The Regiment-A Trilogy

by John Dalmas

  Again the purr. "And what is your unit, private?"

  "First Army Headquarters Battalion, sir."

  Varlik found himself sweating despite the air-conditioned coolness.

  "All right, Private Jaster Gorlip, 36 928 450. Let us out thirty feet from the entrance."

  Carefully the private drove to a position thirty feet from the entrance, stopped, jumped out, and opened the doors for his passengers, holding Voker's open for him. When they were out, and before the driver closed the door, Voker said, "Thank you, private. Hmm. I seem to have forgotten your name." He turned on his heel then and led the three journalists to the entrance. "Reservist," he murmured to Varlik, and chuckled. "He assumed we were new here, and thought he'd play a little game with us; make us walk in the heat. Regular army would have known better."

  He caught Varlik's eye and smiled amusedly. "You wouldn't have done that when you were in, would you?"

  "No way. Not with a colonel, not with a sergeant. Maybe with a green junior lieutenant, but I doubt it."

  Voker laughed, then held open the door of the headquarters building for them. Inside was not exactly cool, but relatively so by local standards: perhaps ninety, Varlik thought. There was the sound of coolers, communicators, voices. "The place has grown since I left," Voker muttered. "Let's see if they've left the Information Office where it was two deks ago." They had, and after knocking, Voker introduced them to a lieutenant, who looked surprised and pleased to have them.

  Lieutenant Brek Trevelos was probably, Varlik decided, the source of the non-news that had been released to the public at home. But the policy would not have been his own; lieutenants didn't set policy, nor did colonels, for that matter. Cheerful and bright looking, Trevelos made sure they'd entered the planetary adjustment factor into their watches, correcting them to Kettle's day length. Then briefly he summarized the army's buildup and preparation here, not mentioning, however, any of the history that Colonel Voker had confided. After that, instead of using his desk comm, he opened the door into an adjacent, somewhat larger office, crowded with several desks.

  "Sergeant Wagar!" Trevelos called, and a man came over. "These are newspeople visiting us from the capital." The lieutenant gave their names. "I want you to call the vehicle pool and have them send over an air-conditioned car and driver. When it gets here, I want you to take our guests over to QM and get them fitted with whatever field clothes they need; three sets each. After that, you'll give them a tour of the base. Show them everything. I expect you won't be done by lunch, so at noon, you'll take them to the officers' mess and pick them up there afterward to complete the tour." He turned brightly to the three. "How does that sound?"

  Without waiting for their answer, the sergeant went out to make his call. "And now," Trevelos went on, closing the door, "perhaps you have some questions you'd like me to answer while we're waiting for your vehicle."

  "Yes," Konni said. "Where will we be quartered?"

  "Forgive me, Miss Wenter, I should have mentioned that. We have special air-conditioned quarters for journalists—six sleeping rooms and a large common room. They've never been used. I'll call and have three rooms made up and the coolers turned on so they'll be comfortable. Sergeant Wagar will take you there at the end of your tour, or sooner if you'd like. I suggest you wait an hour, though, for the rooms to be prepared.

  "Now, if you'll excuse me for just a moment . . ." He murmured a call code into his communicator and waited for a brief moment. Then faintly they heard the tinny voice at the other end—a voice with no face, for there was no screen. "This is Lieutenant Trevelos, Information Officer," Trevelos said. "Three journalists just arrived from the capital. Their baggage needs to be picked up and delivered at media accommodations. Do you know where that is?"

  The tinny voice said something back, about twenty words worth. Trevelos thanked him and hung up, then turned to the three. "A Captain Brusin on the IWS Quaranth has already had them sent. Now, is there anything else?"

  "I presume we'll be able to stop along the way and ask questions," Varlik said. "Or shoot some video cubeage."

  "If you'd like. But this tour is mainly for orientation. You'll be assigned a vehicle to yourselves tomorrow—more than one, if you'd like—and be able to go about more or less as you wish."

  It occurred to Varlik to ask about the T'swa then, but he didn't. He still hoped to send home a feature on them before Bakkis and Wenter could, and it seemed possible that they hadn't heard about them.

