The giant was first into the rest area. He was so tall that he had to maintain a continuous stoop to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling. The trooper with the knife looked up as he approached the table.
"So how goes it, Dyrkin?"
The giant snorted. "How's it supposed to go when you've spent all the watch unblocking a filter in the forsaken twenties?"
The trooper with the knife shrugged. "You shoulda gone sick like me." Dyrkin scowled. "Still jerking off that knife, Ren-chett? I wouldn't have thought you'd be so eager to use it again, not after the last time."
Renchett wiped the blade one last time and then slid it into his boot. "I'm in no hurry. No doubt we'll be dropping into some kind of shit soon enough... and talking of shit—" He jabbed a bony finger in the direction of Hark and the other recruits. "You see what we got here?" Dyrkin nodded. "I seen it. I was just getting around to dealing with it." He suddenly lunged across the table and grabbed Hark by the front of his singlet. "You're sitting in my chair, filth. What you got to say about that?"
Hark's mouth dropped open. "I didn't know—I—"
"Then you ought to have known."
Hark found himself jerked up and out of his seat, dragged across the table, and thrown bodily into a bulkhead. He lay winded for a few seconds, then he started to grow angry. He might have been delivered into this alien place, but he was still an Ashak-ai warrior. He
scrambled to his feet and swung his fist at Dyrkin. The blow was stopped cold by a massive hand. The giant twisted Hark's arm, forcing Hark to bend half double. At the same time, he brought the steel forearm down across Hark's back. Hark's knees buckled, and he dropped to the deck plates with the world spinning around him.
Four
Hark woke with a gasp. He was lying in a pool of water. His face was wet, and his singlet was soaked through. For a moment, he had absolutely no idea where he was or even who he was. All he knew was that he couldn't feel his left shoulder. Then he moved his head, and he felt it with a vengeance. Pain surged through him, and for a moment he wondered if his neck had been broken.
A
ring of grinning faces were staring down at him, hard faces with scars and cold unfriendly eyes. He knew where he was. He was on the Gods' starship. Except all that had changed. The Gods weren't Gods at all, they were creatures called the Therem, and he was part of their army. He groaned. The grins broadened. Dyrkin, the giant with the prosthetic arm, stood right over him. His grin was the meanest of all.
"You learned your place now, new meat, or do you want to go around again?" Hark tried to sit up. He felt as if he were going to vomit. "I..." Renchett, the one who seemed to be in love with his knife, was holding a plastic container. He must have dumped the water over the fallen man.
Hark tried to speak again. "I...won't sit in your chair no more." Dyrkin nodded. "You learn fast, new meat."
Beyond the grinning circle of old hands were the other four recruits from Hark's group. They weren't grinning. Their faces showed an unhappy combination of relief that they weren't the ones who'd been getting the treatment at the hands of Dyrkin and apprehension that they might be next. Renchett turned and glared at them.
"One of you get him up on his feet and into his coffin."
None of them moved. The four stood as if fear had rooted them to the spot. Renchett scowled. "You hear me, you scumsucks?"
The four looked at each other as if each was unwilling to be the one to draw attention to himself by stepping through the ring of longtimers. Renchett didn't wait for a volunteer. He grabbed the nearest by the front of his singlet.
"You, asshole, get that man to his coffin! Move!"
Renchett assisted the movement with the steel toe of his boot. The recruit leaned over Hark, extended a hand, and hauled him to his feet. Despite the pain in his shoulder and the weakness in his legs, Hark had noticed something. Renchett had referred to him as a man. Not as new meat, scumsuck, or asshole but as a man. He wondered if he'd passed some sort of initial test. Hark swayed, and a second recruit moved quickly forward to support him from the other side. The two of them helped him from the rec room and along the row of silent coffins. As they lowered him down into the one assigned to him, he looked at them questioningly.
"We're all in this together, and we ought to know each other's names. I'm Hark."
"I'm Waed."
"I'm Morish."
Hark lay back with a groan. "It seems like we're going to have to stick together." Waed and Morish stood in the narrow aisle between the rows of coffins as if they were uncertain whether they should go back to the rec room. Hark dropped the lid of the coffin and pulled the thin thermal-weave blanket around his shoulders. A sense of cold desolation crept over him, a helpless uncertainty as to what was in store for him in this strange, violent, alien place. Despite all his fears, though, within minutes he was fast asleep.
