“Yeah,” said Farrell. “Shit. But that’s the only choice, isn’t it? We get out or we all die—after the ammo runs out if not before.”
“—he makes his living by lying on a bed.”
The civilians bellowed the chorus, “Go to your left, your right, your left!”
“If we can’t get out from the rim of the wheel,” the project manager said, “and I agree with Tamara that we can’t, then the choice is to strike for the hub.”
“C41 heads for wherever the Spooks were trying to go, you mean?” Farrell said, thinking of the montage that cloaked the subject’s fear.
“I got a girl, her hair is black . . .”
“The entire column,” al-Ibrahimi said. “There’s no point in separating us civilians from our protection. The known dangers would overwhelm us.”
Lundie nodded solemnly. “The Kalendru came here at great risk,” she said. “Whatever it was they were looking for may mean our safety.”
There was a shout of triumph across the camp. Somebody’d gotten a fire to light.
Al-Ibrahimi smiled. “Or it may mean that I satisfy my curiosity before I die. Either result is more satisfying than simply being devoured by the vegetation, wouldn’t you say?”
Art Farrell started to chuckle. Not because the joke was particularly funny; but because he knew that to the project manager, it wasn’t really a joke.
“Go to your left, your right, your left . . .”
Teamwork
The civilians straggled more every day, and there were fewer strikers to guard the lengthening column. Farrell eyed the trees; a striker’s job, not a commander’s. A job he was more comfortable with, though.
It wasn’t anybody’s fault. The march was just taking a physical toll of civilians who weren’t used to it. Anybody who thought you hardened people by pushing them beyond their limits was a damned fool. What you did was break them.
Manager al-Ibrahimi stood at the right margin of the trail, waiting for Farrell. Farrell crossed the column at a gap but continued to stump forward at his regular pace, a little faster than the line of march.
Farrell was coming from the rear of the column to the front. He planned to talk to the noncom with the lead squad, then start back. Like every day in the past, like every day in the future until he died or they all got where they were going.
Which might mean the same thing.
“Two days ought to get us there,” Farrell said to al-Ibrahimi’s back. “That’s an advantage over going to the rim. That would have been another week.”
“Yes,” the manager said. He shifted slightly so that he and Farrell stood side by side, watching the jungle and from the corners of their eyes the column marching in the center of the track. “We’re wearing down the colonists. At the present rate of collapse, in five days there’ll be more people being carried than carrying.”
It was a joke of sorts.
“These are good folks,” Farrell said, feeling oddly defensive about the civilians. “They don’t give up. I’d figured . . . they were drafted, you know. They wouldn’t try.”
“They’re intelligent, successful people, Major,” al-Ibrahimi said. “They’re exactly the sort of people you’d want in any difficult operation. They’d be better for training, of course; but they’re getting that, from your strikers and the environment.”
A party of five civilians passed, arm in arm. The man in the middle and the young women on the two ends were supporting an aged couple who couldn’t otherwise have walked.
“It’s a fucking crime to treat people like this,” Farrell said in sudden bitterness.
“Not a crime, no,” al-Ibrahimi said. “All laws and regulations were complied with. Very likely a sin, though.”
He looked more hawk-faced with the diet and labor of each passing day. “Do you believe in Hell, Major?” he asked.
“Not as much as I used to,” Farrell said. He laughed wryly. “That’s a screwy thing to say, isn’t it? But it’s the truth.”
Nessman marched by cradling a grenade launcher. He was talking to a pair of young women—girls, really. He shut up when he saw Farrell waiting on the trail. The girls didn’t understand and continued to chatter merrily.