Combat was what finished them as far as the TAF was concerned. Not that they broke under battle conditions—just the reverse. The old ship would be rocking and screaming as it changed course every few seconds; every Irvingle, scrambler, and nucleonic howitzer along the firing corridor turning bright golden yellow from the heat it was generating; a hoarse yelping voice from the bulkhead loudspeakers pouring out orders faster than human muscles could move, the shock troops—their faces ugly with urgency—running crazily from one emergency station to another; everyone around you working like a blur and cursing and wondering out loud why the Eoti were taking so long to tag a target as big and as slow as the Khan… and suddenly you’d see a zombie clutching a broom in his rubbery hands and sweeping the deck in the slack-jawed, moronic, and horribly earnest way they had…
I remember whole gun crews going amuck and slamming into the zombies with long crowbars and metal-gloved fists; once, even an officer, sprinting back to the control room, stopped, flipped out his side-arm and pumped bolt after bolt of jagged thunder at a blue-skin who’d been peacefully wiping a porthole while the bow of the ship was being burned away. And as the zombie sagged uncomprehendingly and uncomplainingly to the floor plates, the young officer stood over him and chanted soothingly, the way you do to a boisterous dog: “Down, boy, down, down, down, damn you, down!”
That was the reason the zombies were eventually pulled back, not their own efficiency: the incidence of battle psycho around them just shot up too high. Maybe if it hadn’t been for that, we’d have got used to them eventually—God knows you get used to everything else in combat. But the zombies belonged to something beyond mere war.
They were so terribly, terribly unstirred by the prospect of dying again!
Well, everyone said the new-model zombies were a big improvement. They’d better be. A sling-shot might be one thin notch below an outright suicide patrol, but you need peak performance from every man aboard if it’s going to complete its crazy mission, let alone get back. And it’s an awful small ship and the men have to kind of get along with each other in very close quarters…
I heard feet, several pairs of them, rapping along the corridor. They stopped outside the door.
They waited. I waited. My skin began to prickle. And then I heard that uncertain shuffling sound. They were nervous about meeting me!
I walked over to the window and stared down at the drill field where old veterans whose minds and bodies were too worn out to be repaired taught fatigue-uniformed zombies how to use their newly conditioned reflexes in close-order drill. It made me remember a high-school athletic field years and years ago. The ancient barking commands drifted tinily up to me: “ Hup, two, three, four. Hup, two, three, four.” Only they weren’t using hup!, but a newer, different word I couldn’t quite catch.
And then, when the hands I’d clasped behind me had almost squeezed their blood back into my wrists, I heard the door open and four pairs of feet clatter into the room. The door closed and the four pairs of feet clicked to attention.
I turned around.