  Then Trevelos issued them media passes, which they signed. The passes would admit them to the officers' mess, commissary, and lounges, among other things. And sooner than they would have thought, their driver arrived.

  * * *

  When they'd had their tour and Bakkis and Wenter had gotten out at the media quarters, Varlik asked the driver to drop him off at headquarters. They left the video team, Konni looking questioningly after him. At headquarters, Varlik went straight to the Information Office and knocked. Trevelos answered him in.

  "What can I do for you?"

  "I wondered," Varlik said, "where I can find the T'swa mercenaries."

  On Trevelos's face, a look of surprise was followed by one that might have been concern. "The T'swa mercenaries?"

  "Right. My editor was told by a spokesman on His Majesty's staff that T'swa mercenaries were being contracted with for Kettle. Two regiments." Varlik was not given to lying, and he heard himself say this with some surprise. But it seemed to come out believably enough. "My instructions are to get interviews with them. Where will I find them?"

  Trevelos looked clearly worried now, which immediately struck Varlik as odd. Captain Benglet, back on Iryala, had accepted his interest casually enough, and Voker . . .

  "Um. Well." Trevelos wasn't sure how to respond. "We don't have any T'swa on Kettle."

  "When are they getting here?"

  The lieutenant lagged for three or four seconds, then gave in. "They're supposed to land about midnight tonight, in two transports. But not here. They'll land at their bivouac area over east about thirty miles; a landing site has been marked out there for the ships."

  "I see. I'll want a vehicle and driver then, at about 19.10 hours local.6 I'd like to see them come in."

  Trevelos nodded. "Of course," he said, and waited for Varlik to leave.

  "I'd like you to make the arrangements now," Varlik said, "so I'll be here if there are any questions, or if there's anything I need to know."

  Again Trevelos nodded, and murmured a code into his communicator. Again a tinny voice responded. Trevelos spoke.

  "This is Lieutenant Trevelos, Information Officer. I want a field vehicle at media accommodations at 19.10 hours tonight. It will pick up a Mr. Varlik Lormagen, a newsman, and transport him to the mercenary bivouac site. The driver will have to know how to get there, and where media accommodations is."

  The tinny voice spoke briefly.

  "Good. That'll be fine. At 19.10." He hung up and looked at Varlik. "It's all arranged. You took me by surprise. We hadn't realized that anyone off command lines had been informed about this."

  "And I hadn't realized you didn't know," Varlik replied. "I guess we surprised each other. Thank you very much for your help."

  He started back to media accommodations on foot. Mercenary bivouac area. Odd, he thought, how the command here seems to feel about the T'swa. They hadn't wanted them in the first place, and getting them regardless, were putting them thirty miles away, apparently with no accommodations. Were the reasons Voker had given him all the reasons there were?

  Probably, he decided. The military command mind didn't need good reasons. It could be arbitrary, it could be very spiteful, and it was in a position to exercise and enforce both, especially on a planet twenty-six days from home.

  It was 120° in the nonexistent shade, a breath-stifling heat that had the sweat oozing again before he'd walked a fifth of the four hundred yards there. After supper he'd shower and lie down, he decided, sleep if he could. It promised to be a
busy night, and there was the matter of adjusting to the short days here, and the short hours.

  PART TWO

  The T'swa

  10

  A rapping drew Varlik out of sleep, and he sat up abruptly. "Come in," he called. He got off the cot, wearing fatigues but barefoot. His alarm clock looked reproachfully at him. Apparently he'd forgotten to set it—a hell of a way to start. A corporal, husky and square-faced, stood in the short hallway looking in, and gestured at the rectangle of notepaper Varlik had taped to the door.

  "Mr. Lormagen?"

  "That's right. Come in. What's your name, corporal?"

  "Duggan, sir."

  "Sit down, Corporal Duggan." Varlik motioned to one of the two folding chairs. "What do your messmates call you?"

  "Pat, sir. Short for Patros."

  "Pat it is, then. Mine's Varlik."