The period of sleep seemed to last no time at all. He felt as if he'd only just closed his eyes when horns started baying and the temperature in the coffin dropped close to freezing point. The lid of the coffin opened of its own accord, and he could hear the hectoring voice of Overman Elmo.
"Up, you scum! Everybody up! You want to die in bed?"
Topman Rance stood back in the entrance to the messdeck. Let Elmo roust them out of their pits—they were his battle unit and his babies. Rance had four units to worry about, and the whole damned combat coordinate. Elmo could scare the hell out of the recruits and take abuse from Renchett and Dacker. Rance noticed that one of the recruits, the one called Hark, was moving stiffly and that there was an ugly bruise running across his left shoulder blade. Dyrkin had been reinforcing the pecking order. Dyrkin had been maingun in this twenty for more than seven standards, and he was possessed of what had, so far, proved to be an unerring instinct. First time around, with a pickup of recruits, he always beat up on the most spirited of the bunch. The one he initially picked on usually rose in the pecking order but never challenged his position. Of course, in the end, there would be a challenger, and the challenger might well topple Dyrkin. Mainguns, if they weren't promoted, always
took the fall in the end. There seemed to be a natural rule that ex-mainguns tended not to survive very long in combat after they'd been deposed.
Rance waited until Overman Elmo had run the twenty through the cleanoff and a fast workout on the hexagons. The longtimers were dispatched to their various work details. Keep the bastards busy and they won't have the spare time and energy to start cooking up nastiness. Finally, Elmo paraded the five recruits along the aisle in front of their respective coffins, standing at whatever approximation of rigid attention they could manage. When everything was to Elmo's satisfaction, he took a step back and deferred to Rance.
"Your recruits, Topman Rance."
"Thank you, Overman Elmo."
Rance walked slowly along the line of recruits. He stopped in front of the last.
"Name?"
"Morish 34103-301779."
Rance regarded him bleakly. "I have a name and a title, boy."
"Morish 34103-301779, Topman Rance." "Just remember that, boy." He moved to the next man.
"Name?"
"Voda 34103-301780, Topmari Rance." "Good."
"Waed 34103-301781, Topman Rance."
"Hark 34103-301782, Topman Rance."
Rance probed the bruise on Hark's shoulder with his index finger. "Trouble, boy?"
"No trouble, Topman Rance."
The kid was smart. He had a swift grasp of the essentials.
"Name?"
"Eslay 34103-301783, Topman Rance."
Rance faced the pickup. He smiled coldly and rubbed his hands slowly together.
"Well, my children, my poor little lost sheep, now that you all know your name, your number, and, I-hope, for your sakes, your place, we come to the most important part of your initiation into the armies of the Therem Alliance." He glanced at Elmo. "Suits, boots, and helmets, Overman Elmo." Elmo snapped his fingers. "Suits, boots, and helmets!"
The process was taking on aspects of a ritual. Rance was doing this deliberately. He wanted the recruits fully in his grip. There were some who spooked when the suits first touched them. A floating pallet drifted down the aisle. It carried five black and bulbous space helmets, five pairs of heavy-duty combat boots, and five shapeless blobs of what looked like opaque black jelly. Rance hefted one of the blobs.
"Puzzled, are we? Just dying to blurt out, 'But that isn't like any suit of clothes that I've ever seen, Topman Rance'?"
He paused. None of the recruits looked as if he was dying to blurt out anything.
"And you'd be quite right. These suits are like nothing you've even imagined. It wouldn't be putting it too strongly to say that this suit is almost as important as you are. It will be your friend, your partner, and your constant companion, and you will treat it accordingly. When you're not wearing it, you will store it in the specially designed environment in your lockers. You see, my children, these suits are living beings." He scanned their faces as this fact sank in. Four of the recruits were impassively facing front, but Eslay was looking distinctly queasy. There was usually one. Rance knew that Elmo would be watching him.
