The Eternity Brigade

PRELUDE-2

Of those weapons with which he was familiar, he chose four grenades, an energy rifle, a wide-dispersion laser pistol and a pair of throwing knives. He’d be able to fight anything coming within a hundred meters of him; beyond that range, it was someone else’s concern.

Dressed and armed, now, he looked around to see what came next. People were organizing themselves into squads of ten. Hawker looked about and found the alien—a Spardian, he suddenly recalled—who’d talked to him in Vandik. Her group was not yet complete, so he went over to join her. If worst came to worst, he’d at least have one member of his squad to talk to.

The leader of this particular squad was a human, but Hawker quickly established that the two of them had no language in common. Once again the Spardian was pressed into service as a translator, informing Hawker that their squad had been assigned to defend Sector 14 against possible breakthroughs by enemy troops. Hawker nodded. There wasn’t much more he needed to know; he could take his lead from the rest of the squad.

When everyone was outfitted, the sergeant reappeared and said a few more words—probably last-minute instructions and/or words of encouragement. No one really listened; each squad was busy trying to make itself into a fighting unit rather than the random assortment of individuals it actually was. Perhaps the sergeant himself finally realized he was hindering more than helping, for he shut up abruptly and let the squad leaders do their job.

There was little enough time for that. All too quickly, the troops were pointed to the elevators and brought to the surface, where they’d be dispersed to their particular sectors.

Hawker’s first glimpse of the surface confirmed all his suspicions. The town they were defending was in bad shape; in fact, to all appearances it was lost already.

The sky overhead was dark, despite having two suns above the horizon. Clouds of black smoke hung over the city, evidence of fires wrought by enemy weapons. Although the air on this planet should have been breathable, the stinging sensation of smoke made it far from pleasant. There were tears in Hawker’s eyes, and he wished there’d been gas masks available; rubbing at his eyes with the backs of his hands, he followed the rest of his squad to their designated sector.

All about them was rubble and desolation. Hawker had no idea what world he was on, what the original inhabitants had been like or how splendid their town had looked before falling to the ravages of this war. He could only see the end result: no building over four stories stood intact, and even the smaller ones had windows shattered by the constant bombardment of enemy artillery; large impact craters dotted the streets, hindering progress; vehicles abandoned, overturned, burned; dead bodies lying everywhere, some killed directly by enemy fire, others indirectly by being trapped under a collapsing building. And nowhere, other than his fellow troopers, could Hawker see a sign of life. Everyone capable of fleeing had already deserted the city, leaving the opposing armies to decide the issue.

Let the soldiers fight it out, the citizens said by their actions. Then tell us what the outcome is. At times like this, Hawker often wondered what the difference was between cowardice and common sense.

The squad moved quickly through the empty streets, crouched low to avoid possible gunfire and taking cover behind deserted buildings along the way. Overhead, an occasional ball of blue flame would drift lazily through the sky. Hawker had never seen anything quite like them in battle before, but he hardly had to be told they were dangerous. His guesses about them were confirmed when one of the blue fireballs brushed lightly against the top of a building several hundred meters away. The structure promptly exploded, knocking the entire squad to their knees and showering the area with tiny bits of rubble, hardly more than a fine dust. Hawker instinctively covered his head, but he needn’t have bothered; the blue fireballs didn’t leave pieces big enough to cause any damage.

Their sector, it turned out, was an area of some ten square blocks near the outskirts of the inner city. The neighborhood had been oriented toward small businesses and shops, with few tall buildings and only a scattering of residences. As a result, it had fared better than some other, more important target areas. Only a couple of structures had suffered even minor damage, there were no casualties lying about, and the streets were quite passable.

Probably too passable, Hawker thought, surveying the scene with a professional eye. The enemy could march a battalion through these streets, and all we’ve got is a ten-man squad to stop them. He was already making mental notes of the most effective places to use his grenades to block the streets, should it be necessary.

