Lysander closed his eyes. Every time I think things are getting better they get worse instead, he thought. Is this planet under a curse? It was enough to make him start believing in conspiracies.
“Just what we need,” he said wearily. Then he smiled down into her face. “Funny, we haven’t had much time together, and yet . . . well, we feel a lot closer.”
“We’ve been working together for the same thing, Lynn,” she said.
True. Melissa was more than the heir to the von Alderheim works, and future Queen; she was a very talented hand at the computerized design machines. The best they had, and needed more than ever with the sudden demand for new military products.
“Don’t work yourself to death over at the War College,” he said gently, taking her head between his hands. “And there’s only a few hours before we move out. I don’t want to spend them talking about the war”—how naturally we start to use the word—”or, or anybody else.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I had dinner for us sent up to my rooms.”
“What will your father say?”
“I don’t really care.” She took his hands between hers and kissed the palms. “I just . . . want to make sure you have a good solid memory to remind you of your reason for staying alive.”
And something to remember you by if you don’t come back, went unspoken between them, as they walked toward the stairs hand-in-hand.
CHAPTER TEN
Crofton’s Encyclopedia of the Inhabited Planets
(2nd Edition):
Illyrian Dales, The: area of hilly terrain, named for areas of the Balkan peninsula now part of Serbia, Croatia and Albania. (see names, Mythological, Graeco-Roman) Notable feature of the planet Sparta [see Sparta];
The Illyrian Dales cover an area of approximately 1,400,000 sq. kilometers (875,000 sq. miles) between the western extremity of the Middle Valley of the Eurotas river (q.v.) and the Drakon Mountains (q.v.). The Dales take the shape of a blunt pyramid, with its base pointing northward and its apex lying along the course of the Rhyndakos river (q.v.), a south-bank tributary of the Eurotas.
The Dales are geologically recent, composed of sedimentary marine limestones deposited while the present Middle Valley was a shallow inland sea, prior to the collision of crustal plates which produced the Drakon Range. Buckling and rapid water-erosion has produced a landscape of low hills and gentle ridges, occasionally punctuated by intrusions of harder metamorphic or volcanic rock, which form “plugs” remaining above the peneplain-like surface surrounding them; limited areas of steeper slope have developed semi-karstic formations. The Dales’ limestones consist essentially of calcium carbonate, with high concentrations of potassium, phosphorus and other trace elements. Similar formations on Earth include the Nashville basin of Tennessee, and the central (“Bluegrass”) basin of Kentucky. No formation of this size would be possible on Earth, but the greater liquidity of the Spartan magma and higher internal heat from gravitational contraction and the decay of radioactives produces more rapid and uniform patterns of deposition and uplift. (Thus accounting for the prevalence of high mountains on a planet with such active erosive forces). Altitude ranges from 300 (in the southeast) to 1,200 meters above sea level in the northwest. After allowing for the 18-month Spartan year the climate is comparable to the mid-latitude temperate zone of Earth’s northern hemisphere, having warm to hot summers and cold winters with (depending on area) three to six months of continuous snow cover. There is little surface drainage, but artesian springs and underground water are common, as are sinkholes and caves.
Description: As with much of Sparta, the native vegetation has been largely replaced by introduced Terran varieties. Initially covered with tall-grass prairies (largely greater bluestem, panicum and canegrass) it has increasingly been colonized by broad-leafed trees ranging from tulip poplar and magnolia in the south to rock maple and birch on the northern fringe; forest cover is more plentiful to the south. Rainfall increases from north to south and from east to west, reaching a climax on the lower slopes of the Drakon range; the southernmost areas receive 180 centimeters per annum, dropping to 80 centimeters per annum on the northern fringe where the Dales give way to the level formations of the Hylas Steppe (q.v.). Animal life is almost exclusively Terran, and includes feral cattle, sheep, horse and beefalo, wild swine, various deer species, elk, wapiti, European and North American bison, and brown and black bear. Carnivores were a somewhat later introduction and include wolves (Siberian timber wolf varieties), bobcat, wild cat, lynx, leopard, ounce (snow leopard) and Siberian tiger. Ecological conditions are chaotic, as the introduced species eliminate the less-evolved natives and seek a new equilibrium. (see Planetary Ecology, Terraforming.) To date, there is no resident human population due to transportation difficulties and superior opportunities elsewhere, and exploitation is limited to harvesting of wildlife, with limited timbering and quarrying on the eastern border.
