Space Eater (2 page)

“Blonde,” Raggett said eagerly. “Not over thirty—no, twenty-five.”

I remembered a name from that visit all those deaths ago. “Cathy,” I said. We slapped down the oversized wads of Force scrip he asked for, took the keys, and headed up the stairs.

What the hell am I doing here?
I thought outside the door. The key rattled in the lock; I tapped a warning as I turned the handle, and as the door swung in, a choking blast of stale perfume came out. It took me straight back to the bunker and the HF exhaust for a second ... Inside, it wasn’t the Cathy I remembered, but she was just as efficient, coming to me with a real-looking smile asking if she could help me get my clothes off. I like efficiency: she was an expert in her trade just the way I was in mine. In no time at all we were lying side by side on the huge bed while I looked closely at her gray eyes and pale yellow hair, and decided she was quite a good looker, really.

We chatted a while, lying there. She said professionally nice things about how I was big and strong and so on, and I told her she looked great, and I was a Forceman who hadn’t been into town for a few years. She gave me an odd sort of sidelong look then.

“You know, we don’t see very many old-timers here,” she said.

“Hell, I won’t be thirty for a while,” I said, grinning.

“Mmm ... yes, quite babyfaced. But you know what they say about the Forcemen who’ve been under training a long while.”

I didn’t know what they said about them, and asked. She twisted her face into a funny little frown, and said, “You maybe paid to talk all night? Can’t you do that in your very own cell or whatever they keep you in?”

“OK, let’s get on with it.” I wrapped my arm around her, and her hands started doing things up and down me and it was all very friendly, soft, and warm. She stroked me for maybe a quarter of an hour and I stroked her back, with a little of my mind away, thinking about improvised nukes and next day’s course, and by and by she stopped. She just lay there with her head on my chest and sniffled. I felt a damp spot over my ribs then, and lifted up her head carefully. She was crying.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

“Something wrong with you. You ... you Forcemen! You’re
not
men, you’re not. For Christ’s sake, don’t you ever get it up?”

It came back to me then that that was part of it all, and I thought this was funny since I’d had a bit of a hard-on only that morning when I was rushing the laser bunker. But now I’d hurt her professional pride or something, so I told her I was tired and would try harder, and she stroked me and sucked me and tickled me without anything special happening. In the end I got out of there and waited in the foyer until Raggett came down with a big smile.

I thought about it all on the way back through all the rust and the concrete gone to sand, and it came to me that maybe when you get used to dying and everything, then you’ve got up above all the little weaknesses. I felt, you know, I’d really matured. The next day I put in for promotion.

Two

Waiting in the small gray room, I found my guts were in free fall while the rest of me stayed still. It’s not logical, but these interviews with Admin are tense things. Combat officers you live with, you die with, and we get along. Admin ... Here I was, very flash in the black dress uniform with all its silver braid and D

stars, a morale booster if there ever was one, and the thought of the interview was vibrating me up to just short of the full-scale shakes. Waiting to have a tooth pulled had taken me that way in the old times.

It’s a place like most Complex rooms—square, the walls two-tone gray and glossy up to shoulder level, doors in a third gray, one blank and here the other one saying ADMIN. CAPT. SINCLAIR. A couple of chairs in gray plastic, a rubbery gray floor, making five shades of gray altogether—six if you counted the way my face felt. These twitchy civilians: twitchiness is catching. I wasn’t death-happy yet. I sat counting the grays, waiting, drifting off into thoughts about last week’s combat trial against the laser bunker...

Then there was that tiny click-scrape of the slack being taken up in a loose door handle. Reflex took over. As ADMIN. CAPT. SINCLAIR’s door handle started to turn, I snapped upright, twisting to expose minimum side profile to the opening crack of the door, left hand braced against the wall, right slapping my belt as it scrabbled for the shock gun—Ah.
Special Force Regulations 3/45b: Weapons
may not be carried with dress uniform, “weapons” comprising all classes of offensive implement
listed in Appendix H
. I caught myself then, and dropped out of the reflex sequence.
Civilians!

