The Regiment-A Trilogy

by John Dalmas

  "I have an apology to make," she said. "I've been staying away from you. I shouldn't have."

  He tilted his head back, eyebrows raised. "Tell me about that."

  "That evening we walked together," she said, "you told me some pretty wild stories, and I believed them all. Until you told the one about Colonel Voker beating some trainee, some kind of trainee champion, in a fight. And that sounded so far-fetched that it suddenly seemed to me you'd been lying all along, to see how much I'd believe."

  "Ah!"

  "I liked you at once, you know. Maybe more than I'd ever liked a guy before on first acquaintance, so it really stung me." She paused, holding his gaze, wondering how he'd take such bold frankness. "Well, I just congratulated Artus Romlar on getting his subcolonel's bronze fist. And I said something like, 'How does it feel to replace Colonel Voker at age nineteen?'

  "He said no one replaces Colonel Voker, and told me the same story you did. And that you—the regiment that is—owed Colonel Voker for everything you've become."

  Jerym nodded soberly.

  "He said you owed the T'swa, too, and the Ostrak Project, that you'd never have made it without all three, but that Voker was the one who guided it all. Is that how you see it?"

  Again Jerym nodded. "Voker is our father, the father of the regiment. The T'swa are our teachers, and the project our— The ones who got us acting sane."

  She nodded. "Anyway I'm sorry I doubted you. And stayed away from you."

  She paused, started to ask him about the Ostrak Project, then didn't. It might sound as if her apology was a way of getting him to talk, which in fact was what she'd started out to do. Instead she danced closer, felt the warmth and hardness of his body. Reminded herself that he was eighteen and she was twenty-four, and that they had no future together. The music stopped, they stepped apart, then abruptly she stepped close again and kissed his cheek.

  It startled her as much as it did him, and she almost fled, then got a grip on herself. "I'll only be here three more days," she said. "And I know you'll be busy. But I'll write to you when you go to Terfreya to train, and I hope you'll write back."

  Then she turned and left, left Jerym, left the assembly hall, wondering what had gotten into her. Jerym was scarcely out of adolescence, and she'd only talked to him twice in her life, for only minutes each time; it made no sense at all. She couldn't possibly love him.

  But she would write to him, she was sure about that.

  She went to her room, wondering what Jerym thought about it. Had she seemed like a fool? Or had he been attracted to her the way she had to him? Was he downstairs at the party wondering? Feeling confused? Frustrated?

  Perhaps she should go back down, find him, and take him to the woods or—to her room. The thought troubled her even as it attracted her. It would be cheap, degrading. Not to him perhaps—men were different—but to her.

  She stayed for a while; tried to read, but couldn't keep her mind on the book. Perhaps she could go down and dance with others. Finally she got up from the bed and left her room, unsure of her motives or what she might do when she saw Jerym again.

  From the hall outside her door, she heard trooper voices filling the main-floor corridor, spilling out into the night, as if the party was over. She went to the stairway and most of the way down, watching them leave. The girl Lotta flowed with them, Lotta who was part of the mysterious Ostrak Project.

  Lotta moved out of the current, stepping onto the first step up, out of the troopers' way, as if waiting for them to pass. Tain went down and stood beside her.

  "Waiting to take a walk?" Tain asked.

  Lotta looked at her and smiled. "Yes, as a matter of fact. Want to come along?"

  The place emptied quickly, and they left together. Seeren bulged lopsidedly white, and the breeze and chill of two nights earlier had been replaced by mellow stillness. The two young women strolled down the main road, its grass newly mown and blown from the right of way, its fragrance sweet around them.

  "I'm afraid I'm not a party creature," Tain said.

  Lotta nodded. "Me either. I enjoy them, but they're nothing I feel much attracted to. I generally prefer the company of a friend or two—or maybe half a dozen."

