Then more.
Someone moaned. Someone began to sob like a motherless child. Which we all were, of course.
I rushed to the nearest capsule. I saw a trooper struggling to a sitting position, eyes wide with fright.
“It’s all right,” I shouted, my voice echoing off the chamber’s metal walls. “You’re safe. You’re not a prisoner anymore.”
One by one the pods opened up and my troopers awoke. Many of them were ashen-faced, trembling. Others sat up with fists clenched and teeth gritted, ready for a fight. I saw that most of them were bruised, lips split, eyes swollen, clotted blood matting their hair. They had not gone into those pods peacefully.
I searched through the capsules for Frede’s pod. She was just opening her eyes when I found it.
“Orion?” she asked as I leaned through the vapor steaming out of her capsule. “They got you, too?”
A heavy blue-black bruise swelled her cheek. I saw slashes on her arms where her sleeves had been torn.
“No,” I told her. “I got you back from them. You’re safe. It’s all right.”
“Safe?”
“We’re in a Tsihn station. I got you back from the Skorpis.”
I helped her up to a sitting position. She seemed dazed, disoriented. “We’re not prisoners? Not…”
“You’re not prisoners anymore. You’re safe.”
She looked around, blinking her eyes. “Sheol, do I have a headache,” she muttered. Then she threw her arms around my neck and kissed me so hard that the rest of the barely revived troopers whooped and whistled.
And then someone screamed, as if in agony or mortal terror. I pulled away from Frede’s embrace and sprinted to the pod. It was Lieutenant Quint, screaming horribly, still lying on his back with his eyes squeezed shut, his hands raised defensively in front of him, his legs churning as if he were trying to run away.
“Quint, it’s all right!” I yelled into his contorted face. “You’re safe.”
He kept on screaming as if he could not hear me. I reached into the capsule and grabbed the front of his shirt, yanked him halfway up and shook him violently. Still he screeched, eyes closed, gibbering incoherently.
I slapped his face. Even as I did, I noticed that he was unbruised. Shaking him again, I shouted, “Wake up! It’s me, Orion. You’re safe.”
He was trembling uncontrollably, but he opened his eyes and stared at me.
“You’re not among the Skorpis,” I said, more gently. “It’s all right. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
A few of the other troopers had gotten shakily to their feet and gathered around Quint’s capsule. I smelled something foul, and realized that Quint had emptied his bladder and his bowels, either when the Skorpis had shoved him into the pod or just now, as he awoke.
I waved the other troopers away before they smelled it. “Fall in,” I said. “Give the lieutenant a minute to pull himself together.”
I had them line up, leaving Quint in his capsule. They were bruised, cut, uniforms tattered and dirty, but alive and grinning at me.
“There must be a sorrier-looking bunch of mongrels somewhere in the army,” I said to them, “but if there is, I hope I never have to look at them. Sergeants, get these mutts cleaned up, find their assigned quarters, and see that they’re issued fresh uniforms and kits. Officers, come with me.”
I knew that the remaining sergeants among my troop were experienced veterans who knew how to maneuver their squads through a camp, whether it was on some alien planet or an interstellar way station, such as this was. I wanted the troopers out of the chamber before I dealt with Quint.
He was a mess, both physically and mentally. Frede was the only other surviving lieutenant, and it took the two of us to coax Quint out of his pod and down to the medical rehab center. The gray-faced medic who had supervised the revival process came with us.
“I’ve seen this before,” he told me as a pair of robot nurses took Quint gently in their metal grips. “He won’t be fit for active duty until he’s been completely deprogrammed and retrained. Maybe not even then.”
“What will happen to him, then?” I asked.
The medic shifted his shoulders beneath his white jacket. “Oh, they’ll assign him to some desk job, I suppose. He’ll be perfectly adequate to send other troopers into battle; he just hasn’t got the stuff in him to face battle himself, anymore.”
I should have felt pity for Quint, I know. Instead I felt a smoldering resentment, almost anger.
Frede read my face. “He can’t help it,” she said. “He’s not goldbricking.”
“How do you know?”
She shrugged. “What difference would it make?”
I realized she was right. What difference would it make? Despite all the training, despite being gestated specifically to be a soldier, despite a lifetime of nothing but the military, Quint had taken all the fighting he was ever going to take. I should have seen it coming. I should have realized that while we were fighting for our lives on Lunga he was hiding in a hole somewhere, keeping his head down, unwilling or unable to face the death that the rest of us did not even think about in the heat of action.
“It’s not a good thing for soldiers to think too much,” Frede told me as we left Quint to the medics and went to find our quarters and the rest of the troop.
“Maybe not,” I muttered, thinking of Randa, who did not really believe soldiers were capable of thinking at all.
“You’re now my second-in-command,” I told her as we walked along the metal passageways, guided by the computer displays on the bulkheads. Most of the others in the passageways in this section of the station were humans, although we passed several Tsihn and even a few other species.
She nodded. “Are we going to stay here on this station, or will they ship us to an R-and-R center?”
“No R-and-R,” I said. “We’ve got a new assignment.”
“Without a rest and refit from the last one?” She was immediately indignant.
I suddenly realized that it was my fault. “I asked for you,” I said, “when I got the assignment.”
“What assignment?”
“Bititu. It’s an asteroid in the—”
I stopped. Frede’s eyes seemed to glaze over for a moment. The trigger word. I could have kicked myself. All the data from the subconscious briefing came surging up into her awareness.
“Sheol,” she murmured. “They don’t give you the easy ones, do they?”
“I shouldn’t have asked for you,” I started to apologize. “Maybe I can get you released for R and R.”
“Not now. Not once we’ve been briefed. They’ll either ship us out or freeze us.”
We started walking along the passageway again. I didn’t know what to say. It had never occurred to me that the troopers deserved a spell of rest and recreation after their ordeal on Lunga. Bititu promised to be even worse.
“There’s one glitch in the planning that I’ll have to fix,” Frede told me as we approached the section where we would be quartered.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The sleeping arrangements. They’ve paired each of us off with other people.”
“That’s standard procedure, isn’t it? The army doesn’t want us forming emotional attachments that are too close.”
“Right. But you’re battalion commander now and rank has its privileges.”
“I don’t know if I should—”
“Not you,” Frede said, her eyes twinkling mischievously. “If I’m your second, then I can pull
Chapter 19
So when we boarded a Tsihn troopship for the flight to Bititu, Lieutenant Frede was my second-in-command and my bunk-mate.