They came to a halt and the squad leader broke them down into two-man teams, each to patrol its own area within the sector. Since the Spardian was the only squad member Hawker could communicate with, he found himself teamed up with her again. They said little as they marched out to their post, at the most forward area of the sector. Hawker surmised his squad leader wasn’t happy having someone he couldn’t talk to, and had purposely assigned him to the front lines. Hawker was the most expendable person in the group.

He and the Spardian woman scouted their area and quickly found a secure vantage point in a narrow stairway leading down to a cellar. Peering over the top they had an almost unobstructed view of the street in both directions, while being reasonably safe themselves. With that accomplished, they settled in to wait.

He tried to talk some more with the woman, to find out whether she knew any more of the situation than he did. Their mutual command of the Vandik language, however, was only good enough for the most basic communication, and the woman was not very talkative anyway. Perhaps she resented being sacrificed at the front lines merely because she was the only one who could communicate with Hawker. She told him tersely that she, like he, was a dub, and that the sergeant had only sketched the situation briefly. Then she reverted to sullen silence, implying Hawker should do the same.

Hawker settled back against the wall and waited for the enemy to make its move. He’d learned long ago that a soldier has to cherish any quiet moment he can find. From the way this battle seemed to be going, things wouldn’t be quiet for long.

He pawed through the mess kit they’d given him, looking for a cigarette. It was, by now, a vain hope; he hadn’t seen any tobacco for centuries. There were other drugs to act as mild stimulants or euphoriants, but he’d never found them quite the same. Damn! You wouldn’t think it was that hard to dub a f*****g cigarette, would you?

He sighed. The army never did anything right; why should he have expected them to start with that?

There were three tubes of the pasty stuff they called food. Each tube was a different color, and each had a written description in a language Hawker couldn’t read. He wasn’t particularly hungry at the moment—resurrection always re-created him at a state halfway between lunch and dinner—but he’d learned to grab a meal when he could. Hawker sucked on the tubes of paste, still reflecting that it would have been just as easy for them to dub good food. But he was probably going to die soon anyway.

Two of the tubes filled him up, and he was debating whether to open the third when his partner tensed. He hadn’t seen any motion upstairs himself, but the Spardian was facing the opposite direction. Hawker quickly stuck the unopened tube back in his kit, fastened it securely to his belt, and took up his energy rifle.

Any animosity the Spardian felt toward him vanished now. The alien woman spoke a few words into the comm on her wrist, letting the squad leader know something was happening here, then raised her own weapon in readiness. Cautiously she crept up the stairs until the top of her head was barely even with ground level. Hawker was content to let her take the lead in these matters; his spirit of adventure had evaporated long ago.

The Spardian motioned for him to come up close behind her. When he had done so, she whispered for him to stay there while she ran to a vantage point across the street, where she could get a better view of what was happening. Hawker nodded and brought his rifle up, ready to cover her during her charge. The woman braced herself, then darted out from cover onto the street and across the way to a recessed doorway. The instant she left, Hawker was up with his rifle ready, aimed down the street where his partner had been looking. But he saw nothing, and the Spardian made it across the street without drawing any enemy fire.

Hawker lowered his rifle, but did not relax. Something had spooked the Spardian, and he was not about to take chances. He peered through the smoky gloom that pervaded the city, even here in this untouched neighborhood, looking both ways along the street for the slightest signs of trouble.

There was a movement back in the direction from which they’d come. Hawker spun, rifle at the ready once more. A tall, thin figure was making its way through the haze toward the Spardian. It was not any member of their squad, that Hawker knew for certain. A memory sparked in his mind, an image of an army of these gaunt figures charging up a hill at him—quite unmistakably the memory of an enemy.

The Spardian was busy watching the front; she wouldn’t see the creature approaching her from behind. Hawker thought to yell out a warning, but didn’t want to betray both of them to any enemy within earshot. Lifting his rifle, he fired one quick bolt at the approaching figure, and the alien toppled to the ground, dead.

