“Where are we going to stand?” Harris asked me.

  I pointed up to the roof. In the corners—there were really three corners, because the prow came to a blunt point—were cupolas. “I’m going up there.”

  Harris gave a nasty chuckle. “This is gonna be great! I already feel like Graves, sitting back and sipping a cold one while the men beat each other’s brains out down here in the pit.”

  As the hold had been set to about half-gravity, we were able to jump and climb into our safe zones. Sitting up there, I felt kind of dirty. The troops were going to suffer and possibly die while I watched, and there wasn’t anything I could do for them. Normally, I was personally involved in these conflicts, but today there just wasn’t room for that many people.

  Amid shouted threats and boasts, the flags stood tall, and the two sides faced off. We made them start with at least one heel backed up against the wall. They leaned forward like track stars on their marks. They were both gearing up to race in and grab those central flags first.

  Standing up, I waved to Harris. He was tucked into the forward pocket in the prow of the ship. He waved back and nodded. His side was good to go.

  “Troops!” I boomed. “It’s time to capture those flags! Go-Go-Go!”

  With a roar, the two sides rushed toward each other.

  -20-

  Sargon led his troops, front-lining it all the way. That made me proud. He wasn’t a coward. He was all-in. The kind of leader that inspired men in battle.

  Moller, on the other hand, was in the middle of her troops, shouting encouragement as they advanced. Rather than charging headlong, she led her troops at a trot. They were bunched up and almost in formation.

  The two sides met on the hill of the fourth flag. Sargon’s rush had caused him to grab three on the way. The fourth one was really in Moller’s territory—but it was going to be a fight.

  At the crest of a jangled pile of junk covered in cloth, the footing was treacherous. Sargon met the gorilla-armed man—Moller’s first pick. The two exchanged a few feints, then both landed a blow. The long-armed galoot struck Sargon’s kidney, it looked like, and a blue-white flash lit up the field.

  In the meantime, Sargon had ducked and struck low, going for the knees. His ape-armed opponent went down, shrieking and rolling to the bottom of that jagged pile of junk. Each tumbling spin was a world of hurt, I could tell. By the time he reached the bottom, he was struggling just to get to his knees again.

  Sargon plucked the fourth flag and stood triumphant on the top of the junk pile. He held the flag in one hand and his shock-rod in the other. If his kidney pained him, you wouldn’t have known it by watching. He was like a king over a domain populated by pygmies. Anyone who dared get close was jabbed with the shaft of the flag, or caught by a glittering sweep of the shock-rod.

  All around this center point of the battle the two sides clashed. Most of the struggles were on the slopes of Sargon’s hill. Some had flags in their hands, picked up from the hills they’d passed over.

  Right then, I realized the exercise wasn’t quite going as planned. My tapper buzzed—it was Harris.

  “Your men are carrying their flags and using them to whack people!” he complained.

  “Your guys are doing the same. No one told them they couldn’t!”

  “You coached Sargon to play it like this, didn’t you?” Harris complained. “Always with the cheating and scheming. You never change, McGill.”

  Fuming, he disconnected. I shrugged. I hadn’t told Sargon to do anything. In fact, I’d made up the rules on the spot. He’d done this on his own, and he’d eliminated the problem of uneven hill distribution. His side had simply run faster. By doing so, they already had a four-to-two advantage in flags.

  Unfortunately, I could see that the strain was beginning to show on Sargon. He’d taken that blow to the back, after all, which seemed to be causing him trouble. Having been shocked by rods like this any number of times, I knew that they didn’t feel good at first kiss, and it only got worse from there as your numbness and loss of muscle control spread.

  After five minutes or so, half the troops were down. Many were rolled up into a painful ball. The rest staggered from shocks and injuries, shouting hoarsely and struggling to battle their opponents. The shock-rods were designed to weaken and exhaust people. The toll was mounting up fast.