  Dak-So had announced to the troopers that tomorrow they'd begin parachute training, Lotta said, and that was all it had taken to wind down the party. The troopers had been looking forward to parachute training. On less Standard worlds than Iryala, parachuting had long held a certain minor interest as a sport, but as a military technique, it was unique to the T'swa, who used it for covert infiltration, jumping from high elevations and at some distance from the drop zone, then body-planing in.

  Tain decided it was time to turn the conversation to the psychological drills. "How old are you?" she asked.

  "Sixteen."

  "Sixteen?!" She peered at Lotta, honestly surprised. "I thought— You look about sixteen, but somehow you seem older."

  "I suppose I do."

  The road forked. They kept to the wider one, where more moonlight got through to light their way.

  "What is it you do here?" Tain asked. "At age sixteen."

  "I interview the trainees, the troopers that is, and take them through psychological drills. To improve their emotional stability."

  Tain glanced sideways at her. "To give them the emotional stability of the T'swa. That's what Colonel Voker said. Tell me about the drills."

  Lotta was tempted to show her. Find a good initial button, jump her into whatever opened up, and take her through it. That would really give her reality on it. But the journalist was not to know what the Ostrak Procedures really did. That was the word from Wellem—from Emry, actually. Besides, there were journalists, prominent ones, who'd grown up in The Movement and knew the T'sel. The Crown had brought in Tain Faronya instead, because they wanted an outsider who'd write from a viewpoint closer to the public's. To open her up, even just once, would alter that.

  "There's really not much to tell," Lotta said shrugging. "We lead the trainee around"—mentally that is, she added to herself—"get him to look at things." Just don't expect me to tell you what kind of things. "I'm afraid it's not very interesting. It's a lot of repetition; quite time consuming."

  Tain frowned. It didn't sound like much. It didn't sound like something that would do any good. "And these are drills the T'swa do?" she asked.

  "No no. The T'swa are the way they are because of how they grow up. The philosophy they grow up with. Have you read Varlik Lormagen's book on Tyss?"

  "I'm afraid not. But I've read his With the T'swa on Kettle. How do the drills make the troopers like the T'swa? Frankly, they don't seem much like T'swa to me, except as soldiers."

  "They aren't. The T'swa are from another culture, a very different culture. They're even a different species. Their life experience has been a lot different, and these T'swa are twice as old as the troopers."

  Tain nodded. Three or four wars older! she thought grimacing. "I spent the first day of maneuvers in the forest with 3rd Platoon of F Company," she said. "And heard some weird things there. Like, death is only incidental, and dead isn't really dead. Does that attitude grow out of the drills?"

  Lotta laughed aloud, not only to mislead Tain but to reduce her seriousness. "It does sound weird, doesn't it? But you need to expect a different viewpoint from them. There's one way they're very much like the T'swa: They're inherently warriors. Their psych profiles show it—profiles of their innate personality. That's why they were recruited."

  She changed the subject then. "We'd better go back now. I have to work in the morning. Want to run?"

  They ran. When they reached the Compound, Lotta was much the more winded. At Main Building reception they said goodbye, each going to her own room.

  As Lotta showered, she told herself that this had been her last conversation with Tain Faronya. The woman was too persistently inquisitive.

  Interesting though that Tain had read With the T'swa on Kettle, and still had the questions she had about dy
ing and death. Apparently what the T'swa had said to Varlik had seemed so unreal to Tain, when she'd read it, that it simply hadn't registered.

  * * *

  Tain lay down and turned off the light. As she composed herself for sleep, it occurred to her that she'd never really gotten an answer, a real answer to her question about the drills. Or had she? Perhaps they were nothing more than Lotta had said. Perhaps she was making too much of it. Apparently the psychs had identified these kids as warriors—or inherent warriors, whatever that really meant—and that could account for their peculiar views.

  Interesting that the psych courses she'd taken at the university had never mentioned innate personality.

  And if her talk with Lotta hadn't been very enlightening, at least she hadn't run into Jerym again, perhaps truly to make a fool of herself.

  50

  It had taken twenty-eight days for the first report to reach Iryala about the arrival of the Klestroni at Terfreya. Twenty-eight days by mail pod from Tyss. After that they got a new report almost daily.

