But As A Soldier, For His Country, Page 2

  * * *

  This new type of resurrection is a sudden, frightening thing, a lightning bolt summoning his soul from the depths of limbo.

  Harker awakes to sterility, to a place of abnormal quiet. The air smells funny, antiseptic, even more so than most of the hospitals he’s been in. His body feels funny, too, as though he were floating in some strangely buoyant liquid; yet he can feel a firm couch underneath his back. His heart bangs away inside his chest, much too fast, much too hard.

  He is in a room with other men, other resurrectees, all of whom feel equally strange and perplexed. Their number has almost tripled now from the original three hundred, and they have been crowded closely together to fit into one large hall. Harker lifts his head, and after much looking manages to spot Gary a dozen rows away. The presence of his friend allays some of the alienness he feels here.

  “Welcome to the Moon, men,” blares a voice from a loudspeaker. There is a reverberation of gasps throughout the room at this revelation of their location. The Moon! Only astronauts and scientists got to go there. Are there wars on the Moon now? What year is this and who—and how—are they expected to fight?

  The loudspeaker goes on to give further information. For one thing, they are no longer a part of the U.S. Army. The United States has been incorporated into the North American Union, which has inherited their tapes. The enemy is the South Americans, the Sammies, led largely by the Peruvian complex. The two powers are fighting for possession of the Mare Nectaris, which symbolizes the points of disagreement between them. Since the outlawing of war on Earth itself, aggressions have to be released here, on the Moon.

  “The Moon!” Gary exclaims when they can finally talk together. “Can you believe it? I never thought I’d make it up here. Don’t it knock you on your ass just thinking about it?”

  Calisthenics are not necessary, since their bodies have been re–created in as good a shape as they were in when they were first recorded. But they do have to spend almost two weeks undergoing training to be able to deal with the lighter gravity of the Moon. There are also spacesuits they have to become accustomed to, and whole new instincts have to be drilled into the men to take care that nothing will rip their suits, the portable wombs they carry against Nature’s hostility.

  Projectile weapons are back, Harker notices, in use as antipersonnel armament. On the Moon, in spacesuits, a small sliver of shrapnel is just as deadly as a laser beam. Rifles that fire the lunar equivalent of buckshot are relied on heavily by the infantry in the field. Orbiting satellites cover their advances with wide–angle energy beams that Harker doesn’t even begin to understand.

  It is an entirely different style of fighting, he finds. Totally silent. There are radios in their spacesuits, but they are forbidden to use them because the enemy could triangulate their position. The soldiers make no noise, and on the airless surface of the Moon, the weapons make no noise. It is a battle in pantomime, with silent death ready to creep up at any time.

  Gary is killed the third week out. It is during a battle at the open end of the crater Fracastorius, which proves to be the turning point of the war. Gary and Harker are part of a line advancing cautiously across the pockmarked plain, when suddenly Gary falls to the ground. Other men along the line fall too. Harker goes to the ground, feigning death so that the Sammie snipers will not waste any more ammunition on him. But Gary is not feigning it. Harker, otherwise motionless, can turn his head within the helmet and see the tiny tear in the right side of his friend’s spacesuit. The wound would have been minuscule, but the explosive decompression has been fatal. Gary’s eyes are bugged out, as though in horror at death, and blood is bubbling at his nostrils and mouth.

  Harker cries for his friend. For the last time, he cries.

  He lies there for three hours, motionless, until his air supply is almost exhausted. Then he is picked up by a Sammie sweep patrol and taken prisoner. He sits out the short remainder of the war in a Sammie camp where he is treated decently enough, suffering only a few indignities. When the war ends, he is exchanged back to the N.A.U., where, still numbed from Gary’s death, he allows himself to be retaped and rerecorded for future use.

  * * *

  Harker fell and hit his head against a block of stone rubble. The helmet withstood the blow—unlike the primitive ones he had worn at first, which would have cracked open—but it started a ringing in his ears which momentarily drowned out the pain impulses coming from his leg. He lay there stunned, waiting for death, in the form of the enemy soldier, to claim him. But nothing happened. After a while his head cleared, which only meant that he could feel the searing agony in his leg more deeply. It was hardly an improvement.

