The Eternity Brigade Part 8

Hawker shrugged. "I don't know. I don't feel any different. It sure beats the freezing and waking up in a hospital bed."

"Yeah, and it's all so sudden," Symington added. "It seems like just this afternoon Dave taped that message to you, and now here we all are-on the Moon, for Christ's sake!"

Their conversation' was interrupted by the appearance of a lieutenant who called them to attention for his briefing. First, he told them, they were no longer a part of the United States Army. The United States had been incorporated three years ago into a union with Canada and Mexico, called the North American Complex, or Nacom. They would still be fighting to preserve the land of their births, but it had undergone a change.

The reason they were on the Moon was more difficult to explain.

Nacom, along with several other major world factions, was building a series of s.p.a.ce colonies, using material mined from the Moon for construction.

Nacom's intelligence service had learned, however, that the Russian-Arab bloc was intending to use its s.p.a.ce colony as a military base, from which they hoped to dominate the world. To ensure that their base would be built first, they'd started sabotaging Nacom's mining efforts on the Moon-and that, in turn, had led to the outbreak of hostilities here.This was a silent, dirty war. For intricate political reasons too complex to explain, neither side wanted the conflict known to the general public; to do so would be to invoke chains of alliances that could have every nation in the world at war in a matter of hours. So the war was being limited to outer s.p.a.ce, and particularly to the Moon. The fighting was likely to be on a small scale, but very intense, and the soldiers' bravery here would be unheralded-but much appreciated by their government.

During the next few days they went through a series of exercises-not to get their muscles back into shape, as had been the case before, but to get them used to the one-sixth gravity of the Moon. Using too much muscle in a given situation could be fatal, and the resurrectees had to learn to gauge their strength under the new conditions. They also had to learn quickly how to move in the bulky s.p.a.cesuits they'd be wearing on the lunar surface. These suits had been quickly made, and fit the men crudely; a well-constructed s.p.a.cesuit had to be built around an individual, requiring detailed measurements and fittings that time had not permitted in these circ.u.mstances. Their instructors repeatedly stressed the fact that the suits would be the only things keeping the soldiers alive outside, and that even a single tear could prove fatal.

During their five days of training in the crowded underground base, the soldiers could feel frequent tremors in the walls and floor. These, they were told, were enemy bombing runs. The Russians were sitting snugly inside their well-fortified base, throwing large chunks of rocks and debris at the Nacom base using a device called a "ma.s.s driver," which acted as an enormous slingshot to hurl objects hundreds, or hundreds of thousands, of kilometers. Nacom Base had its own ma.s.s driver, which figured prominently in the Nacom strategy.

So far, neither side had been able to do much more than throw rocks at the other. It was a.s.sumed that the Russians did not have a system for recreating soldiers, as Nacom did, and was probably incapable of transporting large numbers of troops to the Moon. Nacom, too, lacked enough troop carriers to s.h.i.+p its soldiers to a position near the Russian base-but there was the ma.s.s driver, and Nacom intended to use it.

Having received their training, the soldiers were suited up and placed within their individual padded "buckets." They were told to keep their heads down well between their knees and press themselves as tightly against the back padding as they could. Hawker stood in line with the restas, one by one, they were loaded into the slingshot and fired off toward enemy territory.

When his turn came, Hawker obediently tucked his head down and pressed back against his padding, nervously wondering what new nightmares technology had cooked up for him. He didn't have to wait long to find out. As his bucket s.h.i.+fted into position, he was suddenly rammed against the back wall as though hit full strength by a giant flyswatter. The force lasted only a few seconds, but it was brutal enough to make him black out for several minutes.

When he came to, he was floating free in s.p.a.ce with the Moon "above"

him. He felt sick to his stomach and bruised from head to foot, but he was alive and breathing-and in s.p.a.ce, those were the crucial factors. He'd been fired like a circus performer out of a cannon, and now he was on a trajectory that would place him down on a plain barely a hundred kilometers from the Russian base. From there, he and his companions were to launch a full-scale a.s.sault on the base itself and-hopefully-overwhelm its defenders.

This operation had been in the planning stage for the past month, ever since the decision was first made to resurrect the recorded soldiers, and preparations had been laid with the highest secrecy. Working under cover of the two-week-long lunar night, teams of Nacom construction personnel had built an enormous "net" in the target area to catch the s.p.a.cesuited figures as they plummeted back to the surface of the Moon after their flight; without the net, the soldiers would simply have crashed into the lunar soil with roughly the same velocity at which they'd been launched.

