The Far Side (68 page)

“Since then, we don’t take chances.”

Kurt and Ezra stayed a few steps behind them, not saying anything.  Diyala was aware that Kurt had been there when her mother had been killed, but she wasn’t aware that it had been Kurt who had killed everyone aboard the ship except herself.

Kris helped Diyala buckle in, and then explained in a low voice the rituals of the preflight briefing.  Diyala had her nose pressed against the window as they taxied, and, having no experience with takeoffs, was surprised to be pushed back against the seat as they accelerated down the runway.

“That is the ocean, yes?” Diyala asked as they flew out over the water.

“Yes,” Kris answered.

“And those things I see, they are ships?”

“Some of them are very large, but yes, they’re ships.”

“The ground is getting very far away.”

“Yes, we’ll probably be flying seven or eight miles above the ground.”

“Out of musket range,” Diyala said pensively.

“Yes,” Kris said, enjoying the repetition.

Then they were back over the city and Diyala looked at her.  “All of those buildings... there are so many!”

“And people.  Diyala, there are four times as many people within sixty miles of you right now as there are Tengri.”

Diyala didn’t speak; she didn’t even come back with “You say!” but instead she kept looking down.

The flight had left at ten in the morning, and Kris set out to explain what was going to happen.  A five hour flight and three time zone changes meant they would arrive just after the sunset in New York City, where they would change planes and go to Montpelier, the closest airport to Northfield, Vermont, where Norwich was located.

They arrived at their hotel in Northfield, Vermont after 11 PM and had a quick snack and then crashed.  Diyala had borne up better than Kris had hoped.  Her mother had warned her that sometimes people didn’t handle mega-doses of newness all at once.  Diyala was asleep a few seconds after she crawled between the blankets, and Kris spent a few more minutes reviewing the map of the Norwich campus she’d found on the Norwich web site.  She’d read everything a half dozen times, and General Briggs had faxed a lot of material as well for her to read.

Diyala wasn’t happy to be getting up at seven AM, but Kris had told Kurt that she wanted to arrive as early as General Briggs would see her, which turned out to be 0830.

She had Kurt walk Diyala outside to look at the trees, just starting to turn to fall colors.  There was a little frost on the grass as well.  Diyala was as amazed by the frost as anything else.  There were mountains in the Tengri lands with snow on them, but people avoided them.  That people lived and worked in the cold amazed her.

With Diyala kept busy, Kris squared her shoulders and entered the Commandant’s office.

Chapter 26 :: Thoughts Thought

General Briggs was a man in his early forties, trim and fit.  His black hair was cut short, but more like a businessman, instead of a soldier.

Kris had seen his picture on the Norwich website.  She’d asked Kurt how to greet him and he’d laughed.  “Treat him like you would your high school principal.”

“Sir, I’m Kris Boyle,” she said, extending her hand to meet his, already held out.  “We’ve never met, but I’m grateful that you have time for me.”

“Tom Briggs, Miss Boyle.  I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am to see you.  It means, however faint a chance there is, I have a chance to recruit you.”

She nodded.  “People keep telling me that it’s the right thing to have moral qualms about killing people.  I had thought it was something you got used to.  Instead, I begin to understand why Ezra Lawson stopped dropping bombs on people.  After a while, it really sucks.”

“It does.  Did Kurt tell you about his claim to fame?”

“Yes, sir, if you mean the Ridge in Iraq.  I looked it up.”  She shook her head in amazement.  The stories in the histories were completely different than what Kurt Sandusky had told her.

“That’s right.  I was on that ridge, Miss Boyle.  I was another of those who stopped firing when Kurt gave the order.  I didn’t have the moral courage, however, to repeat that order in the clear.  I owe Kurt big time.”

He waved around them.  “I have some things I have to do at 0900.  What I’d like to do is talk to you privately for a few minutes and then turn you over to Captain Bonnie Stone, one of the tactical officers here.  She’ll show you around the campus.  At 1000 I’ll rejoin you and we can all go and look at the new facility and you can tell me what you think.”

“Understand, sir, that probably the thing I know the least about is the physical plant, except the fusor design.  All these new rules and regulations...” she shook her head ruefully.

“No one can understand them -- they change every other day,” he told her.  “We’ll make a good faith effort to meet them, plus I have my wife advising me and she’s more rigorous than any government bureaucrat who has never looked through a microscope.”

He turned to Kurt.  “If you’ll give us a few minutes, Major?”

“Yes, sir.  You understand that Ezra and I are going to be close?”

“I understand.  That’s something we can deal with as well later.”

