Free Space Eater by David Langford Page A

Worst, I was thinking thoughts I didn’t quite want to say out loud. My brain turned things over and over like an old petrol engine that never quite fires but goes around tired and gasping until at last the power gives out.
    I didn’t want to be a person whose thoughts were all complicated, tangled, sick: at the far end of a tunnel years and years long I couldn’t remember having been that way. It had been a bad time before the Force.
    In the Force I got killed every once in a while. In the Force I felt safe. Peer group, the shrink called it, all of us thinking much the same way, all of us saying just about what we thought (except to Admin, but that’s different). Sure there’s lots of technical stuff, courses to soak up, strategy plans, weapon drills ...
    that’s all fun and games like the wargaming, it’s not complicated . And then there were the good times, the jokes, crossing the wires on Security. Even when it all gets out of hand—I remembered Alan going berserk with an axe , for God’s sake, an axe because the quartermaster wouldn’t issue him a jacket that fitted, he caught up with him in Admin, secretaries passing out everywhere, hacked through his thigh and shouted, “Ho ho, the leg is off!”, we all laughed at that one ... Yes, even when it gets out of hand it’s something we all share. This mob in Tunnel lived behind high walls of their own, or in tunnels. And in the Force there was one special time we never talked about much, and that might have done a lot to hold us together: the times in the regrowth tanks after a D. There is that old gag about beating yourself with a gunbutt because it’s so nice when you finally stop. Maybe that was part of it. You’re strung up on pain like high-tension wires, red-hot corkscrews hauling at your gut; then there’s the blackout and you’ve notched up another D, and then ... that time just floating there in the yellow gunk, no need to think, no way to move, so sleepy and so good. If the tanks weren’t expensive and restricted as well, you could clean up a lot of minds better than the shrinks with a regular dose of the big D and the tank. Might even stop people like the Tunnel staff being so goddamn complicated and knotted-up.
    Maybe I’d already been away from Force South Bank too long. I was getting hungry for that old, clear-cut Force feeling; when you start thinking around and about it the way I was doing now, it has to be a sign that things are changing, going wrong. I was changing and I didn’t want to change. I was a happy, efficient fighting machine, but the damp air down in Tunnel was creeping in the corridors, into my reflexes, into my bones.
    The reflexes were still mostly there, I found as a muffled thud came from the door and I was suddenly on my feet in the clammy dark. My hand was enough used to going without weapons that it barely twitched toward where my belt should have been. Instead it found the light plastic chair and hefted that as I moved to the bolted door. Another low thud, not dull enough to be a fist beating on the door, not sharp enough to be knuckles: a bunch of fingertips, then. Someone whispered through the door: “Ken? Ken?Mick y here. Are you awake, Ken?”
    “What’s the matter?” I said to the crack between door and jamb, not standing where the door would hit me if it burst open. One hand held up the chair, the other slid along the wall to the light switch: click and I blinked as the glare took hold of my dark-adjusted eyes.
    “Party,” said Wui none too clearly. “Coming out party for the Project, just a few of us, last chance we get. Come on !”
    Well: I hadn’t been sleeping. And whatever happened now was going to be canceled when the door opened tomorrow on that twisty tunnel 162 light-years from end to end. “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die,” was what one Admin major used to say to us, smiling wide to show any number of not-too-good teeth; he’d always looked disappointed when we just nodded.