WHAM

  WHAM

  WHAM

  “Make it stop!” a marine howled from his cubicle. “Make it stop, anyone!”

  “Take a hit, you idiot. That’s what the slope dope is for. Why don’t you relax some?”

  The other marine wasn’t referring to marijuana but rather to a special cocktail designed to relieve high stress and tension.

  WHAM

  WHAM

  WHAM

  Steele liked to drink whiskey now and again. He didn’t drink much, but he did some. He would have liked several shots about now. Instead, he rummaged around and picked up a hypo stick. He pressed it against his arm, hearing it hiss.

  WHAM

  WHAM

  WHAM

  Steele knew he could get tired of this real quick. He feared for the pusher plate, for all of them. How were the crew and space marines supposed to take this for 1.5 years, for 18 months? This was madness. They would all go mad if this continued for long.

  WHAM

  WHAM

  WHAM

  More marines started shouting. One man wailed in misery.

  “Hey, you morons,” Jones roared. “Take the hit. Dope up for this part. That’s why it’s there. So use it already. I have.”

  Steele could already feel a difference. He breathed more easily and felt some of the tension ooze from his rigid body.

  WHAM

  WHAM

  WHAM

  How fast were they going? How long would this take again?

  Steele smiled. He knew one thing. The George Patton and the other Orion ships were headed for Jupiter. He forgot why at the moment. It would come to him. They couldn’t head straight for Neptune, otherwise the aliens would know, or might figure out the plan. Instead, the Orion ships set out for Jupiter. They were supposed to do something there once they reached the huge gas giant. What was that—?

  WHAM

  WHAM

  WHAM

  Steele blinked, having forgotten what he’d been thinking a moment ago. So far, the George Patton was remaining intact despite nuclear bombs going off every three damn seconds.

  How were the other two Orion ships doing?

  Steele shook his head. They were heading out into deep space, for the Outer Planets, for Neptune of all the godforsaken places to go. Would they reach the blue gas giant?

  That was anyone’s guess. Right now—

  WHAM

  WHAM

  WHAM

  Right now, the George Patton built up velocity fast in order to get there soonest. Or as Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest of the Confederate Army had once said, “Git thar fustest with the mostest.”

  That was exactly what the three Orion ships were trying to do.

  WHAM

  WHAM

  WHAM

  -56-

  PASSING MARS

  NOVEMBER 2062

  Colonel Mike Steele rode a stationary bike, pedaling hard, sweating. There were fifty other space marines pedaling their stationary bicycles in here with dim red lighting glowing down on them.

  The men filled the chamber from one bulkhead to the other, and it reeked horribly of sweat. The moisture exuded by the riders caused high humidity in the chamber. Fans circulated the air while wall receptors collected the moisture, eventually converting it back into water.

  Steele hated drinking the water aboard the George Patton. All the space marines shared this sentiment. It hadn’t been bad at first. The recycled stuff was horrible, though.

  The stationary bikes were critical as they helped the men retain their high stamina. In twenty minutes, they would all dismount and move into the number 4 exercise chamber. There, the men would use springs and pulleys, doing bench presses, squats, military presses and other mainline exercises.

  Prolonged weightlessness stole their muscle mass and bone density—if they would have let it. Thus, the space marines constantly rode the stationary bikes and exercised with springs and pulleys, resistance exercises.

  In this way, the men would be able to sleep better because of bodily exhaustion. They also did zero-G combat training in the largest chamber of the ship. Unfortunately, there had been fights, a few of them turning savage. Some of the squads had been rearranged so those with vicious bad blood would see less of each other.

  Occasionally, during downtimes, teams suited up to either crawl over the Orion ship’s forward hull or float alongside it using tethers. A few times, Steele had each man use a thruster-pack and practice space flight.

  They had lost three men in the first ninety days of flight from Earth. That meant they had lost three fighting spacesuits and thruster packs with the men. Those men had simply tumbled away until they disappeared into the darkness. Probably, they would tumble for hundreds of thousands of years.

