THEIR MASTER

"I hear they're making it from fungus and defoliant." "It tastes like it."

Hark passed the flask back, and Dyrkin took a second swig. For a while they sat in silence, then Dyrkin passed the flask again.

"You know something?"

Hark shuddered again. "What?"

"You've come a long way since that first day on the messdeck when I beat you up."

"I guess I have." Hark thought for a moment. "I've wondered about that. How come you picked on me?"

"I always have to beat up one of a new intake. It's part of the system. It's called imprinting."

"But why me?"

"You looked like you could take it." Hark laughed. It wasn't something that he did particularly often.

"There's plenty of taking it in this game." "That's all there is."

The two men sat in silence again, just drinking and staring into the night. Finally Dyrkin coughed.

"You still seem pretty good at taking it."

"Don't have too much choice."

Hark found that he was copying the topgun's slow, economical speech pattern. Dyrkin didn't show that he noticed.

"You don't even seem to be letting Elmo get to you." "If you want my opinion," Hark said, "I think he's going to kill us all."

"And it don't bother you."

"Sure it bothers me. It bothers me a lot, but since there ain't a forsaken thing that I can do about it, I try not to let him stress me out."

"Back when I was new on the Hyma /, the old-timers used to talk about what they called learning the calm. I guess that's what you've done. Learned the calm. Only you call it not letting it stress you out."

Hark didn't say anything. Dyrkin had to be leading up to something even if he was taking his sweet time getting to it. Dyrkin looked up at the sky and then directly at Hark.

"We may need a whole lot of calm pretty soon." "You figure it's going to be hairy tomorrow?" "I not only figure it's going to be hairy tomorrow, but I also didn't like those bodies today. They could be the start of something new and bad." Dyrkin paused. "That's not all, though."

"I kind of thought it wasn't."

"If something has to be done about Elmo, we're going to need all the calm we can get."

"Are you telling me something?"

Dyrkin looked Hark straight in the eye. "Just making an observation."

He rubbed the steel prosthesis between his hand and elbow.

"Still have feeling in the damn thing after all this time." He stood up. "I'm going to get some sleep. Like I said, I have a feeling it's going to be hairy tomorrow."

As Dyrkin walked away, Hark was grateful for the alcohol that was warming his system. There was a chill coming down.

Thirteen

The Yal forces hit them well before the sun was due up. The first sign of attack was a glowing green energy cloud that rose at the head of the valley and then drifted slowly downriver. Its appearance threw the base into alarm and quite a degree of panic. When it sank to the ground, it would vaporize anything beneath it-and it was coming straight at the base. Some men ran to their battle stations, and others just ran. Still more merely stood and stored at the deadly cloud as if mesmerized by it. Inside the domes and the foxholes, men were struggling into their equipment. Anti-Air Defense was hastily readied. Noncoms bellowed and screamed at their twenties. A handful of recruits threw themselves flat, trying to dig down into the burned earth. Everyone who had a helmet on was deafened by a cacophony of cross-communication and the roaring static that was generated by the approaching cloud. A number of gunsaucers were burning fuel, warming up prior to lifting.

The AADs opened up, splitting the sky with violet streaks of fire. The dynes were also coming alive. Their eyes glowed as they powered up their weapon systems. The cloud was getting close. The dynes also started fir- ing. Multiple energy flares flashed from their eyes and ripped into the cloud. It seemed to slow as every heavy weapon on the base poured fire into it. A ragged cheer from the men followed a series of explosions inside the cloud. It started to fragment. Portions of it sank down into jungle that was immediately consumed by blinding white light. Other parts touched down on the surface of the river and were transformed into roaring gushers of j superheated steam.

The outpouring of fire from the base wasn't, however, completely effective. A small green fireball from the heart of the cloud, probably the fragment that contained the motivator, plunged on, losing height but making directly for the base. It hit at the very edge of the perimeter, and the white fire blossomed upward. Men on the extreme margins of the blast staggered away screaming, their backpods melting and their bodies trailing clouds of smoke from their charred suits. Others were blown apart when the energy packs on their MEWs exploded. A squad of nohans were cooked inside their armor. First one and then two more gunsaucers blew up where they stood. One managed to get into the air before the fireball hit, but the shock wave caught it and flipped it over. It crashed into the jungle and started a fire of its own.

The white fire on the perimeter seemed to have been the signal for the chibas. They came in their thousands, wailing the nerve-jangling chorus of high electric trills that always accompanied their mass attacks. Their losses were horrendous. Without hesitation, the first wave plunged straight into the mines, the wire, and the fixed line autos. They were mown down in their hundreds. Some lost limbs to the wire and continued to drag themselves forward, firing as they went. When they finally failed, the ones behind charged straight over them. The chiba bodies were piled up so high in front of the buffer fields that they simply shorted out and collapsed. There was no instinct of self-preservation in the goop that passed as chibas' brains, just a relentless, almost mind-lass hostility that kept them coming and coming, breaking out through the fungus, pounding across the open pace beyond the perimeter with their strange mechanil run and then hurling themselves into the defenses. I hey must have been massing under cover of the jungle all through the night. The longtimers couldn't believe that there hadn't been patrols sent out. Were the medians really that confident? Not that the longtimers, or uny of the other troopers, had much time to ponder tactics. To the last man, they had their hands full holding hack the onrushing lines of chibas. Even the cookhouse help and the walking wounded found themselves with weapons in their hands, formed into makeshift combat teams and pushed into foxholes. Their only hope of saving their lives was to keep up a withering stream of fire until their weapons threatened to melt.

The hot spot was where the energy fragment had burned a gaping hole in the set-piece defenses. The chibas had moved directly up to the still blazing fires. Briefly, they'd halted. Specialists had come forward, spraying the molten ground with liquid nitrogen until all fires had gone and it was black slag covered with a thick layer of frost. The defenders had picked off dozens of them, but the enemy seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of every variety of chiba.

"Where the hell did they get these numbers?"

"And how did they assemble them without us hearing them?"

"The bastards can be quiet as the grave when they want to be."

As the first horde of chibas came streaming through the gap, Rance had led his twenties in a fast flanking movement against them. It wasn't that he had any desire to be a hero, but he was in the right place and the break- through had to be halted. If the chibas weren't stopped, they'd be all over the interior of the base, and everyone in it would be cut to pieces. He knew how deadly a chiba horde could be when it got in among a disorganized and uncoordinated enemy. His first objective was a system of shallow trenches on the right of the gap. There was no one in them, their original occupants having burned, but they had remained largely intact. They were an ideal position from which to direct fire at the chibas coming through the gap. There was one snag. Between his men and the trenches, there was an open expanse of bare ground that was being raked by a PBA that the chibas had brought in with them. He could make it to the trenches okay, but he'd certainly lose up to a third of his men in the process. That was hardly the object of the exercise. He looked wildly around for another solution. The big planet was setting and soon the sun would be coming up, but for the moment, it was getting darker. The irregular green flashes from the PBA and the multicolors of the scattered return fire seemed doubly bright. He spotted a crawler some distance behind them, maneuvering aimlessly. He prayed that his communicator could cut through all the conflicting noises.