"You've just been ambushed. A mine has blown a wall down, pinning your legs under a shitload of stone, and three rebels with machetes are coming toward you. If you want to live, you've got to lift yourself free."
"Jesus fuck."
"Come on, you idle bastard, lift."
Jones's face was compressed into a rubber mask as he strained to bring his legs back level. Blood vessels stood out on his neck, pulsing fast.
When it was clear he'd never get the bars back, Lawrence let go. "You're fucking useless, Jones. I don't mind that it will get you killed; we might get a halfway decent replacement. But if you're immobilized it leaves the rest of us covering our asses. Keep up with us, or drop out now. I'm not carrying a liability."
"This is a fucking gym, Sarge. If we're out on patrol I'll be in Skin. This fitness crap we're supposed to stick to is total bullshit."
"The only thing you can ever truly rely on is yourself."
Lawrence caught Hal grinning at the scene. He turned to the kid. "And you can stop smirking. In six days we're going to be on the planet. Every welcoming smile you get means they hate you; the bigger the smile the more they want you dead. We've only got each other down there. Nobody else is going to look out for you. So I want you in the best shape it's possible to be. Not just your body, I want your attitude to be right, too, because Fate help me, I've got to depend on you."
He walked back to his own apparatus bench. Hal resumed his pumping, seemingly proud of how high he'd got the resistance turned up and how easily he handled it. Amersy, who hadn't stopped his forward presses, gave Lawrence a look of mild rebuke as he passed. The corporal wasn't out of line, Lawrence admitted; he had overreacted to Jones slacking off. But this time he wanted a lot more from the platoon than on any other mission. If he was ever going to achieve his personal objective when they reached Thallspring he needed to have complete loyalty, and to do that he had to take care of them. Good care. They might not appreciate it up here, but on the ground these missions quickly became very warped. Society's assholes they might be, but they were streetsmart enough to know who they could trust when the shit hit the fan. And Z-B, in the form of Captain Douglas Bryant, didn't get a look-in.
Lawrence began working his apparatus again. He could see Jones pedaling wildly and let out a quiet snort of satisfaction. He was lucky the squaddie hadn't tried to smack him one. The frustration of can-time was twisting them up. At least back in Cairns they could sneak out of the base at night and screw the tension away with a girl on the Strip.
After gym the platoon was due two hours' equipment readiness training. Lawrence left Amersy to supervise them by himself. He'd got another meeting with the captain; this close to the end of the voyage, they were averaging out at nearly one per day.
Their briefing room was a rectangular compartment with bare aluminum walls, apart from one large, high-resolution sheet screen. The three other platoon sergeants, Wagner, Ciaran and Oakley, were already sitting at the composite table. Lawrence gave them a quick nod and took his own seat. Captain Douglas Bryant walked in a moment later, accompanied by Lieutenant Motluk. The sergeants rose to their feet, all of them with one hand gripping the edge of the table to keep their feet on the ground, while the other was used to salute.
"At ease, people," Douglas Bryant said cordially. He was twenty-eight, a product of Z-B's officer academy in Tunisia. A smart man, with a solid family stake in the company to propel him along the promotion path. When Lawrence accessed his record he found the only active duty the captain had seen was counterinsurgency missions in East Africa. Punishment raids on camps deep in the jungle, where the native tribes still fought the imperialist company mines stripping the minerals from their land. It was a qualification of sorts for asset realization, but Lawrence would have preferred someone with genuine experience.
If he was honest, his contempt for Douglas Bryant originated from knowing the young man was more or less what he would have probably turned out to be himself: genuinely concerned about the condition and morale of the men serving under his command, full of information and knowing shit about what really mattered.
"Ciaran, have you got your platoon's supply inventory sorted out?" the captain asked.
"Sir," the sergeant of Platoon 836BK5 answered. "It was a glitch. The supplies were in the correct lander pod."
The captain smiled around at his sergeants. "It's always software, isn't it? Have we had anything other than virtual problems since we left Centralis?"
They smiled back, tolerantly polite.
"Okay. Final suit tailoring, how are we doing? Newton, your platoon hasn't started yet, why is that?"
"I keep them going in for function tests, sir. I want to leave final tailoring until as late as possible. Even with the gym sessions, five weeks in this gravity is messing with their size."
"I can appreciate the reasoning behind that, but unfortunately it's not quite the procedure we're following. Your platoon is to report for final tailoring oh-eight-hundred tomorrow."
"Sir."
"I can't risk them not being ready when we emerge from compression. We must not be caught unprepared."
Right, Lawrence thought, like Thallspring has moved and we 're going to finish this flight early. Final tailoring took a couple of hours per suit, at max. "I understand, sir."
