The Eternity Brigade (2 page)

All about them was rubble and desolation. Hawker had no idea what world he was on, what the original inhabitants had been like or how splendid their town had looked before falling to the ravages of this war. He could only see the end result: no building over four stories stood intact, and even the smaller ones had windows shattered by the constant bombardment of enemy artillery; large impact craters dotted the streets, hindering progress; vehicles abandoned, overturned, burned; dead bodies lying everywhere, some killed directly by enemy fire, others indirectly by being trapped under a collapsing building. And nowhere, other than his fellow troopers, could Hawker see a sign of life. Everyone capable of fleeing had already deserted the city, leaving the opposing armies to decide the issue.

Let the soldiers fight it out,
the citizens said by their actions.
Then tell us what the outcome is.
At times like this, Hawker often wondered what the difference was between cowardice and common sense.

The squad moved quickly through the empty streets, crouched low to avoid possible gunfire and taking cover behind deserted buildings along the way. Overhead, an occasional ball of blue flame would drift lazily through the sky. Hawker had never seen anything quite like them in battle before, but he hardly had to be told they were dangerous. His guesses about them were confirmed when one of the blue fireballs brushed lightly against the top of a building several hundred meters away. The structure promptly exploded, knocking the entire squad to their knees and showering the area with tiny bits of rubble, hardly more than a fine dust. Hawker instinctively covered his head, but he needn’t have bothered; the blue fireballs didn’t leave pieces big enough to cause any damage.

Their sector, it turned out, was an area of some ten square blocks near the outskirts of the inner city. The neighborhood had been oriented toward small businesses and shops, with few tall buildings and only a scattering of residences. As a result, it had fared better than some other, more important target areas. Only a couple of structures had suffered even minor damage, there were no casualties lying about, and the streets were quite passable.

Probably too passable,
Hawker thought, surveying the scene with a professional eye.
The enemy could march a battalion through these streets, and all we’ve got is a ten-man squad to stop them.
He was already making mental notes of the most effective places to use his grenades to block the streets, should it be necessary.

They came to a halt and the squad leader broke them down into two-man teams, each to patrol its own area within the sector. Since the Spardian was the only squad member Hawker could communicate with, he found himself teamed up with her again. They said little as they marched out to their post, at the most forward area of the sector. Hawker surmised his squad leader wasn’t happy having someone he couldn’t talk to, and had purposely assigned him to the front lines. Hawker was the most expendable person in the group.

He and the Spardian woman scouted their area and quickly found a secure vantage point in a narrow stairway leading down to a cellar. Peering over the top they had an almost unobstructed view of the street in both directions, while being reasonably safe themselves. With that accomplished, they settled in to wait.

He tried to talk some more with the woman, to find out whether she knew any more of the situation than he did. Their mutual command of the Vandik language, however, was only good enough for the most basic communication, and the woman was not very talkative anyway. Perhaps she resented being sacrificed at the front lines merely because she was the only one who could communicate with Hawker. She told him tersely that she, like he, was a dub, and that the sergeant had only sketched the situation briefly. Then she reverted to sullen silence, implying Hawker should do the same.

Hawker settled back against the wall and waited for the enemy to make its move. He’d learned long ago that a soldier has to cherish any quiet moment he can find. From the way this battle seemed to be going, things wouldn’t be quiet for long.

He pawed through the mess kit they’d given him, looking for a cigarette. It was, by now, a vain hope; he hadn’t seen any tobacco for centuries. There were other drugs to act as mild stimulants or euphoriants, but he’d never found them quite the same.
Damn! You wouldn’t think it was that hard to dub a fucking cigarette, would you?

He sighed. The army never did anything right; why should he have expected them to start with that?

There were three tubes of the pasty stuff they called food. Each tube was a different color, and each had a written description in a language Hawker couldn’t read. He wasn’t particularly hungry at the moment—resurrection always re-created him at a state halfway between lunch and
dinner—but he’d learned to grab a meal when he could. Hawker sucked on the tubes of paste, still reflecting that it would have been just as easy for them to dub good food. But he was probably going to die soon anyway.

Two of the tubes filled him up, and h
e was debating whether to open the third when his partner tensed. He hadn’t seen any motion upstairs himself, but the Spardian was facing the opposite direction. Hawker quickly stuck the unopened tube back in his kit, fastened it securely to his belt, and took up his energy rifle.

