The Regiment-A Trilogy

by John Dalmas

  "Quite probably."

  "Is that the goal of a warrior? To die?"

  "The goal of a T'swa warrior is to play at war, skillfully and with joy. Death is a common accompaniment."

  "But . . . it's such an empty life!"

  "Is it?"

  Varlik stopped. "Isn't it?"

  "It would be for someone who wanted to raise a family, or paint fine pictures, or"—Varlik could see the eyes turn to him in the near night—"create with words."

  "And you kill people!"

  "True again."

  "Even if they have a new life afterward, the way you believe, you take away from them what they want desperately to keep."

  "That too is true, more often than not. But ask yourself who it is we kill."

  "What do you mean?"

  "We kill those who, knowingly or not, choose to put themselves into battle with us."

  "These Birds didn't choose to put themselves into battle with you!" Varlik snapped. "They're just trying to end the slavery they've been subjected to. I'm surprised you aren't helping them, instead of fighting them. That would be the ethical thing to do."

  "Would it?"

  "Wouldn't it?"

  "That would not solve their problem, and it would worsen the problem the Confederation faces here while putting Tyss at war with the Confederation.

  "Besides, we T'swa do not fight. For us, war is a form of play, and we play most skillfully at it. And true play does not have problems, but challenges and opportunities.

  "Problems, you see, are a matter of attitude; one being's problem might be viewed by another in the same situation as an opportunity, perhaps for a game or a war. With the attitude of play, you may see a situation and decide you will create a different situation in its place, without any determination that you must succeed. What you think of as success has no part in play. You do it for the doing.

  "Think of play as a journey in which the place you have chosen to travel to is far less important than the traveling."

  Varlik groped for his indignation, and somehow couldn't find it. At one level he felt as if he'd been had, snowed by sophistries he couldn't get a grip on—as if someone had told him that solid wasn't solid, that the obvious was fallacy. Yet somehow—somehow, he felt distinctly better than he had minutes before. He let go of the matter, and smiled at Kusu, not widely.

  "You're something," Varlik said. "You know that? All of you are."

  "Thank you, Varlik. You are something, too."

  For just a moment that stopped Varlik. Then a chuckle welled up in him that grew to a laugh, long and hard. The powerful T'swi kept him company in a rumbling bass until they gripped hands and shook on it.

  * * *

  Varlik had been sitting at a table in the work room of the army's media quarters. Not that he had anything to send to Central News. After making another letter cube for Mauen, he waited for Konni, idly browsing, admiring old field cubes. After a bit it was lunch time, and Konni hadn't appeared. Iryala Video had sent two new teams to Kettle, both at Beregesh today, and she was scheduled to leave for home the next morning. Varlik wanted to talk to her before she left.

  Surely she'd show for lunch, he told himself, and got up to leave for the officers' mess. He hadn't reached the door when it opened, and Konni came in.

  "What's up?" she asked. "Did you finally make up your mind to go home?"

  "Not home. Not yet. The T'swa, both veteran regiments, have a new assignment. The word came in this morning confirming it; we'll be going next Fourday."

  She stared at him. "What kind of assignment?"

  "They're going to hit the Birds down in the equatorial zone, then blast enough of a hole in the jungle that floaters can come in and take them out."

  "And you're going along on that?" Her fists were on her hips. "Varlik, you had to be crazy to go out on the last operation. This sounds twice as bad."

  "It's five times as important, and I want to be close to it."

  "Important how? What's it about?"

  "It's confidential. I've already said more than I should."

  Her brows drew down angrily. "Are you saying you don't trust me? After the information we've both kept to ourselves?"

  "I trust you. But I had to give my word," he added unhappily.

  She looked at him, her anger dying.

  "It shouldn't be as dangerous for me as the last one," he went on. "For one thing, it's a single quick raid—land, strike, and leave. And I'll be in the least dangerous part of the operation. But, of course, there's always that little chance. So I wanted to tell you that if I'm killed, you're free to do whatever you want with what we recorded on Tyss."

