Dorsai!

Force-Leader II

The name of Force-Leader Graeme was mud.

The Third Command, or at least that portion of it that was dug in around the village, made no great attempt to hide the fact from him. If he had shown at all that he was sensitive to their opinion of him, they would have made even less. But there was something about his complete indifference to their attitude that put a check to their obvious contempt. Nevertheless, the hundred and fifty men that had been forced by him to make their approach on the village under full equipment and maximum security effort, and the three hundred other men who had made a much more casual and easy approach, and were congratulating themselves on being out from under such an officer, agreed in an opinion of Donal that had reached its nadir! There is only one thing that veterans hatworse than being made to sweat unnecessarily in garrison; and that is being made to sweat unnecessarily in the field. The word had gone out that the day’s work was to be a Sunday walk. And it had been a Sunday walk, except for those serving under a green young Dorsai officer, name of Graeme. The men were not happy.

Along about twilight, as the sunset was fading through the bushy-limbed trees that were the local mutant variform of the Earthly conifer that had been imported when this planet was terraformed, a runner came from Hugh at Command HQ, just outside the enemy end of the village. He found Donal seated astride a fallen log, studying a map of the local area.

“Signal from Battles,” said the runner, squatting beside the log.

“Stand up,” said Donal, quietly. The runner stood. “Now, what’s the signal?”

“Second and Third Commands won’t be moving up until tomorrow morning,” said the runner, sulkily.

“Signal acknowledged,” said Donal, waving him off. The runner turned and hurried away with another instance of the new officer’s wax-and-braid to relate to the other enlisted men back at HQ.

Left to himself, Donal continued to study the map as long as the light lasted. When it was completely gone, he put the map away, produced a small black whistle from his pocket and peeped for his ranking Senior Groupman.

A moment later a thin body loomed up against the faintly discernible sky beyond the treetops.

“Morphy, sir. Reporting,” came a voice of the Senior Groupman.

“Yes—” said Donal. “Sentries all posted, Groupman?”

“Yes, sir.” The quality of Morphy’s tone was completely without inflection.

“Good. I want them alert at all times. Now, Morphy—”

“Yes, sir?”

“Who do we have in the Force that has a good sense of smell?”

“Smell, sir?”

Donal merely waited.

“Well, sir,” said Morphy, finally and slowly. “There’s Lee, he practically grew up in the mines, where you have to have a good sense of smell. That’s the mines on Coby, Force-Leader.”

“I assumed those were the mines you meant,” said Donal, dryly. “Get Lee over here, will you?”

Morphy took out his own whistle and blew for the Senior Groupman, Third Group. They waited.

“He’s about the camp, isn’t he?” said Donal, after a moment. “I want all the men within whistle sound that aren’t on sentry duty.”

“Yes, sir,” said Morphy. “He’ll be here in a moment. He knows it’s me. Everybody sounds a little different on these whistles and you get to know them like voices after a while, sir.”

“Groupman,” said Donal. “I’d be obliged if you didn’t feel the need to keep telling me things I already know.”

“Yes, sir,” said Morphy, subsiding.

Another shadow loomed up out of the darkness.

“What is it, Morphy?” said the voice of Lee.

“I wanted to see you,” spoke up Donal, before the Senior Groupman had a chance to answer. “Morphy tells me you have a good sense of smell.”

“I do pretty well,” said Lee.

“Sir!”

“I do pretty well, sir.”

“All right,” said Donal. “Both of you take a look at the map here. Look sharp. I’m going to make a light,” He flicked on a little flash, shielded by his hand. The map was revealed, spread out on the log before them. “Look here,” said Donal, pointing. “Three kilometers off this way. Do you know what that is?”

“Small valley,” said Morphy. “It’s way outside our sentry posts.”

“We’re going there,” Donal said. The light went out and he got up from the log.

“Us? Us, sir?” the voice of Lee came at him.

“The three of us,” said Donal. “Come along.” And he led the way surefootedly out into the darkness.