And so it went. Bryant was obsessed with details; everything any experienced commander would leave to his sergeants to sort out he wanted a say in. He had to have the operation running perfectly along the standard track, a dead giveaway that he was concerned more with the impression he generated within the company than with the practicalities of the situation they'd be facing. He even wanted Oakley to cancel a request he'd made for more remote sensors when they went groundside. His platoon had been assigned to sweep through an urban area that was all narrow roads in a maze of cheap housing—and that was from a ten-year-old map; it could have decayed a lot since then. In other words, a perfect ambush territory for the local badboys. And they'd have a lot of bravado before Z-B established themselves and obtained their good behavior collateral. Lawrence would have wanted the same security those remote sensors could provide. But despite Z-B's vaunted policy of loop involvement, the beachhead plan already contained the number of sensors considered relevant. Bryant did not want anything to alter at this stage.
Oakley said yes, and got his bracelet pearl to rescind the request. They moved on to the landing operation's tuning and how Bryant didn't want them to suffer undue delay on their way out of the drop gliders.
* * *
A gentle warm rain had been falling on Memu Bay for most of the day, the second unseasonable downpour in a fortnight. It meant Denise had to keep the children out of the garden and at the tables and benches sheltered by the roof. In the morning she'd handed out the big media pads and got them to paint the shapes they saw in the clouds, which resulted in a splendid collage of strange creatures in glowing blues, reds and greens. By the afternoon, when it was obvious the clouds weren't going to blow away any time soon, she settled them in a broad semicircle and sat on one of the tables in the center.
"I think it's time I told you about the planet of the Mordiff," she said. "Even though Mozark never actually visited it himself."
There were several sharp intakes of breath. The children gave each other excited looks. The dark history of the Mordiff planet had only ever been hinted at before whenever she talked of the Ring Empire.
Jedzella stuck her hand up. "Please, miss, it's not too horrid, is it?"
"Horrid?" Denise pursed her lips and gave the question some theatrical consideration. "No, not horrid, although they fought terrible wars, which are always evil. I suppose from where we are today, looking back, it's really quite sad. I always say you can learn the most from mistakes, and the Mordiff made some really big mistakes. If you remember what they did, then, I hope, you'll be able to avoid those same mistakes when you grow up. Do you want me to go on?"
"Yes!" they yelled. Several of them gave Jedzella cross glances.
"All right then. Let's see: Mozark never went there, although he did fly close to the Ulodan Nebula where the planet and its star were hiding. There wasn't a lot of point to him going. Even in those times the Mordiff were long gone, and nothing they'd left behind could have helped him in his quest for a grand purpose in life. Although, in a way, a very warped and twisted way, the Mordiff had an overriding purpose. They wanted to live. In that they were no different to all the rest of us: humans today and the sentient species of the Ring Empire all want to live. But by fate, or accident, or chance, or even luck, the Mordiff evolved on a planet in the middle of the darkest, densest nebula in the galaxy at that time. They had daylight, just as we do. The nebula wasn't thick enough to blank out their sun. But their night was absolute. The night sky on that planet was perfectly black. They couldn't see the stars. As far as they knew, they were completely alone; their planet and its sun were the entire universe."
"Didn't they send ships out to find other stars?" Edmund asked.
"No. Because they had no reason to explore. They didn't know anything else existed, and observation backed up the whole idea, so they didn't even know they could go looking. That was their downfall, and it's the lesson we must learn from them. You see, like most sentient species, they thought in the same fashion we do, even though their bodies were very different. They were big, almost as big as dinosaurs, and they had very clever limbs that could change shape. It meant they could slide their bodies along the ground, the way a snake does, or they could swim like fish by turning the limbs into fins, and some Ring Empire historians and archaeologists even thought they could fly, or at least glide. But that didn't stop them from having an ordinary civilization. They had a Stone Age, and an Iron Age, just like us; then they went on and had a Steam Age, and an Industrial Age, and an Atomic Age, and a Data Age. And that was where their troubles started. By then, they had developed their whole world, and they had good medicine that gave them a long healthy life. Their population was expanding all the time and consuming more and more resources. Whole continents became giant cities. They built islands miles across that were just floating buildings. All of their polar continents were settled. There was no room left, and all the surface was being exploited. It meant they had wars, horrible, terrible wars that killed tens of millions of them every time. But they were always pointless, as all wars are. After entire nations were destroyed, the victors would just move into the ruins, and within a generation the land would be full again. All the while their technology, especially their weapons technology, grew more powerful and more deadly. The wars they fought became worse, and more dangerous to the rest of the planet "Then one day, the biggest nation, which was ruled by the greatest Mordiff overlord, discovered how to create a worm-hole."
The children let out a fearful Ooooh.
"Did they invade the Ring Empire, miss?"
