"But they'll grab the enemy's attention for a few moments," Bleys said. "Someone's coming up behind them who'll use that inattention to get in on those people and remove them."
"But my men! They'll be dead!"
Before Bleys could answer, the man started to move forward— and quickly checked himself as Toni, stepping up from the side, pointed a power pistol at his head from a couple of feet away.
Sadly, Bleys shook his head, glancing quickly at the display on his wristpad.
"Maybe," he said. "Maybe not. They'll have a chance. It has to be done."
"It's not right!" the sergeant said. "You're sending them out there like they were in some kind of dream! You're not even giving them a choice!"
"I don't have a choice, either, and we have less than three minutes," Bleys said, reaching out to remove the power pistol from the sergeant's weapons belt. Taking the pistol off its safety, he pointed it at the Dorsai's stomach. "Turn to your left and kneel facing that wall. If you try anything, you won't be alive to help your men."
As Toni watched the kneeling man, Bleys returned to the rest of the soldiers. They were enthusiastic about his rejoining them, and seemed, in their captured state, not to have noticed the confrontation with their sergeant. Bleys took a moment to greet each one individually, as if they were all comrades together, and gathered their attention to himself once more. He spoke again.
In a few moments he had given them their instructions, and they turned to checking their weapons and arraying themselves on either side of the doorway.
"Remember," Bleys said, "don't move until I give the signal. Then get out the doorway fast, spreading out as you go. Put out as much fire as you can. You can break those people, I know it."
Eyes now fastened on the cntranceway, they all nodded resolutely. Eighty seconds to go, Bleys saw.
At that point the sergeant, ignoring the gun Toni held on him, rose, pivoting—and moved toward him. Bleys raised the man's own pistol; but the sergeant slowed and splayed his arms to each side. One hand was bloody. He continued, however, moving toward his men, and Bleys understood suddenly.
"You don't have to go out there, you know," Bleys said. "Whatever you might think of me, I wouldn't make you do that." Over the sergeant's shoulder, Bleys could see Toni, still behind the man, with her gun on him. Dahno, off to the side, had pulled himself up onto an elbow and was now raising a pistol, his face ugly.
"No, Dahno!" Bleys said, raising a hand in a warding motion. Dahno, he was sure, was in the grip of emotion that wanted a violent outlet.
Bleys had no time to think about it; he was in the grip of his own emotional reaction—one he, too, could not control.
"I suppose I could take your word for that," the sergeant said. "It makes no difference." He paused; and while he did so, Bleys silently reversed the pistol and handed it back to him. The hand in which Dahno held his weapon seemed to jerk as he clenched his finger over the firing button—but nothing happened; the gun was empty.
The white-mind face Toni had been wearing—the inhumanly blank face that signaled a concentration state in someone who had attained a great mastery of the martial arts—changed, too, as her eyes narrowed and her lips curled in a grim half-smile. Bleys thought he caught a gleam from behind her lowered eyelids.
Bleys put his attention back on the sergeant.
"They're my men, you see," the man said, as if that explained it all. He holstered the pistol without looking at it; then turned and limped toward those same men, who had been chattering softly among themselves, as if blind and deaf to the drama behind them. The volume of their chatter rose for a moment as he joined them, but died out as he spoke softly among them. After a few sentences he took a moment to check each man individually, looking him in the eyes and asking a soft question or two. And in just a few more seconds, Bleys gave them an order as the countdown on his pad reached zero; and they burst through the doorway one at a time, the Dorsai leading.
Bleys felt himself frozen in place, listening to the eruption of sound from outside, the explosions of power weapons and the whistling of cones. Toni gripped his arm, pulling him toward Dahno.
"We've got to be ready to go," she said. "Help me with him. If Henry gets through to us, we may have only moments to get out before the opportunity passes."
As they got Dahno to his feet, silence fell outside. They waited tensely, eyes glued to the entrance; and in a few minutes Bleys heard Henry's voice call his name.
"We've got to go now," Toni said, quietly but intensely.
"Yes," Bleys said. He had to go. It would be too tragic a waste, otherwise....
CHAPTER 11
The local sun was lowering toward the horizon line formed by the ridge to the west of Henry MacLean's position, the dimming of its light darkening the opposite sky as he, along with some of his Soldiers, walked across the field, pausing to check out each body they came to. To all sides more of their number were fanning out, alert for any further threat, and he could see another thin line of his people holding the crest of the ridge ahead of him.
This land had never been very productive—Henry's eye could still be that of a farmer—and having a war fought on it had made it rough and uneven, pitted and scabbed. There were no trees of any size nearby, he noted, although his Soldiers, in their attack, had made effective use of the scrubby trees and underbrush lining the small creek that curved around two sides of this position. He himself had walked out of that underbrush to move up the gentle slope.
It was no surprise to him that there were few trees in sight; trees were always casualties when war visited in one place for very long.
