All in a fraction of a second, Graubard disabled the peopie on either side of him-hitting Charlie in the temple with an elbow while he broke Hilleboe’s kneecap with a kick-and slid the chakra out of his tunic and spun it toward me in one smooth action. It had covered half the distance to my throat before I reacted.
Instinctively I slapped out to deflect it and came within a centimeter of losing four fingers. The razor edge slashed open the top of my palm, but I succeeded in knocking the thing off course. And Graubard was rushing me, teeth bared in an expression I hope I never see again.
Maybe he didn’t realize that the old queer was really only five years older than he; that the old queer had combat reflexes and three weeks of negative feedback kinesthesia training. At any rate, it was so easy I almost felt sorry for him.
His right toe was turning in; I knew he would take one more step and go into a savate leap. I adjusted the distance between us with a short ballestra and, just as both his feet left the ground, gave him an ungentle side-kick to the solar plexus. He was unconscious before he hit the ground. But not dead.
If I’d merely killed him in self-defense, my troubles would have been over instead of suddenly being multiplied.
A simple psychotic troublemaker a commander can lock up and forget about. But not a failed assassin. And I didn’t have to take a poll to know that executing him was not going to improve my relationship with the troops.
I realized that Diana was on her knees beside me, trying to pry open my fingers. “Check Hilleboe and Moore,” I mumbled, and to the troops: “Dismissed.”
5
“Don’t be an ass,” Charlie said. He was holding a damp rag to the bruise on the side of his head.
“You don’t think I have to execute him?”
“Stop twitching!” Diana was trying to get the lips of my wound to line up together so she could paint them shut. From the wrist down, the hand felt like a lump of ice.
“Not by your own hand, you don’t. You can detail someone. At random.”
“Charlie’s right,” Diana said. “Have everybody draw a slip of paper out of a bowl.”
I was glad Hilleboe was sound asleep on the other cot.
I didn’t need her opinion. “And if the person so chosen refuses?”
“Punish him and get another,” Charlie said. “Didn’t you learn anything in the can? You can’t abrogate your authority by publicly doing a job.. . that obviously should be detailed.”
“Any other job, sure. But for this. . . nobody in the company has ever killed. It would look like I was getting somebody else to do my moral dirty work.”
“If it’s so damned complicated,” Diana said, “why not just get up in front of the troops and tell them how complicated it is. Then have them draw straws. They aren’t children.”
There had been an army in which that sort of thing was done, a strong quasi-memory told me. The Marxist POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War, early twentieth. You obeyed an order only after it had been explained in detail; you could refuse if it didn’t make sense. Officers and men got drunk together and never saluted or used titles. They lost the war. But the other side didn’t have any fun.
“Finished.” Diana set the limp hand in my lap. “Don’t try to use it for a half-hour. When it starts to hurt, you can use it.”
I inspected the wound closely. “The lines don’t match up. Not that I’m complaining.”
“You shouldn’t. By all rights, you ought to have just a stump. And no regeneration facilities this side of Stargate.”
“Stump ought to be at the top of your neck,” Charlie said. “I don’t see why you have any qualms. You should have killed the bastard outright.”
“I know that, goddammit!” Both Charlie and Diana jumped at my outburst. “Sorry, shit. Look, just let me do the worrying.”
“Why don’t you both talk about something else for a while.” Diana got up and checked the contents of her medical bag. “I’ve got another patient to check. Try to keep from exciting each other.”