Any animosity the Spardian felt toward him vanished now. The alien woman spoke a few words into the comm on her wrist, letting the squad leader know something was happening here, then raised her own weapon in readiness. Cautiously she crept up the stairs until the top of her head was barely even with ground level. Hawker was content to let her take the lead in these matters; his spirit of adventure had evaporated long ago.

The Spardian motioned for him to come up close behind her. When he had done so, she whispered for him to stay there while she ran to a vantage point across the street, where she could get a better view of what was happening. Hawker nodded and brought his rifle up, ready to cover her during her charge. The woman braced herself, then darted out from cover onto the street and across the way to a recessed doorway. The instant she left, Hawker was up with his rifle ready, aimed down the street where his partner had been looking. But he saw nothing, and the Spardian made it across the street without drawing any enemy fire.

Hawker lowered his rifle, but did not relax. Something had spooked the Spardian, and he was not about to take chances. He peered through the smoky gloom that pervaded the city, even here in this untouched neighborhood, looking both ways along the street for the slightest signs of trouble.

There was a movement back in the direction from which they’d come. Hawker spun, rifle at the ready once more. A tall, thin figure was making its way through the haze toward the Spardian. It was not any member of their squad, that Hawker knew for certain. A memory sparked in his mind, an image of an army of these gaunt figures charging up a hill at him—quite unmistakably the memory of an enemy.

The Spardian was busy watching the front; she wouldn’t see the creature approaching her from behind. Hawker thought to yell out a warning, but didn’t want to betray both of them to any enemy within earshot. Lifting his rifle, he fired one quick bolt at the approaching figure, and the alien toppled to the ground, dead.

Hawker’s partner saw the flash of his rifle and turned in time to see the victim fall. At first she froze; then, after checking the front to make sure she wouldn’t be seen, she left her doorway and ran back to the dead body to check it out. She knelt beside it for a moment, then shook her head and ducked for cover once more inside a storefront. She spoke into her wrist comm again, and this time her voice came out of the unit built into the fabric of Hawker’s sleeve. “Why did you that?”

“That was a ….” Hawker strove to remember the name of that creature’s race. “A Cenarchad. We fought them not long ago.”

“Is being fifty years past. Cenarchads to us are allied.” Her tone made it clear she thought him almost as bad a menace as the enemy troops out there.

“Well how the hell was I supposed to know?” Hawker exploded. “I was trying to save your fucking life. You sure as shit didn’t bother telling me how to tell the difference between friend and enemy. If you don’t want any more fuck-ups, you damn well better explain a few things.”

The Spardian was quiet for a moment, probably translating his outburst into terms she could understand and then holding in her own temper. When she did speak, her words were well modulated and controlled. “Is being civil war now almost one year whole. Other side leaders stealing our records, dubbing our people. We having only back-up patterns. Old knowledge is ungood—is friends, enemies on both sides.”

Hawker paused to consider. If the enemy did have a copy of the soldiers’ molecular patterns, the battlefield would be utter chaos. “How do we know who to shoot, then?” he asked.

“Is look at armband. Red is us, blue is they.”

Hawker looked at the colored band on his left arm. Thinking back on it, all the uniforms issued in the bunker had red armbands. Checking more carefully, he could see that the band was just loosely basted on. “What’s to keep someone from changing armbands?”

Across the street, he could see the Spardian shrug. “No one liking being shot by own side in accident.” She paused. “Not even Cenarchads.”

Hawker ignored her sarcasm. True, it would probably be easy enough to change armbands and infiltrate the enemy lines—but imagine the irony of returning to your own side and being shot as the enemy. It was probably being done, but Hawker had no stomach for that double-sided game.

“I sometimes think that’s your strongest asset.”
It was Green’s voice coming back to him after all these centuries.
“You have no imagination. You see only straight forward, without looking to either side. If there’s an enemy there, you shoot. You don’t worry about peripheral issues. People with imagination waste too much energy thinking about incidentals. Keep it up, Hawk, even if they kid you. You’re really the strongest of the lot, when I think about it.”

