Allan Cole - Sten

He finished, covered the humanoid simulacrum with an insublanket, and stood up. Looked around the class.

"Then you yell as loud as you can for a medic. Assuming some bork hasn't decided we're the most important target he can hit and there's any of us left."

"What then?" Pech, the fat recruit, asked.

"If there's no professional treatment, use your belt medpak. If the bleeding's stopped and the insides are more or less together, the antis in the kit should keep your buddy from getting the creeping crud."

He laughed.

"'Course if you're on some world where we don't know anything about the bugs, best you can do is try to leave a good-looking corpse." The medic looked over Pech's steadily diminishing chubbiness. "Which will be hard enough in your case, Pech."

Sten and the others chuckled. The medic was the first instructor they'd had who'd treated them even vaguely like sentient beings.

The medic opened a large cabinet and motioned to Sten, who helped him lift out another simulacrum. This one was dressed in a battle suit.

"In a suit, things are different," the medic said. "The medpak should already be hooked up inside the suit and work automatically. Sometimes it does." Another snort of laughter from the medic.

"But if the suit's holed, all you can do is seal it and get the casualty to a medshelter. You get more on that in suit drill. Now, I need a sucker—I mean a volunteer."

He glanced around the audience, and his eyes lit on Pech. "Come on up, troop."

Pech double-timed up to the stand and waited at attention. "Relax, relax. You make me nervous. Okay. This dummy here is your best buddy. You went through training together. You chased. . ." He pretended to study Pech closely. ". . .uh—ameboids together. Now his arm has just been blown off. What are you going to do?"

The medic stepped back. Pech shifted nervously.

"Come on, soldier. Your best friend's bleeding to death. Move!"

Pech took a tentative step forward as the medic pressed the switch concealed in his palm and the simulacrum's arm exploded. "Blood" sprayed across Pech and the stand.

Pech froze. "Come on, man. Move."

Pech fumbled for the medpak on his belt and moved closer. More pulsing "blood" dyed his face. Pech unclipped the pak's base and took a pressure bandage off.

"Thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven. . .forget it, soldier."

Pech seemed not to hear him and fought to get the bandage in position. Finally, the gout of "blood" stopped.

"Your friend just died," the medic said harshly. "Now, on your feet."

Pech clambered up, numb. The medic stared around at the trainees to make sure they got his point. Then he turned back to Pech.

"The dye used in that blood won't wear off for two days. Maybe that'll help you think about how you'd feel if that dummy had really been your teammate."

Pech never did recover from the incident. A few weeks later, after a series of foul-ups, he disappeared. Washed out.

Sten blinked as the world came back into focus. He and the five other recruits stared at each other blankly. Halstead flipped up the flash visor on his shock helmet.

"How long were you out?" he asked.

Sten shrugged. "A second or two, corporal?"

Halstead held out his watch finger. Two hours had passed. He unclipped another of the tiny bester grenades from his pocket.

"Instant time loss. You don't know what's happened to you, and you don't think anything's gone wrong. These are some of the most effective infiltration weapons you'll use.

"The company's out on the dexterity courser. Report to Corporal Carruthers."

Sten saluted and the recruits ran off.

Sten couldn't get the man out of his mind. There had been nothing unusual about the incident, but for some reason the officer's image kept poking up from his brain at odd moments.

It had been his day as company runner and he had been dozing at the desk. He didn't hear the door open or close.

"You the only one here, guardsman?"

Sten snapped awake and was on his feet.

The man standing in front of him was tall and slender. Sten blinked and found himself staring at the uniform. Almost imperceptibly, it was changing shade to match the paneled wall background. The man wore a soft hat of the same kind of strange material that Sten later learned was a beret. It was tilted rakishly over one eye.

A winged dagger was pinned to the beret The only other insignia on the uniform were captain's stars on one shoulder and on the other the black outline of some kind of insect.

For some reason, Sten found himself stammering.

"Uh, yessir—they're—they're all out in the field."

The officer handed Sten a sealed envelope.

"This is for Sergeant Lanzotta. It's personal, so see it's delivered directly to him."

"Yessir."

Then he was gone.

A week later, Sten got a chance to ask Carruthers who the man was. The corporal whistled when Sten described the uniform.

"That's Mantis Section!"

Sten looked at her blankly.

"You mean you ain't heard?"

Sten shook his head, feeling like a pioneer-world idiot.

"They're the nastiest bunch of soldiers in the Imperial Army," Carruthers said. "Real elite. They work alone—humanoids, ETs. The Empire takes the best the Guard has and then disappears them into the Mercury Corps—Intelligence."

Sten remembered Mahoney and nodded.

"Anyway. Mantis wears those fancy trop-camouflage uniforms when you see them. Mostly, you don't see 'em at all and you'd better hope it stays that way."

"Why is that?"

"If you see one of those boys in the field you know you're about to be in deep trouble. Any one of 'em's probably got about two thousand and three of the enemy on his butt."

Carruthers smiled a rare smile. There was nothing she liked better than war stories. "I remember one time on Altair V. We were down with a regiment on a peacekeeping mission and somehow we'd got outselves surrounded.

"We were screaming for help on every wavelength we could reach and tryin' to hang on. We figured the next thing that'd happen is we'd have to die a lot."

Carruthers laughed. Sten figured that she had just made some kind of a joke and laughed back.

"So, one night this woman shows up at the command post. A Mantis Section troopie. She'd come through the enemy lines, through our pickets, through the support lines and first thing we know she's sitting down with our CO eating dinner. When she finished, she borrowed some AM 2tubes and bester grenades and disappeared again.

"I dunno what she did, or how she did it, but about twelve G hours later six Imperial destroyers showed up and bailed our tails out."

Carruthers glared at Sten, which made him feel a whole lot better. A smiling Carruthers was something he didn't think he wanted to get used to.

"But that's not the way it usually works," she told him. "You ever see one of those guys again, troop, you crawl under something. 'Cause as sure as your tail is where your head ought to be, there's something big and nasty about to come screaming in—you just remember that, hear?"

Sten heard her real well.

"You will all learn about the fighting suit," Lanzotta said. "Chances are, some of you will even die in one. And you will discover, as I did, that the suit will kill you faster than the enemy, more often than not."

At that point, Sten and the others turned their minds to "doze." They all thought they had Lanzotta figured now. All of his little lectures were structured the same. First, an introduction. Then—Lanzotta's favorite part—a history lesson. Followed by the informatipn they really needed to know. At which point they snapped awake again.

"I am particularly fond of this subject," Lanzotta continued. "In fact, I have made a personal study of the suit. Because it was with this piece of equipment that the technicians reached the absolute height of absurdity."