"No, they didn't invade the Ring Empire. Have you forgotten? They didn't know it was there. They made their wormhole go in a very different direction. You see, worm-holes are formed from a distortion of space-time. We use ours to create a tunnel through space so we can fly to the stars. The Mordiff traveled in time. Because the Ulodan Nebula denied them a vision of space, time was all they knew. The overlord ordered a single giant wormhole terminus to be built, standing at the center of his nation. It was the greatest device the Mordiff had ever constructed, for not only did the terminus generate the wormhole, its own structure was self-sustaining. As long as it had power, it would never decay or fail. And it got its power from the way it distorted space-time. In other words, it was eternal, almost like perpetual motion."
"My daddy says that's impossible," Melanie said with haughty self-confidence. "He says only fools believe in it"
"It is impossible," Denise said. "But that's the best way to describe how the Mordiff's terminus worked."
Edmund sneered at the girl, then turned to Denise. "Why did the overlord build it, miss?"
"Ah. Well, that's where the terror and the tragedy of the Mordiff begins. When it was finished, the overlord ordered an exodus of his whole nation. An armada of flying craft carried them all into the terminus, millions and millions of Mordiff. And when they were all safe inside, the overlord's personal guards set off the most terrible weapons the nation possessed. All of them, all at once. They were so bad, and so powerful, that they killed every living thing on the whole planet, and turned all the cities to rubble, even those of the overlord's nation."
The children stared at her, awed and troubled.
"Every Mordiff nation had the same awful doomsday weapons; some spread deadly diseases while some simply exploded hard enough to open up cracks into the magma below the continents," Denise said. "The overlord knew it would just be a matter of time until somebody used them. By then, each of the nations was so desperate for new land and resources that not using the doomsday bombs would mean they'd collapse from within.
"So now the overlord's nation was inside the wormhole, traveling further and further into the future, away from the time of the planet's death. Some of them, a scouting party, emerged a hundred thousand years later, flying out of the terminus—which had survived the explosions and radiation, of course. To the scouting party it was only minutes since they'd entered the wormhole, but as soon as they came out they found a sterile planet, with the ruins of the megacities crumbling into dust. By then, the radiation had decayed, and the plagues had died away. These Mordiff scouts dumped bacteria and algae over the surface and flew back into the terminus. Then they came out another thousand years later, when the bacteria had spread everywhere, bringing the soil back to life. This time they scattered seeds before they went back into the terminus. The third time they emerged, they left breeding pairs of animals and fish. A thousand years after that, the world had returned to the state it was in before their Industrial Age, with huge grassy plains and forests and jungles. That's when the whole of the overlord's nation came out of the wormhole. They'd only been flying inside the worm-hole for a couple of hours, while outside a hundred and twenty thousand years had rushed past.
"They looked around at this beautiful, clean new world, and they rejoiced and thanked the overlord for delivering them to this wonderful place. Many of them forgot the crime that had been done to give them this chance at a fresh life and settled down to rebuild their original society. So once more they mined the land for metals and minerals, and their cities began to grow again, always expanding over the wilderness. After a few generations, some of the Mordiff forgot the debt they owed to the overlord family, which still ruled the original nation, and began to break away and form new nations of their own. Two and a half thousand years later, the planet was once again covered with cities. Once again, wars were being fought. So, the overlord of that time did what his ancestor had done. He gathered his nation into flying craft and sent them through the terminus. Behind them, the doomsday weapons exploded yet again.
"This wretched cycle turned another three times. Whenever the world grew too crowded to support the billions of Mordiff who filled the cities, the overlord's nation would escape through time and kill everyone left behind. But after the last time they fled into the terminus, the scouts came out a hundred thousand years later to find something unexpected had happened. Their sun had changed. When they looked at it, they could see dark sunspots swelling and bursting all across its surface. It was reaching the end of its main cycle and growing colder. Of course, as they'd never seen the other stars in the galaxy, they didn't know what was happening. They never knew that stars change and die; they'd assumed that their little universe was static and eternal. The physicists among them began to speculate and produce theories at once, and they probably worked out what was happening, because they were smart, don't forget But knowing what's happening and being able to do anything are very different things.
"So the scout group took measurements and recordings of how cold the air was becoming, and how frigid the land had turned, and went back into the wormhole to report to the overlord. At first, he didn't want to believe what they told him, but, eventually, he came out and witnessed the star's winter for himself. By now, the ground and ruins were covered in a thick layer of frost, which glittered in the dimming sunlight, and the seas were frozen solid. For a long time the overlord raged against what he thought of as supreme injustice before he regained his senses. Scouts were dispatched far into the future: two hundred thousand years, five hundred thousand, a million, two million, even ten million. They all came back with worsening reports of how the sun grew colder and colder, swelling into a huge red monster that covered a fifth of the sky. At no time did it ever show signs of returning to its original state."