“Oh, I’m sorry! I forgot your arm is still healing.”
“You mean that after all the fighting we’ve done they’re going to pop us back into the freezers?”
Frede gave me a sad smile. “We got a unit citation and individual medals and congratulations from the admiral. They beamed the ceremony back to the capital for all the civilians to see. We’re official heroes. What more can a trooper ask for?”
I shook my head. “I guess you’ve got to be born to it.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Come on, let’s make out while we’re still warm.”
Chapter 21
I was an officer, and not a regular army officer at that. I received special treatment. I was allowed to remain awake for the trip back to sector base six.
There was a handful of other human officers on the ship, but they seemed to deliberately avoid me. They were staff officers, not line. I got the feeling that they regarded fighting soldiers as beneath their dignity. Or perhaps they were inwardly ashamed of their soft jobs and did not wish to be reminded that the memos and charts and requisitions they dealt with represented real, living, bleeding men and women who were sent into battle at the touch of a keystroke.
Brigadier Uxley remained on board, riding with us back to the sector base. Uxley was cut from a different cloth than the staff officers. He had been a frontline soldier; lost both his legs in battle. He was a gruff old buzzard who drank too much and liked to talk far into the night. We became friends, of a sort. I could drink with him because my metabolism neutralized the effects of alcohol almost as quickly as I digested it. And I needed very little sleep, after resting several days from Bititu.
We spent the long nights of the flight back to sector base six in the brigadier’s quarters, drinking his favorite liquor. The Tsihn quartermaster complained about using the ship’s limited supplies of energy to make unauthorized refreshments with the matter-transceiving equipment. Uxley overrode the reptilian’s objections.
“Damned lizards think they own this sector just because their fleet is operating here,” he grumbled to me as we drank the night away.
He liked to tell war stories, and his memory for them became better with each glass of whisky he downed. Unfortunately, he seemed to forget that he had told me several of his favorite stories more than once. He repeated them, night after night, although each retelling was slightly different.
“You’re lucky,” he said one evening, slurring his words as he poured himself another drink and refilled my glass.
“Lucky?” I asked.
Bobbing his reddened face up and down, Uxley said, “You fought those damned spiders. And the Skorpis before that.”
“I wouldn’t call that lucky,” I said.
Waving a finger in the air, he explained, “You don’t understand. You haven’t had to fight humans. It’s easier to kill aliens. Humans—even those bastards of the Hegemony—that’s a little tougher, believe me.”
I grimaced inwardly. I had fought humans, killed them face-to-face with swords and knives, fought for the Greeks at Troy, for the Israelites at Jericho, fought in a thousand different times back on distant Earth.
“I fought humans,” Uxley said, leaning close enough for me to smell his alcoholic breath. “That’s where I lost these.” He thumped on his prosthetic legs.
“It must have been very painful,” I said.
“You don’t feel the pain. Not at first. Shock. I had both m’legs burned out from under me and I never knew it. Just flopped down on my belly and kept on firing at those Hegemony bastards. Bastards took my legs. I wanted to kill ’em all, every one of them. I got a bunch of ’em, don’t think I didn’t. When the battle was over I was surrounded by piles of enemy dead. I held my position and killed ’em by droves.”
I sipped at my whisky.
“I can still hear ’em,” he said, his voice sinking to a whisper. “At night, when I go to sleep. I can still hear the wounded moaning and screaming. Every night.”
One evening he asked me if I would like to see the recording of our ceremony, as it was shown to the populace of Loris and all the other Commonwealth worlds. When I hesitated, he laughed.
“Don’t worry, you won’t have to sit through all the speeches. The news media trimmed our ceremony quite a bit.”
I really had no choice. I pulled up a chair next to his as he ordered the voice-activated screen to show the news recording from Loris.
I saw my troop, looking clean and fresh in the dress uniforms they had issued us. Instead of being in the cargo hold of a troopship, we appeared to be out on the surface of an Earthlike planet, beneath a bright blue sky, flags and pennants snapping in a brisk breeze. And we were only one tiny unit on a parade ground that held massed ranks by the tens of thousands. The ground was black with Commonwealth soldiery that had been added to the scene by computer.
I glanced at the colonel. “They make it look good, don’t they,” he muttered.
The computer-created band played stirring martial music while a commentator identified my unit as the group that “annihilated the defenders of a key planet in a conquest that took only four days.”
Only four days, I thought. Four days in hell.
The entire show was over in less than ninety seconds.
“What do you think?” Uxley asked me as the screen went dark.
I felt anger simmering inside me. “A kernel of fact wrapped in a big phony sugar coating,” I said.
He nodded and began to pour his first drink of the evening. “Got to keep the civilians happy, Orion. Got to keep up their morale.”
“Really?”
He looked at me through bloodshot eyes. “Hell, man, most of ’em don’t even realize there’s a war going on unless we show them stuff like this.”
“Then why don’t they show them combat scenes? Why don’t they show some of the tapes our helmet recorders took on Bititu? Then they’d see there’s a war being fought!”
Uxley shook his head. “Don’t want to scare them, Orion. The deep thinkers upstairs, the psychotechs and politicians, they don’t want to upset the civilians with blood and pain. Just tell ’em that we’re winning, but there’s a long haul ahead. Light at the end of the tunnel. That’s what they feed the civilians.”
“Crap,” I said.
“I suppose it is,” Uxley agreed calmly. Then he took a big swallow of whisky. “I believed in this war, Orion. I really believed it was important to fight for the Commonwealth. That’s why I joined up. Volunteered. No one forced me. I left my family as soon as I graduated university and joined the army.”
“What did your family think of that?”
He shrugged, his sorrowful eyes looking into the past. “Father was proud. Mother cried. My sisters thought I was crazy.”
“And now?” I avoided looking at his legs.
“Who knows? Haven’t seen any of them in years. We would hardly recognize each other, I suppose. Too much has happened, we’ve moved too far apart.”
“Wouldn’t you like to go home?”
He gulped at his whisky. “The army’s my home, Orion. I have no other home now. Just the army.”
Another night we got onto the subject of his legs.
“They tried regeneration, but something in my metabolism fouled up the process. These plastic jobs are all right, though. I can get around just fine and they only hurt if I have to be on my feet for more than an hour or so.”
Then he started once again on the story of how he lost his legs.
“Training, Orion,” he told me. “That’s the important thing. Training. It’s not rational to expect a man to stand and fight when he’s being shot at. A sane man would turn and run for safety. Takes training to make him
