The tactics of mistake

26

The shuttleboat, with the Exotic sunburst emblem inlaid on its metal side, was allowed to land without protest on the Dorsai at the Foralie shuttleboat pad. But on emerging with Mondar, Cletus was immediately disarmed of his sidearm by competent-looking and obviously veteran troops in Coalition uniforms, with the white band of the Alliance-Coalition Joint Force fastened about their right sleeves. The same soldiers escorted the three men through a Foralie town where none of the local people were to be seen - only the occupying soldiers - to a military atmosphere craft that flew them up to Grahame House.

Word of their arrival had obviously been sent ahead. They were escorted to the door of the main lounge of the house, ushered inside and the door closed firmly behind them. Within, seated with drinks in which they obviously had little interest, were Melissa and Eachan, in their stiffness and unnaturalness, like set pieces arranged to show off Dow deCastries, slim in the gray-white Coalition uniform, standing beside the bar at the far end of the room with a drink also in his hand.

Across the room, Swahili, also in Coalition uniform, stood holding a heavy energy handgun.

"Hello, Cletus," Dow said. "I was expecting to find you here when I landed. I'm surprised you came on in when you saw my transports in orbit. Or didn't you think we'd have occupied all of the Dorsai yet?"

"I knew you had," said Cletus.

"But you came in anyway? I wouldn't have," said Dow. He raised his drink and sipped from it. "Or did you come down to trade yourself if I'd turn the Dorsai loose? If you did, that was foolish. I'm going to turn it loose anyway. All you've done is save me the trouble of hunting you down on some other world. I've got to take you back to Earth, you know."

"To be sure," said Cletus. "So I can have a trial - which will end in a death sentence. Which you can commute to life imprisonment - after which I'll be imprisoned secretly somewhere, and eventually just disappear."

"Exactly right," said Dow.

Cletus looked at the watch on his wrist. "How long is it since your scanning screens picked up the approach of the spaceship I came in?" he asked.

"About six hours." Dow put his drink down and straightened up. "Don't tell me you came in here expecting to be rescued? Maybe the handful of officers you left here do have a screen that picked your ship up, and maybe they did know it was you aboard her. But Cletus, we've been chasing them twenty-four hours a day since I brought my troops in here. They're too busy running to worry about you, even if they had enough men and guns to do something."

He stared at Cletus for a second. "All the same," he said, turning to Swahili, "we won't take any chances. Go give the local commander my orders to set up a security cordon to the shuttleboat landing pad in Foralie. And order a shuttle down from one of the transports. We'll get Grahame aboard as soon as possible." He looked back at Cletus. "I'm not going to start underestimating you now."

Swahili went out, handing his weapon to Dow and closing the door carefully behind him.

"You've never stopped underestimating me," said Cletus. "That's what brought you here."

Dow smiled.

"No. What I'm saying is quite true," said Cletus. "I needed a lever to change history and I picked you. From the time I sat down at your table on the ship to Kultis, I was busy working you into this situation."

Dow leaned the elbow holding the heavy handgun on the bar beside him, keeping its muzzle pointed steadily at Cletus.

"Move a few feet away from him, Mondar," Dow said to the Exotic, who had been standing beside and a little behind Cletus all this time. "I can't imagine you sacrificing yourself to give him a chance to escape, but there's no point in risking it."

Mondar moved.

"Go on, Cletus," said Dow. "We've got a few moments to wait anyway. I don't believe what you're saying at all, but if there's even a slight chance you've been able to maneuver me, I want to know about it."

"There's not much to tell," said Cletus. "I started out first by attracting your attention to myself. Then I showed you I had military genius. Then I began to make a name for myself on all the new worlds, knowing this would suggest an idea to you - the idea you could use what I was doing as an excuse to get what you wanted for yourself."

"And what was that?" The gun in Dow's hand was steady.