Poor Green. Hawker had a sudden recollection of that final image, of Green in his arms, begging not to be forgotten.
I still remember you, David,
Hawker thought.
That’s one thing I won’t let them take away, no matter how long I live.

Whatever the Spardian woman had seen—or thought she’d seen—there was nothing on the street now. She and Hawker waited in their respective niches on opposite sides of the thoroughfare for half an hour, with no signs of further activity. Far away, on the other side of the city, they could hear the fireballs exploding and the buildings tumbling. But there was too much distance to make it sound real; from here, there were no sounds of gunfire, no screams of charging soldiers shouting obscenities at one another, no wailing, moaning, or smell of death. Hawker was beginning to think he’d lucked out this time.

Then it all came at once: a swarm of blue fireballs falling like hailstones. Hawker hardly had time to spot them before they were down. The first three hit in the street, jarring the ground like a powerful earthquake and biting huge holes in the paved surface. Hawker was knocked sideways against the wall, so hard it knocked the energy rifle out of his hands. He stooped to retrieve it and was jarred by a second explosion, even nearer. He scooped the weapon up blindly and raced out of the stairwell. That was no place to be when
the walls came tumbling down.

But the street was no better. Volley after volley of the fireballs came in, and there was no defense against them. Buildings on the other side of the street were already demolished; Hawker could see no sign of his partner. He was looking around for a place to run, a place to hide, when a fireball hit the building right beside him. The top stories exploded in a rain of dust, but the lower levels, jarred beyond endurance, began to collapse. Hawker dove back into his stairwell, just as the building tumbled down around him, burying him beneath a mountain of debris.

Hawker was one of the early ones.

The auditorium hadn’t been crowded when he sat down, but as ten o’clock approached the seats began filling up. Since nothing was happening up front, Hawker found himself constantly turning in his seat and craning his neck to look over the later arrivals. He was hoping there might be someone he recognized, someone to sit next to him and maybe talk with later about whatever this mysterious assignment was.

But the army was just too big, and he couldn’t possibly know everyone. Whatever obscure qualifications the army had used to pick the men for this briefing, Hawker fit them and his other acquaintances didn’t. It made him nervous. He still didn’t know what this was about, and their making him sign that nondisclosure agreement before he could attend only made it seem that much more ominous.

At a minute before ten there must have been close to a hundred men in the auditorium, although the room could have seated twice that number. The seats on either side of Hawker were still vacant. Then, at the last second, a sandy-haired young man made his way down the row and asked whether the seat on Hawker’s right was taken. Hawker admitted it wasn’t, and the fellow sat down.

They both rose to attention a few moments later as a captain entered the room and stood on the speaker’s platform. The captain asked them all to be seated again, and spent the next minute fidgeting through a sheaf of notes on the lectern. He was a thin man with a prissy Hitlerian mustache—a desk jobber, Hawker surmised, who’d probably never been near a battlefield in his life. By contrast, most of the audience looked to be front-liners—none of whom were much impressed by officers who shuffled paper. Hawker could almost read the collective thoughts of the audience:
What kind of shit do we have to sit through today?

The man next to Hawker leaned over and whispered, “Well, at least it won’t be another STD lecture—there’s nothing secret about those.”

Hawker nodded, and smiled in spite of his nervousness. He was wondering how he should reply when the captain began to speak.

“Is there anyone here who hasn’t signed one of these?” The captain held up a copy of the NDA Hawker had signed earlier. When there were no hands raised after a few seconds, the captain put the paper back on the bottom of his stack. “Good. Just remember what you signed. What I’m about to tell you is all classified ‘Secret’ at the moment. Whether you end up volunteering or not, you’ll still be bound by that oath. Any man who doesn’t think he can handle it had best leave now.”

“When he says it that way,” whispered the man on Hawker’s right, “nobody
dares
leave.”

The captain gazed out over the audience and, as Hawker’s neighbor predicted, no one got up from his seat. After a discreet pause, the captain continued once more, “Very well. Let me introduce myself. I’m Captain Dukakis, and I’m going to describe to you a project that will probably sound far-fetched, but it’s one we’ve given serious consideration and the army wants to give it a try. I must emphasize again that this is entirely voluntary, and no one will be forced to sign up for the program. I’m just going to tell you about it and let you decide for yourselves.