Forcemen do
not
open doors at you, suddenly, like that. By the time the tall gray door had swung all the way open, I was standing and looking what I hoped was relaxed. A balding secretary peered at me, sniffed, and said, “Captain Sinclair would like to see you now.”

“Thanks.” I followed him through another gray room thick with filing cabinets; it was only six or seven paces and in that time he glanced at me over his shoulder twice. Twitchy, twitchy. Another door...

“Forceman Jacklin,” he said into the room beyond, and I went in.

This was an even more cluttered office; I could guess what some of the clutter was hiding. Admin does not trust Combat even a little bit. Captain Sinclair was sitting hard up against the far wall, behind a massive desk that looked like something left over from the Siegfried Line and was probably a sight tougher. She herself was round-faced, blue-eyed, hair gray like vanadium steel. We’d met before.

“Forceman Jacklin,” she told me, tossing me a smile as if it were a banana. Admin also thinks, or pretends to think, that Combat men are plain stupid.

“Yes, Captain.”

“Please do sit down.”

“Yes, Captain.” There was one hard gray chair standing before the desk; I tried to shift it casually to one side and found it locked in place. Score one for Admin. I sat down, automatically scanning walls, floor, ceiling (nothing immediately over or under the chair, or nothing visible). Sinclair nibbled gently at her bottom lip.

“You’re applying for promotion to combat lieutenant.” Fine, great, first she tells me my name and then comes up with the big punch line about why I’m here. I nodded, half my mind still wondering what bothered me about the portable electric fan sitting on a filing cabinet to the left.

“The reason for your application?”

I knew that one all right. “Advancement of Force career.” That fan...

A shuffle of papers. “This is very interesting. Yes. You would certainly seem to be well qualified in course work, training ground practicals, yes: with one exception, the Anomalous Physics I course.”

The fan was trained right on my chair, not on Sinclair’s desk, and there was a black spot on the central boss between the blades. Probably a dart gun. Anomalous Physics I—ah yes, that was the MT course.

“That’s all right,” I said too quickly. I’d been in the tank after theCopenhagen raid all that week, but my good old drinking buddy Skeld had sneaked out the course texts and read them to me. Interesting stuff ...

wait a minute, that material was restricted. Get Skeld into trouble if know about it.

“According to my records, Jacklin, you were hospitalized during AP-I last year. Have you ever been exposed to this material?” She began to fiddle with some electronic components on the massive desk.

“I can read up on MT in two days if you’ll give me temporary CONF clearance, Captain.”

“Then you aren’t familiar with matter transmission equipment, jammers, nullbombs, or any of the related devices?” It was more of a statement than a question, but I cleverly answered with a long-drawn out

“We-e-e-ll...”

“You aren’t ... Good.”

Good? It seemed the right time to look puzzled, and I did; also just then I registered something I’d been not quite hearing ever since I sat down, a thin whine from, probably, inside the desktop. Even money it was the charge circuitry of a laser somewhere in there. Sinclair must worry a lot about death-happy Combat men.

“I’d better explain to you what all this is about,” she said. “There is a highly hazardous assignment—“

“I volunteer,” I said without thinking about it. Hazardous meant you maybe got killed. So what? That was the job.

She frowned, clicking the electrical bits in her hand. “Please. You’re supposed to be intelligent, for a Combat man: let me finish. This assignment has a security classification so high that even the classification is classified. They don’t want your killer ability or any of that nonsense; they want a Forceman with a high D rating, reasonable intelligence, good reflexes and --
what are these
?”

She shot out her hand with the components rolling on the palm. One was an MT distortion tube just like in the manual’s pictures. I showed off my classy reflexes and didn’t hesitate before saying “Don’t know

... electrical parts?” with a blank look.

“Yes. An open mind, shall we say, on MT technology.” She paused and looked at me with head a little on one side. About then I decided that what looked like woodworm this side of the desktop—a metal desk! -- must be outlets for unfriendly gas or loaded needles. So don’t go in over the top of the desk.

That made three defenses.

“What’s the assignment?” I said.

“I don’t have details. Except that it involves the space program.”

“I thought they canceled all that a hundred-odd years back. When the power started to give out.”

