Colonel

by Rick Shelley

  “That was a long time ago, his first time out as a company commander. He’s completed a lot of good contracts since then.” Lon knew about the Aurora contract. He had heard it mentioned several times by senior officers, and had eventually looked up the record. Murtaugh, then a captain, had commanded one company on a battalion-size contract. Exactly what had happened was still a matter of dispute despite the video and audio recordings from the battle helmets of the officers and noncommissioned officers involved, but Murtaugh’s company had suffered 20 percent casualties and had failed to fulfill their part of the operation, which had led to serious casualties in the rest of the battalion. Another battalion had to be sent to Aurora to fulfill the contract.

  “Maybe you’re right about Murtaugh,” Lon said after thinking about it for a moment. “Memories can be long for something like that. The Corps lost money as well as too many men on that contract. It still leaves Mills and Dumbrovski. Mills’s father and Dumbrovski’s grandfather each served as General at least once.”

  “Don’t you want to be General?” Lawrence asked.

  “I’ve never let myself give it much thought,” Lon said. “Getting my own regiment always seemed to be right at the very edge of possibility. I never had the time or the inclination to look much beyond that. Do I want to be General?” Lon paused, then shook his head. “Not especially, not now. Oh, I wouldn’t turn it down if by some miracle the job was offered to me, but I don’t need the title to validate my life. I don’t have any driving urge to have it. Does that surprise you?”

  Lawrence was slow to reply. “In a way. I’d think that going as far as you could in your chosen career would be more important to you.”

  Lon closed his eyes for an instant before he spoke again. “Dad, I’ve got too many ghosts haunting my dreams now. I’ve seen too much death, buried too many friends. The way conditions are in the galaxy, we do a lot of good. I can see the need for the Corps, despite the cost in lives. As long as I’m a field commander, I can make a difference. I have to believe that fewer of our people die with me in command than might under someone else. But the General isn’t a field commander. He never goes on contract. He just has the final word on which contracts we accept and sends men out where he can’t personally affect what happens.”

  “I don’t think it’s quite that simple.”

  Lon shrugged. “Maybe not, but the point remains. It’s bad enough for me now sending a battalion off, or a company, and not going along to oversee the contract personally.”

  “You oversee training. You have some say in who gets promoted. You affect things, just at one remove. You’re not God, Lon. You’re human, just like the rest of us. All we can do is the best we can.”

  “I’m a soldier. When the best I can isn’t good enough, men die. There are rows and rows of men who have died on contract under my command, so many that sometimes I can’t remember all of their names. That’s part of the nightmare.”

  3

  Although Diligent used the same names for its months that Earth did, they had been synchronized with the seasons on Dirigent’s primary continent, putting Christmas and New Year’s Day in the two weeks past the winter solstice, and bore no intrinsic relationship to the calendars of Earth. When Dirigent was settled, directly from Earth, its calendar was “out of phase” with Earth’s by ten weeks. Over the centuries, slight differences in the length of the year between the two worlds had taken it nearly one more week out of alignment. It was a common problem, and the lengths of day and year on Dirigent were closer to Earth’s than many other colony worlds’ were. Every complink had automatic functions for converting the local calendars of hundreds of worlds to the month and year of any of the three “standards”—those of Earth, Union (for the breakaway Confederation of Human Worlds), and Buckingham (for the worlds of the Second Commonwealth).

  On January 2, 2830, Lon’s staff car pulled to the curb in front of the house at two minutes before seven o’clock in the morning—0658 hours in military time. Sunrise had occurred just six minutes earlier. Night was retreating west. Shadows were long. The temperature was slightly below freezing, and there were patches of ice where the snow of the day before had melted and frozen again. Sergeant Jeremy Howell got out of the gray floater and held the passenger’s door open for Lon when he came out of the house.

  “How’d you draw the duty this morning, Jerry?” Lon asked when they were both in the warmth of the floater. “Where’s Dorcetti?” Frank Dorcetti was Lon’s usual driver.