That setting star, which seemed small to his eyes, was called Tau Ceti. It was a strange name, he thought; and the paleness of its yellow light seemed strange, too—but he knew he felt that way out of his lifelong familiarity with the more orange light cast by Epsilon Eridanus, the star that shone on his home planet.
He had seen bodies lying about on Association, long in his past; and on Newton, too, more recently. The look of them never seemed to change, no matter the color of the light.
And something else hadn't changed: once dead, it did not matter whose side the body had been on.
He had been moving forward as he thought, part of a skirmish line of the former Soldiers of God he led. Now he stopped, as the change in his perspective revealed the lips of the trench that had been their objective. The entrance-way to the bunker would be under the lip on the farther side, he knew; in a few more steps he would be able to see it.
Henry and his Soldiers had been approaching somewhat obliquely to the line of the trench, which now presented the appearance of a kind of scar cutting across the barren field. It didn't seem a very strong defensive position, he thought, but perhaps it hadn't needed to be. What little he had heard about the war that had been fought over this area suggested it hadn't been a serious contest.... He wondered if more people had not died here in this afternoon than in all of that war.
With a hand signal he started his Soldiers moving forward again, cautious as always. Those to his right had already reached the trench, and two of them stopped, covering down its length, while the other two leaped over it, to take up watch on the other side.
In a few steps more he, himself, could see down into the trench. There were more bodies here, these in uniform. From some distance back and at a different angle he had seen these young men burst out into the trench from the bunker, shouting and firing—and had seen them blasted down. Two had gotten a little distance down the trench, back the way he had just come, before falling into the greasy mud; and one had made it up over the edge of the trench, the move giving him enough time to put several bolts into the midst of the group of enemies that had been setting up a power cannon intended to blast Bleys and his party to pieces in their shelter.
It was that cannon that had forced Henry to decide on immediate action.
"Bleys? Are you here?" he called, directing his voice at the entrance across the trench. "Dahno? Toni?
"
As he waited he shifted position, two strides taking him over to the body of the soldier who took out the cannon. The man was badly torn up, having taken a number of needles before bolts from power weapons had blasted him out of life. He had never dropped his pistol, though—his hand, curled in death, still held it firmly.
He appeared to be a little older than the others. But all of them, including this man's enemies, that Henry and his Soldiers had killed, and who now lay behind him—they were all too young.
He was reminded of Will, whose grave he had visited only two days ago. He thought someone must have looked down on his son in very much this same way... did that person feel then as he, Henry, did now?
"Bleys?" he called again. And he gave hand signals to his people to flank the position they were now watching.
Remembering Will, as usual, also made him remember Joshua, his other son, still living on the old farm on Association. In a very-true sense, he realized now, Will had died so that Joshua would live. Joshua, and all their people.
And some of these young people had died so that Bleys could live—if he lived. The others, so that Bleys would die. Did they cancel each other out?
Not in Gods arithmetic, he thought.
"Henry, we're here." It was Toni's voice, and he looked up to see her appear cautiously out of the bunker entrance, stepping down slightly into the mud while waving a white cloth of some sort; with her other arm she was trying to support Dahno, who was also being held up by Bleys, coming out behind him. Henry did not have to speak before several of his Soldiers leaped into the trench to help take Dahno's weight, as, refusing to sit down, he picked his way past a couple of bodies and trudged heavily toward a crude ramp that had been cut out of the side of the trench, farther down its length.
"Bleys, are you hurt?" Henry said. "Toni?"
"No, Uncle," Bleys said. "Dahno has two needles in him, but the rest of us are all right."
"Is there anyone else in the bunker?" "A body or two," Bleys said, "and—"
"Two more wounded soldiers," Toni added. "Please get them help."
"Where is—" Henry began to call; and checked himself upon seeing that Mary Holzer, their lead medician, was already at Dahno's side as he reached the bottom of the ramp.
"I'll look him over," Mary said in her soft voice to James Cella, her number two. "Check inside, Jamie."
She tried to make Dahno lie down so that she could examine him, but he refused, insisting on getting up the ramp and out of the mud-bottomed trench.
Rather than taking the ramp, Bleys had vaulted out of the trench with the aid of cupped hands provided by one of the Soldiers; and now reached Henry. Toni had remained with Dahno.
"Thank you, Uncle," Bleys said as he came to a halt, looking back past Henry at the scattered bodies that had been their attackers. "I believe they might have gotten in on us before long."
"Probably not," Henry said. "They would not have needed to do so. They were setting up a power cannon that likely would have blown that place down on all of you."
"Do you know who they were?" Bleys asked.
"I have no idea," Henry said. "They aren't wearing uniforms."
"Are there any left alive?"
"Not so far," Henry said. "We need to get you out of here—no, don't argue. These people may have comrades; or if not, the army will soon discover how they were deceived and come back; we don't want them to find us with their own dead people."
"But I need to try to find out—"
"We'll check all the bodies and their equipment for anything that might tell us what you want to know," Henry said, "before the rest of us leave. But you and Toni are going now—" he pointed at a wide, high-riding vehicle approaching from an angle behind them, "—and Dahno, if he can travel."