  Would it have been better to keep the thruster-packs and fighting suits? Of course, that would have been better. Live training was critical, though, in Steele’s estimation. Marines needed constant training to help them from going stale. The men could over train, too. It was a fine balance in this sort of thing.

  For the first ninety days of the eighteen-month journey, the George Patton with the Georgy Zhukov and the Sun Tzu following in that order headed from Earth toward Jupiter in the far distance.

  The ships hadn’t even reached the Asteroid Belt yet, but Red Mars.

  An alarm rang in the bicycle room.

  “Start powering down,” First Sergeant Jones shouted from his stationary machine.

  The sergeant on his bike looked like a giant riding a Shetland pony, but he rode more than anyone did.

  The alarm meant one more set of detonations for this leg of the journey. These ninety days were the furious part of the mission, the high acceleration. Soon, the nuclear detonations would end and they would begin the 200 days of gliding through velocity alone to reach distant Jupiter.

  For ninety days, the nuclear devices had blasted at intervals, shoving against the pusher plate and building the needed velocity.

  Most of the men had gotten used to the detonations. Five men, most regrettably, had gone mad. It was inhuman and cruel, but they didn’t have any psychologists or psychiatrists aboard the George Patton. The rest of the battalion couldn’t have handled raving lunatics aboard for such an extended period. It might have bred more madness until lunacy ruled aboard the ship. Battalion morale was too important for that.

  The madman now floated in space, mercifully dead, of course.

  Shoving the madmen into space—one head-case at a time—had been the hardest orders Steele had ever given. Because he believed a man should do the hardest jobs himself, he had been there each time, nodding to the selected enforcers. He’d started having nightmares about that, and slept poorly these days. To compensate, he took far too much slope dope. He’d been thinking about trying to go cold turkey and stop using the drug. He hated the idea of being an addict.

  If he had to space any more of his marines, though—

  Steele shook his head as his stomach clenched. Thinking about it wasn’t going to help him. The head-cases were gone. The Third Space Marine Battalion had a mission, maybe the most important mission in the life of the human race.

  “That’s it,” Jones said from his puny stationary bike. “Towel off and leave your towels on the floor.”

  Steele used his towel and wiped the sweat from his face and body. He waited a bit, and did it again. They all did it that way.

  He dropped his towel in a pile in the center of the room and went to the hatch monitor. The marine checked him and let him out.

  The air felt dry in the familiar and narrow corridors. He floated, using side rails to pull himself along. In a moment, he exited another hatch and entered the large acceleration couch area. He floated to Cubicle 52 and twisted around, floating into his private area.

  If a man was lying down, no one else spoke to him. It had become rigid custom aboard the Orion ship’s tight quarters. That allowed them a form of privacy.

  Steele put the restraints over his chest and groin, clicking them into place. He found himself eager to hear the captain’s voice. He’d been right about one thing. Everyone loved listening to her. He could just lie here and listen for hours when she spoke.

  In a way, the Orion ship was like traveling back in time to the early medieval era. Steele had read before that there had been little privacy in those days. The only real way to acquire it was to become an outcast or outlaw in the forest. People had surrounded even the highest nobles and kings most if not all of the time. Most peasant families had one bed in a house. Mom, dad, the kids, all slept in the same bed. When the parents did it, making more kids, the others stayed on the other side of the bed. That sounded horrible.

  Reading that, Steele had never understood how people had kept their sanity in those days. Now, he had a better inkling of how, and that everyone must have been slightly stir crazy at best in the early medieval times.

  There was a click, and Steele shivered with delight. He anticipated—

  “This is your captain speaking.” Her voice radiated from the nearest wall speaker.

  Early on, men had cheered hearing her voice. That had quickly changed. Soon, anyone who spoke or made a loud sound during her talks, ended up facing an angry crowd later, receiving bruises for his rudeness. When the captain spoke, the Third Space Marine Battalion listened with rapt enjoyment.