The ma.s.s driver's aim was computer-accurate, but Hawker later heard horror stories about soldiers who had missed the two-kilometer-square net and whose bodies were permanently splattered across the lunar landscape.

Hawker landed safely in the net, which was made of some unknown material possessing the strength of steel yet incredible resiliency. The shock of his landing bruised him still more, and he was hurriedly helped off to make room for the next man coming in. It was unlikely that two would land back to back in the same exact place, but the consequences of that were so ghastly that no one wanted to contemplate them.

The Russians realized belatedly what was happening, and took steps to hinder the Nacom effort. The landing area was inside the effectiveminimum range of their ma.s.s driver, but what they did was shoot off a heavy barrage of rocks in a long, complicated trajectory that eventually came raining down on the target field. The hail of moonrocks tore through the netting, but most of Nacom's damage had been done-eighty-three percent of the a.s.sault force had been delivered within striking distance of the Russian base. Food, water and oxygen had already been stockpiled there during the nighttime activities, and there were several large tractors to act as tanks and lead the attack. All that remained was to cross the hundred kilometers and destroy the base.

The troops began what was later to be called the Moon March. Each of the men was in peak condition, yet even so they found the trek across the baking lunar plain to be the most arduous of their careers, far surpa.s.sing any tortures devised by drill sergeants in basic training. There was no shade, no relief from the d.a.m.nably bright sun overhead. The s.p.a.cesuits, constructed hastily, showed the pressure. Twenty-seven men died when their suits overheated; another suit simply exploded for no known reason, instantly killing its wearer; and eleven more people died of tiny rips in the fabric of the suits. The men rested every few hours and the weak lunar gravity helped keep them from becoming too tired. Nevertheless, by the time they were within thirty kilometers of their objective, they were all disconsolate.

Inside this range, the Russians joined nature in working to kill them.

The enemy began lobbing "grenades" that were little more than buckets of sc.r.a.p metal set to explode on impact. On Earth, such things would not have had much effect, but on the Moon- where a small rip in one's suit meant instant death- they took on deadly proportions. All the men could do when they saw the grenades coming was. .h.i.t the ground, presenting as small a target as possible, and pray that none of the shrapnel found them.

In far too many cases, however, those prayers were denied.

Green died during one grenade attack. He and Hawker had been marching together, trying to keep one another's courage up, when word came that another grenade was about to hit. Both dove to the ground, as was now standard operating procedure, and lay still. After a few minutes, when the all clear came, Hawker rose to his feet and Green didn't. Looking down at his friend's prostrate form, Hawker could see no tears in the suit from a shrapnel bit; only when he turned the body over did he see what had happened. Green had evaded the shrapnel, but in falling to the ground he'd torn his suit open on a sharp projection of rock.For the first time since his grandmother's funeral when he was twelve, Hawker cried. His sergeant came over and helped him to his feet, and Symington put an arm around his shoulder. Between them, the two men helped get Hawker moving again-but something of himself had been left behind there on the surface of the Moon, beside Green's still body. It was the last traces of innocence, the final vestige of any part of him that could claim enjoyment of life. All that was left now was a cold callousness, a machine existing only for its continued survival.

Hawker remembered little of the rest of the conflict. He marched through a blue haze that few things could penetrate. He fought with the rest when the Russians finally sent troops against them, after they'd gotten within five kilometers of the base. He was there in the mob that stormed through the actual base, taking it room by sealed-off room in hand-to-hand fighting that killed eighty percent of the remaining a.s.sault team, including Symington. He was standing within three meters of Colonel Gonsalves when the latter announced the base had been secured by Nacom, but he did not celebrate with the rest of the men. Laconically he stood apart, a machine turned off until it received further orders.

There was no agonizing decision to be made this time when the war was over. There was nothing left in this world to live for, so Hawker volunteered to be recorded one more time.

He could tell when he emerged from the protein bath the next time that he was back on Earth; gravity felt right again. He was prepared, this time, for the abrupt transition from one moment to the next, and did not have to be helped from the tub. He nodded silently to the technicians, accepted the clothing they handed him and walked into the next room-where his jaw fell open from shock. Standing there in the center of the room, amid a group of other resurrectees, were Green and Symington, just as naturally as though Hawker had not seen them die with his own eyes. He stood stock still, not believing what he saw, until they finally noticed him and came over to greet him. As Symington reached out one long arm to place around his shoulders, Hawker shrank back from the touch as he would from embracing a corpse.