"Personal control of both the Alliance and the Coalition - and through them the new worlds," answered Cletus. "You talked up my successes on the new worlds as a threat to both the Alliance and the Coalition, until they agreed to combine their outworld forces and put you in command of them. Once in command, you thought all you needed was to stretch the Dorsais out so thin you could defeat them. Then you'd capture me and use your popularity and military power to put military juntas in place of the political leaders at the head of both the Coalition and Alliance, back on Earth. Naturally, the generals you picked for the military juntas would be your men - and in time they'd be yielding up the government of all Earth to you."

Swahili came back into the room. Dow handed him the handgun and, carefully covering Cletus all the while, Swahili crossed once more to his position on the other side of the room.

"How long?" Dow asked him.

"Twenty minutes," Swahili answered. Dow looked thoughtfully back at Cletus.

"Maybe a trial would be too much of a risk after all - " He broke off.

There were shouts, and the sharp, chorused whistling of cone rifles outside the house, followed by the heavy sizzle of at least one energy weapon. Swahili ran toward the door of the room.

"No!" snapped Dow. Swahili checked and spun about. Dow pointed at Cletus. "Shoot him!"

Swahili brought the energy handgun up and there was a sound like the snapping of a small stick. Swahili checked abruptly, turning toward Eachan, who was still sitting in his chair, but now holding the same flat little handgun - minus the long sniper's barrel - that he had used long ago from under the overturned command car in which he, with Melissa, Mondar and Cletus, had been trapped on the road to Bakhalla.

Swahili went suddenly, heavily, to his knees on the carpet. The energy pistol dropped from his grasp. He fell over on his side and lay there. Dow moved sharply toward the fallen weapon.

"Don't!" said Eachan. Dow stopped abruptly. There were more sounds of voices shouting outside the house.

Eachan got to his feet and walked across to the fallen energy weapon, still holding his own pistol. He picked up the fallen gun and bent over Swahili, who was breathing raggedly.

"Sorry, Raoul," Eachan said, gently.

Swahili looked up at him and almost smiled. The almost-smile continued and did not change. Eachan reached down in an old-fashioned gesture and softly closed the lids over the unmoving eyes. He straightened up as the door burst open and Arvid, a cone rifle in one large hand, strode into the room closely followed by Bill Athyer.

"All right, here?" said Arvid, looking at Cletus.

"All right, Arv," Cletus answered. "How about outside?"

"We've got them all," Arvid answered.

"You'd better start running in a hurry, then," said Dow, dryly. "All these detachments of mine are in constant open-channel communication with each other. There'll be other detachments moving in here within minutes. And where are you going to run to?"

"We're not going to run at all." Arvid looked at him. "All your troops on the Dorsai are now captured."

Dow stared at him. Black eyes locked with pale blue.

"I don't believe it," Dow said, flatly. "There are nothing but women, children and old men left on this world."

"What of it?" Cletus asked. Dow turned to look at him. Cletus went on: "Don't you believe I could defeat a few thousand Coalition elite troops with a worldful of women, old men and children to help me?"

Dow regarded him for a few seconds without speaking. "Yes," he said at last. "You, Cletus - I'll believe you could do it. But you weren't here." He lifted his right hand and pointed his index finger at Cletus. "The thing you forget - "

There was a small, momentary, soundless puff of white vapor from the sleeve of his jacket. What felt like a sledgehammer smashed into Cletus' upper right chest. He stumbled backward and the edge of a table stopped him from falling.

Arvid took one long, swift pace toward Dow, his nearer hand flinging up and starting to descend, edge-on.

"Don't kill him!" snapped Cletus, with what little breath was left in him.

Arvid's hand changed direction in midair. It came down to close on Dow's outstretched arm. He peeled back the sleeve, and they all saw a dead-man's tube, a reflex single-dart thrower, strapped to Dow's wrist. Arvid broke the strap fastening loose and tossed the tube into a corner of the room. He caught up Dow's other arm and peeled the sleeve back, but the wrist was bare.

"Don't move at all," Arvid said to Dow, and stepped back from him. Melissa was already at Cletus' side.

"You've got to lie down," she said.

"No." He shook his head, resisting the pull of her hands. He could not feel the extent of the damage from the shock-point of the dart, but his right upper body was numb and a weak dizzyness was threatening to overwhelm him. He fought it back with all the strength of physiological discipline he had. "There's something I've got to tell him."

