“William?” It was the first time she’d shown any sign of knowing me. “This wom — uh, Marygay, she’s your lover? Your regular lover?”

“That’s right.”

“She’s very pretty.” A remarkable observation, her body torn and caked with crusting blood, her face smeared where I had tried to wipe away the tears. I suppose a doctor or a woman or a lover can look beneath that and see beauty.

“Yes, she is.” She had stopped crying and had her eyes squeezed shut, sucking the last bit of moisture from the paper wad.

“Can she have some more water?”

“OK, same as before. Not too much.”

I went out to the locker alcove and into the head for a paper towel. Now that the fumes from the pressurizing fluid had cleared, I could smell the air. It smelled wrong. Light machine oil and burnt metal, like the smell of a metalworking shop. I wondered whether they had overloaded the airco. That had happened once before, after the first time we’d used the acceleration chambers.

Marygay took the water without opening her eyes.

“Do you plan to stay together when you get back to Earth?”

“Probably,” I said. “If we get back to Earth. Still one more battle.”

“There won’t be any more battles,” she said flatly. “You mean you haven’t heard?”

“What?”

“Don’t you know the ship was hit?”

“Hit!” Then how could any of us be alive?

“That’s right.” She went back to her scrubbing. “Four squad bays. Also the armor bay. There isn’t a fighting suit left on the ship … and we can’t fight in our underwear.”

“What — squad bays, what happened to the people?”

“No survivors.”

Thirty people. “Who was it?”

“All of the third platoon. First squad of the second platoon.”

Al-Sadat, Busia, Maxwell, Negulesco. “My God.”

“Thirty deaders, and they don’t have the slightest notion of what caused it. Don’t know but that it may happen again any minute.”

“It wasn’t a drone?”

“No, we got all of their drones. Got the enemy vessel, too. Nothing showed up on any of the sensors, just blam! and a third of the ship was torn to hell. We were lucky it wasn’t the drive or the life support system.” I was hardly hearing her. Penworth, LaBatt, Smithers. Christine and Frida. All dead. I was numb.

She took a blade-type razor and a tube of gel out of her bag. “Be a gentleman and look the other way,” she said. “Oh, here.” She soaked a square of gauze in alcohol and handed it to me. “Be useful. Do her face.”

I started and, without opening her eyes, Marygay said, “That feels good. What are you doing?”

“Being a gentleman. And useful, too—”

“All personnel, attention, all personnel.” There wasn’t a squawk-box in the pressure chamber, but I could hear it clearly through the door to the locker alcove. “All personnel echelon 6 and above, unless directly involved in medical or maintenance emergencies, report immediately to the assembly area.”

“I’ve got to go, Marygay.”

She didn’t say anything. I didn’t know whether she had heard the announcement.

“Estelle,” I addressed her directly, gentleman be damned. “Will you”

“Yes. I’ll let you know as soon as we can tell.”

“Well.”

“It’s going to be all right.” But her expression was grim and worried. “Now get going,” she said, softly.

By the time I picked my way out into the corridor, the ’box was repeating the message for the fourth time. There was a new smell in the air that I didn’t want to identify.

5

Halfway to the assembly area I realized what a mess I was, and ducked into the head by the NCO lounge. Corporal Kamehameha was hurriedly brushing her hair.

“William! What happened to you?”

“Nothing.” I turned on a tap and looked at myself in the mirror. Dried blood smeared all over my face and tunic. “It was Marygay, Corporal Potter, her suit … well, evidently it got a crease, uh …

“Dead?”

“No, just badly, uh, she’s going into surgery—”

“Don’t use hot water. You’ll just set the stain.”

“Oh. Right.” I used the hot to wash my face and hand, dabbed at the tunic with cold. “Your squad’s just two bays down from Al’s, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see what happened?”

“No. Yes. Not when it happened.” For the first time I noticed that she was crying, big tears rolling down her cheeks and off her chin. Her voice was even, controlled. She pulled at her hair savagely. “It’s a mess.”

I stepped over and put my hand on her shoulder. “DON’T touch me!” she flared and knocked my hand off with the brush. “Sorry. Let’s go.”

At the door to the head she touched me lightly on the arm. “William…” She looked at me defiantly. “I’m just glad it wasn’t me. You understand? That’s the only way you can look at it.”

I understood, but I didn’t know that I believed her.

“I can sum it up very briefly,” the commodore said in a tight voice, “if only because we know so little.

“Some ten seconds after we destroyed the enemy vessel, two objects, very small objects, struck the Anniversary amidships. By inference, since they were not detected and we know the limits of our detection apparatus, we know that they were moving in excess of nine-tenths of the speed of light. That is to say, more precisely, their velocity vector normal to the axis of the Anniversary was greater than nine-tenths of the speed of light. They slipped in behind the repeller fields.”

When the Anniversary is moving at relativistic speeds, it is designed to generate two powerful electromagnetic fields, one centered about five thousand kilometers from the ship and the other about ten thousand klicks away, both in line with the direction of motion of the ship. These fields are maintained by a “ramjet” effect, energy picked up from interstellar gas as we mosey along.

Anything big enough to worry about hitting (that is, anything big enough to see with a strong magnifying glass) goes through the first field and comes out with a very strong negative charge all over its surface. As it enters the second field, it’s repelled away from the path of the ship. If the object is too big to be pushed around this way, we can sense it at a greater distance and maneuver out of its way.

“I shouldn’t have to emphasize how formidable a weapon this is. When the Anniversary was struck, our rate of speed with respect to the enemy was such that we traveled our own length every ten thousandth of a second. Further, we were jerking around erratically with a constantly changing and purely random lateral acceleration. Thus the objects that struck us must have been guided, not aimed. And the guidance system was self-contained, since there were no Taurans alive at the time they struck us. All of this in a package no larger than a small pebble.

“Most of you are too young to remember the term future shock. Back in the seventies, some people felt that technological progress was so rapid that people, normal people, couldn’t cope with it; that they wouldn’t have time to get used to the present before the future was upon them. A man named Toffler coined the term future shock to describe this situation.” The commodore could get pretty academic.

“We’re caught up in a physical situation that resembles this scholarly concept. The result has been disaster. Tragedy. And, as we discussed in our last meeting, there is no way to counter it. Relativity traps us in the enemy’s past; relativity brings them from our future. We can only hope that next time, the situation will be reversed. And all we can do to help bring that about is try to get back to Stargate, and then to Earth, where specialists may be able to deduce something, some sort of counterweapon, from the nature of the damage.

“Now we could attack the Tauran’s portal planet from space and perhaps destroy the base without using you infantry. But I think there would be a very great risk involved. We might be … shot down by whatever hit us today, and never return to Stargate with what I consider to be vital information. We could send a drone with a message detailing our assumptions about this new enemy weapon … but that might be inadequate. And the Force would be that much further behind, technologically.