The Eternity Brigade (15 page)

“I didn’t say that,” the counselor hurried to correct him. “We’ll find something for you, I know it. You’ll have triple veteran’s preference, which puts you at the head of the line. You may have to settle for some general type of job, like shoe salesman or supermarket clerk, but we’ll get you something, I’m sure of it. The army always looks after its own.”

Hawker had to suppress the strong urge to spit.

The counselor cleared his throat and continued, “Now, as to where you’ll be relocated. Let’s see, it says here you’re from Kansas City. Let me check... no, Kansas City has no openings. I’ll spread the search out a little—ah, there we are: Topeka. I’m sure you’ll like it there. We can settle you in there and find some sort of job for you, I promise. What do you say to that?”

“Go fuck yourself,” Hawker said, and walked out of the office.

The next day he was stripped naked and facing the molecular scanner. He was frightened, more so than he’d ever been in his life—more than he was during his first combat with an enemy, more than when he first contemplated leaving the army, more even than when he’d first faced the prospect of being frozen for an indefinite period. All the doubts Green had voiced came back to him, with a few of his own added.

The army said the process was painless, but how could they really tell? They’d lied to him before, why wouldn’t they do it again? And even if it was painless, even if it was foolproof, how safe was it? He would exist only as a pattern inside a computer. What if something happened to the computer? Would he die, then? Without ever knowing he was dead? He’d been raised very strongly to believe in the immortal soul, but where did his soul go during this process? The questions were terrifying.

Then the technician called his name. Closing his eyes and uttering a short, silent prayer, Jerry Hawker entered the molecular scanner.

The process was indeed painless and seemingly instantaneous. Scarcely had Hawker stepped into the scanner when he found himself lying in a small tub of liquid. It was a bad disorientation, to be standing one moment and lying down the next; he gasped, and accidentally swallowed some of the salty water around him. He choked a bit, just as two men grabbed his arms and helped lift him out of the tank. Something felt odd about him. His stomach was queasy, and his body felt extraordinarily light. “I think there’s something wrong with me,” he managed to gasp between chokes. “I feel kind of funny.”

“Perfectly normal,” one of the men replied. “You’re on the Moon now.”

He was led into a room with other resurrectees, without being given much chance to think about the predicament. His steps were light and bouncy, and he felt almost drunk, except that his mind was absolutely clear. He was given some clothing, a one-piece jumpsuit that zipped all the way up the front, and told to wait for instructions. He mingled with the other soldiers—there were at least fifty of them so far—and listened to their amazed conversations about how they never expected to go to the Moon, and how fantastic this new process was compared to the old freezing method. Hawker, as usual, did not join in any of the conversations; he merely wandered around the room idly, observing.

The room kept filling up as more and more people were resurrected from their shady half-lives, and eventually Hawker saw some familiar faces. Bounding across the room, oblivious to the startled looks of the other soldiers, he threw his arms around Green and Symington and hugged them for all he was worth. The other two were startled, but equally enthusiastic.

“What do you think of the process, Hawk?” Green asked when the glad noises of reunion had died down.

Hawker shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t feel any different. It sure beats the freezing and waking up in a hospital bed.”

“Yeah, and it’s all so sudden,” Symington added. “It seems like just this afternoon Dave sent you that email, and now here we all are—on the Moon, for Christ’s sake!”

Their conversation was interrupted by the appearance of a lieutenant who called them to attention for his briefing. First, he told them, they were no longer a part of the United States Army. The United States had been incorporated three years ago into a union with Canada and Mexico, called the North American Complex, or Nacom. They would still be fighting to preserve the land of their births, but it had undergone a change.

The reason they were on the Moon was more difficult to explain. Nacom, along with several other major world factions, was building a series of space colonies, using material mined from the Moon for construction. Nacom’s intelligence service had learned, however, that the Russian-Arab bloc was intending to use its space colony as a military base, from which it hoped to dominate the world. To guarantee their base would be built first, they’d started sabotaging Nacom’s mining efforts on the Moon—and that, in turn, led to the outbreak of hostilities here.

This was a silent, dirty war. For intricate political reasons too complex to explain, neither side wanted the conflict known to the general public; to do so would be to invoke chains of alliances that could have every nation in the world at war in a matter of hours. So the war was being limited to outer space, and particularly to the Moon. The fighting was likely to be on a small scale, but very intense, and the soldiers’ bravery here would be unheralded—but much appreciated by their government.