The vehicle was one of a type commonly called a vagen, a civilian adaptation of a high-riding, boxy carrier used on many worlds to ferry small military units. It drew up beside them, angling in at the last moment so that its driver could be next to Henry as his window opened. Its fans threw up very little dust from the still-damp soil.
"John, are you ready to go?" Henry directed his question at the now-open window.
"Yes, Henry," John Colville said. Bleys happened to know that John's father had fought beside Henry years ago, when they were both Soldiers of God.
"Rolf and Kamala have had their wounds treated and are in the rear compartment," John was continuing. "They can shoot."
"Bleys, you get in beside John," Henry said. He turned slightly and raised his voice.
"Mary, can he be moved?" he called.
"Yes, Henry," the medician replied.
"Move over there, John," Henry directed. "Bleys and I will walk over there in a moment. Leave the front seat open for Bleys, and put Dahno, Toni and Mary in the middle compartment. Who's driving your escort?"
"Richard Nelson," said John; "and, yes, I've made sure he knows where we're going. He has Ben and Eli with him, as well as our other wounded."
He moved off toward the ramp, and Bleys and Henry followed on foot.
"How many have we lost?" Bleys asked after a silent moment.
"I don't know that yet," Henry replied. "We had to scatter our people to all sides and try to coordinate our attacks, and there's been no time to get the details. That's another thing I'll have to tell you later." He paused to think for a moment, still walking.
"God willing, I believe we have done better than I feared," he went on. "Those people were not properly alert to the possibility of trouble coming upon them."
They had almost caught up with the vagen now.
"God gives us a lesson in these people," Henry said, "one we would do well to heed: be prepared for the possibility of trouble. Thus, you must go ahead of us, now."
As Bleys still hesitated, Henry spoke more sharply: "Go! Get in!"
Abandoning argument, Bleys moved around the vehicle to its passenger side. Henry began to give more signals to those of his Soldiers who had held their positions farther out from the bunker.
By the time Bleys opened the door, Dahno and the rest had been loaded into the vagen from its far side, a process facilitated by the fact that the vagen was riding higher on its idling fans than did more usual vehicles. Bleys climbed in, finding that a deep well under the dashboard provided plenty of room for his legs.
As soon as Bleys was in, John put the vagen into motion, heading back the way he had come. Another, similar vehicle appeared from somewhere, to fall in behind them.
Looking back as they went, Dahno fidgeting and complaining beside her, Toni saw Henry watching them go.
It must be tearing him up inside, she thought. I know he loves Bleys like another son—enough to risk his very soul to try to keep Bleys out of Satan s hands. But to do that he had to kill, which he believes—no, he knows, to the depths of his soul—is wrong.
As a curve in their path put Henry out of her sight, she faced forward, then leaned back in her seat.
She had never forgotten that Henry had once admitted to her that he was prepared to kill Bleys himself, rather than let him, as he put it, fall into Satan's hands. She herself had resolved that would never happen.
At the same time, she had grown fond of Henry herself; and she recognized that if Henry ever came to that point—regardless of whether he succeeded in killing Bleys, or not—it would come as the result of an almost inconceivable state of pain and despair.
Spare him, Lord!
As she heard her inner self say those words, she knew she meant her prayer to encompass both men.
By the time the local sun set, their vehicle had made a rendezvous with a long-haul cargo carrier. Hidden inside one of the containers inside its streamlined shell, they almost backtracked the way they had just come, now traveling along a paved trafficway that passed about twenty kilometers to the west of the bunker. While they did so, the vehicles from which they had parted, now functioning as decoys, crossed the Nightfish River on their fans—avoiding the bridges— and sped toward
Abbeyville, a city large enough to host a Friendly consulate.
Feverish and achy in the aftermath of the action and the blackout, Bleys drowsed on an air mattress inside their container, Toni sitting quietly beside him as she worked over her wrist control pad. Dahno, sedated, lay quietly on another mattress while the medician monitored his condition. The wounded Soldiers—six in total—had stayed with John Colville and his vehicles, adding to the authenticity of the decoy operation while speeding them toward more advanced medical care.
"I've missed something," Bleys said, lifting the arm he had draped across his brow; the lightstrips glued to the walls of their container seemed to be able to glare right through his eyelids. He rolled onto his side and propped himself up on one elbow, watching Toni as she monitored the displays on her wristpad.
"I deliberately set out to stir the pot on this planet," he went on, "thinking that if our Others were galvanized into action, they might unearth some clue to whoever these people are who've been working in secret here. Or perhaps those people would become aware of the increased activity, and react in some way that might lead us to them. But this! Two major attacks in two days, thousands of kilometers apart... ?"
He stopped himself from shaking his head, for fear that the lurking sense of discomfort in the center of his skull might blossom into a full-blown headache ... he had come to be leery of headaches.
Antagonist - Childe Cycle 11 Page 11