  Then, Sargon went down. Moller and two of her best recruits had rushed him from multiple sides, transforming his king of the hill dominance from an advantage to a trap. He couldn’t defend himself from toe-taps and darting jabs to the legs. His own troops had been pushed back, having acted too independently from the beginning.

  When he fell, I stood up and ordered a halt to the contest. “It’s over. Moller’s squad wins!”

  “Say what?” Harris demanded, standing in his own cupola on the opposite side of the chamber. “Centurion, you’ve got to let them finish! Let her team give Sargon’s men a good old-fashioned beat-down!”

  Harris had a point. In any normal Legion Varus training, there was no mercy shown by either side. The belief was suffering hardened the troops for the future. After all, aliens weren’t known for their kindness and warm consideration.

  But I had other plans, so I shook my head. “I don’t want them too banged up. We’ll repeat this exercise tomorrow—and the next day. Two out of three will determine the winner.”

  “Holy…” Harris said, and I heard him cursing, but I ignored it.

  Sure, I’d changed the rules. Harris would say it was like a kid who’d lost at a game declaring two out of three to be the new standard for victory.

  But it was more than that. In reality, the whole fight hadn’t lasted long enough. They’d barely gotten warmed up. I planned to have several events over several days, and I wanted all the recruits to be able to participate.

  Far from relief, there were a lot of groans among the men. They separated with glowering looks and limped off the field of honor. Shock-rods fizzled and died as they were switched off.

  Harris came to complain to me in private later, as I’d known he would.

  “That was low, McGill. Even for you, sir.”

  “It just didn’t take long enough,” I told him. “We can’t have one fifteen minute fight and call that a training.”

  He eyed me with vast distrust. In battle, I knew he could follow orders and believe in my leadership. But when it came down to games like this, he always suspected I had the worst of motives.

  “As you say, Centurion. It’s your game, sir.”

  Muttering, he stalked away. I left the exercise deck, such as it was, and went to our assigned balloon-like module.

  The sleeping arrangements were the worst I’d seen since Machine World, where we’d all huddled in freezing, stinking tents. This was similar, but at least there was no icy breeze cutting through the middle of it.

  Overhead, a rippling dome of white fabric shifted and glimmered. It was lead-impregnated and all, but I didn’t think it was too safe. I mean, sure, we were traveling inside a warp bubble that supposedly nothing could penetrate, but it still felt like we were flying through interstellar space inside a plastic bubble.

  “This is bullshit, Centurion,” Carlos told me for what had to be the thousandth time since we’d left Earth. “We’re all getting an illegally high dose of rads every day.”

  Now, Carlos was a complainer and loudmouth, but he was also my unit’s bio specialist. That made him harder to ignore than usual in this case.

  “What am I supposed to do about it?” I asked him. “You want to sleep in the hold next to the warheads? Or maybe inside the exhaust ports? They aren’t being used right now.”

  Carlos only half-listened to me. He was looking up, eyeing the not so distant ceiling which rippled and shivered.

  “It’s like being inside a big bladder,” he said. “A rubbery, shivery bladder that needs to be emptied.”

  I laughed. “You always were full of piss-and-vinegar!”

  He didn’t laugh. He stared at me instead. “You know why they think they can get away with this, don’t you? Dosing us up with rads? Because they don’t expect us to live long, that’s why. When this campaign is over, they’ll ditch us on whatever craptastic excuse for a planet we’re fighting over. When they’re sure we’re all dead they’ll make new copies back home.”

  Pursing my lips thoughtfully, I nodded. “Sounds about right.”

  I scratched my cheek. Talk of radiation always seemed to make my skin itch.

  Carlos watched the dome overhead. “It’s been shivering more than usual. Maybe it’s the souls of all those poor bastards who died of heart attacks on your field of honor today.”

  “Come on. Most of the boys lived. We had only three deaths.”

  The rubbery roof of our bubble shivered again. A bigger ripple went through it—it was almost like it had folded over on itself like a luffing sail.

  “Did you see that?” Carlos demanded, pointing. “Did you see that shit? Tell me you saw that, McGill!”