Going through the woods, he was pleased to discover the two Groupmen were almost as sure-footed in the blackness as himself. They went slowly but carefully for something over a mile; and then they felt the ground beginning to slope upward under their feet. “All right. Down and easy,” said Donal quietly. The three men dropped to their bellies and began in skilled silence to work their way up to the crest of the slope. It took them a good half-hour; but at the end of that time they lay side by side just under the skyline of a ridge, looking over into a well of blackness that was a small, hidden valley below. Donal tapped Lee on the shoulder and when the other turned his face toward him in the gloom, Donal touched his own nose, pointed down into the valley and made sniffing motions. Lee turned his face back to the valley and lay in that position for several minutes, apparently doing nothing at all. However, at the end of that time, he turned toward Donal again, and nodded. Donal motioned them all back down the slope.

Donal asked no questions and the two Groupmen volunteered nothing until they were once more back safely within the lines of their own sentry posts. Then Donal turned toward Lee.

“Well, Groupman,” he said. “What did you smell?”

Lee hesitated. His voice, when he answered, had a note of puzzlement in it.

“I don’t know, sir,” he answered. “Something — sour, sort of. I could just barely smell it.”

“That’s the best you can do?” inquired Donal. “Something sour?”

“1 don’t know, sir,” said Lee. “I’ve got a pretty good nose, Force — in fact,” a note of belligerence crept into his voice. “I’ve got a damned good nose. I never smelled anything like this before. I’d remember.”

“Have either of you men ever contracted on this planet before?”

“No,” said Lee.

“No, sir,” answered Morphy.

“I see,” said Donal. They had reached the same log from which they had started a little less than three hours before. “Well, that’ll be all. Thank you, Groupmen.”

He sat down on the log again. The other two hesitated a moment; and then went off together.

Left alone, Donal consulted the map again; and sat thinking for a while. Then he rose, and hunting up Morphy, told him to take over the Force, and stay awake. Donal himself was going to Command HQ. Then he took off.

Command HQ was a blackout shell containing a sleepy orderly, a map viewer and Skuak.

“The commandant around?” asked Donal, as he came in.

“Been asleep three hours,” said Skuak. “What’re you doing up? I wouldn’t be if I didn’t have the duty.”

“Where’s he sleeping?”

“About ten meters off in the bush, at eleven o’clock,” said Skuak. “What’s it all about? You aren’t going to wake him, are you?’

“Maybe he’ll still be awake,” said Donal; and went out.

Outside the shell, and the little cleared space of the HQ area, he cat-footed around to the location Skuak had mentioned. A battle hammock was there, slung between two trees, with a form mounding its climate cover. But when Donal reached in to put his hand on the form’s shoulder, it closed only on the soft material of a rolled-up battle jacket.

Donal breathed out and turned about. He went back the way he had come, past the Command HQ area, and was stopped by a sentry as he approached the village.

“Sorry, Force,” said the sentry. “Commandant’s order. No one to go into the village area. Not even himself, he says. Booby traps.”

“Oh, yes — thank you, sentry,” said Donal; and, turning about, went off into the darkness.

As soon as he was safely out of sight, however, he turned again, and worked his way back past the sentry lines and in among the houses of the village. The small but very bright moon which the Harmonites called The Eye of the Lord was just rising, and throwing, through the ruined walls, alternate patches of tricky silver and black. Slipping in and out of the black places, he began patiently to search the place, house by house, and building by building.

It was a slow and arduous process, carried out the way he was doing it, in complete silence. And the moon mounted in the sky. It was nearly four hours later that he came upon what he was searching for.

In the moonlit center of a small building’s roofless shell stood Hugh Killien, looking very tall and efficient in his chameleon battle-dress. And close to him — almost close enough to be in his arms — was Anea, the Select of Kultis. Beyond them both, blurred by action of the polarizer that had undoubtedly been the means of allowing it to carry her invisibly to this spot, was a small flying platform.

“…Sweet,” Hugh was saying, his resonant voice pitched so low it barely carried to the ears of Donal, shrouded in shadow outside the broken wall, “Sweet, you must trust me. Together we can stop him; but you must let me handle it. His power is tremendous—”

“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!”

“Of 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 ex-miner. “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 me 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 groundlevel 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 dwin-dled 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 Kennedy — 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 sea. 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 him. 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.”