  Varlik pulled on his boots and pressed them snugly closed, snapped his recorder on his belt, slung his video camera under his left arm, slipped the band of his visor-like viewer over his head, then left with the corporal. The night felt strange to him, unreal, like one of the occasional dreams he had of being back in the army in some impossible situation or other. Outside, the air reminded him of a hot pool—all right for sitting in. The vehicle was an uncooled hovercar with the top and windows retracted. The corporal held the door for him.

  Aside from their headlamps, almost the only lights in camp were at the few locations where work went on at night—motor pools, the hospital, and, of course, Army Headquarters. The perimeter, about a mile outside the encampment itself, was a barbed wire fence, tall and silent; outside that, accordion wire; and beneath the ground, string mines, no doubt. String mines, at least. A concrete and earth blockhouse stood by the steel-bar gate, which a guard opened for them while others no doubt watched from the blockhouse. Presumably there were other blockhouses at intervals around the camp.

  Then they were out, accelerating across the prairie, the treated travelway giving way to the prairie's loose dry soil. A trail of dust rose with their passage. Here the way was only barely marked, as if a reaction dozer had scraped a minimal scalp across the grassland, careful to displace as little soil as possible—almost as if it had backed, dragging its blade behind. At intervals stood marker rods, slender, chest high, catching the headlight beams on reflective surfaces.

  The air was still hot, the temperature surely well over a hundred, Varlik decided, and he wondered if the nights here were long enough to allow much cooling. The air that swirled about them seemed hotter, in a way, than it had in stillness outside the hut. But it wasn't really oppressive, not with the sun's fierce rays departed. A person could adapt to Kettle, he thought, at least at 52° north latitude.

  "What do you think of the camp's defensive perimeter, Pat?" he asked. "Is it adequate? Or is it even necessary?"

  Duggan answered without taking his eyes off the cone of their headlights. "You'd need to ask the general about that, sir, or one of his staff. But one thing you ought to be warned about—don't go trompin' around outside the fence. You're likely to lose a leg, all the way to your windpipe. And that's if someone don't shoot you first. The gooks on this part of the planet have been pacified for three hundred years, damn near, and from what I've heard, they've never been known to join together in anything. But it looks to me like the brass isn't taking anything for granted."

  He drove in silence for a minute or so before saying anything more. "And we may not see them, but there's security patrols flying around over the country in light scouts, with scanners and ultra-aud. There's probably one of 'em readin' us right now. We give off a radio signal they recognize. No signal means 'investigate possible hostile.'

  "And besides that, there's heavily armed recon floaters that go back and forth over the whole damn region, watching for anything like a mobilization or large movement of gooks. Just in case."

  They had left the near-flat vicinity of camp for broadly rolling country, and the camp's few lights had disappeared behind the first gentle hill. What he was seeing now, Varlik realized, was the raw, native planet, marked only by this meager track and the cone of their headlights. Here, low rounded ridges ran almost north and south, and on their east-facing slopes, prairie gave way to savannah, its widely scattered, globular trees lurking darker in the night. Varlik wondered if large animals roved here, and whether any were inclined to attack people. Probably none could catch a hovercar if they tried.

  The sky was innocent of city glow, stars myriad against and around the Milky Way's white swath. The present human sector was farther in toward the hub than mankind's earlier home, and the star display a bit richer, although Varlik knew nothing of that. He only knew it was beautiful. Scanning it for a recognizable constellation, he found none, and wasn't sure whether that reflected his sketchy knowledge of constellations or his displacement in space, or possibly the fact that he was in the middle northern latitudes here while Landfall was in the southern hemisphere at home.

  His misgivings about the T'swa returned again, to mind and gut. He was on his way to meet them, to arrange to live with them, share a squad tent with some of them. A picture flashed in his mind, not for the first time, of large, black, hardbitten men who held life cheap. They were gambling, a fight broke out, knives flashed . . .

  Maybe he'd end up with Colonel Voker after all.

  And the T'swa would arrive in the middle of night. Captain Trevelos had said they would bivouac, which implied an unimproved area. When they got off the ship, would they have to dig latrines in the darkness and set up kitchens before they retired, besides erecting tents? Welcome to Kettle! They'd be in a great mood!

