The Regiment-A Trilogy

by John Dalmas

  Some of the guests from offworld were T'swa—the basic training cadre from Blue Forest, on Iryala. They'd ported in, more than four hundred of them, absent from their posts for a day. Their current cycle of trainees was almost at the end of their basic year and would get along very well under their student officers.

  All through the ceremony, Romlar watched them from across the Great Hall, among them Bahn, his old squad sergeant; Dao, his old platoon sergeant; Lieutenant Dzo-Tar; Captain Gotasu; and his old regimental C.O., Colonel Dak-So. And Lord Kristal, representing the king; Colonel Voker, who administered the basic training program; and Varlik Lormagen, the first man to be called "the White T'swa," forty years ago on Kettle.

  And Lotta Alsnor, who so far as he knew had been on Tyss all along. In his three years there, he'd seen her just once and been alone with her not at all. She was shorter than average, and considerably less than half Romlar's mass, with a wiriness apparently more the result of genetics than of her early interest in gymnastics and dance. On Tyss she looked even slighter than before, as if the heat had dried her out, which didn't bother Romlar in the least.

  Perhaps he'd have a chance to talk with her alone before she went back to Dys-Hualuun. It troubled him that he might not, and the feeling surprised him. To someone grounded in the T'sel, it was illogical. Their purposes in life, his and hers, were different, at least those purposes he knew of. This evening he would rebalance himself—enter a trance and regain neutrality on the subject. On Terfreya they'd had what they'd had together. If nothing more came of it, that would be fine.

  On the other hand, perhaps something more would. Perhaps when the time came—when casualties had reduced the regiment below any effective level—perhaps then they would be together. Assuming he survived himself, which in a mercenary regiment in the T'swa tradition was unlikely, even for the commanding officer.

  Mentally he shook his thoughts away and focused on Kliss-Bahn. The ancient veteran, owning humankind's most admired military mind, was worth his full attention, even making a graduation address.

  * * *

  Because of the offworld visitors, there was a reception after the ceremony, an opportunity to mix. Lieutenant Jerym Alsnor went straight to Lotta, his sister. "Hi, sib," he said. "I was hoping we'd have a chance to talk."

  "Bet on it," she answered. "I don't have to leave when the others do."

  "Good. What've you been doing lately?"

  She grinned. "You mean have I been monitoring Tain."

  He laughed. "You read my mind!"

  "Not really. And, yes, I have been monitoring Tain."

  Their eyes met and held. "How is she?"

  "Happy."

  "Really?" The last Lotta had told him, five years earlier on Terfreya, Tain had been a prisoner on a warship from the empire. And amnesic.

  "Really. She's married and has a child."

  Jerym didn't answer for several seconds. "Does she—remember yet?"

  "No. Not you, not me. Nothing."

  Jerym thought of the out-sector marines he'd fought on Terfreya. Mostly they'd been small men, and hairier than anyone he'd ever seen before. They hadn't seemed entirely human to him. "What's her husband like?"

  "He's a good person, Jerym. He's strong and considerate and loving."

  "Remarkable." He wasn't referring to Tain's marriage, but to the welling in his eyes. He didn't feel sad at all, but there it was. "Anything more?"

  "Yes. He's an ex-marine officer—and the emperor of eleven worlds. And he has a rare innate sense of how to treat the woman he loves." She didn't tell him the rest of it, and he didn't pick up on the omission.

  His earlier reaction had receded. "Well. I'm glad, sib, I'm really really glad she's happy." A slow grin built. "I'll ask about her again in another five years. With an emperor for a husband, she shouldn't have any trouble getting authorization for all the kids she wants.

  "Now. What have you heard from the folks?"

  * * *

  Jerym was already talking with Lotta, so Romlar sheered off. Dak-So, his old T'swa colonel, came over to him and asked questions about the fighting on Terfreya. Colonel Voker came over and stood listening. Dak-So's eyes seemed to gleam with a light of their own, and his white teeth were vivid in his black T'swa face. "You are changed, Artus," he said when Romlar had finished. "Beyond the changes generated by combat."