"Hey, what's the matter, buddy?" Symington said in his usual booming voice. "Ain't you glad to see us? We didn't know whether you'd actually sign up for another term."

"What do you think of the new process?" Green asked. "I told you onthe tape-jeez, it seems like just this afternoon I did that, doesn't it?-I told you I had some reservations, but it does seem to work. I sure don't feel any different. It really is instantaneous- what's the matter?"

Hawker had gone white. "You-you're dead. Both of you. You're both dead!"

"Somebody sure forgot to tell me that," Symington laughed, but Green was inclined to take Hawker's upset a little more seriously.

"What do you mean?" he asked. "How can we be dead? The army just resurrected us; we don't even know who we're fighting yet."

"You died last time-on the Moon."

"The Moon? Last time?" Symington's impatience was showing. "What the f.u.c.k are you talking about? Maybe this new process has scrambled your brains."

Green turned to Symington. "Take it easy, can't you see something's wrong?" Then, to Hawker, "Take your time, Hawk, and tell us what you're trying to say. We won't interrupt."

Slowly, painfully, Hawker told them the story of the war on the Moon, and of how each of them had died there. The other two listened silently, the expression on Green's face growing more worried by the minute.

When Hawker had finished, Green shook his head slowly and closed his eyes. "Oh my G.o.d," he said softly, half to himself. "Oh my G.o.d, they've done it."

"Done what?" Symington demanded. "Do you know what's going on?"

"I think so-but I wish I didn't. They really have stolen our souls, and now there's no escape, ever. There's no way out. d.a.m.n, why didn't I think?

Why didn't I see it coming?"

"If you don't start talking sense, ol' buddy," Symington said, "I'm gonna knock your head right down through your a.s.shole."

"Don't you see? Now that they've got us recorded, they can resurrect us any time they like. If we die in battle, they can still bring us back for thenext war-or even later in the same battle-and we'll never know anything is wrong. Even if we quit the program or desert, they can just create another one of us to take the place of the one who left-and that new one will never know that the old one left. They're got us by the b.a.l.l.s, now, and they've got us forever. We're slaves, Lucky. We may be immortal, in a funny sort of way, but we're still slaves."

Symington's face clouded with anger. "They can't do that to me! I'll show them!"

"Oh really?" Green gave an ironic laugh. "What are you going to do-mutiny? They don't even have to bother with a court-martial, because you're not a real person. They can shoot you on the spot and make themselves another Lucky Symington, one who doesn't know a thing about what happened to his predecessor and who might be more docile."

"What if we told everyone else about this, organized a sitdown strike or something... ?"

Green shook his head. "It wouldn't do any good. Don't you see, our lives aren't worth a flea's fart any more, because they can always make us over.

Even if every resurrectee decided to strike along with us, they could come in here with a machine gun, kill every single one of us and simply duplicate the entire herd. They can keep doing that forever until they find a group that goes along with them. Individuals mean nothing any more.

Who knows? Maybe if one of us breaks a leg, the army will think it's better to shoot him and make a new one than to take all the trouble to heal the broken leg."

"There's got to be something we can do!" Symington said.

"I don't know..."

Green's remarks were interrupted by the arrival of a sergeant who'd come to give them their by now familiar briefing. Hawker was so dazed by Green's observations that he could pay no attention to the lecture. An army of soldiers, turned out like a production line-what an idea. He'd played with little plastic soldiers as a kid, setting them up in various positions to simulate combats. When one soldier "died," he moved it around to another place and pretended it was someone different.

And now he and his friends were the plastic soldiers, no more real inthe minds of the generals than Hawker's toys had been to him. If one gets killed in one place, make a new one and stick it someplace else. They were all interchangeable, just pieces in a vast game that had been going on since the beginning of time.

Hawker never did find out very clearly what this particular war was about-but none of the other soldiers seemed to know, either. They just fought where they were told to fight and didn't ask too many questions.

Most of the fighting seemed to be in the mountains of Mexico, which had apparently split off from Nacom to be independent once more-and that was all Hawker could ever really pin down. But the spirit of the troops-particularly the resurrectees-had shown a marked deterioration, from which it would never fully recover. Too many of the men were becoming too well aware of what had been done to them, and the trap they had been led into. None of them was happy about it.

Hawker's path crossed Green's several times during the course of the ten-month-long war. The serious young man had done some heavy thinking about their problem and, while he had no solution, he'd at least worked out a philosophy for tackling the situation.

