I drove for half an hour past wooded hills and plowed meadows. The furrows of the fields were black in the rain. I thought it a kinder black than some other shades I had seen. At last I reached the outskirts of Joseph’s Town.
The autopilot of the car threaded me through a small, neat, typical Ste. Marie city of about a hundred thousand people. We came out on the far side into a cleared area, beyond which lifted the massive, sloping concrete walls of a military compound.
A Friendly noncom stopped my car at the gate with his black spring-rifle and opened the car door at my left.
“Thou hast business here?”
His voice was harsh and high in his nose. The cloth tabs of a Groupman edged his collar. Above them his forty-year-old face was lean and graven with lines. Both face and hands, the only uncovered parts of him, looked unnaturally white against the black cloth and rifle.
I opened the case beside me and handed him my papers.
“My Credentials,” I said. “I’m here to see your acting Commander of Expeditionary Forces, Commandant Jamethon Black.”
“Move over, then,” he said nasally. “I must drive thee.”
I moved.
He got in and took the stick. We drove through the gate and turned down an approach alley. I could see an interior square at the alley’s far end. The close concrete walls on either side of us echoed the sound of our passage as we went. I heard drill commands growing louder as we approached the square. When we rolled out into it, soldiers were drawn up in ranks for their midday service, in the rain.
The Groupman left me and went in the entrance of what seemed to be an office set in the wall on one side of the square. I looked over the soldiers standing in formation. They stood at present-arms, their position of worship under field conditions; and as I watched, the officer facing them, with his back to a wall, led them into the words of their Battle Hymn.
Soldier, ask not-now or ever, Where to war your banners go. Anarch’s legions all surround us. Strike! And do not count the blow!
I sat trying not to listen. There was no musical accompaniment, no religious furniture or symbols except the thin shape of the cross whitewashed on the gray wall behind the officer. The massed male voices rose and fell slowly in the dark, sad hymn that promised them only pain, and suffering, and sorrow. At last, the final line mourned its harsh prayer for a battle death, and they ordered arms.
A Groupman dismissed the ranks as the officer walked past my car without looking.at me, and passed in through the entrance where my noncommissioned guide had disappeared. As he passed I saw the officer was Jamethon.
A moment later the guide came for me. Limping a little on my stiffened leg, I followed him to an inner room with the lights on above a single desk.
Jamethon rose and nodded as the door closed behind me. He wore the faded tabs of a Commandant on his uniform lapels.
As I handed my Credentials across the desk to him, the glare of the light over the desk came full in my eyes, blinding me. I stepped back and blinked at his blurred face. As it came back into focus I saw it for a moment as if it were older, harsher, twisted and engraved with the lines of years of fanaticism, like a face I remembered standing over the murdered prisoners on New Earth.
Then my eyes refocused completely, and I saw him as he actually was. Dark-faced, but thin with the thinness of youth rather than that of starvation. He was not the face burned in my memory. His features were regular to the point of being handsome, his eyes tired and shadowed; and I saw the straight, weary line of his mouth above the still, self-controlled stiffness of his body, smaller and slighter than mine.
He held the Credentials without looking at them. His mouth quirked a little, dryly and wearily, at the corners. “And no doubt, Mr. Olyn,” he said, “youVe got another pocket filled with authorities from the Exotic worlds to interview the mercenary soldiers and officers they’ve hired from the Dorsai and a dozen other worlds to oppose God’s Chosen in War?”
I smiled. Because it was good to find him as strong as that, to add to my pleasure of breaking him.
CHAPTER 23
I looked across the ten feet or so of distance that separated us. The Friendly Groupman who had killed the prisoners on New Earth had also spoken of God’s Chosen.
“If you’ll look under the papers directed at you,” I said, “you’ll find them. The News Services and its people are impartial. We don’t take sides.”
‘”Right,” said the dark young face opposing me, “takes sides.”
“Yes, Commandant,” I said. “That’s right. Only sometimes it’s a matter of debate where Right is. You and your troops here now are invaders on the world of a planetary system your ancestors never colonized. And opposing you are mercenary troops hired by two worlds that not only belong under the Pro-cyon suns but have a commitment to defend the smaller worlds of their system-of which Ste. Marie is one. I’m not sure Right is on your side.”
He shook his head slightly and said, “We expect small understanding from those not Chosen.” He transferred his gaze from me to the papers in his hand.
“Mind if I sit down?” I said. “I’ve got a bad leg.”
“By all means.” He nodded to a chair beside his desk and as I sat down, seated himself. I looked across the papers on the desk before him and saw, standing to one side, the solidograph of one of the windowless high-peaked churches the Friendlies build. It was a legitimate token for him to own, but there just happened to be three people, an older man and woman and a young girl of about fourteen, in the foreground of the image. All three of them bore a family resemblance to Jamethon, Glancing up from my Credentials he saw me looking at them; and his gaze shifted momentarily to the graph and away again, as if he would protect it.
“I’m required, I see,” he said, drawing my eyes back to him, “to provide you with cooperation and facilities. We’ll find quarters for you here. Do you need a car and driver?”
“Thanks,” I said. “That commercial car outside will do. And I’ll manage my own driving.”
“As you like.” He detached the papers directed to him, passed the rest back to me and leaned toward a grille in his desktop. “Groupman.”
“Sir,” the grille answered promptly.
“Quarters for a single male civilian. Parking assignment for a civilian vehicle, personnel,”
“Sir.”
The voice from the grille clicked off. Jamethon Black looked across his desk at me. I got the idea he was waiting for my departure.
“Commandant,” I said, putting my Credentials back in their case, “two years ago, your Elders of the United Churches on Harmony and Association found the planetary government of Ste. Marie in default of certain disputed balances of credit, so they sent an expedition in here to occupy and enforce payment. Of that expedition, how much in the way of men and equipment do you have left?”
“That, Mr. Olyn,” he said, “is restricted military information.”
“However”-and I closed the case–“you, with the regular rank of Commandant, are acting Commander of Forces for the remnants of your expedition. That position calls for someone about five ranks higher than you. Do you expect such an officer to arrive and take charge?”
“I’m afraid you’d have to ask that question of Headquarters on Harmony, Mr. Olyn.”
“Do you expect reinforcements of personnel and more supplies?”
“If I did”-his voice was level-“I would have to consider that restricted information, too.”
“You know that it’s been pretty widely mentioned that your General Staff on Harmony has decided that this expedition to Ste. Marie is a lost cause? But that to avoid loss of face they prefer you here to be cut up, instead of withdrawing you and your men.”
“I see,” he said.
“You wouldn’t care to comment?”
His dark, young, expressionless face did not change. “Not in the case of rumors, Mr. Olyn.”
“One last question then. Do you plan to retreat westward, or surrender when the spring offensive of the Exotic mercenary forces begins to move against you?”
“The Chosen in War never retreat,” he said. “Neither do they abandon, or suffer abandonment by, their Brothers in the Lord.” He stood up. “I have work I must get back to, Mr. Olyn.”
I stood up, too. I was taller than he was, older, and heavier-boned. It was only his almost unnatural composure that enabled him to maintain his appearance of being my equal or better.
“I’ll talk to you later, perhaps, when you’ve got more time,” I said.