Glory Main (5 page)

Mortas handed the sock back. “When we're in the hole where we're going to spend the night, take your boots and your socks off. Let some air get at your feet, and let the socks and the insides of your boots dry.”

“Wrong.” Cranther slid over the edge of the ravine. “Only one boot off at a time, never two. And be ready to put that one on in a hurry. If we have to run suddenly, you'll end up barefoot.”

The scout picked up Gorman's boot and shook his head. “Shipboard piece of shit. Doesn't breathe, doesn't lace up; no matter how many times he pulls up his socks they're gonna slide down.” A finger pointed at the bloodstained garment. “Better off throwing those away.”

Mortas felt his anger rising. “You find us a spot?”

“Yes. About fifty yards that way. It's a hole big enough for the four of us, nobody's gonna find it who isn't actually looking for us.”

“You crawled fifty yards?”

“No. There's more brush here than where we started. If you move in a crouch you should be all right.”

“More brush? You think that means we're close to water?”

“Gotta be. But we won't find it sitting in a hole.”

“I already told you we're stopping for the night.”

“We should be
moving
at night. Less chance of being seen, sweat less.”

“Yeah, well, we've been going all day.” Mortas reconsidered, suspecting the scout was right but concerned about the other two. “We'll lay up until the stars are out and then maybe move on.”

“I'm okay, Lieutenant.” Gorman stood up, hiding the pain.

“And don't worry about me.” Trent had joined the group while they'd been talking.

“How are your feet?”

“They're fine. I told you: I can run for miles.”

“Let me see.”

“Shouldn't we be getting to this super-­nice hole I've been hearing about?”

“It'll be too dark to see then. Let me see your feet.”

Irritated, Trent jammed the pipe section against the wall and dropped to the ground. She yanked off the same kind of boot Gorman was wearing, but there was no sock underneath. The foot was suddenly thrust in Mortas's face, and even in the failing light he could see it was unblemished. It didn't even smell.

He took hold of her ankle before Trent could pull away, gently pressing a thumb against the flesh. It was soft and dry.

“That's incredible. You've got some magic feet. No calluses, no blisters. They're not even sweating.”

“It's why I don't wear socks.”

He was just about to hand her boot back when Cranther's voice sounded in a rasp from the surface. “When you're done with the foot massage, can we get going?”

W
ithout the clouds from the previous evening, the stars came out almost immediately after nightfall. Cranther had timed the day's length at twenty hours and reset the timer to measure the hours of darkness. The hole he'd found for them was just deep enough for Mortas to see out of if he stood up, and the scrub around it provided even more concealment. It wasn't lush, but it was taller than anything they'd yet seen and actually had some kind of trunk area.

Water's got to be around here somewhere.

His stomach had quieted down as they walked, like a sullen child sent to bed without supper, but now it started protesting again. ­Coupled with his thirst, it was a constant reminder of their situation and he was truly beginning to resent it. His feet were sore, the backs of his knees were strained, and Mortas was beginning to understand something his training hadn't taught him: It's easy to rise above one or two minor inconveniences or even injuries, but pile a few of them on top of one another and the obstacle can become very high indeed.

He was suddenly feeling very tired, and decided they would spend the rest of the night right where they were. “Assuming ten hours of darkness, that's two and a half hours of guard apiece.”

“So we're staying here after all?” Cranther spoke from a sitting position, his back against the dirt.

“Yeah.” Mortas let the fatigue enter his voice. “I don't know about anybody else, but I could use the break.”

“The Sims don't take many breaks on a march. Did you know that?” For once the scout's words weren't hostile. “One time I was hunkered down in the brush, a place a lot like this, when a Sim column came trotting by. Close enough to smell, hundreds of 'em, all combat loaded. Not a sound other than their feet, none of that chirping that passes for words with them. Four abreast, really moving out, going somewhere in a hurry.