"Memory is the key," he told Hawker once as the two of them enjoyed a leisure moment together in a wartime bar, sipping a beer. "It's the only thing we have left that we can call our own. Don't ever let them take it away from you."

"I don't understand," Hawker said.

Green leaned forward to explain. "Look, we're going to live a very long time, maybe forever, who knows? Somewhere in all that time, an answer has got to appear-and when it does, we have to be ready for it.

"Each time we die they'll resurrect us again-but the person they'll resurrect will be one who's missing the memories of the one who got killed. They'll have to go back to the last time he was recorded to get a new copy. There'll be times when we can't avoid that, obviously, but we've got to try to minimize it. Every fact, every memory may play a crucial role one day in winning our freedom. We can't allow ourselves to forget, we can't give them any opportunity to rob us of even a single item. Don't ever give them an excuse to kill you prematurely and rob you of the memories you've just gained. Be a good soldier, try to stay live, do whatever you must to preserve your memories and keep your mind intact. Good G.o.d, ifthey're going to force us to live forever, then at least let's live with hope that someday, somehow, we can win free."

The battles of this war were particularly fierce, as the Nacom generals threw their troops into combat with suicidal abandon. They, too, had realized how cheap were the lives of their soldiers, and casualty statistics became meaningless to them. Tacticians thought little about a ninety percent fatality rate, as long as the maneuver in question gained its objectives.

Amazingly, all three of the friends survived that war, all kept their memories of the experience intact. None of them was particularly surprised, either, when-at war's end-they were no longer given any choice in the matter; it was just a.s.sumed that they would be recorded to serve in future wars. The "merry-go-round," as Green called it, would never stop again, and there was no way for them to get off.

The next war was once again fought in outer s.p.a.ce, between two s.p.a.ce colonies on artificial worlds in orbit around the Earth. The reasons for the conflict became more abstruse, less comprehensible to the men who came from another time and place. The weapons were constantly being improved and updated, but the dreary business of fighting remained ever the same.

Hawker, however, would have no recollection of this war. A laser beam tore through his s.p.a.cesuit as he and a boarding party were trying to sabotage the enemy colony's exterior rotation jets. It was his first death, but it was by no means his last.

On the next incarnation, Green and Symington did not mention to Hawker that he had died last time. A new etiquette was growing among the resurrectees, because some of the men reacted badly to the news that they had died one (or more) times before. Some had gone completely crazy and had to be killed and recreated. Now it was completely taboo to mention someone's previous death-and, in fact, it was considered very bad form to even talk about past wars. If it turned out that a person had died in that war he would have no recollection of it, and someone else's talking about it would bring the point home to him most painfully.

With the past taboo and the future a bleak nightmare too frightening to contemplate, the major topics of conversation were all anch.o.r.ed solidly in the present: how tired everyone was, the wretched quality of the food,and successes or failures with women during their infrequent leaves.

Society was changing around them, and the men found it hard to keep up.

Even the language itself was changing; people who ostensibly spoke English were difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend. Green remarked to Hawker that the entire system would break down soon, at this rate, because the men wouldn't be able to understand their officers.

This war was fought on Earth. It seemed that every nation was set against every other, and alliances s.h.i.+fted so rapidly that it was impossible to tell who was on your side even with a scorecard. It was a chaos in its primal form, but that mattered not at all to Hawker. He did his job like a good soldier and refused to let the external world impinge on his personal reality.

The next war was on Mars, and the language spoken was so far from twentieth-century English that the resurrectees had to sit through a basic language course before they could be sent into battle. Green drew some hope from this; if the process of retraining the soldiers became too expensive, perhaps the army-whoever's army it was by now-would decide that the process of reincarnating the soldiers should be sc.r.a.pped in favor of some other system. It wasn't much to go on, but it was some hope, at least.

Conditions on Mars seemed to be a cross between Antarctica and the Moon, with all the wrong features of each. A rip in one's pressure suit was not automatically lethal here, but it was d.a.m.ned incapacitating. The general staff was belatedly coming to the same conclusion as Green, namely that the memories of its fighters were an a.s.set to be preserved if possible. The more memories a soldier had, the wilier and more cunning a fighter he became; he could remember similar conditions in the past and how to turn them to his advantage. The number of suicide missions leveled off until they became, as they'd been before, merely last-ditch efforts of a desperate strategist.

This was also the first war in which women played a significant combat role on Hawker's side. He'd seen women in battle before, generally as guerrillas, but now they const.i.tuted roughly forty percent of his own force.

