The squad had been lying in the woods, waiting. Then the word came and they got to their feet, Tain Faronya with them, and began trotting easily. She was as tall as several of them, her legs as long, and her pack much lighter. Her helmet camera was light too, its focus following the direction she was looking, its pictures approximating closely what she saw in the square on her visor. She was well-drilled in its use; her head movements showed it.
Through the trees she could see the opening where they were to show themselves. Though why they'd do that she didn't know, except that Brossling had ordered it; Brossling, the teenaged battalion commander. She'd heard it on her radio, through the descrambler she'd been issued. Now it was time. Someone in some other unit had reported an enemy gunship headed this way.
It seemed crazy to her, even if the gunship would be firing blanks. It made no sense to do things in maneuvers that you wouldn't do in combat, and ordinarily they'd been keeping carefully to cover thick enough to hide them from aerial observation. Now they were supposed to show themselves to a gunship!
In half a minute they were trotting down a short mild slope and into the opening. It was a wet meadow, about a hundred yards across, she decided, seemingly boggy near the middle. Quickly the ground turned springy underfoot—a little strange to run on. Someone called out and she looked around, saw the silent gunship overflying one end of the meadow, and ran faster. It swung their way. The trainees had begun to sprint, dispersing, and runner though she'd been, fit and lightly laden though she was, she fell behind. She heard the floater's heavy blast hoses, a sound shocking and harsh, making her heart speed wildly, and her legs. Her feet encountered bog, splashed water and muck; one foot hit a soft spot and she fell heavily, jarringly headlong.
Prone, she saw a trainee, Venerbos, with a rocket launcher at his shoulder. The sound of it was lost beneath the coarse frenzied roar of hoses firing out of synch, but she saw the flash when the rocket was fired. It startled her; the rocket was real! Which reminded her that the blast hoses were firing blanks. Abruptly they stopped firing, and the floater, rising, swung away and left. She got to her feet and jogged into the woods, reflexively wiping wet hands on wet shirt.
Her radio was tuned just now to F Company, to which this squad belonged. She could hear Third Platoon's two umpires talking to Mollary, the squad leader, and wondered how many casualties they'd charge them with—how they'd decide. They hadn't been with the squad. The decision would have to be arbitrary, which irritated her, but she supposed there was no alternative.
And there'd been a real rocket, which apparently had hit the gunship!
Several minutes later the umpires arrived, a big-framed T'swa corporal and a lanky army lieutenant. Tain wondered how they worked together, with such disparate ranks. Ground rules, she supposed, but even so . . . They painted each casualty with a red substance, sleeves, helmet, and face. Red for blood, but this blood would wash off and leave no scars. Both sleeves and both sides of the face meant dead; one sleeve and one side, wounded and unable to continue. There were no other casualty categories from this encounter. The squad had been "destroyed": seven dead, one WOA—wounded, out of action. Heavy blast slugs rarely produced light wounds.
"What about her?" the lieutenant said, looking at Tain. "Should she get off free?"
"She is not part of the maneuvers," the T'swi answered, then spoke to her. "Would you like to be a casualty?"
She stared at him, not sure what he was suggesting.
"It would have no practical significance," he added. "You would be free to continue. But if it would make you feel more a part of it . . ."
Part of it! She shook her head. Through her earplug she heard Third Platoon's leader telling the two able-bodied survivors to join the platoon when the umpires released them. The umpires in turn told the unwounded they could leave when ready. Venerbos said he'd stay to give aid to the wounded man, and catch them later.
Tain stared, hardly believing, feeling the growth of anger. They'd abandon their wounded as well as their dead! The other unwounded trainee was already trotting off through the trees, not crossing the meadow again. It was the T'swa corporal who answered her unspoken accusation, his large dark eyes holding hers.
"The regiment is in enemy territory," he said, "isolated, on the move, without means of evacuation. That is the predicated situation of this exercise.
"The casualties will, of course, be picked up by a floater, but not as a combat evacuation of dead and wounded. Simply because they're done with this exercise. They are out of the game now."
Then, without saying more, he trotted off with his army counterpart.
Out of the game now? What kind of game was this, where men practiced being killed and wounded? What kind of people were these? She wanted to ask the umpires that, the T'swi, actually. But somehow, just now, she didn't have the will to follow them. Instead she went over and squatted down to watch Venerbos treat the "wounded" man. As if the wound were real. He'd already cut away a trouser leg, applied a tourniquet around the thigh, sprayed something on a hairy calf. He'd even snugged up the tourniquet.
"You fired a rocket!" she said.
Venerbos answered without turning to her, continuing to bandage. "Right. Scored, too. If that had been a live round, I'd probably have crippled the bugger, at least. The umpires on board must have agreed with me; anyway it quit shooting and left."
So the rocket had been an uncharged round, hitting without explosion. "Could it have damaged the floater?" she asked.
"Naw. These practice rounds are dummies and collapse on impact. It left a patch of orange though, to show where it hit. When the floater gets back to base, the umpires can decide whether it's a kill or not."
A kill.
She'd come to Blue Forest guardedly pleased at the assignment. It had sounded potentially interesting, and it could help build her career. For five days she'd mixed with the young men—more than kids despite their youth. Watched them train, hiked with them, even ran with them, though she'd run without pack or weapon. Had been awed at their fitness, and gained their respect, it seemed to her, by her ability and willingness to keep up.