Kurt turned and left.  The general waved Kris to a chair.  She sat down and saw his eyes were twinkling.  “Comfortable?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

He chuckled.  “You understand that the average person your age in my office has trembling knees and hands, and more than one has been sick.  It is refreshing to see someone sit down and be relaxed.”

“It’s been a long summer, sir.  After a while, well, you stop sweating the little things.”

“Exactly.  I don’t want to bedevil you with fan boy questions, even though I have a million of them.  The fact remains that there has been nothing much said in public about any of the events on Arvala, and not much about the research into fusors.  Andie Schulz found a way to go to alien planets.  It takes a top secret clearance, nearly, to learn the names of the principals, although your name is more accessible than most, because your father rocked the government demanding your rescue.  Oh, and one thing Miss Schulz did was accidentally bring several thousand gallons of water from an alien ocean through one of those doors.  The talking heads discuss that rather often, as a justification for anything else -- leaving out that the government can’t show a single person adversely affected by the event.”

“Yes, sir.  To be honest, Andie and I talked about what we would face beyond the door, but we were more concerned with supplies and equipment.  We didn’t give germs and bugs much thought.  Not until we were rescued and learned what people were upset about.  Once I joked about having alien cooties on my hands when Andie tossed me a local rock to look at.  A studio gaffer was the first person to alert us that we might not be so lucky with where the Far Side doors opened after we got lucky with the first one.  He was right.

“One opened to vacuum!  Anyone who tries that at home had better be tied down or they are going missing!  Another opened into what seemed to be solid rock -- probes wouldn’t go through the door.  There was a water world, where the bottom foot or so of the door was below the water surface.  Another planet we found we could see no land, and the water was twenty feet beneath the door.

“We were crazy, sir.  We hadn’t thought it through nearly well enough.  We both acknowledge that, and we accepted with something like good grace a month’s quarantine.

“We prepared for an emergency, we thought.  We took food, water and emergency gear through the door.  We forgot toilet paper, toothpaste, toothbrushes, sanitary napkins, no binoculars... it was a huge long list of things we needed there and didn’t have and that we should have had.  We had two nine millimeter pistols and Ezra had a P90 -- he brought that along because he knew Andie loved Star Gate SG-1, and that was their weapon of choice.  It turned out to be a good choice.

“We had virtually no tools.  We had a pair of tin snips.  No hammers, saws, or screwdrivers -- nothing.  We had
a radio, but the range was just a few miles outside during the day and almost zero in the cave we sheltered in.  In the early evening twilight or just before dawn we could probably reach a hundred miles.

“We were, in short, not really prepared.”

“Not many people have prepared that well to be shanghaied.  Kurt won’t talk about that, saying it’s an ongoing court case,” the general said.

“That and one of the two men who did the deed is dead and for three months the other man has had a bullet whiz past his head every day, no matter where he hides.  Another man, an oil industry executive who had offered to pay for our deaths, is also dead.  As my father keeps harping on, there are a lot of politicians with dirty fingers -- sticky green from the payoffs they took.

“We thought there would be a few people who’d threaten us and ask Andie to stop.  We never imagined what happened.”

“You were marooned?  Kurt said that much.”

“Yes.  We had a pallet of MREs, a pallet of water and a couple of boxes of other gear.  It was a big help, don’t get me wrong, but a week after we arrived, we were using local field expedients for TP.  It sounds stupid, sir, but believe me, it’s not.”

“No, it’s not,” he agreed.  “There is a reason why logistics is something that the US military emphasizes and excels at.  In 1990, when Sadaam went south, his army had to halt because it outran their supply lines.  We were able to move in enough men to make him think twice before he could resupply, even though his supply lines were a few hundred miles long, while ours was thousands of miles long.”

“Yeah, well our planning didn’t extend to spare clothes, not even socks.  Both Andie and I backpack -- we should have thought of that.”

“It takes a lot of experience before that sort of thing is second nature,” he told her.  “I’ll wager you’ll take a lot longer in the planning stage next time.”

Kris blushed.  “I told Andie how important pre-production was in the movies.  That days spent in pre-production could save many days in production, and that production cost so much, you had to do a good job with the planning.  I didn’t pay that thought nearly enough attention.”

“Kurt knows, as do I, that none of us are fond of recounting our combat experiences.  They are personal; entirely too personal.  That said, I understand that you participated in several small unit actions, one company-sized action and one with several thousand men engaged.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you’ve no education in the military arts?”

“No, General.  Oh, I’ve read military science fiction novels like Honor Harrington, Herris Serrano, Miles Vorkosigan and his mother...  Now, however, I had a month with nothing else to do but read.  Kurt gave me a reading list and I read a lot of the books that real soldiers study.”