  If the soldier had not delivered the killing blow, it could mean that Harker’s reflex shot had killed or wounded him. He had to find out quickly; his life might depend on it. He twisted around painfully, his leg pulsing with agony. There, about thirty meters down the street, a spacesuited body lay flat on the ground. It wasn’t moving, but was it dead? He had to know.

  Harker crawled over the field of death, over the remains of shattered bodies. The front of his spacesuit became caked with mud and some not–quite–dried blood that had an inhuman, oily consistency. The drizzle was becoming harder, turning to rain, but still steaming up from the radioactively heated ground. Clouds of vapor fogged his way, hiding the object of his search. Still Harker crawled, keeping to the direction he knew to be the true one.

  His leg was on fire, and every centimeter of the crawl was hell, a surrealist’s nightmare of the world gone mad. Once he thought he heard a scream, and he looked around, but there was no one nearby. It must have been a hallucination. He’d had them before on the battlefield, under pain.

  He reached his goal after an eternity of crawling. He could detect faint twitches; the enemy was still alive then, though barely. Harker turned him over on his back to deliver the death blow, then looked into the man’s face.

  It was Gary.

  * * *

  All the resurrections now seem to run together in his memory. The next one, he thinks, is Venus, the place of hot, stinking swamps, of nearly killing atmospheric pressure and protective bubble–pockets of life. These are the first aliens he’s ever killed, the tiny creatures no more than twenty–five centimeters high who can swarm all over a man and kill him with a million tiny stabs. At first it is easier to kill nonhumans, less wearing on the scruples. But eventually it doesn’t matter. Killing is killing, no matter whom it is done to. It becomes a clinical, mechanical process, to be done as efficiently as possible, not to be thought over.

  Then back on the Moon again—or is it Mars?—fighting other humans. The spacesuits are improved this time, tougher, but the fighting is just as silent, just as deadly.

  Then a war back on Earth again. (Apparently that outlawing of war on the mother planet has not worked out as well as expected.) Some of the fighting is even done under the oceans, in and around large domes that house cities with populations of millions. There are trained dolphins and porpoises fighting in this one. It doesn’t matter. Harker kills them no matter what they look like.

  This war is the last time Harker ever sets foot upon his native planet.

  Then comes the big jump to an interstellar war. He is resurrected on a planet under a triple sun—Alpha Centauri, someone says—and the enemy is meter–long chitinous caterpillars with sharp pincers. They fight valiantly despite a much more primitive technology. By this time Harker is no longer sure whom he is working for. His side is the one that resurrects him and gives him an enemy to fight. They give him shelter, food, clothing, weapons and, occasionally, relaxation. They no longer bother to tell him why he is fighting. It no longer seems to matter to him.

  Wake up and fight until there is no more killing to do; then retreat into purgatory until the next war, the next battle. The killing machine named Harker has trod the surfaces of a hundred planets, leaving nothing but destruction and death in his wake.

  * *
*

  Gary stared up into Harker’s eyes. He was in pain, near death, but was there some recognition there? Harker could not speak to him, their communicators were on different frequencies, but there was something in Gary’s eyes…a plea. A plea for help. A plea for a quick and merciful death.

  Harker obliged.

  His mind was numb, his leg was burning. He did not think of the paradox of Gary still being alive though he had seen him die on the Moon years (centuries? millennia?) ago. He knew only that his leg hurt and that he was in an exposed position. He crawled on his side, with his left elbow pulling him forward, for ten meters to a piece of wall. He lifted himself over it and tumbled to the ground. If not completely safe, he was at least off the street, out of the open space.