  “Not due back from leave until tomorrow, sir,” Howell said. “And I was the only sergeant around HQ this morning.” One of the “honors” a colonel in the DMC was “due” was to have a sergeant as his assigned driver. Jeremy Howell was Lon’s aide, one of the people Lon had brought along from 2nd Battalion to 7th Regiment headquarters when he was promoted.

  “That’s right. I guess I forgot,” Lon said, nodding to himself. “How about you? You have a good New Year’s Eve?”

  “Holidays are always good when we’re home, sir.” Jeremy, his two brothers, and their father were all on active duty in the Corps. “We’ve got enough stripes among us to shame a zebra,” he had joked once. His brothers were both corporals in the regiment’s 1st Battalion, and their father was 4th Battalion’s lead sergeant. “I could count the number of Christmases and New Years we’ve all been home on one hand … and still have a finger left for an obscene gesture.”

  Lon laughed, and Jeremy started the floater down the street.

  “Never yet been a year when the four of us and my uncle and all my cousins were all home for the holidays,” Jeremy continued. He had six first cousins in the Corps. Another uncle had been killed on duty ten years earlier, in a training accident on Dirigent. The rest of those relatives were in 5th Regiment. It was currently out on contract, not due back for at least another six weeks. And he had more distant kin in two other regiments—a not unusual situation in the DMC. “Just as well. Get too many of us together at one time and there’s sure to be trouble.”

  “Your whole clan gets together at one time here and it pretty much means the Corps is out of work, doesn’t it?” Lon asked.

  “Oh, it works out sometimes, sir,” Jeremy said. “Some of us on planetary defense, some on training routine, everybody either just back from contract or due to go out soon. Sometimes. Not often. We were all on-planet about four years back for a couple of weeks in the summer … no, five years come August. That was the last time.”

  The drive to 7th Regiment did not take long. When Lon’s car came around the side of the headquarters building he could see each of its battalion HQs lining the regimental parade ground. No one was standing out there at this time, and there were only a couple of men crossing it. Reveille was past, and most of the men would be at breakfast or getting ready for their work formations at 0800 hours.

  “You figure you’ll need the car before quitting time this afternoon, Colonel?” Jeremy asked as he held the door for Lon to get out.

  “Not that I know of, Jerry, but that’s always subject to change without notice. We’ve got a Council meeting at ten, but I’ll walk over to Corps headquarters for that. I need the exercise. Check with me after lunch. If I can get away I’m going to spend a couple of hours in the gym this afternoon.”

  “Yes, sir.” Jeremy saluted. Lon returned the salute, then went into the building.

  All fourteen regimental headquarters buildings had been built to the same plan, inside and out. They were three-story stone and plascrete buildings with the sizes of individual offices tailored for those who would use them. Unlike company or battalion headquarters, which might be left empty if the unit was on contract or simply at one of the Corps’ secondary training bases, a regimental headquarters was always manned, even if the regiment and all its ancillary units—armor/artillery, transportation, and maintenance—were away, and it was extremely rare for all of the secondary services to accompany the regiment on contract.

  At the front of the first floor, the orderly room
, domain of the regimental lead sergeant and his clerks, was on the left, and operations was on the right. The executive officer had his office behind, and connecting to, operations. A conference room was across the hall from that. Lon’s office was on the second floor, above the orderly room and connected to it by a private lift tube. The intelligence officer and his staff were across the hall. There was a coffee room for officers at the rear of the second floor. The third floor was given over to other administrative offices.

  Lon glanced into operations, then went into the orderly room on the other side of the corridor. Only the duty sergeant from the night shift, Brian Kespean from 3rd Battalion, was in the orderly room, waiting for the regimental lead sergeant to arrive and relieve him.

  “Morning, Colonel,” Kespean said, standing to attention and saluting. “Quiet night, sir. Not a bit of trouble on the log.”

  “That’s always good to hear,” Lon said as he returned the salute. “Good way to start the new year.”

