“I beg your pardon?” the Suit said. He looked genuinely puzzled.
“This is the battle of Good against Evil,” the Colonel said. “Evil loses, right? And don’t try to tell me we’re the forces of Good!”
“Certainly not that,” the Suit said with a faint smile. “What a concept.”
His smile hardened. “But for the rest, Colonel, you’re quite wrong. Good doesn’t defeat you.” The Suit shook his head. “What a concept!” he repeated.
The Colonel stepped into the hallway where the silent servitor waited. He didn’t know how to take what the Suit had just told him, so he didn’t think about it.
He had a lot of experience with not thinking about things.
The troops were camped under a metal-roofed shelter at the edge of thorny scrubland. Fiber matting hung from the rafters on the south side as a sun shade. There were low platforms around the edges where the men would lay out their bedrolls at night. Now they used the platforms as seats as they cooked on a pair of small fires burning on the dirt floor in the center.
The man who noticed the servitor guiding the Colonel toward the shelter jumped up and called to the others. Chattering with high-pitched enthusiasm, the troops spilled out to stand in a single rank to greet their new commander.
The air was hot and dry. The outline of the mountains in the eastern distance was as unfamiliar to the Colonel as the topographic map had been.
“Sir!” said the man at the left end of the line of troops. He threw the Colonel a British-style salute, palm outward. “I am Captain Sisir Krishnamurtri of the Telugu Resistance Army. My men and I know you by reputation. We are honored to serve with you!”
The Colonel returned the salute with the edge of his hand out the way he’d learned it too many years ago. Instinctively he sucked in his gut. He was in good shape—”great shape for a man of his age,” people said—but he knew the difference between that and nineteen.
The servitor knew the difference too. They never spoke, these hairless, sexless nude figures who performed administrative duties for the fighting forces, but they had minds and personalities. This one smirked when he saw the Colonel pretending to be more than the decayed remnants of what he once had been.
What made it worse was that the troops were so absurdly young themselves. Captain Krishnamurtri was probably twenty-five, but the Colonel doubted any of the others were out of their teens. Several on the far end of the line were fourteen at the oldest, boys hopping from one foot to the other with their eagerness to go out and kill.
Telugus were South Indians, the Colonel thought, though he’d never heard of a Telugu Resistance Army. They were small, dark folk, barefoot and wearing dhotis wrapped around their loins. Krishnamurtri had put on a short-sleeved khaki shirt as a sign of his rank when the Colonel arrived. Their red sweatbands were probably a uniform.
“I’m pleased to be working with you too, Captain,” the Colonel said. That was a lie, but it was a very familiar lie; and God knew he’d commanded worse. In Sierra Leone, for instance . . . “Send the men back to their meal while you brief me on your unit.”
God knew. The Colonel smiled at his accidental joke. Black humor was the only kind of humor there was in the field.
The platform at the east end of the shelter was eight inches high, twice that of the others. It provided a dais on which Krishnamurtri and the Colonel sat—the Telugu squatting, the Colonel with his left leg crossed and the right straight out in front of him because the knee hadn’t bent properly since the day bamboo splintered its way through the connective tissue.
“First off,” the Colonel said, “how many of your men speak English?”
A young soldier came over with two small glass cups of tea on a brass tray. There was a sprig of mint in either cup. He bowed, set the tray down between the officers, and scuttled off.
Krishnamurtri picked up a cup and offered it to the Colonel. “Them?” he said. “None, they only speak Telugu. They’re merely field workers. I am a Brahmin. Without me they would be nothing. You will tell me what to do, Colonel, and I will see that they do it.”