  "As you expected. They've trained us well here, not only Kliss-Bahn's cadre, but the Ka-Shok adepts under Master Rinn. We're ready."

  Dak-So laughed, a deep rich rumbling. "I believe you," he said. "Your higher center had already displayed itself during your basic training. Brigadier Shiller was sufficiently disheartened that he retired, beaten and embarrassed by a nineteen-year-old commander-in-training with less than a year's service."

  Voker spoke then. "Speaking of ready, Lord Kristal wants to talk to you before he goes."

  Romlar's pulse quickened. A contract, he thought, and wondered where for. Kristal wasn't letting grass grow under his feet or theirs. He looked around, but didn't spot him in the large crowded room. Who he did see was Lotta Alsnor coming toward him. His lordship can talk to me later, he told himself. "Excuse me," he said, and started toward her.

  She grinned at him as they met, and her touch on his arm had an electric intimacy. Her gaze was direct but her words playful. "I had to tell Jerym it was nice talking to him, but that lovers outrank brothers."

  Lovers. They'd never used the word before. It gave their feelings a certain standing. Lotta read his reaction and laughed. He gestured with his head in the direction of Voker and Dak-So. "Lovers outrank colonels, too. Shall we go outside and talk? There'll be some privacy there."

  They wove their way toward the entry, among clusters of cadre and troopers renewing old bonds. Outside, there was enough dawnlight to extend visibility, and no one was in sight. Romlar felt an urgency now that took him by surprise.

  "Colonels have private quarters," he murmured. "Would you like to see? It's been more than five years."

  She purred. "A long five years. Let's go, before someone else comes out."

  He took her hand then and they ran, his gait an easy lope. Her slender legs scissored quickly, feet scarcely seeming to touch the ground. The regimental officers' barracks were dark and silent. In his room, enough light came through the windows that they could see each other's eyes, if not their color. Their first kiss was cool, lingering, then they sat down on his narrow bed and kissed urgently, hotly, their hands busy. Within a couple of minutes they were naked.

  When they were spent, they lay side by side holding hands. "I'm lucky," he said. "Lucky we found each other."

  "It was an agreement we made, before this life."

  "I've always thought so. That winter at Blue Forest, it seemed more like a renewal than a new friendship."

  "It goes beyond this," she said, "beyond being together and making love."

  "True." He lay thoughtful for a few seconds, then asked: "An agreement to do what?"

  "I think we won't know until the time comes. Or it might simply be an agreement to love each other. I've developed a lot, training under Grand Master Ku; I can see more deeply than ever into other people. But not into myself, and when it comes to seeing my own script . . ." She shook her head and chuckled. "Ku says that's typical, almost invariable, even among masters. Otherwise it would remove much of the challenge and interest from life, and the lessons of experience." She turned her head to look at Romlar. "I'm done on Tyss, at least for the present. I'm a master now. Officially. I'm going back to Iryala at the end of the week."

  He grinned. "You're my master, I know that."

  She jabbed him with an elbow then, and they began to wrestle. He discovered he wasn't as spent as he'd thought.

  5

  On Maragor the solstice was approaching, and the back-country village of Burnt Woods was in deep spring. The air smelled of forest in the flush of new growth. Birds sang, and—the flaw in the beauty—insects bit, Maragor's version of mosquitoes.


  Burnt Woods was now the administrative capital of what was left of the republic of Smolen. The southern one-fourth—with ninety percent of the population and arable land—had been occupied by the Army of Komars. Except that it didn't have ninety percent of the population anymore. More like seventy-five percent. And in the north, throngs of refugees lived in scattered tent camps, while making communal shelters of logs against inevitable winter.

  Burnt Woods' largest house had been turned over to the president for his quarters and offices. Not commandeered. Offered freely by the owner, the local fur broker, who lived now with his son's family in their home. The hotel had been commandeered—all twelve rooms of it—rented by the government for deferred rents that might never be collected. Would surely not be collected, unless some hard-to-envision military turnaround occurred. It held what was left of the president's staff. Officed them, that is, for they dwelt in tents like the refugees. And like the regiments stationed southward, prepared to meet as best they could any Komarsi strike.

