Half a mile away, a Komani officer stood under a cloudy, smoke-filled sky and spoke into his wrist communicator:
“The main body of the Terran forces has reached the summit of the hills. We will attack again if you order us to, but my company is down to less man half its original strength. The Terrans have the advantage of massed firepower, and their armored vehicles are faster than our flyers, once they are in open country.”
After a long wait, an utterly exhausted voice sounded from the communicator, “Break off contact with the enemy. Regroup your men. The battle is over.”
XII
Sittas
It showered briefly at sunset, as the Mobile Force streamed out to the rolling, open countryside. Then all through the night clouds piled up thicker and darker until, by dawn, it began to rain steadily.
Sittas heard the first drops strike the roof over his head. The old priest was standing by a window on the upper floor of the town hall of Matara, a tiny farming vilfage a few miles from the valley of Carmeer.
He had turned the town hall—the only two-story building in the village—into an emergency hospitalTerrans, Komani, and the few Shinarians who had been wounded in the battle were being brought in. Sittas stood by the window after a full night of dressing wounds and blessing the dead, and watched the maimed and shattered men still being brought through the muddy, rainspattered morning into the makeshift infirmary. When would the pitiful parade end? Sittas had gathered every doctor and every available boy and woman from milesound. But they were few. terribly few, for this horrible toll.