  “Yes, it is, sir,” Kespean agreed. “Nothing much on the log for the whole weekend.” New Year’s Day had fallen on Monday, which meant that there had been a long holiday weekend. Only those units serving a tour as part of the planetary defense system had kept more than a skeleton staff on duty.

  “Tell Phip I’ll be in my office when he gets here,” Lon said, continuing across to the door leading to the private lift tube. Phip Steesen had been another of the men Lon had brought along from 2nd Battalion. Phip was the regimental lead sergeant now. “He can wait until his people get in before he comes up. Tell him there’s nothing pressing on the docket.”

  “Yes, sir. I expect him in the next couple of minutes. He’s in the area. He stopped by and said he was going to have a look around at the mess halls. I think he wanted to see how many hangovers he could spot.”

  Lon smiled. “He seem to have one himself?”

  “Not that he was showing. Probably not. His wife wouldn’t let him have one even if he did get drunk and forgot to put on a killjoy patch soon enough.”

  “I think Phip lost the taste,” Lon said. The way I did, he thought. Drinking was more fun when I was young and single.

  Lon had never gone in for excessively decorating the various offices he had occupied during his years in the Corps. There were holographic photographs of family members on the desk, a small lump of rock gathered in the Great Smoky Mountains of Earth, near his childhood home, on top of the single filing cabinet in the room. The wall directly across from his desk held a manning chart for the regiment, showing each officer under his command. He could call up a more complete manning chart on his desk complink, snowing each man in the regiment, with links to complete service records and photographs. Even after two years, Lon spent at least a few minutes every day with that when possible, still trying to get to know all of the men under his command. At the regimental level, that was an almost impossible task. With four line battalions and the auxiliary units assigned to 7th Regiment, he had five thousand men under him. There was a constant, if slow, turnover in personnel, as well as promotions and changes of assignment for those who remained.

  There was a fresh pot of hot coffee on the cart next to Lon’s desk when he got there, almost certainly prepared by Jeremy Howell before he left to pick Lon up. Lon poured himself a cup, then carried it to the window and looked out over the parade ground while he sipped at the liquid. He hardly noticed the taste, strong and unadulterated by cream or sugar. Lon slipped into a blank stare, something near the mental numbness of a soldier too long in combat with too little sleep. He was scarcely aware of what he was seeing outside; the movements of his coffee cup were automatic, unnoticed. There were no pressing problems waiting for his attention, no special worries carried over from the past year. Lon could afford the luxury of a few minutes in something approaching a trancelike state, his mind idling. There were too few opportunities for this sort of passive escapism in Lon’s life. When they did come, he abandoned himself to them completely, knowing the respite never lasted.

  What brought Lon out of his reverie was an empty coffee cup. He had continued to drink automatically until he brought the cup to his lips and there was nothing left in it. Lon blinked several times, then looked into the cup as if he thought he might be mistaken, that there still might be coffee lurking in a hidden corner, reluctant to be drunk. Walking to the cart to get more coffee was too much bother. Lon simply set the cup on the windowsill in front of him and put his hands behind his back.

  The blank did not return. Lon was too aware of people moving outside, and the slight sounds filtering through to his office from other parts of the building. His office was supposedly soundproof, but that insulation was not as thorough as it might be … or might have been when the building was new a century and a half before. Renovation of all fourteen regimental headquarters buildings was a perennial topic in the budget planning of the Council of Regiments, but it carried a low priority even though the fourteen colonels who decided on the budget would each get refurbished offices from the renovation. It might be another dozen years before the project would be started … after the last barracks and battalion headquarters had gone through renovation and remodeling.

  The knock on the door was welcome. Lon turned away from the window and said, “Come in.” Phip Steesen opened the door and entered, carefully closing the door behind him.