“I stopped counting at two hundred and just put my face in the dirt. Didn't even try to send a report, too scared they'd hear me. I called it in after they were gone, got chewed out like you wouldn't believe, but I did have a direction for them.

“An aerobot found the column hours later, so far away that they must have been moving the entire time. No breaks at all. Hustling along that whole distance, under those loads, knowing that if they got spotted we'd drop everything we had right on 'em. Which is what happened. Heard later the entire column was annihilated. That they were rushing up to reinforce an outfit that was under heavy attack. Only reason they tried to pull a stunt like that in daylight.”

The stars allowed Mortas to see the scout's head shake. “They're tougher than we are, you know. Command laughs at them for being so far behind us technology-­wise, but from what I've seen they don't need it. They understand how important it is to be able to do without. Even the stuff they have, they train for the times when they don't have it. They practice hard on things like bayonet fighting, for the times when they run out of ammo. They have these amazing signals that they all understand, hand signals, smoke signals, lights, heck, even music. They can trot for hours under a full combat load. No breaks at all. And look what happens to us when we don't have all our toys. We crap out and hide in a hole.”

“You sound like you think we're not going to win.” Gorman was on his back, his boots elevated against the wall to reduce the swelling.

“We're not gonna win, Wisp. Weren't you listening just now?”

“Stop calling him that.” Trent rasped from his left.

“What? Wisp? If he's Holy Whisper, he shouldn't mind. They don't mind anything. Right, Gorman?”

“Actually we mind a lot of things. Killing, for one. That's why we're all objectors. But you're right, in that we don't get excited about silly name-­calling. But as insults go, that one's not that bad at all and it reminds us of our origin. God's call isn't a shout, it's a whisper.” He raised himself up on an elbow. “And a wisp can be a very important thing, if you think about it. A wisp of smoke, for example. You ever had to fight a shipboard fire, Corporal?”

“Not yet.”

“I only fought one. Pulling mid-­deck watch, smelled smoke. Sensors went off right after that, and of course the hatches all sealed automatically, so it was just a few of us against this wall of flame.” His voice trailed off.

“So tell me. Did you get down and pray, or did you fight that thing alongside the others?”

“You can pray and fight at the same time, Corporal. Especially if you learn how before things get rough. It's important to have a philosophy of life . . . and of death.”

“Well I'm an orphan, so nobody ever bothered to give me one of those. Guess I was robbed, huh?”

“You can't be robbed of something you never had. Even less of something you gave away.”

Trent's voice rose from the shadows. “You're an orphan?”

“Yes. I was born on Celestia. Escaped from the orphanage just before they would have sent me to the mines. Did you know that on Celestia the word for orphan is the same as the word for slave? It's true. So I ran off when I was probably ten.”

“Probably?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. They don't keep very accurate records on the slaves.”

Mortas turned away from watching the surface. “How old are you now?”

“At Scout Basic they ran a whole bunch of tests on us and one doctor said I was fifteen. That was five years ago.”

“Amazing. How long were you in the ser­vice before you went to the Spartacans?”

“I wasn't. Like I said, I was fifteen when they caught me and handed me off to the Force. Cleaned out this entire slum of every runaway, piled us into these massive corrugated boxes, and next stop was Scout Basic.”

“I thought the Spartacans were all volunteers.”

“Don't know who Spartacus was, Lieutenant? Don't worry, nobody seems to. He was a slave of the Romans, led a revolt and ended up getting executed for it. That's one of the first stories they tell you at Scout Basic. Not that they needed to.”

“Needed to what?”

“Tell us a scary story to keep us in line.” Cranther's voice became thin, bled of emotion. “They left us in that box for hours, no food, no water, no toilets. I swear they waited until the fights started before they opened this one hatch. Five or six guys in those massive armored suits came walking in, all of 'em holding these big shock-­sticks. Man, did those things have a jolt.

