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Authors: Gordon R. Dickson

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BOOK: Dorsai!
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“I know, I know!” she interrupted, fiercely, all but wringing her hands. “But every day we wait makes it more dangerous for you, Hugh. Poor Hugh—” gently she raised her hand to touch his cheek, “what I've dragged you into.”

“Dragged? Me?” Hugh laughed, low and confidently. “I went into this with my eyes open.” He reached out for her. “For you—”

But she slipped away from him.

“Now's not the time for that,” she said. “Anyway, it's not me you're doing this for. It's Kultis. He's not going to use me,” she said fiercely, “to get
my
world under his thumb!”

“Or course, it's for Kultis,” said Hugh. “But you
are
Kultis, Anea. You're everything I love about the Exotics. But don't you see; all we have to work on are your suspicions. You
think
he's planning against the Bond, against Sayona, himself. But that s not enough for us to go to Kultis with.”

“But what can I do?” she cried. “I can't use his own methods against him. I can't lie, or cheat, or set agents on him while he still holds my contract. I . . . I just
can't
. That's what being Select means!” She clenched her fists. “I'm trapped by my own mind, my own body.” She turned on him suddenly. “You said when I first spoke to you, two months ago you said you had evidence!”

“I was mistaken,” Hugh's tone was soothing. “Something came to my attention—at any rate I was wrong. I have my own built-in moral system, too, Anea. It may not reach the level of psychological blockage like yours,” he drew himself up, looking very martial in the moonlight. “But I know what's honorable and right.”

“Oh, I know. I know, Hugh—” she was all contrition. “But I get so desperate. You don't know—”

“If he had only made some move against you personally—”

“Me?” She stiffened. “He wouldn't dare! A Select of Kultis—and besides,” she added with more of a touch of common sense than Donal had heretofore given her credit for possessing, “that'd be foolish. He'd have nothing to gain; and Kultis would be alerted against him.”

“I don't know,” Hugh scowled in the moonlight. “He's a man like anyone else. If I thought—”

“Oh, Hugh!” she giggled suddenly, like any schoolgirl. “Don't be absolutely ridiculous!”

“Ridiculous!” His tone rang with wounded feelings.

“Oh, now—I didn't mean that. Hugh, now stop looking like an elephant that just had his trunk stung by a bee. There's no point in making things up. He's far too intelligent to—” she giggled again, then sobered. “No, it's his head we have to worry about; not his heart.”

“Do you worry about my heart?” he asked in a low voice.

She looked down at the ground.

“Hugh—I do like you,” she said. “But you don't understand. A Select is a . . . a symbol.”

“If you mean you can't—”

“No, no, not that—” she looked up quickly. “I've no block against love, Hugh. But if I was involved in something . . . something small, and mean, it's what it would do to those back on Kultis to whom a Select means something— You
do
understand?”

“I understand that I'm a soldier,” he said. “And that I never know whether I'll have a tomorrow or not.”

“I know,” she said. “And they send you out on things like this, dangerous things.”

“My dear little Anea,” he said, tenderly. “How little you understand what it is to be a soldier. I volunteered for this job.”

“Volunteered?” She stared at him.

“To go look for danger—to go look for opportunities to prove myself!” he said, fiercely. “To make myself a name, so that the stars will believe I'm the kind of man a Select of Kultis could want and belong with!”

“Oh, Hugh!” she cried on a note of enthusiasm. “If you only could! If only something would make you famous. Then we could really fight him!”

He checked, staring at her in the moonlight with such a sandbagged expression that Donal, in the shadows, nearly chuckled.

“Must you always be talking about politics?” he cried.

But Donal had already turned away from the two of them. There was no point in listening further. He moved silently out of earshot; but after that he went quickly, not caring about noise. His search for Hugh had taken him clear across the village, so that what was closest to him now was his own Force area. The short night of Harmony's northern continent was already beginning to gray toward dawn. He headed toward his own men, one of his odd certainties chilling him.

