* * *
“Good work,” Falkenberg told me when I made the afternoon report. “We’ve made forty kilometers so far, and we’ve got a couple of hours of daylight left. It’s a bit hard to estimate how fast we’ll be able to march.”
“Yes, sir. The first party we disarmed had three Skyhawk missiles. There were five here at the fort, but nobody got them out in time to use them. Couple of guys who tried were killed by the mortars. It doesn’t look good for helicopters in this area, though, not now that they’re warned.”
“Yes,” Falkenberg said. “I suspected as much. We’ll retire the choppers for a while. You’ve done well, Slater. I caution you not to relax, though. At the moment we’ve had no opposition worth mentioning, but that will change soon enough, and after that there may be an effort to break past your position. They don’t seem to want to give up their weapons.”
“No, sir.” And who can blame them? I thought. Eric Flawn had worried me. He hadn’t seemed like an outlaw. I don’t know what I’d expected here at Beersheba. Kidnapped girls. Scenes of rape and debauchery, I suppose. I’d never seen a thieves’ government in operation. Certainly I hadn’t expected what I’d found, a group of middle-aged men in control of troops who looked a lot like ours, only theirs weren’t very well equipped.
“I understand you liberated some wine,” Falkenberg said.
“Yes, sir.”
“That’ll help. Daily ration of no more than half a liter per man, though.”
“Sir? I wasn’t planning on giving them any of it until you got here.”
“It’s theirs, Slater,” Falkenberg said. “You could get away with holding on to it, but it wouldn’t be best. It’s your command. Do as you think you should, but if you want advice, give the troops half a liter each.”
“Yes, sir.” There’s no regulation against drinking in the Line Marines, not even on duty. There are severe penalties for rendering yourself unfit for duty. Men have even been shot for it. “Half a liter with supper, then.”
“I think it’s wise,” Falkenberg said. “Well, sounds as if you’re doing well. We’ll be along in a few days. Out.”
There were a million other details. At noon I’d been startled to hear a trumpet sound mess call, and I went out to see who was doing it. A corporal I didn’t recognize had a polished brass trumpet.
“Take me a few days to get everyone’s name straight, Corporal,” I said. “Yours?”
“Corporal Brady, sir.”
“You play that well.”
“Thank you, sir.”
I looked at him again. I was sure his face was familiar. I thought I remembered that he’d been on Tri-v. Had his own band and singing group. Nightclub performances, at least one Tri-v special. I wondered what he was doing as an enlisted man in the Line Marines, but I couldn’t ask. I tried to remember his real name, but that escaped me, too. It hadn’t been Brady, I was sure of that. “You’ll be sounding all calls here?”
“Yes, sir. Centurion says I’m to do it.”
“Right. Carry on, Brady.”
All through the afternoon the trumpet calls sent men to other duties. An hour before the evening meal there was a formal retreat. The CoDominium banner was hauled down by a color guard while all the men not on sentry watch stood in formation and Brady played Colors. As they folded the banner I remembered a lecture in Leadership class back at the Academy.
The instructor had been a dried-up Marine major with one real and one artificial arm. We were supposed to guess which was which, but we never did. The lecture I remembered had been on ceremonials. “Always remember,” he’d said, “the difference between an army and a mob is tradition and discipline. You cannot enforce discipline on troops who do not feel that they are being justly treated. Even the man who is wrongly punished must feel that what he is accused of deserves punishment. You cannot enforce discipline on a mob, and so your men must be reminded that they are soldiers. Ceremonial is one of your most powerful tools for doing that. It is true that we are perpetually accused of wasting money. The Grand Senate annually wishes to take away our dress uniforms, our badges and colors, and all the so-called nonfunctional items we employ. They are fortunate, because they have never been able to do that. The day that they do, they will find themselves with an army that cannot defend them.
“Soldiers will complain about ceremonials and spit-and-polish, and such like, but they cannot live as an army without them. Men fight for pride, not for money, and no service that does not give them pride will last very long.”
Maybe, I thought. But with a thousand things to do, I could have passed up a formal retreat on our first day at Fort Beersheba. I hadn’t been asked about it. By the time I knew it was to happen, Lieberman had made all the arrangements and given the orders.
By suppertime we were organized for the night. Ardwain had collected about a hundred weapons, mostly obsolete rifles—there were even muzzle-loaders, handmade here on Arrarat—and passed nearly three hundred people through the roadblock.
We closed the road at dusk. Searchlights played along it, and we had a series of roadblocks made of log stacks. Ardwain and his troops were dug in where they could cover the whole road area, and we could cover them from the fort. It looked pretty good.
Tattoo sounded, and Fort Beersheba began to settle in for the night.
I made my rounds, looking into everything. The body-capacitance system the previous occupants had relied on was smashed when we blew open their bunker, but we’d brought our own surveillance gear. I didn’t really trust passive systems, but I needn’t have worried. Lieberman had guards in each of the towers. They were equipped with light-amplifying binoculars. There were more men to watch the IR screens.
“We’re safe enough,” Lieberman said. “If the lieutenant would care to turn in, I’ll see the guard’s changed properly.”
He followed me back to my quarters. Hartz had already fixed the place up. There were fresh adobe patches over the bullet holes in the walls. My gear was laid out where I could get it quickly. Hartz had his cloak and pack spread out in the anteroom.
There was even coffee. A pot was kept warm over an alcohol lamp.
“You can leave it to us,” Lieberman said.
Hartz grinned. “Sure. Lieutenants come out of the Academy without any calluses, and we make generals out of them.”
“That may take some doing,” I said. I invited Lieberman into my sitting room. There was a table there, with a scale model of the fort on it. Flawn had made it, but it hadn’t done him much good. “Have a seat, Centurion. Coffee?”
“Just a little, sir. I’d best get back to my duties.”
“Call me for the next watch, Centurion.”
“If the lieutenant orders it.”
“I just—what the hell, Lieberman, why don’t you want me to take my turn on guard?”
“No need, sir. May I make a suggestion?”
“Sure.”
“Leave it to us, sir. We know what we’re doing.”
I nodded and stared into my coffee cup. I didn’t feel I was really in command here. They tell you everything in the Academy: leadership, communications, the precise form of a regimental parade, laser range-finding systems, placement of patches on uniforms, how to compute firing patterns for mortars, wine rations for the troops, how to polish a pair of boots, servicing recoilless rifles, delivery of calling cards to all senior officers within twenty-four hours of reporting to a new post, assembly and maintenance of helicopters, survival on rocks with poisonous atmosphere or no atmosphere at all, shipboard routines, and a million other details. You have to learn them all, and they get mixed up until you don’t know what’s trivial and what’s important. They’re just things you have to know to pass examinations. “You know what you’re doing, Centurion, but I’m not sure I do.”
“Sir, I’ve noticed something about young officers,” Lieberman said. “They all take things too serious.”
“Command’s a serious business.” Damn, I thought. That’s pompous. Especially from a young kid to an older soldier.
He didn’t take it that way. “Yes, sir. Too damned serious to let details get in the way. Lieutenant, if it was just things like posting the guard and organizing the defense of this place, the service wouldn’t need officers. We can take care of that. What we need is somebody to tell us what the hell to do. Once that’s done, we know how.”
I didn’t say anything. He looked at me closely, probably trying to figure out if I was angry. He didn’t seem very worried.
“Take me, for instance,” he said. “I don’t know why the hell we came to this place, and I don’t care. Everybody’s got his reasons for joining up. Me, I don’t know what else to do. I’ve found something I’m good at, and I can do it. Officers tell me where to fight, and that’s one less damn thing to worry about.”