“What made the difference between winning and losing?  Were there commonalities that you observed?”

“Our allies had longbows at first.  The first afternoon we met the locals, Andie sat down and made a primitive crossbow.  It only lasted for two shots, but it gave them the idea.  After that, I’m not sure what was common.  The Tengri had muskets.  The muskets fired very slowly and weren’t accurate -- yet they stuck with them, even though they had to know they were getting slaughtered anyway.

“They had cannon, but I don’t think a single one of our soldiers was injured by a ball; a half dozen were killed by what was probably grapeshot.  You’d see the ship line up and you’d hit the ground, and there would be the sound of the balls passing overhead -- it wasn’t pleasant, but they missed.

“They had radio, but it was something like Morse code.  We could hear them, but we didn’t understand them -- but still, we could gather intelligence about where the radio transmitters were.  That’s how we knew there was another ship coming from the east and that knowledge allowed us to ambush it.  Again, we ambushed another ship that had been mapping the Arvalan coastline as well, and made a particular target of the navigators, cartographers and ship’s officers.”

“How could you tell who they were?”

“We were pretty sure that we knew what they had been doing, and we knew that those men would be the first off the ship.  We had an ambush awaiting them.  We fired some mortar rounds at the ship to distract everyone’s attention, and then we swarmed the men at the boat.  Our people were back in cover before they started shooting back.”

Kris thought for a moment.  “I’d say there were two things we had going for us.  The Arvalans hate the Tengri a very great deal -- while the Tengri hold the Arvalans in contempt.  The second thing is that we understood the value of intelligence and put it to good use.  It didn’t hurt that our weapons were a match for theirs, and when we were reinforced, ours were much better than theirs.”

He contemplated her for a moment.  “Miss Boyle, have you thought about what you’ve just said before today?  Or were your comments just now off the cuff?”

“Honestly, General, since this summer I spend more and more time wondering why -- not how or what.  If I start thinking about the actual events...” she shook her head.  “Sir, one man, the first man I killed, wasn’t even looking at me -- he may never have seen me.  He lifted his weapon and I thought he was going to shoot a woman of about twenty-five.  She was wearing a slave collar.

“I’ve asked myself about that a million times.  I’d heard sounds of someone approaching and I pulled out the 9 millimeter pistol Andie had loaned me.  I saw him lift his weapon and it was just instinctive.  I lined up and shot him.  There was no thought, no nothing.

“The second time I killed men was in a battle -- it was them or me.  One of the men who were supposed to protect me died a few feet away from me.  After that, I shot crossbows, I used the pistol; I didn’t stop to think until afterwards.  Then Ezra was all weird, because Andie had been wounded and didn’t want me to worry.”

“She was wounded?”

“She’s Andie Schulz, sir.  I don’t know how it works, but bullets bounce off her.  She had a six-inch scratch on her thigh.  We washed it and that was all we had to do.  Ezra had a small first aid kit, but none of the bandages were large enough to do the job.

“It was probably the first time in Andie’s life that nothing was large enough to fit her.

“The next time there was a general at the head of an army of six thousand men, standing at his King’s left hand.  The King told him to kill me, and the general dropped his hand to a dagger on his belt, drew it and stepped towards me.  He was closer than we are, sir.  I killed him with a single shot to the head.”

“You killed the King’s right hand man, at the King’s side, standing in front of an army?” he said, sounding bemused.

“Yeah.  Ezra and Kurt say that I’m my father’s daughter that way.  Then, one of the King’s generals stepped forward and killed the King for making war on women and not the enemy.”

“Good God!  And the army was there?  Armed with?”

“Longbows and swords, sir.  But the bows weren’t strung.  I never really thought about it until later.  It was like they weren’t there.  He stepped forward and after that the pistol was on automatic.  Do you understand that that bothers me?  That I’ve never told anyone else about this and I pray to God you don’t tell anyone either?”

“Never!” he said hastily.  “Do you understand the importance of that kind of decision-making to military officers?”

“Staying alive?  I understand the importance that is to anyone who expects to be around tomorrow.”

“That too, but Miss Boyle, you don’t sound suicidal to me!  Were you?”

“Of course not.  I told you, I didn’t think about the soldiers.”

“It could well be that it’s just like you said, that you didn’t think, but Miss Boyle, I’m a military officer and one thing we value is repeatable results.  You evaluated the threat from six thousand soldiers and took out the immediate threat.  I don’t think it’s something we can teach, but... it’s important to instill in our people the attitudes that can lead to that sort of decision.”