Hawker’s partner saw the flash of his rifle and turned in time to see the victim fall. At first she froze; then, after checking the front to make sure she wouldn’t be seen, she left her doorway and ran back to the dead body to check it out. She knelt beside it for a moment, then shook her head and ducked for cover once more inside a storefront. She spoke into her wrist comm again, and this time her voice came out of the unit built into the fabric of Hawker’s sleeve. “Why did you that?”

“That was a ….” Hawker strove to remember the name of that creature’s race. “A Cenarchad. We fought them not long ago.”

“Is being fifty years past. Cenarchads to us are allied.” Her tone made it clear she thought him almost as bad a menace as the enemy troops out there.

“Well how the hell was I supposed to know?” Hawker exploded. “I was trying to save your f*****g life. You sure as s**t didn’t bother telling me how to tell the difference between friend and enemy. If you don’t want any more f**k-ups, you damn well better explain a few things.”

The Spardian was quiet for a moment, probably translating his outburst into terms she could understand and then holding in her own temper. When she did speak, her words were well modulated and controlled. “Is being civil war now almost one year whole. Other side leaders stealing our records, dubbing our people. We having only back-up patterns. Old knowledge is ungood—is friends, enemies on both sides.”

Hawker paused to consider. If the enemy did have a copy of the soldiers’ molecular patterns, the battlefield would be utter chaos. “How do we know who to shoot, then?” he asked.

“Is look at armband. Red is us, blue is they.”

Hawker looked at the colored band on his left arm. Thinking back on it, all the uniforms issued in the bunker had red armbands. Checking more carefully, he could see that the band was just loosely basted on. “What’s to keep someone from changing armbands?”

Across the street, he could see the Spardian shrug. “No one liking being shot by own side in accident.” She paused. “Not even Cenarchads.”

Hawker ignored her sarcasm. True, it would probably be easy enough to change armbands and infiltrate the enemy lines—but imagine the irony of returning to your own side and being shot as the enemy. It was probably being done, but Hawker had no stomach for that double-sided game.

“I sometimes think that’s your strongest asset.” It was Green’s voice coming back to him after all these centuries. “You have no imagination. You see only straight forward, without looking to either side. If there’s an enemy there, you shoot. You don’t worry about peripheral issues. People with imagination waste too much energy thinking about incidentals. Keep it up, Hawk, even if they kid you. You’re really the strongest of the lot, when I think about it.”

Poor Green. Hawker had a sudden recollection of that final image, of Green in his arms, begging not to be forgotten. I still remember you, David, Hawker thought. That’s one thing I won’t let them take away, no matter how long I live.

Whatever the Spardian woman had seen—or thought she’d seen—there was nothing on the street now. She and Hawker waited in their respective niches on opposite sides of the thoroughfare for half an hour, with no signs of further activity. Far away, on the other side of the city, they could hear the fireballs exploding and the buildings tumbling. But there was too much distance to make it sound real; from here, there were no sounds of gunfire, no screams of charging soldiers shouting obscenities at one another, no wailing, moaning, or smell of death. Hawker was beginning to think he’d lucked out this time.

Then it all came at once: a swarm of blue fireballs falling like hailstones. Hawker hardly had time to spot them before they were down. The first three hit in the street, jarring the ground like a powerful earthquake and biting huge holes in the paved surface. Hawker was knocked sideways against the wall, so hard it knocked the energy rifle out of his hands. He stooped to retrieve it and was jarred by a second explosion, even nearer. He scooped the weapon up blindly and raced out of the stairwell. That was no place to be when the walls came tumbling down.

But the street was no better. Volley after volley of the fireballs came in, and there was no defense against them. Buildings on the other side of the street were already demolished; Hawker could see no sign of his partner. He was looking around for a place to run, a place to hide, when a fireball hit the building right beside him. The top stories exploded in a rain of dust, but the lower levels, jarred beyond endurance, began to collapse. Hawker dove back into his stairwell, just as the building tumbled down around him, burying him beneath a mountain of debris.