A tinny voice came out of the ring: “Tate here. What’s up?”

“Get a hold of the men and tell them we have to be in the shells by 2000. Evasive maneuvers.”

“Crap. They told us it would be days.”

“I guess something new came up. Or maybe the Commodore has a bright idea.”

“The Commodore can stuff it. You up in the lounge?”

“Yeah.”

“Bring me back a cup when you come, okay? Little sugar?”

“Roger. Be down in about half an hour.”

“Thanks. I’ll get on it.”

There was a general movement toward the coffee machine. I got in line behind Corporal Potter.

“What do you think, Marygay?”

“Maybe the Commodore just wants us to try out the shells once more.”

“Before the real thing.”

“Maybe.” She picked up a cup and blew into it. She looked worried. “Or maybe the Taurans had a ship way out, waiting for us. I’ve wondered why they don’t do it. We do, at Stargate.”

“Stargate’s a different thing. It takes seven cruisers, moving all the time, to cover all the possible exit angles. We can’t afford to do it for more than one collapsar, and neither could they.”

She didn’t say anything while she filled her cup. “Maybe we’ve stumbled on their version of Stargate. Or maybe they have more ships than we do by now.”

I filled and sugared two cups, sealed one. “No way to tell.” We walked back to a table, careful with the cups in the high gravity.

“Maybe Singhe knows something,” she said.

“Maybe he does. But I’d have to get him through Rogers and Cortez. Cortez would jump down my throat if I tried to bother him now.”

“Oh, I can get him directly. We…” She dimpled a little bit. “We’ve been friends.”

I sipped some scalding coffee and tried to sound nonchalant. “So that’s where you’ve been disappearing to.”

“You disapprove?” she said, looking innocent.

“Well … damn it, no, of course not. But — but he’s an officer! A navy officer!”

“He’s attached to us and that makes him part army.” She twisted her ring and said, “Directory.” To me: “What about you and Little Miss Harmony?”

“That’s not the same thing.” She was whispering a directory code into the ring.

“Yes, it is. You just wanted to do it with an officer. Pervert.” The ring bleated twice. Busy. “How was she?”

“Adequate.” I was recovering.

“Besides, Ensign Singhe is a perfect gentleman. And not the least bit jealous.”

“Neither am I,” I said. “If he ever hurts you, tell me and I’ll break his ass.”

She looked at me across her cup. “If Lieutenant Harmony ever hurts you, tell me and I’ll break her ass.”

“It’s a deal.” We shook on it solemnly.

2

The acceleration shells were something new, installed while we rested and resupplied at Stargate. They enabled us to use the ship at closer to its theoretical efficiency, the tachyon drive boosting it to as much as 25 gravities.

Tate was waiting for me in the shell area. The rest of the squad was milling around, talking. I gave him his coffee.

“Thanks. Find out anything?”

“Afraid not. Except the swabbies don’t seem to be scared, and it’s their show. Probably just another practice run.

He slurped some coffee. “What the hell. It’s all the same to us, anyhow. Just sit there and get squeezed half to death. God, I hate those things.”

“Maybe they’ll eventually make us obsolete, and we can go home.”

“Sure thing.” The medic came by and gave me my shot.

I waited until 1950 and hollered to the squad, “Let’s go. Strip down and zip up.”

The shell is like a flexible spacesuit; at least the fittings on the inside are pretty similar. But instead of a life support package, there’s a hose going into the top of the helmet and two coming out of the heels, as well as two relief tubes per suit. They’re crammed in shoulder-to-shoulder on light acceleration couches, getting to your shell is like picking your way through a giant plate of olive drab spaghetti.

When the lights in my helmet showed that everybody was suited up, I pushed the button that flooded the room. No way to see, of course, but I could imagine the pale blue solution — ethylene glycol and something else — foaming up around and over us. The suit material, cool and dry, collapsed in to touch my skin at every point. I knew that my internal body pressure was increasing rapidly to match the increasing fluid pressure outside. That’s what the shot was for; keep your cells from getting squished between the devil and the deep blue sea. You could still feel it, though. By the time my meter said “2” (external pressure equivalent to a column of water two nautical miles deep), I felt that I was at the same time being crushed and bloated. By 2005 it was at 2.7 and holding steady. When the maneuvers began at 2010, you couldn’t feel the difference. I thought I saw, the needle fluctuate a tiny bit, though.

The major drawback to the system is that, of course, anybody caught outside of his shell when the Anniversary hit 25 G’s would be just so much strawberry jam. So the guiding and the fighting have to be done by the ship’s tactical computer — which does most of it anyway, but it’s nice to have a human overseer.

Another small problem is that if the ship gets damaged and the pressure drops, you’ll explode like a dropped melon. If it’s the internal pressure, you get crushed to death in a microsecond.

And it takes ten minutes, more or less, to get depressurized and another two or three to get untangled and dressed. So it’s not exactly something you can hop out of and come up fighting.

The accelerating was over at 2038. A green light went on and I chinned the button to depressurize.

Marygay and I were getting dressed outside.

“How’d that happen?” I pointed to an angry purple welt that ran from the bottom of her right breast to her hipbone.

“That’s the second time,” she said, mad. “The first one was on my back — I think that shell doesn’t fit right, gets creases. ”

“Maybe you’ve lost weight.”

“Wise guy.” Our caloric intake had been rigorously monitored ever since we left Stargate the first time. You can’t use a fighting suit unless it fits you like a second skin.

A wall speaker drowned out the rest of her comment. “Attention all personnel. Attention. All army personnel echelon six and above and all navy personnel echelon four and above will report to the briefing room at 2130.”

It repeated the message twice. I went off to lie down for a few minutes while Marygay showed her bruise to the medic and the armorer. I didn’t feel a bit jealous.

The Commodore began the briefing. “There’s not much to tell, and what there is, is not good news.

“Six days ago, the Tauran vessel that is pursuing us released a drone missile. Its initial acceleration was on the order of 80 gravities.

“After blasting for approximately a day, its acceleration suddenly jumped to 148 gravities.” Collective gasp.

“Yesterday, it jumped to 203 gravities. I shouldn’t need to remind anyone here that this is twice the accelerative capability of the enemy’s drones in our last encounter.

“We launched a salvo of drones, four of them, intersecting what the computer predicted to be the four most probable future trajectories of the enemy drone. One of them paid off, while we were doing evasive maneuvers. We contacted and destroyed the Tauran weapon about ten million kilometers from here.”

That was practically next door. “The only encouraging thing we learned from the encounter was from spectral analysis of the blast. It was no more powerful an explosion than ones we have observed in the past, so at least their progress in propulsion hasn’t been matched by progress in explosives.

“This is the first manifestation of a very important effect that has heretofore been of interest only to theorists. Tell me, soldier.” He pointed at Negulesco. “How long has it been since we first fought the Taurans, at Aleph?”