“Halt!” cried one of his own sentries, as Donal broke clear of the houses, “Halt and give—sir!”

“Come with me!” snapped Donal. “Where's the Third Group Area from here?”

“This way, sir,” said the man; and led the way, trotting to keep up with Donal's long strides.

They burst into the Third Group area. Donal put his whistle to his lips and blew for Lee.

“What—?” mumbled a sleepy voice from half a dozen meters' distance. A hammock heaved and disgorged the bony figure of the exminer. “What the hell . . . sir?”

Donal strode up to him and with both hands swung him about so that he faced toward the enemy territory from which the dawn breeze was coming. “Smell!” he ordered.

Lee blinked, scrubbed his nose with one knotty fist, and stifled a yawn. He took a couple of deep breaths, filling his lungs, his nostrils spread—and suddenly he snapped into complete awakedness.

“Same thing, sir,” he said, turning to Donal. “Stronger.”

“All right!” Donal wheeled about on the sentry. “Take a signal to Senior Groupmen, First and Second Groups. Get their men into trees, high up in trees, and get themselves up, too.”

“Trees, sir?”

“Get going! I want every man in this Force a dozen meters off the ground in ten minutes—
with
their weapons!” The sentry turned to make off. “If you've got time after making that signal, try to get through to Command HQ with it. If you see you can't, climb a tree yourself. Got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then get going!”

Donal wheeled about and started himself on the business of getting the sleeping Third Group soldiers out of their hammocks and up the trunks of tall trees. It was not done in ten minutes. It was closer to twenty by the time they were all off the ground. A group of Dorsai schoolboys would have made it in a quarter of the time, from the sounder sleep of youth. But on the whole, thought Donal, pulling himself at last up into a tree, they had been in time; and that was what counted.

He did not stop as the others had, at a height of a dozen meters. Automatically, as he hurried the others out of their hammocks, he had marked the tallest tree in the area; and this he continued to climb until he had a view out over the tops of the lesser vegetation of the area. He shaded his eyes against the new-rising sun, peering off toward enemy territory, and between the trees.

“Now, what d'we do?” floated up an aggrieved voice from below and off to one side of his own lofty perch. Donal took his palm from his eyes and tilted his head downward.

“Senior Groupman Lee,” he said in a low, but carrying voice. “You will shoot the next man who opens his mouth without being spoken to first by either you, or myself. That is a direct order.”

He raised his head again, amid a new silence, and again peered off under his palm through the trees.

The secret of observation is patience. He saw nothing, but he continued to sit, looking at nothing in particular, and everything in general; and after four slow minutes he was rewarded by a slight flicker of movement that registered on his gaze. He made no effort to search it out again, but continued to observe in the same general area; and gradually, as if they were figures developing on a film out of some tangled background, he became aware of men slipping from cover to cover, a host of men, approaching the camp.

He leaned down again through the branches.

“No firing until I blow my whistle,” he said, in an even lower voice than before. “Pass the word— quietly.”

He heard, like the murmur of wind in those same branches, the order being relayed on to the last man in the Third Group and—he hoped—to the Second and First Groups as well.

The small, chameleon-clad figures continued to advance. Squinting at them through the occulting leaves and limbs, he made out a small black cross sewn to the right shoulder of each battle-dress. These were no mercenaries. These were native elite troops of the United Orthodox Church itself, superb soldiers and wild fanatics both. And even as the recognition confirmed itself in his mind, the advancing men broke into a charge upon the camp, bursting forth all at once in the red-gray dawnlight into full-throated yips and howls, underlaid a second later by the high-pitched singing of their spring-gun slivers as they ripped air and wood and flesh.

They were not yet among the trees where Donal's force was hiding. But his men were mercenaries, and had friends in the camp the Orthodox elite were attacking. He held them as long as he could, and a couple of seconds longer; and then, putting his whistle to lips, he blew with the damper completely off—a blast that echoed from one end of the camp to the other.