* * *
When first under fire an’ you’re wishful to duck
Don’t look nor take ‘eed at the man that is struck.
Be thankful you’re livin’, and trust to your luck
And march to your front like a soldier
* * *
“Hey, Top.”
Sergio Guiterrez lowered the field glasses; there wasn’t anything to see, anyway.
“Yeah, Purdy?”
He’d known it was one of the Legionnaires; the Spartans in the First RSI were calling him Sergeant Major, which was his brevet-transfer rank. To a member of Falkenberg’s Mercenary Legion, there was exactly one RSM among Legionnaires; and that was Regimental Sergeant Major Calvin, just as Falkenberg was the only colonel.
“This river ever end?”
“They say so, Purdy; supposed to be today. I can’t see much sign of it.”
Not much of anything to see all the weeks upriver, just the Eurotas getting smaller in stages so tiny you couldn’t notice them. Riverbanks with trees, riverbanks without trees, views of farm fields, views of grassy prairie and swamp and bare mud and tangled forest. Animals and birds, of course, like something out of the zoo or an old flat Tri-V documentary. Damned few people even the first few days out of Sparta City, so the wildlife was something welcome, something to look at. That and the other troops on the big flat barge, and every now and then some little town where they stopped to take on fuel or run the troops around to keep them from losing their edge. Wet and cool down on the Lower Valley, wetter and colder as they went west along the Middle, which was the same as the Lower except there were fewer people. Wettest and coldest since they’d turned southwest up this tributary, the Rhyndakos.
“Top?”
“Yeah?”
“Something I can’t figure,” the Tanith-born Legionnaire said.
“Ask away, kid,” Guiterrez said. Purdy liked to figure things out, which was one reason he’d made monitor so quick, that and being able to read and having a way with machinery.
“What I can’t figure, is why does anyone on this planet want to rebel? It doesn’t figure, you know?”
The noncom pushed himself into a sitting position against the pile of supplies and looked around. The barge was a wooden box ten meters by twenty, one of a string pulled along by a puffing little stern-wheeler boat. A dozen more boats and barge-strings further back, where the Brotherhood militia battalions they’d picked up in Dodona were following. About half of this one was taken up by supplies, mostly a battery of heavy 160mm mortars, three-meter tubes on wheeled carriages, and boxed Legion electronics, counterbattery radars and suchlike. The rest was filled with a company or so of the First RSI; they’d rigged up tarps over the hold of the barge, so everyone was pretty dry, and lit low-coal fires in steel drums, so you could get warm. Some of them were cooking things, fish they’d caught or chickens from the last stop, or brewing coffee, and the quality of the wine ration was better than he’d had anywhere else.
He grinned. They had kept the troops busy as possible, classes and even small-arms practice at things passing by, but it was still soft duty. A few of the Spartans had had the gall to complain about conditions, until they saw the Legion veterans laughing at them.
Wait until they’re up to their balls in mud and eating monkey, he thought. “You can get rebellions in most places,” he said. “They don’t like the people running the place, I guess. Your folks moved off into the jungle back on Tanith to get away from the planters and the government, didn’t they?”
“Yeah, but Top, they’d have given their right foot to have a place like this. Except it’s so cold. No jungle, no Purple Rot, no Weems Beasts or Nessies, lots of good eats, you can pick who you want to work for without slaving your sentence term on some plantation, or hell, just get away from the river a ways and start farming.”