"If you delve into your brand-new memories, my chil dren, you will find the term 'symbiotic parasite.' That is exactly what these suits are. They are a form of animal life with their own minimal intelligence. The want nothing more than to guard and protect us. They were genetically tailored and selectively bred by our masters, the Therem, to interact with us humans. They can absorb massive amounts of radiation and impacts that would kill us." Rance was holding the suit with one hand, and it had started to insinuate itself down his arm. Eslay's eyes had started to bulge. Rance hoped that Elmo had them all well in hand.
"These are our suits. They make us feel good, and in return, we love and cherish them." He tossed the suit he was holding directly at Hark. "Catch it, boy!"
Hark caught the suit and stood holding it awkwardly. The idea of wearing a living thing hardly appealed to him either, but he was doing his best not to show it.
"So put the suit on, boy."
Hark looked down at the blob in his hands. It was gently sliding around his fingers.
"How do I do that, Topman Rance?"
"It's the simplest thing in the world, boy. Strip off those shorts and singlet and stand on the suit." Hark stripped off his clothes and gingerly placed one naked foot on the blob.
"Don't be shy, boy, stand right on it. It won't bite you."
Hark stepped up onto the suit. His feet sank into it, and it immediately started to flow up his legs, covering them with a thick second skin. Beside him, he heard Eslay gasp. It had reached his knees and was advancing up his thighs. The thing felt warm against his flesh. He almost gasped himself as it flowed around his genitals. As it got to his waist, the feeling subtly changed. The sense of revulsion melted away and was replaced by a
pleasant tingling of well-being. Topman Rance was right; the suit was his friend.
"Feel okay, does it, boy?"
Hark grinned. He was close to euphoric.
"Yes, sir, Topman Rance. It feels great."
He was aware that the suit had to be doing something to him, but he didn't give a damn. He was in love with his suit. Rance tossed out the other four blobs of black jelly.
"Okay, the rest of you get suited up too."
Eslay made no attempt to catch the suit that was thrown at him. It thudded to the deck plates at his feet and just lay there. Hark was sure that it was his imagination, but somehow the blob seemed to look rejected. As the suits covered the other three recruits, they all started grinning. Eslay stood stock-still. He might have been afraid of Rance, but he was a lot more afraid of the suit. Rance advanced on him.
"Are you going to put on that suit, boy?"
Eslay looked as if he were about to strangle. "I... can't." Rance's voice was hard and quiet. "Put on that suit, boy."
Eslay's mouth worked, but no sound came. Rance glanced at Elmo.
"Let's put him in his suit."
Together, they grabbed the recruit and, before he could put up a struggle, lifted him clear off the ground and dumped his feet into the black jelly. The suit, as if it could sense the urgency, flashed up his legs at high speed. They didn't put him down until it had covered him all the way up to the chest. Eslay swayed and then collected himself. He didn't look euphoric, and sweat stood out on his face, but at least he was calm.
"Do you have a grip on it now, boy?"
Eslay was still sweating, but he had found his voice. "Yes, Topman Rance. I've got a grip on it."
"Then we can move on to the next phase."
Elmo took the floor to explain how to adjust and lock the boots, seal the helmets, and use the tongue switch controls oh the air feed, lights, and communicator. As the information was already in the recruits'
heads, he had only to go through it once.
"Now we issue your weapons."
The pallet that had brought in the suits and boots was replaced by one that carried a rack of five weapons. Rance removed one and held it up.
"Observe well, my children. What we have here is the standard weapon of the ground trooper. The Multipurpose Energy Weapon, the MEW. Next to your suit, this weapon is your best friend. Its function is very simple. It kills the enemy and, we hope, prevents the enemy from killing you." Elmo passed out the weapons. The recruits handled them gingerly.
"You don't have to be afraid of them. The power packs haven't been loaded yet." The MEW was slightly longer than a man's arm. I consisted of four parallel tubes that ran from a hemi spherical muzzle shield at one end into a cylindrical trigger control at the other. A folding stock fitted into the user's shoulder.
"All you need to know to operate the MEW has already been implanted in your brains. What we are going to do now is to take you out onto the outside of the ship and shake that information loose by practice."
Hark was surprised at how fast things were going. Rance and Elmo seemed to be giving them no time to stop and think. After less than a day on the ship, the recruits were armed and in fiill combat gear. They were practically soldiers already. Elmo was marshaling them