Over the next few days, they discovered that a few more people had joined Norquist’s Rangers. No one talked much about it as they went through a series of exercises—not to get their muscles back into shape, as had been the case before, but to get them used to the one-sixth gravity of the Moon. They also had to learn quickly how to move in the bulky spacesuits they’d wear on the lunar surface. The instructors repeatedly reminded the soldiers that the suits would be the only things keeping them alive outside; even a single rip could prove fatal. The suits, Hawker noticed, were not very well made, and fit them poorly.

During their five days of training in the crowded underground base, the soldiers felt frequent tremors in the walls and floor. These, they were told, were enemy bombing runs. The Russians were sitting snugly inside their well-fortified base, throwing large rocks at the Nacom base using a device called a “mass driver,’’ which acted as an enormous slingshot to hurl objects hundreds, or hundreds of thousands, of kilometers. Nacom Base had its own mass driver, which figured prominently in the Nacom strategy.

So far, neither side had been able to do much more than throw rocks at the other. Nacom assumed the Russians didn’t have a comparable system for re-creating soldiers, and was incapable of transporting large numbers of troops to the Moon. Nacom, too, lacked enough troop carriers to ship its soldiers to a position near the Russian base—but there was the mass driver, and Nacom intended to use it.

Having received the training, the soldiers suited up and were placed within their individual padded “buckets.” They were told to keep their heads down well between their knees and press themselves as tightly against the back padding as they could; Hawker stood in line with the rest as, one by one, they were loaded into the slingshot and fired off toward enemy territory.

When his turn came, Hawker obediently tucked his head down and pressed back against his padding, nervously wondering what new nightmares technology had cooked up for him. He didn’t have to wait long to find out. As his bucket shifted into position, he was suddenly rammed against the back wall as though hit full strength by a giant flyswatter. The force lasted only a few seconds, but it was brutal enough to make him black out for several minutes.

When he came to, he was floating free in space. He felt sick to his stomach and bruised from head to foot, but he was alive and breathing—and in space, those were the crucial factors. He’d been fired like a circus performer out of a cannon, and now he was on a trajectory that would place him down on a plain barely a hundred klicks from the Russian base. From there, he and his companions were to launch a full-scale assault on the base itself and—hopefully—overwhelm its defenders.

This operation had been in the planning stage for the past month, ever since the decision was first made to resurrect the recorded soldiers, and had been laid with the highest secrecy. Working under cover of the two-week-long lunar night, teams of Nacom construction personnel had built an enormous “net” in the target area to catch the spacesuited figures as they plummeted back to the surface of the Moon after their flight; without the net, the soldiers would have crashed into the lunar soil with roughly the same velocity at which they’d been launched. The mass driver’s aim was computer-accurate, but Hawker later heard horror stories about soldiers who had missed the two-kilometer-square net and whose bodies were permanently splattered across the lunar landscape.

Hawker landed safely in the net. The shock of his landing bruised him still more, and he was hurriedly helped off to make room for the next incoming soldier. It was unlikely that two would land back to back in the same exact place, but the consequences of that were so ghastly that no one wanted to contemplate them.

The Russians realized belatedly what was happening, and took steps to hinder the Nacom forces. The landing area was inside the effective minimum range of their own mass driver, but what they did was shoot off a heavy barrage of rocks in a long, complicated trajectory that eventually came raining down on the target field. The hail of moon rocks tore through the netting, but most of Nacom’s damage had been done—eighty-three percent of the assault force had been delivered within striking distance of the Russian base. Food, water and oxygen had already been stockpiled there during the nighttime activities, and there were several large tractors to act as tanks and lead the attack. All that remained was to cross the hundred kilometers and destroy the base.

The troops began what was later to be called the Moon March. Each of the men was in peak condition, yet even so they found the trek across the lunar plain the most arduous of their careers, surpassing any tortures devised by drill sergeants. There was no shade, no relief from the damnably bright sun overhead. The spacesuits, constructed hastily, showed the pressure. Twenty-seven soldiers died when their suits overheated; another suit simply exploded for no known reason, instantly killing its wearer; and eleven more people died of tiny rips in the fabric of the suits. The troops rested every few hours and the weak lunar gravity helped keep them from becoming too tired. Nevertheless, by the time they were within thirty klicks of their objective, they were all disconsolate.