Now her enthusiasm was gone. Entirely. This war game with the army's 8th Heavy Infantry Brigade was real enough that she suddenly realized what the regiment was all about. Its function wasn't hypothetical anymore, was no longer something less than real. It was the gunship attack that had done it, made her see it—that and the umpires painting the casualties. She'd heard shooting off and on all day. Once, quite a ways off, it had been heavy, insistent, tapering off only after half an hour or so. But this— This had been immediate and personal.
From Blue Forest, the regiment would go to Backbreak and train for a year in its jungle, probably its tundra-prairie too, and maybe its cold rainforest, in a gravity of 1.19 gees. After Backbreak there'd be a year on Tyss, with its terrible heat and its 1.22 gees. Then they'd go to some trade world or resource world, to die in a war that was meaningless, or get limbs torn off.
She'd thought about going to Backbreak with them for a few weeks, had planned to talk to Colonel Voker about it. Now, suddenly, the attraction had died of acute reality.
She squatted, attention obscured by her thoughts, then realized that Venerbos, his bandaging done, was reassembling his aid kit.
"And now we wait," she said.
"Not him. Us." It was Mollary who answered. "Dead" Mollary. "You can go with him or stay here with us casualties."
She sat groping for what she wanted to say, how she wanted to say it. "And if this had been real," she pronounced slowly, "real bullets, some of you'd be really dead by now!"
"Right. Maybe all of us." Mollary looked at her without his usual grin. Not, she thought, because the enormity of it had gotten through to him. It hadn't; she was somehow sure of that. But because he read her mood and realized that a grin would offend her. "And the gunship," he went on, "might be lying out there in the grass, smoking. Unless Venerbos had been one of the casualties too, hit before he could get his rocket off. The umpires decided he wasn't, probably the ones in the gunship."
Tain looked hard at him. "Do you know what you're really doing here?"
His eyes met hers calmly. "Maybe not. I thought I did."
"You're practicing dying."
"Not really. Dying is incidental. We're practicing war."
"You're practicing dying! And dying is not incidental!"
"Okay. I understand."
She stared, partly deflated by his reply. "Do you? Really?" Her words were part challenge, part question.
"I think so. You consider death the end of existence. That when someone gets killed, that's it. And that bothers you, pretty badly."
Her gaze, her perception, seemed to change, become dreamlike, as if her eyes had photographed him and she was looking at the print, a print with definition sharper, colors more vivid, than reality: sandy hair, blue eyes, his cheeks tan where the paint didn't cover them. "And you don't think so?" she heard herself ask.
"That's right," he said quietly. "I don't." Quietly as if, again, to soften the impact on her.
She remembered some of the trainees going to the Main Building in the evenings. When she'd asked about it, asked to accompany one of them, she'd been refused, almost the only refusal she'd received with the regiment. The drills, what the trainees did there, she was told, were personal and confidential. She'd gone to Voker then, hoping he'd overrule the refusal, but he hadn't. They were doing psychological drills, he'd repeated, to develop T'swa calm. There's another way of putting that, she told herself now. They've been psycho-conditioning these kids with some technique they didn't tell us about in Psych A and B. Something T'swa that they probably don't even know about at school.
A chill ran over her. "So," she said, also quietly. "What do you think happens when you die?"
"What are the possibilities? It's either the end or it's not. To me—I recycle. Maybe take a vacation first."
"And if you're wrong? If you don't?"
He shrugged. "If I don't, I won't know the difference because I won't exist anymore. But that's not real to me."
What do you say to something like that? she asked herself, and getting to her feet, walked toward the opening, the meadow.
"Tain," Mollary said from behind her, "don't show yourself in the opening. A gunship might see you and waste his time strafing here when we're already dead. It wouldn't be fair."
Fair! His warning seemed to her an accusation, and she glared back at him without answering, then sat down a little ways within the forest edge, absently switching her recorder from on to wait. It would turn itself back on in response to any voice. Taking out her mapbook, she played angrily with it, hardly noticing what she did. Another matter surfaced in her consciousness: Why had they shown themselves to the gunship? To get an open shot at it? Would they sacrifice a squad for that? She couldn't think of any other reason, and the thought added to her anger.
She remembered the girl she'd met the evening before, on a late walk. Lotta. They'd strolled together, talking, and Tain realized now that while Lotta had learned a lot about her, she'd learned nothing about Lotta. The girl looked no more than fifteen or sixteen, but had to be in her twenties. They'd said goodnight at the reception desk—perhaps guard station was a better word—she turning off toward the guest section, Lotta turning in the direction the trainees went for their drills.
It occurred to Tain now that Lotta might know something about those "drills," and she determined to find and ask her.
Less than twenty minutes later, a floater landed. She boarded it with the casualties and it took off for the compound. By then her mood had recovered somewhat, to mildly aggravated.
The dispatcher wouldn't send a floater to take her back to the platoon. That would tell the "enemy" where troops were. Tain wasn't really disappointed. It was nearly supper time, and she'd been with Third Platoon, F Company, since daybreak. So she was tired, despite her hobbies, recent and not so recent—dance and gymnastics in lower and middle school, track in upper school and college, and since then, backpacking, orienteering, mountain climbing, ski touring. And the workouts she did semi-regularly to stay fit for the other four.
She'd eat and take a nap, she decided, then look up Lotta and see what she might know about the "psychological drills."
If Lotta would talk. And she would. Tain considered herself a good interviewer—one reason, she supposed, that she'd gotten the assignment. This was only her third year on the job, but she'd demonstrated more than once an ability to get people to open up to her.