  Master Tso-Ban didn't learn everything that went on with the Klestroni there, although he was spending as much as fourteen hours a day monitoring. For instance, he'd been out of touch when Tarimenloku destroyed the Confederation ship, and subsequently the encounter hadn't entered the commodore's conscious mind while Tso-Ban was melded with him. So the monk didn't know about it. But Tso-Ban sent word of the Klestroni landing, and later the capture and questioning of prisoners, the executions, and the attack by the cadets.

  Nor had it occurred to Kristal that the supply ship might have been destroyed. Tso-Ban had said nothing about it, and the elapsed time made it easy to assume uncritically that the supply ship had already left Terfreya, continuing on toward Tyss, before the Klestroni arrived. A simple check of its scheduled arrival time would have corrected the assumption, but nothing happened that caused Kristal to look.

  Originally it had been planned that the regiment would travel by ship to Terfreya, after the equinox, for a year of training there. Now the training plan and the transportation plan both were obsolete. For one thing, travel by ship was slow. And it seemed quite possible that the Klestronu flagship by itself was too strong for anything the Confederation could send to protect the regiment's troopship. Earlier, in the Garthid Sector, Tso-Ban had said something about the Klestronu ship having a force shield; the Confederation had nothing like that.

  So clearly, the most promising way to get the regiment to Terfreya was to teleport it, with its equipment, as soon as the large teleport was ready. Assuming Kusu had developed adequate targeting procedures by then.

  Meanwhile the assumption was that they'd soon have a teleport, with its technicians, on Tyss. The ship would leave a shuttle there as a suitable power source. And when the targeting procedures were adequate, a Crown representative would be ported there to expedite the hiring of a T'swa regiment.

  Of course, if the war lodges had contracts for their graduating regiments in advance, as they usually did, they might very well refuse to bump one of the contract holders and give the Confederation priority. On the other hand, they might do it without being asked. Or they might put together a regiment or battalion of demobilized veterans.

  We'll just have to wait and see, Kristal thought, and reached for his comm set to make his daily check on Kusu's progress.

  51

  "Lotta Alsnor to see you, Colonel," said the voice from the commset.

  Voker's eyebrows arched. "Send her in," he answered, then sat back in his chair. A moment later Lotta stepped into his office, and without asking, sat down facing him.

  "We're done with the floater crews," she said, "but I hope you're not done with me."

  "Wellem told me last night that you'd finished. What do you have in mind?"

  "I want to go to Terfreya with the regiment."

  "Oh?"

  "As part of Headquarters Company. Intelligence Section. I have no doubt at all that I can meld with the Klestronu commander on the ground. And probably their commodore."

  Voker was instantly interested. "Wellem told me what you were working on. I didn't know you'd made such progress." He looked her over. Five feet two, he thought, and ninety-five pounds. But then, she wasn't asking to be a lobber man. "What makes you so sure you can meld with him?"

  "I've gotten so I can find people I've never met, if I know of them and have some idea where they are. And if I can find them, I can meld with them. I've done it, to make sure."

  "Can you reach him from here?"

  "Not yet. I should be able to—theoretically the distance shouldn't make any difference. But for some reason I haven't succeeded with anyone outsystem, except for a couple of people I know personally."

  "What about language?"

  "That shouldn't be any problem. One of the things I learned as a little kid, melding with animals, is that their minds deal with a surprising lot of images and even concepts. They don't verbalize them, but you can read them quite completely. Even people only verbalize some of their mental activity."

  She laughed then. "I've been practicing on your cadre. They know it, of course; you can't slip into a T'swi's mind in secret. So I touch one of them psychically, and if it's all right with him, I meld. He can be reading or talking or meditating. And even when he's talking Tyspi, which I don't understand at all, the verbalization's no problem. I ignore it."

  "Hmh! Headquarters Company may move around a lot on Backbreak. The way it did on maneuvers. Possibly on foot for security. Do you know the gravitational constant on Backbreak?"