Inside this range, the Russians joined nature in working to kill them. The enemy began lobbing “grenades” that were little more than buckets of scrap metal set to explode on impact. On the Moon—where a small rip in one’s suit meant instant death—they took on deadly proportions. All the men could do when they saw the grenades coming was hit the ground, presenting as small a target as possible, and pray that none of the shrapnel found them. In far too many cases, however, those prayers were denied.

Green died during one grenade attack. He and Hawker had been marching together, trying to keep one another’s courage up, when word came that another grenade was about to hit. Both dove to the ground, as was now standard operating procedure, and lay still. After a few minutes, when the all clear came, Hawker rose to his feet and Green didn’t. Looking down at his friend’s prostrate form, Hawker could see no shrapnel tears in the suit; only when he turned the body over did he see what had happened. The shrapnel had missed Green, but in falling to the ground he’d torn his suit open on a sharp projection of rock.

For the first time since his grandmother’s funeral when he was twelve, Hawker cried. His sergeant came over and helped him to his feet, and Symington put an arm around his shoulder. Between them, the two men helped get Hawker moving again—but something of himself had been left behind there on the surface of the Moon, beside Green’s still body. It was the last traces of innocence, the final vestige of any part of him that could claim enjoyment of life. All that was left now was a cold callousness, a machine, existing only for its continued survival.

Hawker remembered little of the rest of the conflict. He marched through a blue haze that few things could penetrate. He fought with the rest when the Russians finally sent troops against them, after they’d gotten within five klicks of the base. He was there in the mob that stormed through the actual base, taking it room by sealed-off room in hand-to-hand fighting that killed eighty percent of the remaining assault team, including Symington. He was standing within three meters of Colonel Gonsalves when the latter announced the base had been secured by Nacom, but he did not celebrate with the rest of the men. Laconically he stood apart, a machine turned off until it received further orders.

There was no agonizing decision to be made this time when the war was over. There was nothing left in this world to live for, so Hawker volunteered to be recorded one more time.

***

He could tell when he emerged from the protein bath the next time that he was back on Earth; gravity felt right again. He was prepared, this time, for the abrupt transition from one moment to the next, and didn’t have to be helped from the tub. He nodded silently to the technicians, accepted the clothing they handed him and walked into the next room—where his jaw fell open from shock. Standing there in the center of the room, amid a group of other resurrectees, were Green and Symington, just as naturally as though Hawker had not seen them die with his own eyes. He stood stock still, not believing what he saw, until they finally noticed him and came over to greet him. As Symington reached out one long arm to place around his shoulders, Hawker shrank back from the touch.

“Hey, what’s the matter, buddy?” Symington said in his usual booming voice. “Ain’t you glad to see us? We didn’t know whether you’d actually sign up for another term.”

“What do you think of the new process?” Green asked. “I told you in the email—jeez, it seems like just this afternoon I did that—I told you I had some reservations, but it does seem to work. I sure don’t feel any different. It really is instantaneous—what’s the matter?”

Hawker had gone white. “You—you’re dead. Both of you. You’re both dead!”

“Somebody sure forgot to tell me that,” Symington laughed, but Green was inclined to take Hawker’s upset a little more seriously.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “How can we be dead? The army just resurrected us; we don’t even know who we’re fighting yet.”

“You died last time—on the Moon.”

“The Moon? Last time?” Symington’s impatience was showing. “What the fuck are you talking about? Maybe this new process scrambled your brains.”

Green turned to Symington. ‘“Take it easy, can’t you see something’s wrong?” Then, to Hawker, ‘“Take your time, Hawk, and tell us what you’re trying to say. We won’t interrupt.”

Slowly, painfully, Hawker told them the story of the war on the Moon, and of how each of them had died there. The other two listened silently, the expression on Green’s face growing more worried by the minute.

When Hawker finished, Green shook his head slowly and closed his eyes. “Oh my God,” he said softly, half to himself. “Oh my God, they’ve done it.”

“Done what?” Symington demanded. “Do you know what’s going on?”

“I think so—but I wish I didn’t. They really have stolen our souls, and now there’s no escape, ever. There’s no way out. Damn, why didn’t I think? Why didn’t I see it coming?”