He leaned gratefully back against the supporting edge of the table top behind him.

"Listen to me, Dow," he said. "I'm going to send you back to Earth. We're not going to kill you."

Dow looked at him fearlessly and almost curiously.

"If that's so, I'm sorry I shot you," he said. "I thought I was on my way out and might as well take you with me. But why send me back to Earth? You know I'll just raise another army and come back. And next time I'll beat you."

"No." Cletus shook his head. "Earth's lost its influence on the new worlds. You'll tell them that, back there. From now on any colony can hire half the number of Dorsai troops that the Alliance or the Coalition supplies to their enemy - and defeat the Earth troops easily. The Dorsais will always win, and any colony can afford to hire them."

Dow frowned. "It's you that make Dorsais potent," he said. "And you won't last forever."

"But I will." Cletus had to pause to fight off the encroaching dizziness again. Barely, once more, he won the battle and went on.

"Just as you said - I wasn't here when you landed. And a planetful of women, children and oldsters beat you. That's because I was as good as here. You see these two?" He nodded weakly toward Arvid and Bill.

"There're the two parts of me," he said, almost whispering now. "The theoretician and the field general. The only orders I left them was to defend Dorsai. But they defended it just the way I would have - right down to being here, when I knew they would, to rescue me from you. There's no end to the Dorsais now. Earth won't ever have troops able to beat them." The dizziness surged in on him and he forced it back.

"... why?" he heard Dow saying. He looked about for the man and saw the lean face under the black hair and graying temples floating as if on a field of mist.

"It's time for the new worlds to go free," Cletus said. "They had to break loose from the Alliance, the Coalition - from all Earth - and make themselves into what they're meant to be. It was time. I did it."

"... because of the books you wanted to write, you said." Dow's voice faded out almost to nothingness and then roared like the sound of surf on his ears.

"That... too... " Cletus held hard to the table edge behind him with both hands, for the floor was threatening to dissolve under his feet. "The last sixteen volumes will be tactics only as Dorsais-to-come can use... no use to ordinary military, back on Earth. Only with a new sort of soldier... with restraint... obligation... mind and body... "

There was no more.

After what seemed many centuries of nothingness, he drifted back to fuzzy consciousness to find himself lying on a bed. A young commandant wearing medical insignia was just finishing a broad bandage across his upper chest, and behind the commandant stood Melissa and Mondar.

"I'm not dead... then?" he asked, hearing the words come out in a whisper so weak it was ridiculous.

"Dow used the wrong weapon on you, Cletus," said Mondar. "Darts that trigger a state of physical shock and collapse are all right for killing ordinary men, but not one like you, who's trained his physiological processes to obey his will automatically. You're going to live - isn't he, Doctor?"

"Absolutely." The medical commandant straightened up and stepped back from the bedside. "He should have died on his feet within the first minute and a half after he was hit. When he got past that point, there was no place for his system to go but toward recovery."

He handed a hypospray arm band to Melissa. "See that he does a lot of sleeping," he said. "Come on, Outbond."

The figures of the two men moved out from Cletus' field of vision. He heard a door close at a little distance. Melissa sat down in the chair the doctor had occupied and began to strap the hypospray around Cletus' sleeveless right arm.

"You don't have to do that," he whispered to her. "You can go now, to Earth or anywhere you want. It's all over."

"Don't talk," she said. "It's all nonsense, anyway. If I'd wanted to go, I'd have gone right after you made me marry you. I could have dreamed up some excuse - to explain it to Dad. You know he'd believe anything I told him."

He stared at her. "Then why didn't - "

"Because you told me you loved me," she said. "That was all I wanted to know."

He rolled his head a little, weakly and negatively, on the pillow. "I said - "

She finished strapping the hypospray on his wrist and bent down and kissed him, stopping the words on his lips.

"You idiot!" she said, fiercely and tenderly. "You magnificent, genius-idiot! Do you think I paid any attention to what you said?"