  Briefly her eyes tried to pry him open. "You're going to get yourself killed," she said at last.

  He didn't answer, just shook his head.

  "I'd have propositioned you deks ago," she continued, "but you were married. The reason I didn't was my respect for your wife. But if you're not going to get back to her anyway . . ."

  "No, I'll be back. I don't know why I feel so confident, but I'll be back here when it's over—not even wounded this time."

  Konni backed off. "Maybe you're right. I hope so." She grinned then, unexpectedly. "Anything I can do for you?"

  He grinned back. "Sure. You can have lunch with me."

  "You've got a date," she said, and took his arm.

  31

  Only the least moon watched, low in the east, little more than a bright point of light and less vivid than a clouded planet.

  The floaters settled slowly, dull black landers from the large troopship miles above, guiding vertically down lines of gravitic flux. Eyes could not have seen them, even if there had been sentries above the jungle's canopy—not even as occlusions against the star field overhead, because clouds moving up the bowl of sky were approaching the meridian, eclipsing more and more the view.

  To the proper instruments, of course, the floaters would have been as visible as at midday. But such an instrument would have to stand above the forest roof, and would have been detected in advance by recon flights. It had been a radio antenna that brought special attention to the site—a slender steel structure rising inconspicuously a dozen yards above the layered jungle.

  Seeing by instrument themselves, and holding formation by keeping each to its own gravitic ordinate, the stealthy floaters stopped their still descent half a hundred feet above the tallest trees, those shaggy giants emergent from the general canopy. Now would come the first real hazard: letting down the troops. If they alarmed the birds and arboreal animals, the general cacophony might draw the attention of unfeathered Birds.

  Unlit hatches opened. Slender weighted cables slid out and down, into the foliage below. Only isolated brief complaints could be heard, no more than might happen in the random mini-dramas of an ordinary jungle night. Below some threshold of excitement, silence and concealment were favored over noisy alarm by the jungle galleries.

  The creatures near the cables adjusted quickly to their dangling presence and, already alerted, less susceptible to being startled, made even fewer audible responses to the men who followed, despite the movements of cables as they descended, and the release of branches as heavy bodies first depressed and then slipped free of them.

  After he'd passed through the dense crown of a canopy tree, Varlik squeezed the let-down control of the harness he rode, slightly speeding his descent. From there to the ground, he passed through the branches of only one frail, light-starved undertree. Then his feet touched down on a narrow twisting root a foot high, and his ankle turned, throwing him heavily to the ground.

  At least he hadn't come down on an ant mound, he told himself. The scouts had radioed more than the locations of the military encampment and cave entrances; they'd described as well the ground conditions.

  To Varlik it seemed too dark even for the T'swa to see. They'd anticipated that, and the T'swa had night goggles.

  Varlik had rejected night goggles. Instead, he took off his battle helmet and put on his
monitor visor, then scanned about with his camera. In such dense darkness, visibility was limited even so, and the quality of seeing was strange. Beyond fifty feet he saw only dimly, and beyond eighty nothing at all. Nor was there much undergrowth where he was; by day few plants could photosynthesize in such dense shade.

  He could see four T'swa. Two of them were Kusu and Lieutenant Zimsu; he recognized their insignia. Kusu was the platoon sergeant now.

  Varlik had been the last man down his cable. Now he heard it twitch, the prelude to its being drawn back up. Half a minute later he watched and recorded it snaking upward out of sight, heard faintly its dangling harnesses swish through branches, and with its passing felt a heavy finality.

  Then, visor in place, he put his battle helmet back on his head and reached up to make sure his communicator was turned on.

  This was a very different kind of operation from the earlier ones; high mobility wasn't needed here. They'd been put down in the position they were to hold, would make only small adjustments in their line till time to leave. Thus the T'swa here carried and wore equipment that would have been more burden than help up north—not only battle helmets and night goggles, but quantities of grenades, while every third man had a blast hose and a satchel of box magazines for it.

