THEIR MASTER

Rance watched the line officer walk away. He simply couldn't believe that anyone was able to remain so calm before a jump. The bastards had to have something that wasn't being given out to the men. Rance found that he had been gritting his teeth.

"One day, you're finally going to go into combat, and I'm finally going to blow your forsaken head off."

A siren wailed through the messdeck. The coffin lids slowly lowered. Hark found that his fists were clenching and unclenching. How would it start? What would be the first sign? Could it really be as bad as they said? The tongtimers on the messdeck didn't seem the kind to exaggerate. Inside the coffin, all Hark could hear was his own breathing. Through the transparent cover, he watched the lights on the messdeck go out. Only small red safety lamps remained. Cold sweat beaded his back. How would he endure it if it was as bad as they said? If he went mad, he didn't doubt that they would dispose of him as arbitrarily as they had disposed of Eslay.

Hark waited, resigned to the coming agony, but for what seemed like an hour, nothing happened. The constant, muscle-tensing fear was exhausting. Let it start. At least end the suspense. Or maybe the jump had been postponed. Did he dare hope for a temporary reprieve? At that precise moment, a vibration ran through the coffin as if the ship had shifted or stretched. He continued to hope, but he knew in his heart that something was starting. For no logical reason, Hark had somehow imagined that the pain would start slowly and gradually increase in intensity. As the first shock seared through him, he knew that he had been completely wrong.

There was molten fire in his bones. At the same time he was being twisted out of shape. It was worse than being twisted-he was losing his shape, he was being spread across space, smeared over the blackness of the void. He was falling and screaming. Every deformed nerve was being tortured; the teeth were being dragged from his gaping mouth. His own screams beat inside his head until his skull started to fragment. His brain boiled over in an eruption of excruciating color. This was worse even than the datashot. His surroundings gone, he was alone, a thing without form, constantly shifting and rending. All that remained was the pain. It was his very being, burning through eternity. The pain defined him.

He was like a star made of constantly exploding and regenerating agony.

To his surprise, he found that he could think inside the suffering. If anything, that made it worse. The capacity to think prevented him from losing himself in the howling hallucinations that racked his overloaded senses. He began to feel how the pain came in distinct phases. There was no respite, and each was as bad as the next. All the change of phase meant was a shift in emphasis. There was the blinding red-gold fire that burned and consumed his flesh. There were the icy razor bolts that ripped and gouged through the backs of his eyes. There was the terrible spatial distortion in which even his identity became unrecognizable. Worst of all, the hallucinations refused to stop. The cycle of torment went on and on, a spiraling loop on which he helplessly hung, twisted, and turned.

At first, he couldn't believe that it had stopped. It had been everything. He was pressed hard against the side of the coffin, clawing at the lining and muttering to himself. His eyes were tightly shut, and the visions of horror lingered like an afterimage while his nervous system cringed, believing in nothing but the next stage in the cycle.

"Let it stop, please. Let it stop! Let it stop?*

When the messdeck siren started braying again, he thought that it was still his screaming.

"Let it…"

The last word was a sob. He opened his eyes. Everything was back to normal. The lights were coming on, but none of it seemed real. The pain-that was real, that was everything. Except that the pain had gone. There was blood on the palms of his hands where his fingernails had dug in. His right shoulder hurt. He must have been banging it against the inside of the coffin. The cover opened. He experienced a fresh clutch of dread. The unreality was still there. Had he gone mad? There seemed to be something wrong with the light; things didn't look right. The cover was now fully open. Hark tentatively sat up. Immediately, his stomach revolted. He was racked by a spasm of dry retching, and sweat poured from his upper body. He felt dizzy and had to grab hold of the side of the coffin. Strangely, there was a kind of comfort in this violent physical reaction. If he could feel like this, he was probably still sane. The madness that he had felt back on the planet had been nothing like this. There was a certain safety in madness, and the last thing he felt was safe. Reality seemed to be returning. He waited until the spasm passed, wiped off his face, then tried to stand. His legs felt like rubber, but by concentrating hard, he managed it. Others on the messdeck were emerging from their coffins. To a man, they looked as bad as he felt. Most were verging on green, and most had dark circles under eyes that still stared in horror. It wasn't long, though, before the cursing started. "Shit."

It was Dyrkin, as top man in the pecking order, who led the chorus of complaint.

"I ain't never going to go through that again. They're going to have to burn me first."

"There's got to be some other way."

Renchett, who had recovered faster than most, spat on the deck. "Of course there's a better way. We all know that the officers and medians don't do the jump the hard way. They got something. They got drugs or shielding or implants or something. They don't have to feel it the way we do."

Elmo had come into the messdeck. He looked almost as bad as the men did, but he was doing his best to pull his overman authority back together.

"Curse it up, boys. Get really angry. That's the best way to get over a jump. Anyone in really bad shape?"

Dyrkin scowled. "We're all in really bad shape. What did you expect?"

"Don't get on my ass, Dyrkin. We ail went through the same shit."

"Did we?"

Elmo ignored the challenge. He wasn't in any mood to deal with the age-old bitch that came up with every jump.

"If there are no casualties, you better eat and then get suited up." "What?"

Everyone turned and looked at Renchett. He was a troublemaker and a mess monkey lawyer, but nobody yelled at an overman. His face was a mask of furious outrage.

"What do you mean suit up?"

Elmo was very calm. The aftermath of a jump could also be a potential flashpoint. "Are you talking to me, Renchett?"

"I'm looking at you, ain't I?"

"Under normal circumstances, your mouth would have earned you three days in a pod."

"Under normal circumstances, we'd be getting a down day with all the food and booze we want. After a jump, the messdecks get drunk. That's the rule."

"That's the tradition, and these aren't normal circumstances. We're in an A-plus combat zone, and we got a new intake to bring up to scratch."

"Screw the new meat. Let them take care of themselves. I hurt all over."

"You just ran out of chances, Renchett. One more word and you're in a pod."

Elmo let Renchett glare defiance for a full fifteen seconds, then he gave him a final chance to save face.

"Get your suit on, trooper."

Renchett turned on his heel, ripped his suit from its environment, dumped it on the ground, and trod on it. The suit, as though sensing his anger, hesitated before climbing up his legs.

"Do the rest of you have any objections to climbing into your suits?"

The rest of the twenty turned away. There was some muttering, but they all started hauling out their equipment.

Rance had decided that he wasn't going to go out on the hull for the training sessions. The new men were getting close to being as ready as they would ever be, and the overmen were more than capable of keeping the men ru