Free Their Master's War by Mick Farren Page B

his gaping mouth. His own screams beat inside his head until his skull started to fragment. His brain boiled over in an eruption of excruciating color. This was worse even than the datashot. His surroundings gone, he was alone, a thing without form, constantly shifting and rending. All that remained was the pain. It was his very being, burning through eternity. The pain defined him. He was like a star made of constantly exploding and regenerating agony. To his surprise, he found that he could think inside the suffering. If anything, that made it worse. The capacity to think prevented him from losing himself in the howling hallucinations that racked his overloaded senses. He began to feel how the pain came in distinct phases. There was no respite, and each was as bad as the next. All the change of phase meant was a shift in emphasis. There was the blinding red-gold fire that burned and consumed his flesh. There were the icy razor bolts that ripped and gouged through the backs of his eyes. There was the terrible spatial distortion in which even his identity became unrecognizable. Worst of all, the hallucinations refused to stop. The cycle of torment went on and on, a spiraling loop on which he helplessly hung, twisted, and turned. At first, he couldn't believe that it had stopped. It had been everything. He was pressed hard against the side of the coffin, clawing at the lining and muttering to himself. His eyes were tightly shut, and the visions of horror lingered like an afterimage while his nervous system cringed, believing in nothing but the next stage in the cycle.
    "Let it stop, please. Let it stop! Let it stop?*
    When the messdeck siren started braying again, he thought that it was still his screaming.
    "Let it..."
    The last word was a sob. He opened his eyes. Everything was back to normal. The lights were coming on, but none of it seemed real. The pain—that was real, that was everything. Except that the pain had gone. There was blood on the palms of his hands where his fingernails had dug in. His right shoulder hurt. He must have been banging it against the inside of the coffin. The cover opened. He experienced a fresh clutch of dread. The unreality was still there. Had he gone mad? There seemed to be something wrong with the light; things didn't look right. The cover was now fully open. Hark tentatively sat up. Immediately, his stomach revolted. He was racked by a spasm of dry retching, and sweat poured from his upper body. He felt dizzy and had to grab hold of the side of the coffin. Strangely, there was a kind of comfort in this violent physical reaction. If he could feel like this, he was probably still sane. The madness that he had felt back on the planet had been nothing like this. There was a certain safety in madness, and the last thing he felt was safe. Reality seemed to be returning. He waited until the spasm passed, wiped off his face, then tried to stand. His legs felt like rubber, but by concentrating hard, he managed it. Others on the messdeck were emerging from their coffins. To a man, they looked as bad as he felt. Most were verging on green, and most had dark circles under eyes that still stared in horror. It wasn't long, though, before the cursing started. "Shit." It was Dyrkin, as top man in the pecking order, who led the chorus of complaint.
    "I ain't never going to go through that again. They're going to have to burn me first."
    "There's got to be some other way."
    Renchett, who had recovered faster than most, spat on the deck. "Of course there's a better way. We all know that the officers and medians don't do the jump the hard way. They got something. They got drugs or shielding or implants or something. They don't have to feel it the way we do." Elmo had come into the messdeck. He looked almost as bad as the men did, but he was doing his best to pull his overman authority back together.
    "Curse it up, boys. Get really angry. That's the best way to get over a jump. Anyone in really bad