Some of the older men refused to fight alongside the women at first, and had to be persuaded at gunpoint. All the men made lewd and vulgar comments about what they might be doing in the foxholes during breaks in the action-but the truth of the matter was that surprisingly littles.e.xual activity occurred during this war. It was most awkward to engage in such conduct while dressed in pressure suits while the outside temperature was well below zero and the atmospheric pressure almost nonexistent.

There followed several wars that Hawker never knew about, because he died in each of them.

The next war he could recall was on the h.e.l.l known as Venus, where the atmospheric pressure was hundreds of times that on Earth and the temperature was hot enough to melt tin. To go out on the surface, even in the best s.p.a.cesuits ever conceived, would be instant death. The war was fought instead inside mobile bases that roamed over the barren landscape like enormous tanks. Each base held a crew of between fifteen and twenty-eight people, and there were long periods of inactivity between battles. Women had been fully integrated into the army by this time, comprising fifty percent of the resurrectees. There was a great deal of s.e.xual activity among the troops during this war-but in the cramped confines of the mobile bases, there was very little privacy. Hawker had to learn not to notice when his comrades were intimately engaged, and he hoped they would return the favor.

Then back to Earth, but in a role he hadn't expected. He was part of an expeditionary force from the Planetary League, sent to punish the mother world for its recalcitrance in submitting to the "natural domination" of Geos, the awesome artificial world that controlled the economic life of the Solar System.

Hawker and his cohorts did their job well, and Earth learned its lesson.

Never again was it in a position to challenge the leaders.h.i.+p of its colonies for control of its own destiny.

Then there came a gap of more than a hundred and fifty years, the largest single hiatus Hawker could ever recall. Since it was unlikely there'd been no ware during all that period, Hawker could only a.s.sume he'd died numerous times in the interim. None of his friends, of course, would say anything about it, and he never asked.

Technology had improved markedly during the past few centuries. The resurrection process had been made ever more streamlined, with the nutrient tanks growing smaller and more efficient, until now they were no longer needed. At present it was possible to recreate a person out of "thinair" simply by playing his pattern in a special way that Hawker couldn't even begin to understand. The process had even engendered a new verb: "to duple," shortened from the word "duplicate." Green thought that ironically appropriate since, as he said, they were all dupes anyway.

The language barrier, which had been a constantly growing problem, was also solved by the invention of training caps. Small plastic headpieces were worn for a couple of hours, and all the information the subject needed to know was implanted directly into his brain. After that, he became as fluent in the current language as any native, and was well versed in the theory and practice of all the latest advances in weaponry.

Green was vastly disappointed at these developments; he'd been hoping he and the other resurrectees would become obsolete and gradually phased out. Now there seemed no chance of that.

At the same time, the army dashed another hope of his-that the soldiers would eventually become too old to fight any more. While no time elapsed for them when they were patterns stored in the computer, they did age during the periods when they were let out to fight. Physically, Hawker, Green and Symington were all men in their early thirties by this time; if they aged too much further, even the army would give up on them.

But progress once again decided against them. They were now given treatments to rejuvenate their bodies and prevent the c.u.mulative deterioration that was known as aging. They learned that no one-at least, no one on the advanced, civilized planets-aged any more. Everyone was eternally youthful and, except for accidents and acts of war, no one ever died.

On the surface, it sounded ideal: an age of prosperity when material goods, like the soldiers, could be dupled at will to relieve need, and when people could look forward to many centuries, at least, of useful, active lives.

But this golden age was on the surface only. There were still soldiers, still wars, still a need to fight and kill. The reasons behind the combat had become too subtle for Hawker to comprehend, but they still existed-and as long as they did, he and his friends were doomed to Green's "merry-go-round."

This war was the first one Hawker fought in a different solar system.

The planet was a world circling the star Alpha Centaurai B, and the enemywas a group of rebel colonists who were trying to declare their independence from the Solar League that had given them birth. Days were long, and very strange. Sometimes there would be two suns in the sky at once, casting odd double shadows on the landscape and playing h.e.l.l with Hawker's perceptions. Sometimes night never came at all, as Alpha Centaurai A would come over the horizon just as B was setting. And even when both stars were down, the night was seldom dark-Proxima Centaurai, the nearby companion, often glowed in the sky like a bright red distress flare. Battle strategies had to be considerably revamped to take these ephemerides into account.