  Or maybe they preferred it that way. Outside the Confederation worlds, and maybe some of the trade worlds, attitudes deviated a bit from Standard. And the T'swa were gooks—barbarians in uniforms, more or less. You couldn't know what they'd consider satisfactory.

  After a while the mild hills gave way to an area almost as level as the military camp they'd left, and the hovercar slowed. "It's right about in here, sir," said Duggan. It was the first either of them had spoken for quite a few miles. "Hard to locate exactly in the dark. What we did was, we brought a reaction dozer out, and it sort of scalped a perimeter line around a big square so the ships can find it on the scanners at night. Or they can hang around up there till it gets light, or just set down blind by gravitic coordinates, I suppose; but if they tried that, they might miss the place, depending on how good their coordinates are set."

  The corporal's speech was Iryalan instead of Romblit, his diction marking him back-country rural; a lot of soldiers were.

  "Would it make any difference where they put down?" Varlik asked. "Couldn't they as well camp in one place as another, way out here?"

  "Not very well. We drilled some water wells for 'em; they're going to need 'em when the sun gets up. They're really gonna need those water wells. I've heard their world is as hot as this one, but if they're human, they're gonna want lots of water."

  He stopped, and they settled mentally to wait. "Pat," Varlik asked shortly, "what do you think of the Rombili?"

  Duggan didn't answer at once, sitting back with one arm leaning on the top of the door. "The Rombili? They seem all right to me. They kind of screwed up the war, but it's easy to see how that would be; nobody had any idea that all those sweatbirds were running around loose down there, or that they had weapons or anything. I've talked to quite a few Rombili, and they're not much different from us."

  "Sweatbirds. Is that what you call the gooks here?"

  "Right. They got a funny build—long legs, big chest, and kind of skinny. All they need is a long neck and beak for catching fish, and they do have quite a nose. Longish necks, too."

  "What do you think about T'swa mercenaries coming out here?"

  "Seems good to me." He turned his face to Varlik, a brief reflection of starlight in one eye. "Let the T'swa fight the gooks. I hear they love wars; why not give 'em this one? I'd like to see two divisions of 'em, not
just two regiments. Specially if they're as good as you hear."

  Varlik watched the man remove something, a small package, from a pocket of his fatigue shirt, take something from it with his fingers, and put the something into his mouth. The spicy smell of nictos reached Varlik's nose. For a moment the corporal chewed, compacting the plug, then spat onto the prairie.

  "Is that how most of the men feel about the T'swa? They wish there were two divisions?"

  "Or a whole army." His eyes returned to Varlik. "We're not afraid of the gooks. Don't get me wrong. But they've got big jungles down south, hotter than a cookpot. I mean, it's bad up here, but it's supposed to be a lot worse at Beregesh. So there's this bunch of crazy sweatbirds down there, and it's gonna be bloody work doin' anything about 'em. If it wasn't for the technite, I'd say let 'em have the place. And we probably would, too."

  He spat again and said nothing for half a minute. Then, "That's kind of what we're trying to do anyway, I guess. What General Lamons has in mind, accordin' to rumor. Just take back the country around the mines, fortify hell out of it, and let the gooks have the rest of the planet. Except for Aromanis.

  "And stop usin' slaves. That's where the Rombili screwed up. If they'd have just started mining with mechanicals and contract workers, the gooks wouldn't have even known the Rombili were on the planet."

  The corporal paused then, as if uncertain, and peered at Varlik in the starlight. "If I tell you somethin' private between the two of us, will you keep it that way?"

  Lormagen extended his right hand. "I guarantee it." They gripped on the promise.

  "My best buddy's a computerman, and he called up the staff briefing file on Kettle, to read it. The gooks never even lived where the mines are until the Rombili took slaves down there. And the first batch they took there, a lot of 'em died, because they made 'em work without cool suits. And the women they took down there, some of 'em died when they got pregnant. So the gooks that could take it lived, and the toughest got away to the jungles and had families there. And that's the strain we gotta fight."