Read A Separate War and Other Stories for Free Online Page B

African god. But he was quiet and modest, my favorite.
    I mainly talked with him and Sharn through the meal, chatting about everything but our immediate future. When everything was done, the cooks came in with two carts and cleared the table, leaving tea and coffee. Garcia waited until all of us had been served and the privates were gone.
    â€œOf course we don’t have the faintest idea of what’s waiting for us at Aleph-10,” the major said. “One thing we have been able to find out, which I don’t think any of you have been told, is that we know how the second Strike Force bought it.”
    That was something new. “It was like a minefield. A matrix of nova bombs in a belt around the portal planet’s equator. We’re assuming it’s still there.”
    â€œThey couldn’t detect it and avoid it?” Risa asked.
    â€œIt was an active system. The bombs actually chased them down. They detonated four, coming closer and closer, until the fifth got them. The drone that was recording the action barely got away; one of the bombs managed to chase it through the first collapsar jump.
    â€œWe can counter the system. We’re being preceded by an intelligent drone squad that should be able to detonate all of the ring of nova bombs simultaneously. It should make things pretty warm on the ground, as well as protecting our approach.”
    â€œWe don’t know what got the first Strike Force?” Sid asked.
    Garcia shook her head. “The drone didn’t return. All we can say for sure is that it wasn’t the same thing.”
    â€œHow so?” I asked.
    â€œAleph-10’s easily visible from Earth; it’s about eighty light-years away. They would have detected a nova bomb 120 years ago, if there’d been one. The assumption has to be that they attacked in a conventional way, as ordered, and were destroyed. Or had some accident on the way.”
    Of course they hadn’t beamed any communication back to Earth or Stargate. We still didn’t. The war was being fought on portal planets, near collapsars, which were usually desolate, disposable rocks. It would only take one nova bomb to vaporize the Stargate station; perhaps three to wipe out life on Earth.
    So we didn’t want to give them a road map back.
    6
    A lot of the training over the next eleven months had to do with primitive weapons, which explained why so much of my ALSC time had been spent practicing with bows and arrows, spears, knives, and so forth. We had a new thing called a “stasis field,” which made a bubble inside which you had to use simple tools: no energy weapons worked.
    In fact, physics itself didn’t work too well inside a stasis field; chemistry, not at all. Nothing could move faster than 16.3 meters per second inside—including elementary particles and light. (You could see inside, but it wasn’t light; it was some tachyon thing.) If you were exposed to the field unprotected, you’d die instantly of brain death—no electricity—and anyhow freeze solid in a few seconds. So we had suits made of stuff like tough crinkly aluminum foil, full of uncomfortable plumbing and gadgets so that everything recycled. You could live inside the stasis field, inside the suit, indefinitely. Until you went mad.
    But one rip, even a pinprick, in the fabric of the suit, and you were instantly dead.
    For that reason, we didn’t practice with the primitive weapons inside the field. And if you had a training accident that caused the smallest scratch, on yourself or anyone else, you got to meditate on it for a day in solitary confinement. Even officers; my carelessness with arrow points cost me a long anxious day in darkness.
    Only one platoon could fit in the gym at a time, so at first I trained with whoever was using it when I got a few hours off from my other duties. After a while I arranged my schedule so that it was always the fourth platoon. I liked both Aurelio Morales,