“So did I. Do you still volunteer?”

“I volunteer, Captain.” I wanted to stand up and salute snappily, but when I tensed to do that she jerked, and one small hand ran like a spider to a button set in the desktop. Captain Sinclair was still worried.

Once in a while a Forceman goes death-happy. He doesn’t mind pain, he doesn’t mind death at all any more, and what’s left to do to him? Usually he won’t go for his mates, though; the old bad feeling about Admin comes bubbling up and he wastes a few of
them
. So Admin are scared of Combat, which makes things worse—the way dogs are readier to bite people they know are afraid of them. Admin would surely like to deal with Combat at a safe distance, behind armorglass walls or CC3V links—but that would be bad for
morale
, wouldn’t it? And so they have their little personal defenses.

“How does all this tie in with my promotion?” I said, staying seated and very still, like a good boy. But how did I look to her? Hard muscles, wavy brown hair, baby-blue eyes and a long nose that bent a little to the left—did that add up to the identikit of a death-happy killer?

“Yes.” (She used “yes” as punctuation, I thought.) “Briefly, the suggestion is that you assume the rank of lieutenant for the period of this assignment, to be made permanent should you return and then satisfactorily complete the course we’ve discussed. Yes. That seems to be the proposal.” She was fingering the AP components intensely; maybe being in the room with a Combat expert was getting her down all the more. Which led me to thinking how one should bounce right off the chair to start with, as ten to one there were hypos concealed in the seat, and—“Yes, sounds great,” I told her—and guessing the laser aperture to be
there
you’d have to dodge it and roll under the line of fire of whatever it was in the fan, around the side of the desk to avoid the gas or needles in the desktop which looked rigged to fire straight up, do it fast and she’d find there’s no time to touch that silly defense button—

The calculation must have showed, because that white hand scuttled for the button again. Surely she didn’t expect a Forceman
not
to solve her defenses when handed the problem—any more than, if given a form, she’d stop herself at least working out how to fill it in. As an academic exercise.

“Yes,” she said again, and her left hand stroked up and down her jawline. “That would seem to cover it.

Yes. I’ll recommend your application, Forceman Jacklin: just a formality.”

“So it’s back to duties until the official word comes through?”

A little smile, adding to her wrinkles. Stupid Forceman, not knowing that! “No indeed. As a recommendee, you’re already under the security umbrella. You’ll be isolated from non-cleared personnel until further notice.”

That was bad. There are rituals that help keep the Force together: a one-man assignment, you say your good-byes and buy a few rounds of juice, name the pals who get your pay balance and wargame credits if they don’t recover enough of you...

“Has it got to be like that? Captain.”

“Yes. These are our orders.” A very self-satisfied look.

I wanted to scare her then, wanted to dance around that booby-trapped desk, tweak her nose and say
Boo!
But that would mean demerits and removal from the assignment (and a good lot of jeering from the boys as well, if she killed me on the way): I was curious now, I wanted to know whatever was going on in space to need a force of, it seemed, one. So I swallowed and said: “Permission to leave, Captain?”

“Dismissed, Forceman.” And the finger right on the button, tense and terrified, as I got up very slowly, very carefully, and went to the door. Just before I reached it, I stopped short for half a second and could almost hear her jump. Maybe she could almost hear me chuckle. Outside her secretary was waiting, twitchy but not so twitchy as ADMIN. CAPT. SINCLAIR, to lead me away. Off to isolation until I got a briefing from someone who actually knew something.

Once or twice in training there’d been fights in the bar or more often in the game room, nothing to write home about; two, three people killed, on their feet next day to face the jokes about “Hey, you’re getting slow—“ Culprits got tossed into the brig to cool off for a week; the brig was another of those bare gray rooms with a smell of disinfectant and no distractions at all to keep you from thinking what a wicked person you were. (Some of the fellows would always say afterward that they got themselves brigged on purpose—it was supposed to give you an edge in Sensory Deprivation I.) And the isolated quarters they gave me now weren’t one damn bit different from the brig. Temporary rank hath its privileges. I could almost hear Sinclair chuckle.