Charlie eased his pudgy self into one of the hard chairs and sighed. “Twenty months on this greasy machine. With her. Shit.”

“Well, if you’re nice to me, I won’t billet the two of you together.”

“All right. I’m your slave forever. Starting, oh, next Friday.” He peered into his cup and decided against drinking the dregs. “Seriously, she’s going to be a problem. What are you going to do with her?”

“I don’t know.” Charlie was being insubordinate, too, of course. But he was my XO and out of the chain of command. Besides, I had to have one friend. “Maybe she’ll mellow, once we’re under weigh.”

“Sure.” Technically, we were already under weigh, crawling toward the Stargate collapsar at one gee. But that was only for the convenience of the crew; it’s hard to batten down the hatches in free fall. The trip wouldn’t really start until we were in the tanks.

The lounge was too depressing, so Charlie and I used the remaining hours of mobility to explore the ship.

The bridge looked like any other computer facility; they had dispensed with the luxury of viewscreens. We stood at a respectful distance while Antopol and her officers went through a last series of checks before climbing into the tanks and leaving our destiny to the machines.

Actually, there was a porthole, a thick plastic bubble, in the navigation room forward. Lieutenant Williams wasn’t busy, the pre-insertion part of his job being fully automated, so he was glad to show us around.

He tapped the porthole with a fingernail. “Hope we don’t have to use this, this trip.”

“How so?” Charlie said.

“We only use it if we get lost.” If the insertion angle was off by a thousandth of a radian, we were liable to wind up on the other side of the galaxy. “We can get a rough idea of our position by analyzing the spectra of the brightest stars. Thumbprints. Identify three and we can triangulate.”

“Then find the nearest collapsar and get back on the rack,” I said.

“That’s the problem. Sade-138 is the only collapsar we know of in the Magellanic Clouds. We know of it only because of captured enemy data. Even if we could find another collapsar, assuming we got lost in the cloud, we wouldn’t know how to insert.”

“That’s great.”

“It’s not as though we’d be actually lost,” he said with a rather wicked expression. “We could zip up in the tanks, aim for Earth and blast away at full power. We’d get there in about three months, ship time.”

“Sure,” I said. “But 150,000 years in the future.” At twenty-five gees, you get to nine-tenths the speed of light in less than a month. From then on, you’re in the arms of Saint Albert.

“Well, that is a drawback,” he said. “But at least we’d find out who’d won the war.”

It made you wonder how many soldiers had gotten out of the war in just that way. There were forty-two strike forces lost somewhere and unaccounted for. It was possible that all of them were crawling through normal space at near-lightspeed and would show up at Earth or Stargate one-by-one over the centuries.

A convenient way to go AWOL, since once you were out of the chain of collapsar jumps you’d be practically impossible to track down. Unfortunately, your jump sequence was pre-programmed by Strike Force Command; the human navigator only came into the picture if a miscalculation slipped you into the wrong “wormhole,” and you popped out in some random part of space.

Charlie and I went on to inspect the gym, which was big enough for about a dozen people at a time. I asked him to make up a roster so that everyone could work out for an hour each day when we were out of the tanks.

The mess area was only a little larger than the gym even with four staggered shifts, the meals would be shoulder-to-shoulder affairs-and the enlisted men and women’s lounge was even more depressing than the officers’. I was going to have a real morale problem on my hands long before the twenty months were up.

The armorer’s bay was as large as the gym, mess hall and both lounges put together. It had to be, because of the great variety of infantry weapons that had evolved over the centuries. The basic weapon was still the fighting suit, though it was much more sophisticated than that first model I had been squeezed into, just before the Aleph-Null campaign.

Lieutenant Riland, the armory officer, was supervising his four subordinates, one from each platoon, who were doing a last minute check of weapons storage. Probably the most important job on the whole ship, when you contemplate what could happen to all those tons of explosives and radioactives under twenty-five gees.

I returned his perfunctory salute. “Everything going all right, Lieutenant?”

“Yessir, except for those damned swords.” For use in the stasis field. “No way we can orient them that they won’t be bent. Just hope they don’t break.”

I couldn’t begin to understand the principles behind the stasis field; the gap between present-day physics and my master’s degree in the same subject was as long as the time that separated Galileo and Einstein. But I knew the effects.

Nothing could move at greater than 16.3 meters per second inside the field, which was a hemispherical (in space, spherical) volume about fifty meters in radius. Inside, there was no such thing as electromagnetic radiation; no electricity, no magnetism, no light. From inside your suit, you could see your surroundings in ghostly monochrome which phenomenon was glibly explained to me as being due to “phase transference of quasi-energy leaking through from an adjacent tachyon reality,” so much phlogiston to me.

The result of it, though, was to make, all conventional weapons of warfare useless. Even a nova bomb was just an inert lump inside the field. And any creature, Terran or Tauran, caught inside the field without the proper insulation would die in a fraction of a second.

At first it looked as though we had come upon the ultimate weapon. There were five engagements where whole Tauran bases were wiped out without any human ground casualties. All you had to do was carry the field to the enemy (four husky soldiers could handle it in Earth-gravity) and watch them die as they slipped in through the field’s opaque wall. The people carrying the generator were invulnerable except for the short periods when they might have to turn the thing off to get their bearings.

The sixth time the field was used, though, the Taurans were ready for it. They wore protective suits and were armed with sharp spears, with which they could breach the suits of the generator-carriers. From then on the carriers were armed.

Only three other such battles had been reported, although a dozen strike forces had gone out with the stasis field. The others were still fighting, or still en route, or had been totally defeated. There was no way to tell unless they came back. And they weren’t encouraged to come back if Taurans were still in control of “their” real estate supposedly that constituted “desertion under fire,” which meant execution for all officers (although rumor had it that they were simply brainwiped, imprinted and sent back into the fray).

“Will we be using the stasis field, sir?” Riland asked.

“Probably. Not at first, not unless the Taurans are already there. I don’t relish the thought of living in a suit, day in and day out.” Neither did I relish the thought of using sword, spear, throwing knife; no matter how many electronic illusions I’d sent to Valhalla with them.

Checked my watch. “Well, we’d better get on down to the tanks, Captain. Make sure everything’s squared away.” We had about two hours before the insertion sequence would start.

The room the tanks were in resembled a huge chemical factory; the floor was a good hundred meters in diameter and jammed with, bulky apparatus painted a uniform, dull gray. The eight tanks were arranged almost symmetrically around the central elevator, the symmetry spoiled by the fact that one of the tanks was twice the size of the others. That would be the command tank, for all the senior officers and supporting specialists.