  He reached for the first–aid kit on his belt, to tend his leg. There was none there. That idea took a full minute to sink into this mind: THEY HADN’T GIVEN HIM A FIRST–AID KIT. He felt a moment of anger, but it subsided quickly. Why should they give him a kit? What was he to them? A pattern called out of the past, an anachronism—useful for fighting and, if necessary, dying. Nothing more. He was a ghost living far beyond his appointed hour, clinging to life in the midst of death. A carrion eater, feeding on death and destruction to survive, for he had no purpose except to kill. And when the killing was done, he was stored away until his time came round again.

  He sat in the rubble with his back against the crumbling wall, and for the first time since Gary’s death on the Moon, he cried.

  * * *

  Asia.

  Africa.

  Antarctica.

  Luna.

  Venus.

  Pacifica.

  Alpha Centauri 4.

  The planet with the forests.

  The world with oceans of ammonia.

  Planets whose names he’s never even bothered to learn.

  The ghosts of billions of war dead assault his conscience. And Harker cries with them, for them, about the, over them, to them.

  * * *

  There was a movement. A man in a red armtag. A strangely familiar figure. He hadn’t seen Harker yet. Without thinking, Harker’s hand raised the gun to fire.

  His motion attracted the other’s attention. The soldier, with reflexes as fast as his own, whirled to face him. It was himself.

  “They copied some of our tapes,” he had been told. Exactly. Then they could make themselves a Harker, just as this side could. He wanted to laugh, but the pain in his leg prevented it. It would have been his first laugh in uncounted incarnations. This was the ultimate irony—fighting himself.

  The two Harkers’ eyes joined and locked. For one joyless instant, each read the other’s soul. Then each fired at the other.

  End of But As A Soldier, For His Country

  Read Stephen Goldin’s unforgettable full-length novel of eternal life and unending warfare, The Eternity Brigade. See the Parsina Press page at https://parsina.com/eternity.html.

  This story is one of many in Stephen Goldin’s collection, Ghosts, Girls, & Other Phantasms. For more information, visit https://stephengoldin.com/ghost.html.

  ABOUT STEPHEN GOLDIN

  Born in Philadelphia in 1947, Stephen Goldin has lived in California since 1960. He received a Bachelor’s degree in Astronomy from UCLA and worked as a civilian space scientist for the U.S. Navy for a few years after leaving college, but has made his living as a writer/editor most of his life.

  His first wife was fellow author Kathleen Sky, with whom he co-wrote the first edition of the highly acclaimed nonfiction book The Business of Being a Writer. His current wife is fellow author Mary Mason. So far they have co-authored two books in the Rehumanization of Jade Darcy series.

  He served the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America as editor of the SFWA Bulletin and as the organization’s Western Regional Director. He has lived with cats all his adult life. Artistically, he enjoys Broadway musicals and surrealist art.

  OTHER BOOKS BY STEPHEN GLDIN

  (most titles available at your favorite ebook retailer)

  Science Fiction

  The Eternity Brigade (sample)

  Scavenger Hunt (sample)

  Assault on the Gods (sample)

  A World Called Solitude (sample)

  Ghosts, Girls, & Other Phantasms (short story collection)

  Alien Murders (sample)

  And Not Make Dreams Your Master (sample)

  Crossroads of the Galaxy (sample)

  Herds (sample)

  Caravan (sample)

  Trek to Madworld (an original Star Trek novel)

  Mindsaga

  Mindflight (sample)

  Mindsearch (sample)

  The Rehumanization of Jade Darcy (co-written by Mary Mason)

  Jade Darcy and the Affair of Honor (sample)

  Jade Darcy and the Zen Pirates (sample)

  Agents of ISIS

  Tsar Wars (sample)

  Treacherous Moon

  Robot Mountain

  Sanctuary Planet

  Stellar Revolution

  Purgatory Plot

  Traitors’ World

  Counterfeit Stars

  Outworld Invaders

  Galactic Collapse

  Fantasy

  Polly! (sample)

  Angel in Black

  The Parsina Saga

  Shrine of the Desert Mage (sample)

  The Storyteller and the Jann

  Crystals of Air and Water

  Treachery of the Demon King

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