  Steele found that he couldn’t stop grinning as she spoke. He usually closed his eyes and let his imagination go wild, picturing her in a bikini or some other outrageous outfit. He’d never seen a picture of the real captain. He didn’t need to. Her voice was enough. Often, as she spoke, his mind drifted into outright pornographic images and scenarios.

  It was a sad commentary on them, but this was a sad and frightful world. The men ached for women and talked about women all the time.

  When the captain finished speaking, the latest nuclear device detonated, pushing and nudging the ship. She’d told them each Orion ship needed to be aligned just so. This was the aligning phase of the Jupiter Run.

  Steele frowned as he thought about something she’d said. The captain had told them the Sun Tzu had dropped behind schedule. No one from the Sun Tzu had said why. It probably wasn’t a problem, but she mentioned it so everyone knew the deal.

  Soon, the nuclear devices no longer detonated.

  There were clicks, and the speakers turned back on.

  “That’s it for the next two hundred days, boys,” the captain said. “Enjoy the break and keep on exercising. Everything is still on schedule. That means Earth is getting ready for its next deployment. I’ll keep you in the loop, boys, about the progress of all that. That’s it for now, though.”

  She signed off as the speakers powered down.

  Steele sighed, and he unbuckled, sitting up. Jones sat up beside him in his cubicle. They glanced at each other and quickly looked away.

  “The first part of the journey is over,” Steele said.

  Jones nodded.

  “Are there any problems, Sergeant?”

  “My liver, but that’s it.”

  It was an old joke between them. Steele gave the obligatory laugh. Jones might have smiled, but neither man looked at the other.

  Steele pushed up from his cubicle. He was going to the viewing port to stare at the stars for a time. He would stare and ignore the sounds of men around him. Two hundred days to Jupiter—he wasn’t sure he was going to remain sane that long.

  If he did go mad, would Jones push him out of an airlock? Steele shuddered. He didn’t want to think about it. He wanted to go home, but that wasn’t going to happen for a long time, if ever.

  Steele pulled along a rail. He needed to get to the stars and stare for a while. The confinement in here was beginning to drive him stir crazy.

  How in the hell were they going to get this done? Steele was starting to doubt that it was possible.

  -57-

  MID-WAY TO JUPITER

  MARCH 2063

  The George Patton Orion ship traveled through the void, having passed the Asteroid Belt some time ago. Behind it by half a day were the Georgy Zhukov and then another half-day the Sun Tzu.

  For several months now, savage sparking flared on the Sun Tzu. That happened on schedule. In some respects, it resembled Old Faithful at Yellowstone National Park in Montana, U.S.A.

  On this day in March 2063, the sparking on the Sun Tzu Orion ship grew worse, stopped for a moment and then resumed with increased intensity. That continued for three hours and eighteen minutes. After that, explosions occurred on the Sun Tzu. They were not controlled detonations but massive and horrific nuclear explosions. That increased, and then the entire 100,000-ton Orion ship exploded in a massed detonation.

  Steel, titanium, reactor cores, bomb shrapnel and bio-matter exploded outward in a misty mass. The spreading continued, all that was the left of the mighty Sun Tzu and its contents. The Chinese space marines and crew were all quite dead and gone.

  Soon, alarms rang on the George Patton. This signaled an emergency. None of the men of the Third Space Marine Battalion knew why.

  A half hour later, all the space marines lay in their cubicles, clicked into place.

  Different clicks heralded the speakers turning on.

  “Boys, this is your captain speaking. I’m afraid that I have bad news today. I’m going to tell you in a second. First, I want you all to dope up. I’m asking that as a personal favor to me.”

  “Colonel” Jones called from his cubicle.

  A few angry marines shouted for the first sergeant to shut the hell up so they could hear the captain.

  “Do it,” Steele said.