  A strike that might be made but seemed unneeded. There were nearly one hundred thousand people in the northland now, including troops. By next spring they'd be very hungry. There was neither arable land nor implements to grow anything like adequate crops.

  The Smoleni had had a long history of oppressions, though none for more than four hundred years. And traditions had grown from those oppressions: notably doggedness, a refusal to give in. And a dedication to as little government as practical.

  Most mornings, in the weeks they'd been in Burnt Woods, the president's War Council had met in his office, which for years had served as a family's dining room. His conference table had been their dinner table. President Heber Lanks was a very tall, rawboned man who'd gained weight in middle age and now was losing it. His arms were long, even for his height, their length accentuated by long, large hands. All in all, he was physically imposing, but his manner was mild.

  He stood up to call the meeting to order, and on his feet studied briefly, soberly, the men he'd surrounded himself with. The night before, a floater had landed. A message had been delivered to his hand, and the floater had lifted again.

  "Gentlemen," he said, "I have news from a source which I shall not identify. A couriered message. It seems we shall have some help." He paused, looking thoughtful, unexcited. "This is strictly confidential. I repeat that: this is strictly confidential. A regiment of mercenaries will be delivered to us. They . . ."

  "Mercenaries? Mercenaries?" General Eskoth Belser had half gotten to his feet, his voice rising in anger. Vestur Marlim jerked on the general's sleeve and almost hissed the words: "Eskoth! For Tunis's sake shut your mouth! This is confidential! Have you no self-control?"

  Belser's heavy features reddened and seemed to swell, but he settled slowly to his seat, jerking his arm free of Marlim's grasp. The general was a thick slab of a man, while the War Minister was small and fine-boned.

  President Lanks had looked briefly pained. "Not mercenaries from here on Maragor," he said. "These are civilized and highly trained professionals from offworld. T'swa trained."

  Belser's clamped jaw relaxed slightly. "T'swa trained?"

  Lanks told them what he knew.

  "But only one regiment! We have twenty-six regiments of our own!"

  "Not as many as we need."

  "Of course not! Not by a long shot! But what good will a single additional regiment do us?"

  "That remains to be seen. We know the impact the T'swa had in the Elstra-Tromfel War, and at Stemperos."

  "But these mercenaries aren't T'swa. Correct? They're 'T'swa-trained,' you said."

  "That's right. They're Iryalans."

  Belser subsided into grumblings. "I've never even heard of Iryalan mercenaries."

  Colonel Elyas Fossur looked across at him. Fossur was the president's intelligence chief and military mentor. "Actually, Eskoth, I think you have, but they weren't identified as mercenaries at the time." He turned to the president then. "I presume this is the regiment that drove the out-sector invaders off Terfreya, several years ago."

  "That's the information I have."

  "Then they may not be T'swa, but they seem to be something quite like them. T'swa-trained indeed! The T'swa dubbed them the White T'swa."

  The council sat digesting this, all but Lanks, who still stood. He'd digested it earlier, lying awake in his bed till the birds called the sun to the sky. Historically, the Smoleni experience with mercenaries had been as victims, not beneficiaries. He would make a point of welcoming this regiment as valuable friends, and hope its men behaved decently.

  Belser was still disgruntled. "What we really need is for someone else to declare war on Komars," he said. "The Komarsi'd at least have to pull their troops south of the Eel then."

  "There are various reasons that won't happen," Lanks said drily. "And these Iryalan mercenaries may make a difference. Meanwhile they won't arrive for at least a week, and we'll need that much time to prepare a camp for them."

  He handed a thin sheaf of papers to Belser. "This is not the contract," he said. "The party who hired them for us has that. But it does include all the operational clauses, and assigns responsibility to me. I'm turning that responsibility over to the army, specifically to you. It's important that we meet the clauses to the best of our ability; that was stressed to me."

  Belser took the papers with his jaw clamped. It seemed to him that this would be more trouble than it was worth.

