Meanwhile, I was paying little attention and using the seconds to pull my own wits together. Anger is a luxury-the Force-Leader might be a good soldier, but he had not yet learned that elemental fact in all occupations. He ran down finally.
“The point is,” he said grimly, “you are on my hands. And what am I going to do with you?”
“Nothing,” I answered. “We’re here at our own risk, to observe. And observe we will. Tell us where we can dig in out of your way, and that’ll be the last you’ll have to think of us.”
“I’ll bet!” he said sourly, but it was merely a last spark of his anger sputtering out. “All right. Over there. Behind the men dug in between those two trees. And stay in your spot once you pick it!”
“All right,” I said. “But before we take off, would you answer me one other question? What’re you supposed to be doing on this hill?”
He glared at me as if he would not answer. Then, the emotion inside him forced the answer out.
“Holding it!” he said. And he looked as if he would have liked to spit, to clean the taste of those two words out of his mouth.
“Holding it? With a patrol?” I stared at him. “You can’t hold a position like this with a dozen or so men if the Friendlies are moving in!” I waited, but he said nothing. “Or can you?”
“No,” he answered. And this time he did spit. “But we’re going to try. Better lay that cloak out where the black helmets can see it when they come up the hill.” He turned away to the man beside him wearing the message unit. “Get Command HQ,” I heard him say. “Tell him we’ve got a couple of Newsmen up here with us!”
I got the name, and unit, and the names of the men in his patrol; then I took Dave off to the spot the Force-Leader had indicated, and we started digging in just like the soldiers around us. Nor did I forget to spread my cloak out in front of our two foxholes as the Force-Leader had said. Pride runs a very slow second to the desire to remain alive.
From our holes, once we were in them, we could look down the steeper slope of the wooded hill toward the direction of the Friendly lines. The trees went all the way down the hill and continued on to the next hill beyond. But halfway down, there was the scar of an old landslip, like a miniature cliff, breaking the even roof of treetops, so that we could look out between the pillars of those tree trunks rising from the upper edge of the landslip and see over the tops of the trees at the bottom edge, and thus get a view of the whole panorama of wooded slope and open field toward the far green horizon under which probably sat the Friendly sonic cannon Dave and I had run from earlier.
It was our first good look at the general field since I had brought the air-car down to ground level, and I was busy studying it through glasses, when I saw what seemed to be a flicker of movement among the tree trunks at the bottom of the divide between our hill and the next. The flicker was not enough for me to pick out anything definite, but at the same time I saw movement in both of the foxholes ahead of us and knew that the soldiers in them had been alerted by whichever one of them carried the patrol’s heat-sensing unit. The screens of which would now be showing the blips of the body heat of men, starting to mix in with the earth vegetation, and other heat of the ground area before us.
The Friendlies had found us. In a few seconds, there was no question of it, for even my glasses picked out flickers of black as their soldiers began to work their way up the slope of the hill toward our front and the weapons of the Cassidan patrol began to whicker and snap in response.
“Down!” I said to Dave.
He had been trying to raise up and see. I suppose he thought that because I was raising up to get a better view and so exposing myself, he could too. It was true that the Newsman’s cloak was spread out in front of both our holes; but I also had my beret color controls set on scarlet and white, and in addition I had more faith in my ability to survive than he. All men have such moments when they feel invulnerable; and the moment in that foxhole, with the Friendly troops attacking, was one of mine. Besides, I was expecting the current Friendly attack on us to die down and quit in a moment. And sure enough, it did.
CHAPTER 11
There was no great mystery about the pause that came then in the Friendly attack. The men who had come into momentary contact with us were little more than a skirmish line out in front of the main Friendly forces. It had been their job to push the Cassidan opposition ahead of them, until it dug in and showed signs of fighting. When that happened the first line of skirmishers had, predictably, backed off, sent messages for reinforcements, and waited.
It was a military tactic older than Julius Caesar-assuming Julius Caesar were still alive.
But it, and the rest of the circumstances that had brought Dave and me to this place and moment, provided me with the mental ammunition to draw a couple of conclusions.
The first was that all of us-I included the Friendly forces as well as the Cassidan, and the whole war right down to its involved individuals, like Dave and myself-were being shoved around by the plannings of forces outside and beyond the battlefield. And it was not too hard to figure who those manipulating forces might be. One, clearly, was Eldest Bright and his concern with whether the Friendly mercenaries wrapped up their assignment in such a way as to attract further employers to their employment. Bright, like one chess player facing another, had planned and set in motion some kind of move aimed at wrapping up the war in one bold tactical strike.
But that strike had been, if not foreseen, at least precalculated by his opponent. And that opponent could only be Padma, with his ontogenetics.
For if Padma, with his calculations, could figure that I would put in an appearance at the party of Donal Graeme on Freiland, then with the same ontogenetics he would have been able to calculate that Bright would make some swift move with the Friendly forces to destroy the Cassidan levies opposing them. His calculation of this was deducible from the fact that he had lent one of his own best tacticians from the Exotic forces-Kensie Graeme-to frustrate what Bright had planned. Without that explanation Kensie’s appearance here on the battlefield at the crucial moment made no sense.
But the interesting question to me, behind all this, was why Padma should automatically oppose himself to Bright in any case. As far as I knew the Exotics had no stake in this civil war on New Earth-important enough to the world on which it was occurring, but small compared to other matters between the sixteen worlds and the stars.
The answer might He somewhere in the tangle of contractual agreements that controlled the ebb and flow of trained personnel between the worlds. The Exotics, like Earth, Mars, Freiland, Dorsai, and the little Catholic Christian world of Ste. Marie, did not draft their trained young graduates en bloc, and trade oiF their contracts to other worlds without consulting the wishes of the individual. They were therefore known as “loose” worlds; in automatic opposition to “tight” worlds like Ceta, the Friendlies, Venus, Newton, and the rest who bartered their skilled personnel without concern for individual rights or desires.
The Exotics, therefore, being “loose” worlds, were automatically in opposition to the “tight” worlds of the Friendlies. But this alone was not reason enough for their choosing up sides in a conflict on some third world gratuitously. There might be some secret tangle of contractual balances concerning the Exotics and the Friendlies I knew nothing about. Otherwise, I was at a loss to understand Pad-ma’s taking a hand in the current situation.
But it showed me, who was concerned with manipulating my environment by manipulating those immediately around me, that forces could be brought into play outside the charmed circle of my tongue, which could frustrate anything I could do, simply because they were from outside. In short, there were wider areas to be considered in the handling of men and events to some individually desired end than I had thought of before this.
I filed that discovery away for future reference.
The second conclusion that came to mind now had to do with the immediate matter of our defending this hill as soon as the Friendlies could bring up reinforcements. For it was no place to defend with a couple of dozen men. Even a civilian like myself could see that.