So shall we, anointed soldiers, Stand at last before the Throne. Baptized in our wounds, red-flowing, Sealed unto our Lord-alone!
After that they dispersed to cots no different from mine.
I lay there listening to the silence in the square and the measured dripping of a rainspout outside by my window, its slow drops falling after the rain, one by one, uncounted in the darkness.
CHAPTER 25
After the day I landed, there was no more rain. Day by day the fields dried. Soon they would be firm underneath the weight of heavy surface-war equipment, and everyone knew that then the Exotic spring oiFensive would get under way. Meanwhile both Exotic and Friendly troops were in training.
During the next few weeks, I was busy about my newswork-mostly feature and small stories on the soldiers and the native people. I had dispatches to send and I sent them faithfully. A correspondent is only as good as his contacts; I made contacts everywhere but among the Friendly troops. These remained aloof, though I talked to many of them. They refused to show fear or doubt.
I heard these Friendly soldiers were generally un-dertrained because the suicidal tactics of their officers kept their ranks always filled with green replacements. But the ones here were the remnants of an expeditionary force six times their present numbers. They were all veterans, though most of them were in their teens. Only here and there, among the noncoms and more often among the commissioned officers, I saw the prototype of the noncom who had ordered the prisoners shot on New Earth. Here, the men of this type looked like rabid gray wolves mixed among polite, well-schooled young dogs just out of puppyhood. It was a temptation to think that they alone were what I had set out to destroy.
To fight that temptation I told myself that Alexander the Great had led expeditions against the hill tribes and ruled in Pella, capital of Macedonia, and ordered men put to death when he was sixteen. But still the Friendly soldiers looked young to me. I could not help contrasting them with the adult, experienced mercenaries in Kensie Graeme’s forces. For the Exotics, in obedience to their principles, would hire no drafted troops or soldiers who were not in uniform of their own free will.
Meanwhile I had heard no word from the Blue Front. But by the time two weeks had gone, I had my own connections in New San Marcos, and at the beginning of the third week one of these brought me word that the jeweler’s shop in Wallace Street there had closed its door, had pulled its blinds and emptied the long room of stock and fixtures, and moved or gone out of business. That was all I needed to know.
For the next few days, I stayed in the vicinity of Jamethon Black himself, and by the end of the week my watching him paid off.
At ten o’clock that Friday night I was on a catwalk just above my quarters and under the sentry-walk of the walls, watching as three civilians with Blue Front written all over them drove into the square, got out and went into Jamethon’s office.
They stayed a little over an hour. When they left, I went back down to bed. That night I slept soundly.
The next morning I got up early, and there was mail for me. A message had come by spaceliner from the director of News Services back on Earth, personally congratulating me on my dispatches. Once, three years before, this would have meant a great deal to me. Now I only worried that they would decide I had made the situation here newsworthy enough to require extra people being sent out to help me. I could not risk having other news personnel here now to see what I was doing.
I got in my car and headed east along the highway to New San Marcos and the Exotic Headquarters. The Friendly troops were already out in the field; eighteen kilometers east of Joseph’s Town, I was stopped by a squad of five young soldiers with no noncom over them. They recognized me.
“In God’s name, Mr. Olyn,” said the first one to reach my car, bending down to speak to me through the open window at my left shoulder. “You cannot go through.”
“Mind if I ask why?” I said.
He turned and pointed out and down into a little valley between two wooded hills at our left.
“Tactical survey in progress.”
I looked. The little valley or meadow was perhaps a hundred yards wide between the wooded slopes, and it wound away from me and curved to disappear to my right. At the edge of the wooded slopes, where they met open meadow, there were lilac bushes with blossoms several days old. The meadow itself was green and fair with the young chartreuse grass of early summer and the white and purple of the lilacs, and the variform oaks behind the lilacs were fuzzy in outline, with small, new leaves.
In the middle of all this, in the center of the meadow, were black-clad figures moving about with computing devices, measuring and figuring the possibilities of death from every angle. In the very center of the meadow for some reason they had set up marking stakes-a single stake, then a stake in front of that with two stakes on either side of it, and one more stake in line before these. Farther on was another single stake, down, as if fallen on the grass and discarded.
I looked back up into the lean young face of the soldier.
“Getting ready to defeat the Exotics?” I said.
He took it as if it had been a straightforward question, with no irony in my voice at all.
“Yes, sir,” he said seriously. I looked at him and at the taut skin and clear eyes of the rest.
“Ever think you might lose?”
“No, Mr. Olyn.” He shook his head solemnly. “No man loses who goes to battle for the Lord.” He saw that I needed to be convinced, and he went about it earnestly. “He hath set His hand upon His soldiers. And all that is possible to them is victory-or sometimes death. And what is death?”
He looked to his fellow soldiers and they all nodded.
“What is death?” they echoed.
I looked at them. They stood there asking me and each other what was death as if they were talking about some hard but necessary job.
I had an answer for them, but I did not say it. Death was a Grouprrian, one of their own kind, giving orders to soldiers just like themselves to assassinate prisoners. That was death.
“Call an officer,” I said. “My pass lets me through here.”
“I regret, sir,” said the one who had been talking to me, “we cannot leave our posts to summon an officer. One will come soon.”
I had a hunch what “soon” meant, and I was right. It was high noon before a Force-Leader came by to order them to chow and let me through.
As I pulled into Kensie Graeme’s Headquarters, the sun was low, patterning the ground with the long shadows of trees. Yet it was as if the camp were just waking up. I did not need experience to see the Exotics were beginning to move at last against Jame-thon.
I found Janol Marat, the New Earth Commandant.
“I’ve got to see Field Commander Graeme,” I said.
He shook his head, for all that we now knew each other well.
“Not now, Tarn. I’m sorry.”
“Janol,” I said, “this isn’t for an interview. It’s a matter of life and death. I mean that. I’ve got to see Kensie.”
He stared at me. I stared back.
“Wait here,” he said. We were standing just inside the headquarters office. He went out and was gone for perhaps five minutes. I stood, listening to the wall clock ticking away. Then he came back.
“This way,” he said.
He led me outside the back between the bubble roundness of the plastic buildings to a small structure half-hidden in some trees. When we stepped through its front entrance, I realized it was Kensie’s personal quarters. We passed through a small sitting room into a combination bedroom and bath. Kensie had just stepped out of the shower and was getting into battle clothes. He looked at me curiously, then turned his gaze back on Janol.
“All right, Commandant,” he said, “you can get back to your duties, now.”
“Sir,” said Janol, without looking at me.
He saluted and left.
“All right, Tarn,” Kensie said, pulling on a pair of uniform slacks. “What is it?”
“I know you’re ready to move out,” I said.
He looked at me a little humorously as he locked the waistband of his slacks. He had not yet put on his shirt, and in that relatively small room he loomed like a giant, like some irresistible natural force. His body was tanned like dark wood and the muscles lay in flat bands across his chest and shoulders. His belly was hollow and the cords in his arms came and went as he moved them. Once more I felt the particular, special element of the Dorsai in him. It was not even the fact that he was someone trained from birth to war, someone bred for battle. No, it was something living but untouchable-the same quality of difference to be found in the pure Exotic like Padma the OutBond, or in some Newtonian or Cassidan researchist. Something so much above and beyond the common form of man that it was like a serenity, a sense of conviction where his own type of thing was concerned that was so complete it made him beyond all weaknesses, untouchable, unconquerable.