  6

  At the Movrik family's large wildlife estate on Splenn, the weather was considerably different than at Burnt Woods. It was early winter there, and a cold rain fell steadily and thickly, drumming on the roof. The gray lake surface seemed to seethe with it.

  Pitter Movrik loved that kind of weather; during the long rainy season he often visited the lodge just to experience it. But the decisive reason for being there this day was isolation. A teleport large enough to accommodate AG trucks, say, or floaters, was hard to camouflage in a populated area. Certainly it could be difficult to conceal the occasional traffic it received.

  For example, 1,170 troopers plus their gear. They'd be impossible to hide or explain, even at the family's rural estate, where the sizeable domestic staff and farm crew would see them. Here, on the other hand, there were no neighbors at all, except wild animals. And the lodge staff of four, ported there as needed, were at least second generation employees of the family. They'd been educated in the family school with the family offspring, and received the Ostrak Procedures as children. As their parents had before them. And finally, as adults, they'd chosen to stay.

  The regiment had already arrived, and transferred to the HS Maryam Burkitt, which sat parked on a gravitic vector well above the weather. Just now, though, twenty-one regimental officers, including the company commanders and their execs, sat in the lodge's dining room, with old Pitter an interested observer. They were waiting for a situation briefing by Movrik's senior agent on Maragor, Klute Helmiss. The dining room opened onto a roofed deck which overlooked the lake, a view framed by rain forest. Water poured off the eaves onto rockwork below, except where a gable provided a gap in the cataract, a sort of window through which Movrik could see a shuttle parked close above the shore, waiting to take the officers up.

  Helmiss finished writing instructions into the player, then turned to face his audience. He pressed a key, and the wallscreen lit up with a globe of Maragor. Slightly to the left of center, they saw a block of yellow and one of pink, together extending from about 45 degrees to nearly 53 degrees north latitude.

  "All right, gentlemen," he said, "let's start." He spoke a bit loudly, to be heard above the rain and the splashing of the roof cataract. "We're looking at what by definition is the eastern hemisphere of Maragor. The country shown in yellow is Komars, and the one in pink is Smolen. And here . . ." The two countries filled the screen now, and briefly he described their demographics, Komars with its nine million people, Smolen to the north with three hundred and twenty thousand.


  Graphs showed in windows on the map, replacing each other as he talked. In terms of area, the two countries weren't too different, but they differed greatly in the kinds of land they had. Komars was mostly a fertile plain, flat to rolling. The southernmost part of Smolen, "the Leas," was similar, if generally more hilly. The Leas, along with two northward extensions and a short strip of coastland in the southeast, made up twenty-five percent of Smolen, but contained almost all its farmland and manufacturing. The rest of the country was forest, lakes, and peat bogs, broken here and there by small farm settlements which became fewer as one went farther north. It was called "the Free Lands," because centuries earlier, the Smoleni peasants, suffering home-grown oppressors, would flee to its forests from time to time. There to starve and raid until coaxed back out by promises of justice.

  "Normally," Helmiss said, "the Leas raise enough food to feed the nation, but without enough left for significant export. Smolen's on-planet exports are primarily lumber, paper, and furs. Its offworld exports are entirely furs, some ranch-grown but mostly trapped."

  He went on to describe the events leading up to a Komarsi attack that had quickly occupied first the Leas, then the coast, and two valleys that extended northward. "Initially," he said, "the Smoleni policy seems to have been to cost the Komarsi enough in blood and material that they'd settle for limited objectives. It wasn't a promising policy, but it may well have been the best available to them. Obviously it didn't work. Now—" He shrugged. "Now I don't think they have a policy, unless hanging on and hoping qualifies. In fact, the Smoleni prospect seems nearly beyond hope. It appears that you'll find yourself in a no-win situation there. But you'll have marvelous opportunities to fight, and landscapes well suited to the operations of small, elite units.

  "I've always found war intriguing, and I've read a great deal about it. Including Lormagen's video-studies of the T'swa, prepared before he got the Ostrak Procedures. I've also read about and watched the cubes on your training at Blue Forest, and your campaign in the Terfreyan jungles, and it seems to me you can find marvelous opportunities in this war. As the T'swa would."