  “Huh…” I gazed up and frowned. That last shiver—it had been something new and alarming. After a weeklong voyage, I’d gotten kind of used to our minimal quarters, but this…

  A klaxon sounded a few moments later, making us both jump half out of our skins.

  “Emergency procedures initiated. All personnel must follow their required paths. All personnel…”

  The computer voice repeated itself, and the floor lit up. Dark red arrows stood out on the deck under our boots. That was our color, because we were combat troops. Following the path at a trot, we were quickly joined by a hundred others.

  We jammed up at the emergency exit, which amounted to a hatch in the deck. Have you ever tried to get a hundred panicked people through a one-meter hole in the floor? It wasn’t pretty.

  “One at time!” I roared. “Moller, supervise the escape!”

  “Sir!” Moller started grabbing each escaping soldier with her fat hands, then she rammed them into the hole as soon as there was room below.

  “You realize that hatch is really an external exit from the hull,” Carlos said. “We’ve been living in a bubble on the outside of Berlin.”

  “I sure do. So what?”

  “There’s absolutely no way we can all fit inside this battlecruiser. If we’re out here for another minute longer, they’re going to close that hatch and let us die.”

  Thinking about that for a second, I couldn’t find a flaw in his logic. “You’re probably right.”

  -21-

  When about half the troops were down the escape hatch, Carlos’ prediction came true. The hatch abruptly closed, snicking shut from the side like a cigar cutter. One man was shorn in half, and another lost a hand at the wrist.

  Carlos and I were still standing around on the outer hull at that point. We had fifty-odd people with us. One of them was Moller.

  “Centurion,” she said without a quaver in her voice. “The ship’s full-up.”

  I nodded. “I figured.”

  “That’s all you’re going to say?” Carlos demanded while he patched up the man with the missing hand. The injured recruit was howling something awful, so I squelched his mic with my HUD controls.

  “Don’t go and piss yourself,” I told Carlos. “We’re either screwed, or we aren’t. Not much we can do about it at this point.”

  Life in the legions was often glorified by the press. When actors pretended to be one of our kind in a feelie, they especially liked to romanticize space travel.

  The truth was, grunts like us hated being aboard ship. When a foot soldier was inside any warship, even a big bastard like this one, you were canned meat. You couldn’t do much to defend yourself, and you were just cargo in the eyes of the crew.

  That’s what we were: irritating, stinking cargo that fussed and ate too much.

  “Okay,” I said, looking over the group. “Sargon’s team made it down—very genteel of you, Moller—and so did all my officers. We’ll form up two platoons, Moller you take your people. I’ll take the rest.”

  She organized the troops while Carlos left the one-handed guy behind after giving him a speech about being a “big boy”. He soon came and stood at my side again.

  “What are we going to do?” he asked.

  “We’ll gear-up on the off-chance we can be useful. In the meantime, are there any techs left?”

  Natasha had escaped, but Kivi was still on hand. I told her what I wanted, and she went to work on it right away. “I can do that,” she said. “Natasha isn’t the only hacker on this ship.”

  Nodding, I let her try to get into the network and synch with Berlin’s bridge channel. These days, the crew operated on different channels than the legion they were carrying. It sort of made sense.

  While in space, Berlin’s captain was in charge of the mission. When we landed, however, the Varus tribune would take over. That was made abundantly clear to Turov after certain misunderstandings occurred during the Clone World Campaign.

  The long and the short of it was that Kivi had to hack into the crew’s command channels in order to find out what was happening to the ship. The Varus command chain had been cut out and separated.

  “Everyone shut up!” she said, closing her eyes so she could focus. “I’m getting lots of chatter… There’s been some kind of accident.”

  “Like hell there has,” I said. “Sabotage more like—or an attack.”

  She put a hand up in my face. I shut up sourly. I knew she was listening to a lot of channels and voices at once, all mixed together, and probably without the best sound quality.