  The colonel reached into his carrying area and pulled out a dope stick. He really planned to inject himself. He’d gone through withdrawals three months ago and didn’t want to get hooked again. But this sounded ominous. Besides, if the captain wanted it—

  A hard core to the colonel flared into life. Was it anything like what his ancestor had felt in the harsh winter of Russia in 1812-1813, or something like his fighter pilot ancestor had felt before in 1959 while beating the shit out of the cheater with his wife?

  Steele shoved the dope stick back in a side pouch. He was going to do without the cocktail of drugs. If he failed in this, he would fail as he was. It might be harder on him. He might crack, but he was going to face harsh reality as sane as he could manage.

  “Boys,” the captain said over the speakers. “An hour ago, the Sun Tzu underwent a terrible accident. I don’t know any other way to say this. It exploded. It wasn’t enemy action that caused it. I think it was some faulty construction that finally went too far.”

  Silence reigned in the space marine portion of the George Patton Orion ship.

  “I’ve had communications from Director Gray of the WRC,” the captain said. “He says we must continue the mission. The aliens cannot benefit from this. The entire world is counting on the space marines of the George Patton and the Georgy Zhukov. This places an extra burden on you boys, I know. Because I feel as if I personally know each one of you, I took the liberty of telling Director Anwar that the space marines of the George Patton would do it. I know these boys, I said. There isn’t a better group of fighting men anywhere in the Solar System.”

  Steele found himself staring up at the bulkhead. Maybe he should take the dope stick after all. This was horrible news.

  “Listen, boys,” the captain said. “I know you won’t let me down. I know I’m going to fly down the enemy’s throat and place you marines in exactly the right spot. You are going to win, isn’t that right?”

  Dull silence greeted the captain’s words.

  There was a click, click, and another click. The captain came back on. Why had she gone off for a second? “I know this is hard to hear, but we can do it,” she said.

  Steele cleared his throat. Without sitting up, he said, “We’ll do this, Captain. We’re the Fighting Third Space Marine Battalion.”

  “Hell yeah,” First Sergeant Jones said. “We’re going to kick some alien ass, and we’re going to twist off their alien heads and piss down their throats. I can hardly wait to do it.”

  More silence reigned in the cubicle chamber of the Orion ship.

  “Thank you, Captain,” Steele said loudly. “The Fighting Third Space Marine Battalion hears you loud and clear. We’re going to finish what we started because otherwise the human race dies to these alien invaders.”

  “Is that right, boys?” the captain asked. “Are you going to twist off their alien heads?”

  A few marines cried out in hoarse voices.

  “Give us time, Captain,” Steele said. “We need to come to terms with the news.”

  “Very well, Colonel,” she said. “I’m signing off for now, boys. We’re going to do it. You can count on that.”

  There were clicks, and her voice dissipated.

  Steele clicked off the restraints and pushed off his cubicle. “This is war,” he said loudly, floating in the air. “Shit happens. Okay? We already knew that. Losing the Sun Tzu will make it harder, but what the hell, we’ve faced horrible odds before. I want you with me, but you can ride this one out if you want. I don’t think you will ride it out. But take some time. Think it over. We’re here. We might as well finish this and secure our Earth’s right to exist.”

  Steele found that his mouth was bone dry. He pushed away, heading for the galley. He needed a drink. Then he planned to ride his stationary bike until exhaustion.

  Damn, the Sun Tzu had exploded because of shoddy workmanship. Maybe that was the price for getting these two Orion ships heading to Jupiter. It was still a long way to go, a lonely mission—

  Steele shook his head. He didn’t want to think about it anymore. He just wanted to pedal himself into forgetfulness.

  One thing he knew was this. If he ever returned to Earth, he was going to have himself a weeklong drunk and then some. But until then, he was going to hold it together because that was what his ancestors had done when it was their turn. Now, it was his turn.

  -58-

  HIMALAYAN MOUNTAINS

  MAY 2063

  Manfred A.S. Huber—aka Rumpelstiltskin—hurried after James Petty, using his stumpy legs to try to keep up with the big man’s long strides.