“They started at one end of the box and just worked their way through, shocking the heck out of every one of us. We attacked them, of course, but that was a waste of time because of the armor. How they knew who hadn't been jolted I will never figure out. I pushed this one kid in front of me, got around behind them while they were letting him have it, and the next thing I knew I was on the floor screaming, all my muscles going berserk and my insides feeling like they were being ground up.

“And then they just walked out. Left us there in this pile of shit and piss and vomit and bodies, half my muscles didn't work for I don't know how long.”

“Why'd they do that?”

“Every Spartacan's got a different opinion, but I go with how I felt right at that moment. Completely helpless. I think that's why they did it. To let us know we were totally in their power, that they could do whatever they wanted. I swear, lying there thinking of what they might decide to do next was worse than anything they did later.

“So finally we'd recovered enough to stand up, and that's when the loudspeaker said that they were going to drop one wall of the box and that we were supposed to get our toes on these white lines that were painted on the pavement just outside. We were all happy to do that, but then the loudspeaker said that the last guy out of the box was going to wish he'd moved a little faster.”

The stars allowed Mortas to see the little man shudder before he continued.

“So the wall comes down with a crash, this mass of bodies goes tumbling over it, it's daylight outside so nobody can see, everybody's running into everybody else, ‘Where are the lines? Where are the lines?' and then somehow we found 'em and we were all standing like statues in three long rows. Still wearing our civilian clothes, covered in filth, but we were really dedicated at that moment to standing in that formation.

“And the armored suits came back, just took this one guy, just grabbed him at random, no
way
they could have known who was last out of that box, and they dragged him out in front of the others. They pinned that poor bastard to the ground,
stood on him
with those massive suits, and shocked him until he passed out screaming his head off.

“And nobody in that formation made a move to help him.” He gave a short laugh. “It was a thing of genius.”

They all waited for him to say more, but after a time it was clear that he was finished. Gorman lifted his boots off the rock where they'd been propped and curled himself up into a sitting position.

“I'm not doubting you, Corporal, but how do you know they just picked that one guy? How do you know he
wasn't
the last one out of the box?”

“Because I wasn't last.”

M
ortas had the final guard shift of the night, and he leaned his chest against the hole's dirt wall as the sky slowly began to lighten. A breeze had sprung up over time, causing the brush in front of him to sway back and forth. In the predawn darkness it reminded him of undersea grass he'd once seen while snorkeling at home, gently rocking to invisible currents.

One of the others moved at his feet, and Mortas looked down to see Trent stretching and yawning. Cranther and Gorman were still asleep, the mapmaker with his feet elevated once again and the scout curled up into a ball. Trent stood up without disturbing the other two and joined him at the wall.

“Sun's coming up.”

“Yeah. Seen anything out there? Animals? Birds?”

“No, but it was pitch dark during most of my shift. And the wind's kept the brush moving, scraping against itself, making noise. Might have been something out there but I missed it.”

“I could have sworn something flew over us during my shift.” She stretched again, raising her arms over her head and arching her back. “Ya know, as hungry as we all are, I can honestly say that what bugs me right now is that I haven't had my coffee.”

Mortas gave her a friendly smile, relieved that she'd found something to say that didn't irritate him.

“We'd pull these long shifts when the wounded came in, and when the last ones had been sorted and handed off to the doctors I'd sit with the triage techs and drink this awful coffee and shoot the breeze. You wouldn't believe the jokes they told, just to stay sane.”

“Sounds like a tough job.”

“For them it was. Not a lot of latitude. The scanners told them how bad off the patient was, and they sorted them according to Force guidance.” Trent shook her head. “They used all these codes and phrases so that anyone who was being set aside wouldn't know what was happening.”

“Like FUAD?”

“Yeah. I guess making an acronym out of it made it less ugly. The doctors would try to get involved with triage every now and then, so Command posted guards between the receiving bay and the surgery. Some of the techs wondered if that meant the triage guidance was wrong, but speaking up got you a tour in the brig, so they pretty much kept it to themselves.”