  “I don’t know…” she said at last, putting down her ear piece. “Something happened to the generators. The power from the main banks has gone down. We’ve still got

  batteries and emergency backups, but it’s not enough to fight with if we had to fight right now.”

  “Seriously?” Carlos demanded from behind me. “Why the hell would that make them order everyone to get below decks?”

  I turned around to face him. He’d snuck up on us. I would have chased him off if I’d seen he was listening in.

  “Some fuck-tard tripped on a cord!” he shouted over his shoulder to the others. Then he turned back to us. “I was shitting myself. I owe the guy who did this a—”

  “I’m going to give you a swift kick in the pants if you don’t shut up,” I told him.

  Knowing I was serious, he walked away muttering.

  “Is he right?” I asked Kivi. “Is this all just precautionary?”

  She was listening in again, eyes clenched. “Carlos is an idiot… but he would be right, except…” She opened her eyes looked up at me in sudden alarm. “James, the warp bubble—we’re losing power. They’re going to shut it down!”

  Her eyes were full of fright, but I didn’t get it.

  “Yeah, so? We’ll go back to normal space right? Is that the worst case?”

  “You don’t understand. We’re standing inside a warp bubble. Only a thin lead-impregnated sheet exists between us and that bubble. If they don’t shut down properly, if it dies with an unstable glitch—we’ll be fried out here by a wave of electromagnetic radiation.”

  She looked around at the shivering bladder thing. I did the same.

  I finally got it. The Alcubierre warp drive had been only theory a century ago, but it was a reality in modern times. The trick had always been in turning on and off the drive without destroying the ship or irradiating it with so many rads everyone inside died.

  The start-up and shutdown were the dangerous parts—just like the takeoff and landing of an aircraft, only worse. The field had to be brought up and maintained in the space around the ship, forming a bubble in which everything seemed relatively stable. Outside of it, of course, space was whizzing by faster than the speed of light.

  “Uh…” I said, looking at the shivering rubber ceiling with growing alarm. “Maybe we should find shelter after all.”

  “There’s no point,” Kivi said, shrugging. “If this goes badly, they’ll know we were all fried. That’s good enough. At least we won’t be permed.”

  I frowned fiercely. I would normally get drunk or something. I even kept a squeeze bottle in my private sleeping box for that express purpose. I briefly considered asking Kivi to join me in there. We’d had a thing for each other years back.

  But it seemed wrong to be pondering ways to go out with a smile. Not yet, anyway.

  “There’s something strange about this accident,” I said aloud. “In fact, I don’t think it was an accident at all. “Why not?”

  “Because you said all the generators failed. What are the odds of that? All of them dying on us—all at once?”

  She stared at me and nodded. “It is strange. They are built to back each other up.”

  “It could be nine kinds of a coincidence—but I don’t believe in crap like that.”

  She shrugged helplessly. “What can we do about it?”

  I pointed at the closed and sealed hatch in the deck. “That’s just an external hatch, like Carlos said.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Let’s find another one.”

  Kivi looked startled. “Outside, you mean? Outside our protective bubble?”

  I laughed and hopped up high enough to punch the bubble. It wobbled and shimmied more than before. “It’s not protecting anyone today.”

  “Don’t do that, you crazy fuck! You’ll rip it!”

  Nodding, I flipped out my combat knife. The diamond edge glittered.

  “Oh yeah…” Carlos said, walking up to us again. He’d been malingering not far off. I had to give him a pass on that, however, as the bubble wasn’t really big enough for anyone to be alone.

  “This is what I expected,” he said with a sad shake of the head. “Mayhem and death.”

  I looked at him. “I’m going outside to look for another exit. Are you game to come with me?”

  “You know I am, big guy. We’re as good as cooked anyway.”

  “You two are ditching me?” Kivi complained.

  “Three’s a crowd,” Carlos told her.

  Before she could launch into an angry tirade, I put up a cautionary glove. “We’re probably all dead no matter what we do. There’s a chance you’ll hear something useful from the bridge crew—or they might even open the hatch to let a few more in.”