Not that it mattered to Hawker. The landscapes might change, the weapons might improve, but war itself remained dismally the same.

The next war was also fought on a world circling a different star, one that didn't even have a real name in human language, just a catalog designation. What made this war particularly memorable was that it was the first time Hawker fought against alien beings. The "Sticks," as they were called, were no more native to this planet than Hawker was; this world had developed no intelligent life of its own, and was being coveted by both races.

The Sticks were tall, thin creatures who looked much more fragile than they really were. They came from a world with a slightly lower gravitational force than Earth, and were probably better suited to this world than the humans. Hawker found the gravity a little too light-though stronger than on Mars-and the air a little too thin for his taste; he was constantly having to gulp for breath, while the Sticks seemed unaffected.

In the end, an agreement was reached. The Sticks settled on two of the three major continents and the humans on the remaining one. Hawker wondered why no one had thought of that earlier.

There was an incarnation, somewhere in this time period, when the army tried an experiment. Someone in Planning decided there was no reason why only one duplicate of a given soldier should be made at a time; why not duple squads composed entirely of a single man? The advantages were obvious. Such a squad would be more coordinated than any other in history. Every member of it would have the same reflexes, the same thought patterns, the same level of skills. There could be no dissension, no arguments, no conflicts of personality-in short, such a squad would bethe perfect fighting unit.

The experiment was duly carried out, with Hawker and several of the other resurrectees chosen to be multiply copied for special squadrons. At first, the experiment seemed to be paying off-the "clone squads," as they were called, fought with exceptional precision as long as they received no casualties. But then the experiment fell apart. There was something very demoralizing about seeing yourself lying dead or bleeding on the ground beside you. Once a few members of the clone squads were killed, the other members generally went crazy and became useless as fighters. The trauma of seeing "themselves" killed was so deep that these resurrectees were destroyed without allowing their memories to be recorded.

Hawker, naturally, remembered nothing of this, and the experiment was never repeated.

Then there was a war back on Earth itself, but under conditions Hawker would not have believed. The war was between two vast domed cities under the Pacific Ocean, and the soldiers had to fight in pressure suits and odd protective vehicles just as they did in s.p.a.ce. Dolphins and porpoises were used extensively on both sides of the conflict. During his few periods of leave, Hawker had a chance to examine the quality of civilian life, and found it totally incomprehensible. People didn't seem to have jobs, yet they kept busy at something. Material objects meant very little, yet- though they seemed immortal-time was very valuable as something not to be wasted. The citizens behaved unpredictably, for motivations Hawker could not begin to understand. These glimpses of life on Earth only made Hawker depressed, because they emphasized how alienated he was from everything he thought he'd known. He was glad when the war was over, because he knew he'd probably end up on some other planet where he expected things to be strange.

As it turned out, Hawker never set foot on his native world again.

Technology continued to improve faster than he could keep up with it.

Personal force fields were devised to protect the soldiers from most weapons-and then, just as rapidly, weapons were developed that made the force fields obsolete. Even the training caps became outmoded; any necessary information could now be imparted directly into the subject's mind with a mental probe during the resurrection process itself, in a fraction of a second.Mankind continued to expand into the Galaxy and, as might be expected, the army was at the forefront of the expansion. Hawker fought battles on many worlds, under suns of every hue, against beings of every imaginable description. Sometimes the atmosphere itself was so dense he couldn't see through it, and had to rely on instruments to show him the way. Sometimes the gravity was so high that merely standing up was a major achievement. Sometimes the combat took place in s.p.a.ce itself, and Hawker actually found himself liking that environment. The dark, silent void ideally matched what his own life was becoming.

Another piece of etiquette that developed through the ages was the mercy-kill. Medical science had made great advances since the days of Hawker's birth, and even lost limbs could be replaced on a wounded resurrectee before his pattern was rerecorded. But out in the field, where medical a.s.sistance was often lacking altogether, it was sometimes better to finish off a colleague rather than let him suffer a lingering death.

There was one jungle planet where Hawker encountered Green after the latter's patrol had been caught by an ambush. Most of the soldiers were dead, but Hawker found Green still alive in a pit, impaled on a crudely carved wooden spike. Green was conscious, but in so much pain that he couldn't even speak. He just looked at Hawker with pleading in his eyes.

Hawker took his gun and calmly shot his friend through the head, confident Green would be dupled again.

In their next lifetime, Hawker never even bothered to mention the incident to Green. There was little point. Green would have done the same for him, he knew. Perhaps, sometime in the past, he even had.