  Every third man. They were the ones who would hold their positions if necessary to let the others get away. Abundant explosives had been lowered too, to clear a place for evac floaters when the time came.

  Somewhere out in front of them, B Company of the Night Adders was less encumbered. Carrying only rifles, sidearms, and a few grenades, they'd been put down by squads at coordinates where they could cover the trails away from the Bird cave and headquarters area. The scouts were to have met them there. When the air strike began, they were to pick up fleeing Bird officers, then move quickly with their prisoners toward the defensive circle formed by the rest of the force, dropping off men as they went—men who would fight any rearguard action necessary.

  The defensive circle was nothing to fight a prolonged action from. There were too few T'swa for that, and too much cover for attackers, and there'd be little opportunity to clear fields of fire. They'd clear as much as time allowed after the bombing began and the need for silence ended. But ideally, the pickup squads would bring their prisoners while the Birds were still confused, and the evac floaters would take them out quickly, with little or no fighting necessary.

  And it could happen that way. Or the Birds might respond quickly and in force.

  According to Kusu, this wouldn't have been an exceptionally hazardous action against enemy they'd faced on other worlds, but the Birds were special. Even on trail interdiction, where the T'swa had been able to choose the time and place of their hit-and-run ambushes, they'd quickly learned the quality of the men they fought. Here, on the other hand, the T'swa were committed to fixed but unfortified positions. It was a question of speed—how quickly the Birds realized what was happening and responded. Time would tell. Or as the T'swa said, time would expose the script.

  And they would revise it as the cast and stage and props allowed, ad libbing from moment to moment. That was how Kusu had described battle to him the day before—an odd concept.

  The T'swa had been in a strange, almost joyous calm. Varlik had gotten used to this, adjusting to their reality, and had even found it rubbing off on him to the extent that, at times, he'd been almost cheerful.

  But not now. Now he had a prime case of nervous gut, even hidden as he was by opaque and silent darkness. He didn't wonder if the T'swa were nervous, too; they weren't.

  After a time a sound began, a distant susurrus, increasing quickly to an irregularly pulsing swash of heavy rain upon the jungle roof, rain that soon began to penetrate the canopy above. Some of the T'swa, taking advantage of the noise, moved out with their swordlike bayonets and chopped away what undergrowth and saplings there were. This scarcely provided a field of fire, but it would help. Somewhere behind them, in the middle of their ring, two platoons were setting explosives. Some of the men, with climbing irons, were setting charges well up the trunks so the trees would come down in sections. Otherwise, many would lodge crisscross, perhaps denying the floaters adequate landing space.

  The men cutting undergrowth finished and returned to lie waiting with the others. Photography done for the time, Varlik curled on his side and dozed in semisleep, wakened now and then by water running in his ear or by infrequent thunder. Before long he became aware that the rain had stopped, though dripping continued from above. Now he could see more and farther than before; dawn was breaking. The morning bird chorus began, and when it ended he slept.

  * * *

  And awoke with a start to the first crash of bombs. He'd expected them louder—the target zone was only a mile away—but the jungle vegetation absorbed and deadened sounds. It was full daylight, and raising his head to look around, he saw the T'swa peering steadily outward. Somewhere out there, not far, lookouts had been posted. His hand touched the holster of his sidearm, then went to his audio recorder and camera.

  There was little enough to record—the constant thudding of bombs, the T'swa lying ready with rifles and blast hoses—for about half an hour. No pickup squads arrived with prisoners, but he told himself it was too soon; there hadn't been time for that. Or they might have come through somewhere else. Then rifle fire erupted well up front, spreading, developing into a firefight that went on sporadically for minutes before dying. There'd been blast hoses, and the pickup squads hadn't carried any.

  He spoke his thoughts for the record, mentally tuning out the sound of bombing. Without the firefight it seemed almost quiet—an almost-quiet ruptured suddenly by great roaring explosions, almost stopping his heart; the T'swa were blasting their evacuation clearing, a stupendous sound of high explosives and trees crashing. After a moment, pieces of branchwood fell through the canopy to patter on the ground. And when that was over, a matter of seconds, it was truly quiet, because the bombing had stopped.