“As you all know, both from having been there and from reading all the criticism, the United States was badly prepared for the African Wars. We got sucked into it so quickly there was no way out, and we didn’t have enough well-trained men available. Part of the reason for those initial heavy losses was that our troops were inexperienced, and made stupid mistakes that combat veterans would never have made. We started out off-balance, and spent most of the war just getting back on our feet.

“In analyzing the problem, the Pentagon decided that the peacetime gap between ground wars was a major factor. For several decades we’d been able to avoid any major ground conflicts. We used air strikes to bomb our enemies into submission. Our soldiers were excellent in peacekeeper duties and skirmishes, but they couldn’t handle all-out warfare. Frankly, we were rusty. When the multiple crises hit us in Africa and it was time to fight, our troops made the same mistakes over and over again. They had to relearn the entire art of fighting in a hostile environment—and the lessons were costly ones.

“The African Wars are over now, and we’re once again at peace. But how long that peace will last is anybody’s guess. It could be a month, it could be a hundred years.”

“I’ll put my money on the shorter end of that scale,” whispered the soldier on Hawker’s right.

The captain continued his lecture, oblivious of the interruption. “Each of you men was carefully selected. Each of you saw fighting in Africa, and each of you served with distinction. Each of you served your tour there and signed up for a second. This indicated to us a certain dedication to your duty and your country that we wanted for this program.”

“All it indicates is we’re too stupid to get the hell out while the getting’s good,” commented the soldier beside Hawker. He was careful, though, that his voice didn’t carry to the captain.

Captain Dukakis was so engrossed in his notes that little short of an earthquake would have halted his progress. “We also had our computers search through thousands of personnel records, looking for people who exactly fit the profile we wanted. Every one of you in this room has already been thoroughly screened for the desirable characteristics.”

The captain paused and looked up briefly from his notes. “How many of you are familiar with the word ‘cryogenics’?”

The soldier next to Hawker put his hand up, along with a scattering of others. Hawker wasn’t one of them.

Captain Dukakis was not happy with such a small show of hands, because it meant he would have to explain. He took a deep breath and buried his head in his notes once more. “Essentially, cryogenics is the science of supercold, of freezing objects down close to absolute zero. In this particular case, we’re interested in freezing people.”

Hawker was expecting another wisecrack from his neighbor, but saw to his surprise that the soldier was leaning forward, interested in hearing more about this.

“What we hope to do,” Captain Dukakis went on, “is to reproduce artificially what some animals can do naturally. Bears, for instance, hibernate during the winter and emerge in the spring ready for action. We have found by experimentation that it’s possible to freeze a person’s body down to the point where he seems barely alive, and thaw him out again at a later date. In this suspended animation state, the subject does not age at all—at least, not perceptibly—and may be stored indefinitely; yet when he is quickened once more, he is as fresh as when he went in. His health is good, and there is no memory loss or brain damage. It’s as though he went to sleep and just woke up the next morning.”

The captain dimmed the lights at this point and showed a video, explaining the experiments portrayed. The audience watched various animals—mostly rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees—being placed in casketlike containers hooked up to endless amounts of scientific equipment. The captain did not describe the freezing process in detail, but there were a few quick shots of the monkeys lying peacefully in their coffins. Then there were scenes of the monkeys being revived once more. The earliest experiments had been for a few days, then a few weeks; eventually the scientists gained such confidence that one chimp had been kept in hibernation for two full years and then revived without any ill effects.

“Of course,” whispered the soldier on Hawker’s right, “they’re not showing us all the monkeys that died along the way.”

The video went on to document the experiments done with human subjects, prison inmates who’d volunteered to undergo the hibernation treatment in return for lessened sentences. Tests had so far shown that men could be frozen for six months with no ill effects whatsoever. Men were shown after their experience, walking and talking normally, taking various verbal and physical tests. Interviews showed that the men felt as though they’d only been asleep overnight, and were quite stunned to learn that six months had passed.

And, Dukakis pointed out proudly, not a single human subject was harmed by the experiment. The army, he was sure, had the process down cold.

He was quite startled by the mild laughter that greeted his remark. He hadn’t realized he was making a pun, and it took a moment for him to realized what he’d said.

