A Separate War and Other Stories by Joe Haldeman Page A

hours.”
    â€œEight,” Siderenko said. “We’ll be about ten hours behind you.”
    â€œWait in orbit?” I said, knowing the answer.
    â€œYou wish. Let’s go down to the bay.”
    We had a holo of the base projected down there and worked out a simple strategy. Twenty-two of us in fighting suits, armed to the teeth, carrying a nova bomb and a stasis field, surround the place and politely knock on the door. Depending on the response, we either walk in for tea or level the place.
    Getting there would not be so bad. Nobody could endure four hours of five-gee acceleration, then flip for four hours of deceleration, unprotected. So we’d be clamshelled in the fighting suits, knocked out and super-hydrated. Eight hours of deep sleep and then maybe an hour to shake it off and go be a soldier. Or a guest for tea.
    Cat and I made the rounds in the cramped fighter, seeing that everybody was in place, suit fittings and readouts in order. Then we shared a minute of private embrace and took our own places.
    I jacked the fluid exchange into my hip fitting and all of the fear went away. My body sagged with sweet lassitude, and I let the soft nozzle clasp my face. I was still aware enough to know that it was sucking all of the air out of my lungs and then blowing in a dense replacement fluid, but all I felt was a long low-key orgasm. I knew that this was the last thing a lot of people felt, the fighter blown to bits moments or hours later. But the war offered us many worse ways to die. I was sound asleep before the acceleration blasted us into space. Dreaming of being a fish in a warm and heavy sea.
    8
    The chemicals won’t let you remember coming out of it, which is probably good. My diaphragm and esophagus were sore and tired from getting rid of all the fluid. Cat looked like hell and I stayed away from mirrors, while we toweled off and put on the contact nets and got back into the fighting suits for the landing.
    Our strategy, such as it was, seemed even less appealing, this close to the portal planet. The two Tauran cruisers were old models, but they were a hundred times the size of our fighter, and since they were in synchronous orbit over the base, there was no way to avoid coming into range. But they did let us slide under them without blowing us out of the sky, which made Eagle’s story more believable.
    It was pretty obvious, though, that our primary job was to be a target, for those ships and the base. If we were annihilated, the Bolivar would modify its strategy.
    When Morales said we were going to just go straight in and land on the strip beside the base, I muttered, “Might as well be hung for a sheep as a goat,” and Cat, who was on my line, asked why anyone would hang a sheep. I told her it was hard to explain. In fact, it was just something my father used to say, and if he’d ever explained it, I’d forgotten.
    The landing was loud but featherlight. We unclamped our fighting suits from their transport positions and practiced walking in the one-third gee of the small planet. “They should’ve sent Goy,” Cat said, which is what we called Chance Nguyen, the Martian. “He’d be right at home.”
    We moved out fast, people sprinting to their attack positions. Cat went off to the other side of the base. I was going with Morales, to knock on the door. Rank and its privileges. The first to die, or be offered tea.
    The buildings on the base looked like they’d been designed by a careful child. Windowless blocks laid out on a grid. All but one were sand-colored. We walked to the silver cube of headquarters. At least it had “HQ” in big letters over the airlock.
    The shiny front door snicked up like a guillotine in reverse. We went through with dignified haste, and it slammed back down. The blade, or door, was pretty massive, for us to “hear” it in a vacuum; vibration through our boots.
    Air hissed in—that we did hear—and