THEIR MASTER

Rance allowed the recruits their moments of naked wonder, but eventually he snapped them back to the matter at hand. They were marched across the vast expanse of the Anah J's outer hull to where the other groups of five that made up the intake were waiting for them along with their overmen. Hark had somehow expected the surface of the ship's hull to be a featureless sheet of smooth metal. If anything, it was quite the reverse. It was covered by a deep patina of fine dust, pebbles, and even small rocks. It was pitted both by numerous small craters and by large washes of fused and blackened metal that were clearly legacies from previous battles. As they marched toward the others, the five passed a team of four humpbacked, suited nonhuman creatures performing a minor repair on the hull with vibrant red lasers. Their suits were jointed steel armor, not the living parasites issued to the troopers.

Waed and Morish paused to look more closely at the creatures, but Elmo chivvied them along.

"Keep it moving. You're going to have to get used to a lot of different species before you're through. There's nothing particularly interesting about the nohans."

When they reached the other squads of five, they were formed into parade ranks. Rance positioned himself in front of the whole intake.

"The overmen will now hand out the energy packs."

Of all the danger spots in the induction process, this was probably the most crucial. The recruits would now be armed and capable of the most terrible destruction if any of them decided to psych or serk. His hold on them had to be absolute.

"Do not load the energy packs until I give the word!"

Each recruit was handed the dull black pod, slightly larger than a clenched fist. It clipped into the underside of his weapon. Each had the specifications of the MEW and its energy source in his new memory, and only the dullest failed to experience a slight thrill of excited fear at the realization of the extent of the power he was holding in his hand.

"Take the energy pack in your left hand. Hold your weapon by its midsection with the underside pointing away from you."

He paused until all of the recruits had it right.

"Place the pack between the guide blocks but do not, I repeat, do not push it home."

Again he paused.

"On the command 'Load' you will load your weapons. At all times, you will keep your hands away from the triggers."

The overmen walked down the rows of recruits to make sure that they followed Rance's instructions to the letter. It was only when they were completely satisfied that the order was given.

"Intake… load!"

The energy packs were slammed home. There was no noise in the silence of space.

"Open formation, advance! Keep those hands away from the triggers!"

They spread out into one long, extended rank, each man some two meters from the next one.

"Weapons ready!"

Weapons were pushed forward by nervous hands.

"In this first phase of the exercise, lighted targets will appear in front of you. They will move toward you. The object is to shoot them down before they reach you. You will use all of the functions of your weapons, and I will call the changes of function."

Now that the weapons were energized, Rance was brutal efficiency. All the "my children" mockery had gone from his voice.

"Targets up!"

A blip of yellow light appeared from nowhere and floated a couple of meters above the surface of the hull. At first there was just the one, then it subdivided into a whole line of blips, maybe twenty in all. They advanced on the troopers at about the speed of a man walking.

"Set to blast and fire at will!"

There was a moment of hesitation, as if none of the recruits wanted to be the first to fire.

"The idea is to shoot them down. They're the enemy, and they want to kill you."

The recruits' weapons went off almost as one. A number of the blips vanished, but by no means was every shot a hit. Rance raised his hand.

"Targets down."

The yellow blips vanished.

"That was uniformly pathetic. In combat, you'll rarely have an enemy moving as slowly as that. Targets up!"

For the next four hours, they practiced with their weapons. The speed of the blips increased, and their movement became trickier; they ducked and weaved, and toward the end, they fired bolts of green light that delivered a severe but not incapacitating shock to whomever they hit. Rance had the men constantly switching functions on their weapons. They jumped from laser-trace to blast, from blast to heat ray to concussion, and back to lasertrace. Very early in the exercise, Hark realized that the multiple triggers on the MEW were almost identical to the prayer levers with which he'd worshiped back on his planet. This left him with a growing feeling that his former life had been a cruel deceit.

Rance not only worked the men hard on their weapons, he also pushed them toward the limit of their physical capabilities. He had them ru

The disaster didn't occur until the exercise was almost over. Only one recruit from Hark's squad, Eslay, seemed unable either to cop the feel of the MEW or to keep up with the rest of the intake. When the blips started firing shocks, he was constantly being zapped. Finally he gave up and dropped to his knees with a sighing sob that was audible over everyone's communicator. Two blips hovered over him, hitting his body with repeated shocks. He was now babbling in a language that Hark didn't understand. Then, to the horror of the other recruits, the babbling turned to screams that reverberated inside their helmets. The seal between Eslay's helmet and his suit was opening. The suit was peeling back. Blood fountained from the exposed flesh as it went into explosive decompression. More blood splashed the inside of his helmet visor. As the suit retreated toward Eslay's waist, his lungs blew. The force of his chest rupturing lifted him clear off the surface. The suit snaked off his dead legs and, carried by the grav still ru

"Couldn't just leave him to float around, could we?"

Hark was shocked by the blunt callousness. Surely a man's death deserved something, some kind of observation. Rance seemed to be well aware of the feeling.

"Think we should have taken the time to give him a decent burial? Let me tell you something, getting a de- cent burial can be a dangerous luxury. The first thing you learn is that a dead body is a worthless lump of organic garbage and isn't something you take risks for. Anything else is sentiment, and sentiment can get you killed. You're probably wondering how it was that the suit came off him and could the same thing happen to you. The answer is that it might, but it most likely won't, unless you cave in like he did. Not often, but now and again, a suit turns on its wearer if it feels he isn't giving one hundred percent. Eslay didn't like his suit, and apparently it didn't like him."

Rance made a dismissive gesture, and the overmen began herding the recruits into ordered ranks preparatory to returning to the interior of the ship. Elmo picked up Eslay's suit, boots, and weapon. As they marched away, Rance didn't go with them. He needed a few moments to himself. Eslay's death was damned nuisance. Now he'd have to make a report to the line officer.