The lights came on again as the video ended, and Dukakis returned to his lectern. “This, as you may have guessed, is the army’s answer to the problem of how to keep enough trained soldiers on hand during peacetime, without letting their skills deteriorate. By freezing our best soldiers at the end of one war and reviving them to fight in the next, we maintain a sense of continuity that is otherwise impossible to achieve. A man in the state of suspended animation can be expected to age about one day during the course of a year, so that even a gap of a decade or more is no hardship.

“You men have been selected to participate in this experiment, if you choose to volunteer. You would be placed in suspended animation until you are needed, then revived and sent out for a tour of combat duty. You would each be put in charge of a squad, so that your experience could be used to train newer soldiers in the field.”

He paused and cleared his throat. “Let me run through the risks one more time. We have a perfect record with freezing men for up to six months. We propose to freeze you for what might be a considerably longer period. We will, of course, monitor each individual for signs of trouble, and revive him instantly if anything goes wrong. Nevertheless, there might be some slight chance that something could go wrong and we wouldn’t know about it until we wake you up.

“When you are revived, you go into combat like any other soldier, and you face the same risks of death that you always did—except that you’ll be more experienced than most of the people around you, which hopefully will give you an edge. After your tour of duty, you will be discharged with the army’s gratitude for a job well done.”

Captain Dukakis paused once more and looked out over the audience. “Are there any questions?”

“Yeah,” said a soldier in the first row. “What’s in it for us?”

“Oh, did I forget to mention it? There’s a bonus of….” He shuffled through his papers to find the appropriate figure. “…of thirty-one thousand, seven hundred dollars. That includes the standard re-enlistment bonus plus a special hazard bonus. You get the money plus a three-week leave before reporting back to begin the experiments. We think that’s eminently fair.”

The audience was buzzing as the men started talking among themselves. The thought of having close to thirty-two thousand dollars to go on a three-week spree was tempting—and as for risks, they had certainly faced worse ones on the front lines in Africa.

After a moment’s thought, the soldier next to Hawker raised his hand. Captain Dukakis waited until the noise in the room died down a bit, then nodded acknowledgment.

“What about our pay?” Hawker’s neighbor asked. “Do we earn our regular salaries all during the time we’re in suspended animation?”

Captain Dukakis looked uncomfortable. It was clear he’d hoped no one would think of that point. “It, uh, it’s something that can be negotiated.”

“It damn well better be. Sir.”

There were quiet murmurs of agreement in the crowd as each soldier began computing how much he might possibly earn while he “slept.” The financial rewards were looking better every minute. To try to take their minds off that, Dukakis hastily recognized another questioner.

“You say we’ll be frozen until there’s another war,” one man said. “What if there isn’t another one?”

The remark drew a general laugh and assorted catcalls, but the soldier persisted. “No, I’m serious. What if there’s a sort of uneasy peace from now on and no real fighting breaks out? Do we just stay frozen forever?”

“There is a definite maximum term,” Captain Dukakis replied. “We would revive you in no more than fifteen years, whether there’s a war or not.”

“They probably couldn’t afford more than that,” Hawker’s neighbor whispered. “I’d have to check a table of compound interest for exact numbers, but even if they only kept us out for ten years, we’d each wake up with a small fortune—and we’d still be young enough to enjoy it, if we survived
that
war too.”

Another soldier stood up with a question. “We’re just ordinary sluggos. Why aren’t you putting the Taus into this program?”

That brought the audience back to attention. The Tactical Assault Units were the elite fighting force. It would make sense to freeze the best, rather than just plain old line soldiers.

Captain Dukakis tried to frame his reply as delicately as possible. “The army has decided that Tactical Assault teams are versatile enough to be of immense value even during times of peace. There are always pinpoint missions where a little bit of force applied in the proper spot can achieve its goal quite well. The Tactical Assault Units are useful in peace as well as in war—”

“While we’re only good for cannon fodder.” This time, Hawker’s neighbor spoke loudly enough to be heard throughout the room.

Dukakis stopped and glared at him. “I would not put it that way,” the captain said slowly. “You men have all demonstrated a special aptitude for fighting in combat situations. You may have a variety of peacetime skills that would serve you well in civilian life, but there’s never any shortage of those. What the army needs most from you are your fighting skills, both to help train new recruits and to provide an example on the front lines.