THEIR MASTER

"Stand right where you are! You don't have to run away from me. You're going to grow to love me before we're through. And while we're at it, why don't we lower those stupid hands. We don't want to look foolish, do we?"

The hands dropped. Rance gave a satisfied nod. He walked forward and indicated a white line that had been painted across the floor of the hold.

"This is very simple. You will all move up to this line here. You will all face in this direction, and you will stand with your toes touching the line. And when I say touching, I mean touching. I want the toes of both your feet exactly on the line. Not behind it and not in front of it. Now, move!"

They jumped. Rance was reasonably pleased. It shouldn't take too long to shake this bunch into combat readiness. Rance walked slowly along the line with deliberate steps, his boots ringing on the floor. In every way he was the complete opposite of the dazed naked men in his charge. His black suit was glossy, his harness gleamed, and the steel tips of his boots were buffed until they shone like mirrors. In his twenty years of fighting for the Therem, the life of a ground trooper had thrown everything at him that it was possible to take and still survive. His eyes were hard, narrow slits with deeply etched, humorless lines radiating from their corners. His mouth was a tight-lipped line with few signs that it ever let go and laughed. His hair was cropped short in the style of the longtimers and was rapidly turning to an iron-gray. A network of scars ran from his right ear to the point of his jaw and bore testimony to the ravages of the unending war.

"You are all very confused now, but the confusion will not last. You have been recruited as ground troopers attached to the fifth ship of the Anah battle cluster of the Therem Alliance. You are already twelve licks out from your home planet, and you will never see it again. In our language, the enemy we fight is called the Yal. It's doubtful that you will ever come face to face with them. The war in which you are now involved is almost completely fought by proxies. We are some of theiii. All the information that you need to make the adjustments to your new situation has already been placed in your memories. You simply have to accept it and make use of it. Once you do that, your confusion will diminish."

One man's toes protruded over the white line. Rance paused beside him and brought his steel-shod boot down hard on them. The recruit screamed and fell to his knees. This one would have to be put in for reexamination.

"On your feet, damn you!"

The man struggled painfully to stand. It was likely that at least one of his toes was broken; Rance had stamped on them with considerable force. It wasn't that Rance was a sadist. It was that he simply didn't have the time anymore. If the individual trooper was going to survive, if the squad was going to survive, indeed, if the whole damned army was going to survive, orders had to be obeyed immediately and precisely. Approximation could mean death or worse. There had been a time when Rance had questioned, when he'd even railed against the system by which the Therem held them all in total bondage. Now he neither raged nor wanted to know why. There was no percentage. He just lived. In a war without reasons or answers or even passion, and certainly without an end, survival became everything. Rebellion had been replaced by a dry bitterness.

"You may be wondering why you should have been snatched up into space from your idyllic and primitive little planet by what you thought of as a god and pressed into service in a war you never heard of. You may feel that it's extremely unfair." Rance looked coldly up and down the line of men. "From this point on you can forget about fair. This is a vastly unfair universe. The best you can expect is a good deal of variety."

Static arced with a sharp whipcrack. The intake jerked. Rance didn't even look around. They were starting to settle down. The sooner the better, as far as he was concerned. His sense of order was offended by their stumbling around like zombies after the trauma of pickup and datashot. He took these details only because pickups were ten times worse. Rance always did his best to avoid pickups, fixing it so that he could stay on the mothership, up in the cluster. Pickups could become messy. Even with the mind control cranked to redline, the primitives could still serk out and cause a great deal more trouble than they were worth. He'd heard that this lot's culture had been based on a symbiosis with some kind of riding lizard. Animals could also be a problem. Apparently a number of these couldn't be driven off after their riders had been taken, and were pulped by the backwash as the pickup shuttle lifted.

It was the eyes that he had to watch. When they came out of the sterile area, their eyes were like those of children, wide and frightened, unmarked and unknowing. It was all too easy to forget the bodies of these men. They were sinewy and lean, hardened by deprivation, some bore the scars of knives or the goring of animals. These men were hunters and fighters. They were able to adjust to the situation and their new, imposed memories with great rapidity. Sometimes the adjustment could be so rapid that more than one topman had lost his life when a recruit used his new skills and knowledge in an attempt at an old-fashioned, take-a-few-with-him kamikaze.

"You may wonder why a species like the Therem should bother with primitives like yourself. The truth of the matter is that our masters find us valuable weapons. And make no mistake, the Therem are precisely that. Now and again, you may hear them referred to as our allies. That's shit. They own us. We're clever violent little monkeys, and we make great planetside shock troops. Why do you think that they'd go to all the trouble of maintaining an accessible supply of us close to all combat sectors? Somewhere in your brand-new memories, you'll find the phrase 'planet forming.' There are hundreds of worlds just like yours, pla

Rance halted. He looked up and down the line of men.

"You have been harvested. You're battle fodder, and you might as well make the best of it."

Rance noticed that two of the intake seemed to be shaking down. Their eyes were starting to harden and focus. It was time to get them under his control before they got ideas of their own. He stood in front of the nearest one, a young man of medium height, in his late teens or early twenties, with the high forehead and the hooked bird of prey nose that seemed to be common to this colony. He looked capable enough, and recent extensive bruising on his left shoulder tended to indicate that he was a fighter.

"You know your name yet?"

The recruit's lips moved awkwardly. "Umm…"

"Come on, boy. You know your name. You can do it."

"Hark…"

"One more time."

"Hark. My… name… is… Hark." "Very good."

Hark knew that they'd somehow changed his name. They'd also changed his language. The new unfamiliar words felt strange, harsh even, in his mouth, but at least the panic had receded a little. He felt more able to control it. He didn't understand where he was or what was happening, but he found that if he concentrated on an object, the new parts of his mind would tell him what it was and what it was for. When the images had first come, immediately after the pain, they had been so vast that he had felt they were going to swallow him. His identity was diminished almost to nothing. The only consolation was that he could ask questions of the new mind and, at least, he was Hark. There was a number, as well.

"I'm Hark 34103-301782."

"Very good, but don't overreach yourself."