenant—had been made the scapegoat. If the war hadn’t come along and given him a chance to show the brass what a good soldier he was, he would have remained an SL until he was forced to resign after being passed over for promotion too many times.

As the captain came in, trailed by Junior Lieutenant Torl’vi Trivauna, Lead Sergeant Deelock, and Platoon Sergeant Xeres, I shouted, “Attention!” and braced into the position myself. Trivauna was our new porracci platoon leader. Eso Vel Hohi, the biraunta JL who had moved into that position, and company executive officer, when his predecessor was killed on Olviat, had made senior lieutenant and was now the commander of D Company.

“First squad ready for inspection, sir,” I reported.

Captain Fusik smiled and nodded. He glanced over my shoulder into my room but didn’t bother to go in. He looked the other way for an equally cursory glance into the latrine. Then he started down the middle of the squad bay. The men were all standing at attention at the ends of theirbunks, all in fresh fatigue uniforms. The captain went through the motions, taking a little time looking over the gear that the men had laid out and glancing in their lockers, but I could tell that he had no intention of nit-picking. He was taking the time to go through the motions because he knew that the men had put effort into getting ready. It’s a way of saying, “Hey, you didn’t waste all that effort. I appreciate what you’ve done.”

The captain worked his way down one side and back up the other, with his entourage—which now included me—trailing along behind, ready to receive any complaints the captain might have. He didn’t have any. When we got back to the corridor end of the room, he simply said, “Good work, Sergeant. You may dismiss your men for the weekend,” and left. At the door, Tonio hesitated just long enough to give me a thumbs-up gesture.

I gave the group about ten seconds to get farther down the corridor—toward the nest squad bay—before I went back to the middle of the squad bay. “You heard the man,” I said. “Good job. You’re now officially off duty until the bugle blows Monday morning. Anybody going off base, don’t forget to pick up your pass at the orderly room … and try to stay out of trouble.”

No one made a run for the door. Most of the men would hang around for lunch in the mess hall. When you eat at government expense it saves money for drinking. Anyone going to leave base would also change into civilian clothes or a dress uniform. We’re not supposed to go off base in fatigues except on duty.

“You got plans for this weekend?” Robbie McGraw asked, ambling toward me in that peculiar gait he has; it looks a lot slower than it is. Robbie was a lance corporal, assistant second fire team leader behind Souvana.

I grinned and grunted. “Nothing special. First off, I’m going to soak under a steaming hot shower until my muscles quit aching. Then I’m going to the mess hall for chow. After that, I’ll probably pour a little beer down my gullet. One of the clubs. I’m too beat to go to town.”

“I heard that,” Robbie said. “I know how beat I feel, so it must really be tough on an old-timer like you.”

“Watch it. I’m not so old I can’t whup the daylights out of half a dozen kids like you.” Far as that goes, Robbie wasn’t more than five or six years younger than me. He was a good soldier, knew the business, and kept his head when it counted. You didn’t have to watch your back if he was behind you. “You figure to paint the town?”

“Maybe later. I think I’m gonna sack out this afternoon. Catch up on my beauty sleep.”

“There aren’t enough afternoons in a year for that,” I said, walking away.

Okay, it wasn’t an important exchange, not on the surface, but in another sense it was a very important gauge. The mental pain was gone, and we didn’t have the same level of tension within the squad we’d had for so long. After a lot of months in training together, and two bloody campaigns, the whole business of integrating the species was finally working. Robbie and I were both human, of course, but I might have the same sort of exchange with any of the men under my command.

Well, Souvana hadn’t opened up all that much yet, but our relationship was no longer nearly as hostile as it had been in the beginning. The only really fragile relationship in the squad was between our two porracci, Corporal Souvana and Lance Corporal Kiervauna. A long time back, they had come to blows, and the strain was still visible between them. But there had been no repetition of the fight. They could work together.

I ATE A BIG MEAL, THEN DRANK SLOWLY ONCE I got to the enlisted men’s club that afternoon. I forced myself to sip when I wanted to gulp. I still had memories of all the gab sessions the head doctors had put me through. I knew it would be easy to start using booze as a crutch. I’d been there. But there was soft music playing in the bar, and there were bowls of munchies within reach. The placewasn’t particularly crowded. I guess a lot of guys were either sacking out like Robbie or had gone into town to have more freedom than they would on base.

Now and then I found myself humming along with one of the songs, doing a good job of not thinking about anything but my restful afternoon. It’s good to be able to turn everything off for a while. I was on my fourth or fifth beer when Tonio came in and took the stool at my left. He ordered a beer for himself and a refill for me.

“Captain find anything to spoil his weekend?” I asked, after Tonio had a chance to take the foam off his beer. Tonio and I go way back. He’s the best friend I’ve ever had, more like a brother than the real brother I was blessed with.

“No, he went home happy,” Tonio said. He gave me a sharp glance. “How’re you feeling?”

I shrugged. There was a lot in Tonio’s question. He wasn’t just asking if I was on my way to drunk. He was asking how my head was working as well. “Comfortable, somewhere between here and there. I’m getting by. How about you?”

“Keeping one step ahead of the brain bugs.”

We didn’t need to talk all the time. We sat and drank, with Tonio sipping as slowly as I had been. It was just a comfortable afternoon, and drinking with a buddy is almost always better than drinking alone. I bought the next round. We were near the bottom of those bottles before I said anything.

“Any news I haven’t heard yet?”

“Not about the regiment,” he said. “Nobody’s started guessing how much time we’ll have before they send us out again.” Deal with the important stuff first. “The war news”—he shrugged—”I guess you’ve heard as much of that as I have.”

“Doesn’t seem to be any end in sight,” I said. Mumbled. There was fighting in at least half a dozen places, worlds many light-years apart. The Alliance of Light hit the Ilion

Federation; they hit us. Men died. Bits of real estate changed hands. The war went on. And on.

“It can’t go on forever,” Tonio said.

“It can go on until there’s nobody left to hold a gun but the honchos running the mess,” I said, draining the last of my beer. It didn’t taste so good now. It had a sour flavor. “Once we’re all dead and buried but the politicians.”


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