THEIR MASTER

Rance was holding the suit with one hand, and it had started to insinuate itself down his arm. Eslay's eyes had started to bulge. Rance hoped that Elmo had them all well in hand.

"These are our suits. They make us feel good, and in return, we love and cherish them." He tossed the suit he was holding directly at Hark. "Catch it, boy!"

Hark caught the suit and stood holding it awkwardly. The idea of wearing a living thing hardly appealed to him either, but he was doing his best not to show it.

"So put the suit on, boy."

Hark looked down at the blob in his hands. It was gently sliding around his fingers.

"How do I do that, Topman Rance?"

"It's the simplest thing in the world, boy. Strip off those shorts and singlet and stand on the suit."

Hark stripped off his clothes and gingerly placed one naked foot on the blob.

"Don't be shy, boy, stand right on it. It won't bite you."

Hark stepped up onto the suit. His feet sank into it, and it immediately started to flow up his legs, covering them with a thick second skin. Beside him, he heard Eslay gasp. It had reached his knees and was advancing up his thighs. The thing felt warm against his flesh. He almost gasped himself as it flowed around his genitals. As it got to his waist, the feeling subtly changed. The sense of revulsion melted away and was replaced by a pleasant tingling of well-being. Topman Rance was right; the suit was his friend.

"Feel okay, does it, boy?"

Hark gri

"Yes, sir, Topman Rance. It feels great."

He was aware that the suit had to be doing something to him, but he didn't give a damn. He was in love with his suit. Rance tossed out the other four blobs of black jelly.

"Okay, the rest of you get suited up too."

Eslay made no attempt to catch the suit that was thrown at him. It thudded to the deck plates at his feet and just lay there. Hark was sure that it was his imagination, but somehow the blob seemed to look rejected. As the suits covered the other three recruits, they all started gri

"Are you going to put on that suit, boy?"

Eslay looked as if he were about to strangle. "I… can't."

Rance's voice was hard and quiet. "Put on that suit, boy."

Eslay's mouth worked, but no sound came. Rance glanced at Elmo.

"Let's put him in his suit."

Together, they grabbed the recruit and, before he could put up a struggle, lifted him clear off the ground and dumped his feet into the black jelly. The suit, as if it could sense the urgency, flashed up his legs at high speed. They didn't put him down until it had covered him all the way up to the chest. Eslay swayed and then collected himself. He didn't look euphoric, and sweat stood out on his face, but at least he was calm.

"Do you have a grip on it now, boy?"

Eslay was still sweating, but he had found his voice. "Yes, Topman Rance. I've got a grip on it."

"Then we can move on to the next phase."

Elmo took the floor to explain how to adjust and lock the boots, seal the helmets, and use the tongue switch controls oh the air feed, lights, and communicator. As the information was already in the recruits' heads, he had only to go through it once.

"Now we issue your weapons."

The pallet that had brought in the suits and boots was replaced by one that carried a rack of five weapons. Rance removed one and held it up.

"Observe well, my children. What we have here is the standard weapon of the ground trooper. The Multipurpose Energy Weapon, the MEW. Next to your suit, this weapon is your best friend. Its function is very simple. It kills the enemy and, we hope, prevents the enemy from killing you."

Elmo passed out the weapons. The recruits handled them gingerly.

"You don't have to be afraid of them. The power packs haven't been loaded yet."

The MEW was slightly longer than a man's arm. I consisted of four parallel tubes that ran from a hemi spherical muzzle shield at one end into a cylindrical trigger control at the other. A folding stock fitted into the user's shoulder.

"All you need to know to operate the MEW has already been implanted in your brains. What we are going to do now is to take you out onto the outside of the ship and shake that information loose by practice."

Hark was surprised at how fast things were going. Rance and Elmo seemed to be giving them no time to stop and think. After less than a day on the ship, the recruits were armed and in fiill combat gear. They were practically soldiers already. Elmo was marshaling them to move out of the messdeck. As Elmo marched them for the second time through the complex and mysterious bowels of the ship, there was a whole different spirit among the recruits. They had come in as nervous newcomers with nothing but their underclothes to protect them. Now, with the sole exception of Eslay, who still looked less than comfortable in his suit, they were almost standing tall as they walked through the corridors and companionways carrying their weapons and helmets. Their boots crashed on the deck plates, and they no longer flinched at the ship's random groans and booms, the flares of plasma, and the flashes of static.

The spirit wilted slightly when they confronted the large circular air lock that led to the exterior of the ship. Beyond the thick double iris was an unknown infinity that was so awesome that not even the suit-induced euphoria could totally calm their fears. Rance continued to give them no time to panic. At his order, they put on their helmets. He and Elmo carefully checked the seals, then Elmo operated the air lock controls. The i

The second iris opened, and the blackness of space was above their heads. For a few moments, they had no chance to take in the view. There was the instant of disorientation as their horizontal perspective performed a ninety-degree turn, then a clutch of dizziness as they stepped from the floor of the air lock onto the subjectively vertical surface of the ship's hull. In that instant, the pseudograv built into their boots took over from the ship's internal gravity. Everything normalized, and the air lock became a rapidly closing hole in what was now the ground.

For once, Rance didn't hurry them. No one, not even a topman, could bully a recruit through his first contact with the emptiness of space and the different but equally frightening vastness of the battle cluster itself. They had to be given time to stand and stare. Hark and the others did exactly that. Even in the desert, when he had gazed up in wonder at the night sky, he had never felt so completely dwarfed. There were numbers in his head that attempted to make sense of the endless black and the cold light of the thousands of stars, but they didn't help any. There were also numbers for the battle cluster, but those were equally meaningless. Hark couldn't conceive how anything so vast could have been built even by Gods. Thirteen huge ships, each as large as the one on which he was standing and each having its unique if inexplicable design and form, hung together in an unidentifiable configuration, the relationships of which Hark knew that he would never begin to understand. The way the giant ships were clustered together reminded Hark of some strange, exotic flower. The parts added up to a unit that was somehow greater than the sum of the individual parts. Although the ships floated free of each other, there could be no mistaking the fact that the cluster was a fully integrated unit. There were continuous ship-to-ship exchanges of all kinds of raw energy. A faint rainbow aurora glowed in the space between two ships that were long tapering triangles and a third that was a bulky, irregular spheroid. A ship that appeared to be constructed of hexagonal crystals discharged cracks of purple ball lightning into empty space. Three other ships were linked by a vibrating web of plasma pseudopods. The overall impression was one of the battle cluster being so highly charged that it could scarcely contain its own impossible levels of power. All served to reinforce Hark's original feeling that the ship, and now the cluster, was more a living thing than a collection of soulless machines.