screen. “What its strategic value is, no one in the upper echelons has seen fit to tell me. But it’s to be taken by you and your thousand. And damned quick, too.”
“Sir,” I said, still at ramrod attention, “I would like to have the survivors of the Lunga mission as part of my command.”
He fixed me with a bloodshot eye. “Why?”
“I know them, sir, and they know me. We work well together.”
“Do you?” He looked down at the display screen on his desk for several moments. I could not see the screen, but from the reflection of light on his face I could tell he was paging through a considerable amount of data very quickly.
Finally he looked up at me. “You pulled them out of a Skorpis depot? Single-handed?”
“I negotiated for them, sir.”
His attitude softened appreciably. Leaning back in his padded chair, he pointed at me with a rock-steady finger. “You’re not regular army, are you?”
“No, sir.”
“Yet you went in there and got your troops away from the Skorpis.”
I said nothing.
“All right, you can have them with you. I’ll even add them to your command, since you’re already slated for a full battalion. The sergeant outside will show you where your quarters are. Better start spending every waking second on studying Bititu and the Hegemony’s defenses of it.”
“Yessir.” I saluted and left his office.
And went straight to the cryonics center where my troop was being revived. It was a big chamber very similar to the one where I had first awakened in this era. The medics had removed forty-nine of the chamber’s regular cryosleep units and placed my troopers’ capsules on their foundations. They were all plugged in to the chamber’s environmental controls and computer system. Frede was in one of those pods. And Quint, Jerron and the others. Frozen inside dull metal canisters inscribed with Skorpis symbols. The capsules looked old, heavily used. But I saw no vapor leaking from them; battered they might be, but they still worked as they should.
“They won’t be coming out of it for another six hours, at least,” said the medic on duty at the control station. Her voice echoed off the metal walls.
“It takes that long?” I asked.
She waggled one hand in the air. “Slower is better, once the body cells have been defrosted. Pump nutrients into them, stimulate their brains to restart, let them dream and sort out whatever memories were locked in short-term storage when they went under.”
Their short-term memories must be terrible, I thought. The last thing they would remember would be the Skorpis freezing them for their food larders. Did they struggle? Try to fight? Or go under resigned to their miserable fate, convinced that they had been abandoned by their leaders?
“And besides,” the medic added, “we just got orders to feed some new training into them. So while we’re letting them come back gradually we can program this new material into their neural systems.”
I didn’t bother to ask what the new training material was. I knew they were being programmed with everything the army thought they needed to know about Bititu. I decided to go back to the cubicle they called my quarters and start to study up on the asteroid, too. It wouldn’t do for my troops to know more about the operation than I did.
But first I asked the medic, “Could you call me when they wake up?”
“I’ll be off duty then,” she said.
“Well, how long will it take? What time will they start to come out of it?”
“Another six hours. I already told you.”
I thanked her and hustled back to my quarters. I spent the six hours studying Bititu, grateful that I did not need sleep. What I learned of the asteroid was not encouraging.
Bititu was an asteroid in the Jilbert system, a seven-mile-long chunk of barren rock, roughly kidney-shaped. Jilbert itself was a dim red dwarf star with only one true planet, a gas giant orbiting so close to the star that they were almost a binary system. The rest of the system was nothing but asteroids, an unusual state for the planetary system of a dwarf star.
The Hegemony had apparently fortified Bititu heavily. According to the reports I scanned, the asteroid was honeycombed with tunnels defended by a full regiment of spiderlike creatures that the reports referred to only as the Arachnoids. Very little was known about them; even their intelligence was in some doubt. Some scientists believed that individual Arachnoids were not intelligent, in the sense of being self-aware and motivated, but were instead part of a collective hive mind, as many species of insects have proven to be.
The most discouraging part of the reports was the admission that not much was known about the Arachnoids because none had ever been taken alive. They always fought to the last member. Not a happy prospect for those who had to do battle against them.
Then I saw that the Commonwealth’s scientific community requested that we take as many of the Arachnoids prisoner as possible, for them to interrogate and study. The phrasing of their request made it clear that they thought we soldiers slaughtered all the Arachnoids deliberately.
“Despite their nonhumanoid appearance,” the scientists’ request read, “the Arachnoids are to be treated as fully sentient, intelligent beings. Indiscriminate killing of these creatures is punishable by military code.”
I turned off the video reader with a feeling almost of disgust. Bititu would be a bloody mess, it seemed. There was no way to take the asteroid except by direct assault, and the enemy was well entrenched and willing to fight to the bitter end. I doubted that the Arachnoids would willingly allow themselves to become prisoners and objects of our scientists’ eager investigations.
With my mind full of foreboding I went down the metal passageway of the station back to the cryonic center.
A different medic was on duty now, a gray-haired male whose face was also a grayish pallor, as if he had not seen the sun in years.
“They’re coming around,” he whispered as I looked out across the big room filled with the cryonic capsules. His attention was focused on the dozens of display screens set into the curving panel before his chair like the faceted eyes of a giant insect.
I felt the chill of cryonic cold seeping into my bones. “Shouldn’t it be warmer in here?” I asked.
He shot me a disapproving glance. “I know what I’m doing, soldier.”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”
“They’re going to be disoriented for a bit. The briefings they’ve been getting while we’re pulling them out will be mostly subconscious, until they’re brought to the surface by trigger phrases.”
The trigger phrase, I knew, was simply the name of the target asteroid: Bititu.
“The last real memories they’ll have will be whatever they saw when they were put under.”
Skorpis warriors forcing them into the cryo pods. Knowing that they were nothing more than food to their captors, that if they were ever awakened it would be for ritual execution.
“Isn’t there some way we can tell them they’re safe, that they’re not prisoners of the Skorpis anymore?”
The medic glared at me. “Is that what happened to these soldiers? They were frozen by those damned cats?”
“Yes.”
“Shit on a goddamned mother-loving sonofabitch sandwich,” he snarled, his fingers suddenly playing across the control keys. “Nobody tells me any pissing thing. Same old army. If there’s a way to screw things up…” His voice sank to a disgruntled mumble.
At last he looked up from the controls and displays. “It’s too pissing late. There’s nothing I can do. They’re going to start waking up in a few minutes and they’ll still be thinking that they’re prisoners. If we don’t have a couple of heart attacks among them it’ll be a pissing miracle.”
My mind raced. Was there anything I could do? Could I reach out to them mentally and assure them that they were safe, that they had nothing to fear?
Too late. A heard a click and a sighing sound. Looking across the chamber, I saw one of the capsules pop open, white vapor issuing from it like fog seeping across a graveyard at midnight. Another clicked and sighed.
