Ben Bova: Orion Among the Stars

“All right,” I said, my mind made up. “Ten minutes. Keep the light shielded.”

I went with her as she examined the first trooper, a woman whose forearm had been cut when one of the swamp monsters punctured her armor.

The wound was crawling with tiny red ants feasting on her torn flesh. Frede jerked back with surprise as the ants, obviously bothered by the light, began burrowing into the woman’s skin. The trooper screamed, whether in pain or fright I could not tell.

I took off the armor from my own injured leg and saw that the ants were chewing away. One of the drawbacks of inhibiting pain signals is that your body can no longer warn your brain of its danger.

Frede swallowed hard, then went to work on the wounded troopers. She had to flush out the ants with liquid astringents that burned so badly the troopers yelped and howled with pain. I stayed silent when my turn came and received admiring glances in the darkness of that tortured night.

It took more than ten minutes, but not much more. Frede was quietly efficient, once she got over her first shock of discovery. But as we powered up the flight packs again and started to glide forward through the trees, she said to me, grim-faced, “I hope those ants haven’t laid their eggs under the skin.”

A pleasant thought.

“I’ll have to examine all of you once we set up base camp,” she said.

We pressed on to the rendezvous point. The giant trees rose all around us in the pitch-black night like the pillars of a colossal darkened cathedral, but their lowest limbs were dozens of meters above the hummocky, leaf-littered forest floor. There was hardly any vegetation on the ground, only an occasional low-lying bush or shrub and thin grass. The high canopy of the lofty trees blocked sunlight very effectively, I realized, preventing much foliage from growing at ground level.

So we drifted through the massive boles of the trees like two squads of ghosts gliding through the sinister night. Muttering, complaining ghosts; clouds of biting insects still hounded us. At least the wounded stopped their whimpering once Frede got rid of the vampire ants. Now and then one of the equipment packs bumped gently into a tree or got wedged between two trunks and some of us had to go back and move it away, then find a wider avenue for it. After nearly two hours of this stop-and-go we finally reached the rendezvous point.

One of the other squads was already there, and the fourth showed up shortly after we did. Once Frede attended to the other wounded, I called a meeting of my lieutenants, leaving the noncoms to direct the checkout of the equipment packs and to make certain we had not lost any. The rest of the troopers began setting up our tents.

All three of the officers shared an uncanny resemblance. They were all about chin-high to me, and had broad, high-cheeked faces with clear blue eyes; they looked enough alike to be brother and sisters. In the dim light of our field lamps I saw that they even had nearly identical sprinkles of freckles across their noses. The army must have cloned them from the same genetic stock.

Lieutenant Frede, my medical officer as well as a squad leader, seemed levelheaded and not given to panic. Yet she looked plainly worried.

“Two of my troopers died,” she said as she took off her helmet. The same short-cropped sandy brown hair as the other two lieutenants. “I haven’t been able to do much more than give them a superficial look-see while we were on the march here, but it seems to me that the wounds those monsters inflicted on them were not serious enough to be fatal.”

“Then what killed them?” I asked.

Swarms of insects whined all around us. She slapped at them. We were all scratching and trying to wave the bugs away.

“I think those swamp monsters must have injected a toxin into the wounds,” Frede said, scratching inside the collar of her tunic.

“Poison?”

She nodded. “Poison. Which means that our other wounded may have been poisoned, too.”

“Is there any indication—”

She did not let me finish my question. “The wounded are more sick than hurt. I think they’ve been injected with toxin. They seem to be getting sicker by the minute. Maybe those damned ants are poisonous, too.”

I thought about that for a moment.

“I notice, sir,” she added, “that you were wounded in the leg. How do you feel?”

“Fine,” I said. Then I added, “My immune system produces antibodies very quickly.”

Another nod. “Then may I recommend that we take a sample of your blood and use it to transfuse the antibodies into the wounded men?”

“Yes, of course. Good thinking.”

So while the troopers began to assemble our transceiver and the dawn slowly lightened the leafy canopy high above us, I lay down on a cot in Lieutenant Frede’s medical tent and let her draw blood from my arm.

“Thank you, sir,” she said, holding up the syringe filled with bright red blood.

I sat up and rolled down my sleeve. “If you need more, let me know.”

“This should be sufficient, sir.”

I got to my feet. The tent’s bubble shape was barely tall enough for me to stand without stooping in its center. Four cots with sleeping wounded in them filled most of the floor space; the lieutenant’s examination table and other medical equipment were arranged along the outer edge.

Frede stood up also and gave me a critical examination with her sky blue eyes. “You’re not one of us, are you?”

“One of who?”

“The regular officer corps. You’re from a different gene stock. You’re bigger, darker hair and eyes, even your skin coloration is more olive than ours. Are you a volunteer officer?”

I made a rueful smile. “No, Frede, I’m not a volunteer.”

She broke into a sly grin. “Then somebody at headquarters must be worrying about our sex lives.”

“What?”

“According to the duty roster, you and I are paired for the duration of this mission. It’ll be my first time with someone outside of our own clone group.”

I must have stared at her like an idiot. Nothing in my briefings or my memories told me about sexual duties.

Her grin faded. “Just what I thought,” she said somberly. “You’re not a regular army officer at all, are you?”

I sat back down on the cot. “I’ve been selected to lead this mission by—” What could I say? A god? One of the Creators? An incredibly advanced descendant of the human race who regards us mere mortals as tools for his use, slaves for his whims? “—by the upper echelons,” I finished lamely.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Most of us have already figured out that this mission is some fucked-up brainchild of the higher echelons. Why else would they have replaced our regular captain?”

“Was he your regular partner?”

Her eyes widened. “You are a stranger, aren’t you? Soldiers don’t have regular partners. The army decides who you pair with, just like the army decides everything else in life.”

I began to understand. These soldiers are created by the army, to serve in the army. They know no other life. No parents, no families. Nothing but the military way of life. Nothing but serving in the army.

“I wonder why,” I mused aloud, “the army didn’t do away with the sex drive altogether. Or even make its soldiers sexless.”

Frede made a noise that sounded like an angry snort. “Might as well ask why they don’t use robots instead of cloned humans.”

“Well, why not?”

“Because we’re cheaper , that’s why! And better, too. Because we have emotions. Ever see a robot charge in where it’s hopeless? Yeah, sometimes we get scared, sometimes we even run—but more often we stand and fight and kill our enemies even when we’re dying ourselves.”