  "One point one-nine gee."

  "And how much do you weigh? Here."

  "A hundred and two."

  "That much! Is that with boots on?"

  She grinned. "That's wearing a smile and nothing more. I'm heavier than I look; my body's hard. I've done gymnastics and ballet most of my life, and I've made time to run and work out lately."

  "That's a lot short of what these troopers have been doing for next to a year now," Voker replied. "As you well know. And on Backbreak, a hundred and two pounds of mass will weigh a hundred and twenty-one."

  "Right. And Artus's 210 will be 250."

  Voker laughed, shaking his head in appreciation. "Since the beginning of warfare, military commanders have been wanting intelligence officers that can do what you can. So I'll accept your offer on one condition: that Artus agrees."

  "Thanks," she said, and got up.

  "Does Wellem know about this?" Voker asked.

  "He's known for deks that I've had it in mind. And he's got his students working on melding. It's good experience, even if they never go very far with it. Maybe you'll have more intelligence people like me in a while."

  "If Colonel Romlar agrees"—and I have no doubt he will, Voker added mentally—"tell Captain Esenrok I want you running and hiking with A Company as much as you can, until you're ready to leave. With 2nd Platoon; you can buddy up with your brother."

  She nodded, turned and left. Voker sat thoughtfully motionless for a few seconds, contemplating what the girl expected to do, then swiveled his chair to his terminal and began scanning reports again.

  52

  In the twilight, the big teleport gate seemed to loom above the instrument van, and Carlis Voker, standing by it, grunted softly at the strangeness he felt. Kusu Lormagen unlocked the van's rear door and opened it, a light coming on automatically inside. He motioned the other two men in—Voker and a middle-aged civilian—then followed them, leaving the door open.

  The portly civilian, a one-time Iryalan trade official on Terfreya, exuded tension. Though he hadn't received the true Sacrament, to be in the presence of anything as utterly non-Standard as this, anything so conspicuously, technologically new made him distinctly uneasy.

  While Voker watched, Kusu keyed the power on, then called up and briefly checked several subsystem status reports. Satisfied, he called up a holomap, a globe, showing Terfreya's inhabited hemisphere, rotated it thirty degrees, moved the cursor to a point in
the equatorial region, and called up a map of the district it covered.

  It looked like a high altitude aerial holo. A black thread of river crossed it, and locating the cursor on it, Kusu called for another enlargement. Now, near the top, Voker could distinguish an irregular, light-colored strip—open ground—with the river a slender ribbon curving through it. Kusu moved the cursor, the map recentering as he did. "This one looked good to me," he said, and called up another enlargement.

  The open ground showed now as a valley bottom more than half a mile wide; a white line in the upper left corner provided scale. The bordering ridges were jungle clad and fairly steep. Voker guessed them at perhaps three hundred feet high; Kusu didn't call for contour lines.

  Again Kusu recentered the cursor and called for maximum enlargement. Now they were looking "down" at tall grass—a variable stand ranging, he guessed, from waist high to taller than a man, and mostly sparse, with scattered denser clumps and patches.

  Kusu looked at the third man, whose face was the color of bread dough in the artificial light. "What can you tell us about that?" Kusu asked. "As a site to put a regiment down on."

  "That's tiger grass," the man answered. "It means the valley floods briefly now and then, during heavy winter rains and maybe after exceptional summer storms."

  "Winter?" Voker said. "That's near the equator there."

  "They call it winter. Things cool down planetwide in the long arm of her orbit. The solar constant gets down to point-seven-eight about midway between the winter solstice and spring equinox. It gets chilly, even at Lonyer City."

  Of course. I should have realized, Voker thought. "What makes the tiger grass so sparse?" he asked. "Is the ground mucky?"

  The ex-trade official shook his head with tight little movements, over-controlled. "No. It's probably covered with a layer of stones. Flat rounded stones about an inch or two across. That's what you find when the grass is thin like that. And tiger grass never grows on mucky ground. Or so I've heard."