Savagely, his own men opened up from the trees. And for several moments wild confusion reigned on the ground. It is not easy to tell all at once from which direction a sliver gun is being fired at you. For perhaps five minutes, the attacking Orthodox soldiers labored under the delusion that the guns cutting them down were concealed in some ground-level ambush. They killed ruthlessly, everything they could see on their own eye-level; and, by the time they had discovered their mistake, it was too late. On their dwindled numbers was concentrated the fire of a hundred and fifty-one rifles; and if the marksmanship of only one of these was up to Dorsai standards, that of the rest was adequate to the task. In less than forty minutes from the moment in which Donal had begun to harry his sleep-drugged men up into the trees, the combat was over.

The Third Group slid down out of their trees and one of the first down—a soldier named Kennebuc—calmly lifted his rifle to his shoulder and sent a sliver through the throat of an Orthodox that was writhing on the ground, nearby.

“None of that!” cried Donal, sharply and clearly; and his voice carried out over the area. A mercenary hates wanton killing, it not being his business to slaughter men, but to win battles. But not another shot was fired. The fact said something about a significant change in the attitude of the men of the Third Command toward a certain new officer by the name of Graeme.

Under Donal's orders, the wounded on both sides were collected and those with serious wounds medicated. The attacking soldiery had been wiped out almost to a man. But it had not been completely one-sided. Of the three hundred-odd men who had been on the ground at the time of the attack, all but forty-three—and that included Force-Leader Skuak—were casualties.

“Prepare to retreat,” ordered Donal—and, at that moment, the man facing him turned his head to look past at something behind Donal. Donal turned about. Pounding out of the ruined village, hand gun in his fist, was Commandant Killien.

In silence, not moving, the surviving soldiers of the Command watched him race up to them. He checked at their stare; and his eyes swung about to focus on Donal. He dropped to a walk and strode up to within a few meters of the younger officer.

“Well, Force-Leader!” he snapped. “What happened? Report?”

Donal did not answer him directly. He raised his hand and pointed to Hugh; and spoke to two of the enlisted men standing by.

“Soldiers,” he said. “Arrest that man. And hold him for immediate trial under Article Four of the Mercenaries Code.”

VETERAN

Directly after getting into the city, with his canceled contract stiff in his pocket, and cleaning up in his hotel room, Donal went down two flights to pay his visit to Marshal Hendrik Galt. He found him in, and concluded certain business with him before leaving to pay his second call at a different hotel across the city.

In spite of himself, he felt a certain weakness in the knees as he announced his presence to the doorbot. It was a weakness most men would have excused him. William, Prince of Ceta, was someone few persons would have cared to beard in his own den; and Donal, in spite of what he had just experienced, was still a young—a very young—man. However, the doorbot invited him in, and summoning up his calmest expression, Donal strode into the suite.

William was, as the last time Donal had seen him, busy at his desk. This was no affectation on William's part, as a good many people between the stars could testify. Seldom has one individual accomplished in a single day what William accomplished in the way of business, daily, as a matter of routine. Donal walked up to the desk and nodded his greeting. William looked up at him.

“I'm amazed to see you,” he said.

“Are you, sir?'' said Donal.

William considered him in silence for perhaps half a minute.

“It's not often I make mistakes,” he said. “Perhaps I can console myself with the thought that when I do they turn out to be on the same order of magnitude as my successes. What inhuman kind of armor are you wearing, young man, that leads you to trust yourself in my presence, again?”

“Possibly the armor of public opinion,” replied Donal. “I've been in the public eye, recently. I have something of a name, nowadays.”

“Yes,” said William. “I know that type of armor from personal experience, myself.”

“And then,” said Donal, “you did send for me.”

“Yes.” And then, without warning, William's face underwent a change to an expression of such savagery as Donal had never seen before. “How dare you!” snarled the older man, viciously. “How dare you!”

“Sir,” said Donal, wooden-faced, “I had no alternative.”

BOOK: Dorsai!
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