  “Happy New Year, Lon,” Phip said. In private, they could still indulge in the informality of longtime friends, even when they were both on duty. It was only when others were present that they had to observe all the protocols of military life. Phip was ten years older than Lon and had spent more than that number of years in the Corps—not rising above the rank of private—before Lon arrived as an officer-cadet. Since then, Phip’s rise in rank had paralleled Lon’s, going from private to regimental lead sergeant in the same time that Lon had gone from lieutenant to colonel.

  “Happy New Year, Phip,” Lon responded automatically. “You manage to stay sober?”

  “Unfortunately,” Phip said, grinning. “Jenny and I shared a bottle of wine and were both asleep before midnight New Year’s Eve. The kids were probably both awake later than we were.” Jenny was his wife. Phip shook his head. “Makes me feel like an old man.”

  “Hell, you’re not sixty yet. Still in your prime,” Lon said.

  “For some things, maybe,” Phip said. “But there are only three men in the regiment older than me, two lieutenant colonels and one major. I’ve been in the Corps longer than half the officers have been alive. If I had half a brain I’d get out. That’d save me the aches of all the exercising I do to stay fit enough to pass the annual test. And maybe I’d have time to do a little serious drinking now and then.”

  Lon went behind his desk and sat, gesturing for Phip to sit on the chair at the side of the desk. “I know how you feel,” he conceded. “When I was a kid I was a fanatic about physical training. Used to think that if I invested enough sweat I’d get that little bit faster and get my name in the record books for the fastest mile. I won a few races when I was in high school, and even while I was a cadet at The Springs”—the military academy of the North American Union on Earth—“but I never even tied the existing record for the mile, let alone set a new record. And as the record times got faster after I came here, my times were already getting slower. Now it’s been a dozen years since I came within a minute of the record, and four years since the last time I broke four and a half minutes.”

  “Hell, I couldn’t break four and a half minutes for the mile when I was twenty,” Phip said. “And making the six minutes I need to stay qualified for duty gets harder every year. There’s only one reason I don’t hang up the uniform right now.”

  “What’s that?” Lon asked when Phip didn’t go on to explain.

  “I’d kind of like to be here when you make General,” Phip said after a snorted chuckle. “Be nice to retire as Lead Sergeant of the Corps. You’ve dragged me along every time they changed the pips on your uniform.”
<
br />   “Another optimist. You’ve been in the Corps long enough to know they’re never going to elect me General.”

  “Back when you got your commission, I might have agreed with you, but now I can get even odds on you being elected General within the next five years at any betting parlor in Camo Town.”

  “I thought you gave up gambling when you got married.”

  “I did, pretty much, but I still check the sheets every day. Make mental bets if nothing else, just to keep my hand in. Oh, by the way, there’s nothing special on the program for today, not that’s come to my attention, anyway.”

  “Normal routine, no changes to the training or work schedules that I know of,” Lon said, nodding. “No disciplinary problems over the long weekend. I’ve got the weekly council meeting at ten o’clock.” He glanced at the timeline on his complink. “And it looks as if it’s about time we got to work.”

  The building that housed the headquarters of the Dirigent Mercenary Corps and served as Government House for the world was H-shaped, with the crossbar on a north-to-south axis looking across a parade field large enough to hold seventy thousand soldiers without looking particularly crowded, toward the main gate of the base. The wings of the building were two-thirds on the west side of the crossbar. The facade was of polished white marble covered with a transparent preservative that added a sparkle to the stone. In front of the north and south wings, on the side facing the parade field, were rows of artillery pieces—many brought from Earth—showing the development of artillery from the earliest extant bronze cannons to the most modern self-propelled howitzers and rocket launchers.

  The meeting chamber of the Council of Regiments was in the central portion of the building, on the second floor, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the parade ground. A circular table in the chamber had built-in comp-links at each of the fourteen places. Seating was in regimental order, clockwise beginning at the north. The General, whoever he was during a particular year, presided from the same seat he had held as regimental commander. The only visible distinction his place showed was a small gold gavel and a red bokka wood pad to bang it against. Several small curved tables sat behind the main table, with seats for aides or guests.