  The silence was brief, a minute or two. Nearby to his left a blast hose ripped a long burst of bullets, to be answered by hose fire from outside the circle, brief but shockingly violent. And close. Then all the T'swa were firing. Rockets hissed and slammed, and Varlik heard insistent Tyspi in his helmet radio, asking the pickup squads to report. None did.

  The command came to move back. He did, crawling backward on knees and elbows, pausing frequently to record with his camera. The T'swa withdrew slowly, taking advantage of cover, maintaining fire. The shooting was intense. Lieutenant Zimsu exploded, literally, hit by a rocket. Varlik had seen it in his monitor while scanning with his camera.

  After that for a time he didn't know what was happening or what he was doing, until he found himself behind a section of blasted tree trunk near the edge of the evac clearing, which he could see through the fringe of tattered trees behind him. Kusu was kneeling beside him, and a little way off, Captain Tarku crouched.

  Kusu was gripping Varlik's shoulder. "Varlik," he was saying in Standard, "go to the clearing. That's an order. Floaters are taking people out. Sergeant Gis-Tor is in charge of loading, and he knows you're to have priority. I want you out of here."

  Varlik nodded, numbly willing. "And keep low!" the T'swa reminded. "I don't want you killed." Kusu peered into Varlik's eyes as if looking for something, then grinned and thrust him on his way.

  The Iryalan crawled through debris into the steamy sunlight of the clearing. It was perhaps three hundred feet across, littered with blasted trees. He could see three evac floaters loading personnel, half hidden by jumbled debris, and Varlik paused to use his camera. Another floater, settling in, was hit by a rocket as he watched, and pitched forward, downward, impacting heavily. A few Birds had obviously reached the edge and could see and shoot at the floaters.

  The din of firing was continuous now. A floater raised under fire, its rate of lift like a leap, angling up and away. Still another came in, almost recklessly swift, braking abruptly only a few yards above t
he ground, then settling quickly among the debris to load.

  Another popped upward, was hit by a rocket, circled momentarily out of control, was hit again, and fell sideways to the ground. Others, hanging or circling well above, were hidden by jungle and could only be glimpsed. One came in and landed unhit. It occurred to Varlik that the Birds might have let it land, to shoot it down later loaded with men. As if to verify that, another, popping swiftly up, was hit at least twice, to fall back slowly. Another raised. It too was hit, but continued upward and away, as if the round had failed to explode after penetrating. Still another landed, and another.

  He realized he'd been crouching there with his camera in his hands, recording. He was supposed to load and leave; no one would ever see his cube if he died here. Cautiously he moved, crouching toward the floaters.

  Another floater lifted, jumping as if on a spring, was hit some fifty feet above the ground and fell crashing on top of one still loading. Then Varlik heard a radioed command in Standard.

  "Floaters, attention. Floaters, attention. This is Major Masu, acting commander on the ground. Move away. Repeat, move away. Evacuation is cancelled."

  That they were to be left here was not what impacted Varlik's mind. Rather, it was that Major Masu was in charge. That meant Biltong and Koda were probably dead. He glimpsed floaters still circling; they hadn't left yet, and he felt a brief surge of pride, for their pilots were Iryalan, or maybe Rombili: Confederatswa.

  Again the radio commanded; this time the voice wasn't Masu's. "T'swa, regroup," it said. "Take cover in the clearing."

  Of course. The litter of fallen trees here gave better cover than they'd find elsewhere. But where was Kusu? Crouching, crawling over fallen trees, Varlik started back toward where he'd seen him last.

  "Lormagen!"

  He stopped, knelt. Captain Tarku was on his knees behind a massive fallen trunk, looking at him.

  "Where are you going?" Tarku had shouted to be heard. Varlik realized he'd been heading out of the clearing.

  "To find Kusu."