The Regiment-A Trilogy

by John Dalmas

  "Are you prepared, Admiral?"

  It seemed to Romlar he couldn't breathe, yet from somewhere he found the breath to speak. "I am ready, Your Imperial Majesty." He could see the eyes now, kind, loving. Implacable. Mad.

  "Excellent. Give the command."

  The dream slowed again. Dream-Romlar felt his lips part, his tongue poise. His vocal cords vibrated with the beginning of a word—

  Romlar jerked bolt upright on his cot, sweat cold on his face, staring into the semidarkness of a moonlit night. There was no ship's bridge, no bridge watch intent on their monitors. Only a squad tent, shared with his aide and his executive officer. For a moment he sat breathing heavily, feeling enormous relief. The dream was fading, mere impressions, then they too were gone. But the feeling remained that it had been terrible, the sort of dream no one should have after the Ostrak Procedures, and certainly not after the spiritual training of the Masters of Ka-Shok.

  He untucked the mosquito bar from beneath the edge of his narrow mattress, swung his feet out, got up and dressed. He needed activity, to walk, perhaps to think.

  For awakening, he felt a concern that hadn't been there when he'd laid down. A concern that this war would waste his regiment, eat it up, that he would need it somewhere else but only a remnant would remain, too few to do what was necessary. True they were occupied largely with training Smoleni rangers just now, but that was temporary. It was also true that the Komarsi units they'd fought so far were neither well trained nor well led; casualties had been light.

  But bold new actions were necessary. The status quo—even the new, adjusted status quo—seemed to lead ultimately to defeat for Smolen. And if the Komarsi brought in T'swa . . . The thought took Romlar by surprise, but once looked at, it seemed to him very possible.

  * * *

  Lotta had monitored the entire dream without impinging. Three hyperdrive years away, the kalif's invasion fleet had left Varatos, and at a very deep level, Romlar had become aware of it. It had touched, had stirred, a very powerful sequence of incidents in his remote past—many, many lifetimes past. In a vague and general way, Lotta had known it existed—Wellem Bosler did too—and what it was about. Both of them, in processing Romlar, had glimpsed it. Now she knew more, knew certain specifics.

  She thought of communicating to him, then didn't. Troubled as he was just now, and introverted, he might not receive her anyway—not consciously. And at Artus's Ostrak level, to dream script for him might do more harm than good.

  Besides, it would settle out by itself, for the most part, unless it was further restimulated.

  She decided to look in on him from time to time though.

  32

  Kro preferred water from a wild creek to that in his canteen, even when the creek was amber brown tea, flavored with tannic acid, steeped with dead bog moss, fallen needles, and last year's leaves. His knees were wet from kneeling beside it, and a pair of bull flies bit his neck, but he swigged deep, his face to the water, drinking noisily uphill like a horse.

  While he drank, a sound reached him, a yapping of jackwolves. When he'd finished, he listened, and though his knowledge of them was limited, it seemed to him they must have something treed or at bay.

  He'd started this mission feeling a certain urgency, but four days in the forest had eased it. And he was curious. So instead of continuing due north, he angled off easterly toward the yapping. He found them less than a quarter mile off; they had something backed into the hollow base of a large old, fire-scarred roivan. They were so intent, they didn't notice him, and he edged around for a look at their victim.

  It was a man!

  Kro stepped forward then with a sharp shout, and the small wolves parted, startled, saw him coming toward them, and after a moment's hesitation fled silently.

  The man stayed in the hollow base. He had a knife in his hand, its blade bloody, otherwise they'd have had him: dragged him out and torn him up. Kro was sure all the blood on the man's clothes wasn't wolf blood. And the man, he saw now, was elderly, his face blood-smeared.

  "You gonna be all right?" Kro asked.

  The old man laughed with irony. "I can't walk and they cut my nuts out," he said. "They cut my heel tendons and busted some ribs, too. Other'n that, I'm fine." He crawled from the hollow, gasping and sweating at the pain of it, then collapsed on the side where no ribs were cracked. After a long moment, he opened his eyes again and looked up at the newcomer. Realizing he'd confused the man, he explained. "My problem weren't jackwolves; it's human wolves done this to me." He eyed Kro critically. "Dressed like soldiers, same as you, but they talked like Komarsi."

  Kro realized then that he'd spoken with the Smoleni accent he'd cultivated as a logger and trapper. He'd intended to, of course, when he got to Burnt Woods, but hadn't consciously thought to just now. His dialect wasn't perfect, but good enough to pass for someone from another district.

  He knew damned well who'd done this—not specific individuals, but they'd been his men, no doubt of it. He knew them, to a large degree understood them, and had tolerated their aberrations, not happily but of necessity. He exhaled gustily. "Well shit! How far to the nearest folks?"

  "'Bout six mile." The old man gestured eastward with his head. "There's a hand-plus of farms over there. I got a shack at my daughter's. Her man got called up with the reserves, and killed in the fight at Island Cove. I help her farm." As quickly as he'd said that, his voice changed, as if he'd just seen for the first time the long-term consequences of his mutilation. "Leastwise I used to help her."

  Kro made a decision then, and took off his rucksack. "This is gonna hurt like fire," he said, holding the pack up. "But I want you to wear this. Then I'm gonna hoist you on my back and carry you. You'll have to tell me the way."

  Oska Niemar eyed him, then nodded stoically. He'd had the notion that this man might be of a piece with the others, in spite of his speech. A submachine gun out in the bush like this, and a big, scar-faced man . . . But he weren't the same. "Put it on me," he said.

  Just stretching his arms back while the stranger put the pack on him hurt badly, and when the man rose with him on his back, Oska nearly passed out. Then the stranger started walking. Every step sent pain stabbing through the old man's chest.

  * * *

  It was when he came to a pond surrounded by floating bog, that Kro realized the old man had passed out. He'd asked which way was best to go around, and got no answer. So he chose a way and slogged on, guided by intuition. Things got worse when he came to an old burn, littered with the crisscrossed bones of fire-killed trees, and choked with brush and saplings. He chose a direction and skirted around it. The sun was down when finally he stumbled into a hay field, grown knee-deep again since the first cutting. At the far end of the clearing was a log house and log outbuildings. Kro strode more strongly, now that an end was in sight.

  The farmer and his family were eating, but forgot their food when Kro put down his burden at their door. Kro had begun to wonder if he was carrying a corpse, but there still was breath in the unconscious man, and a discernible pulse. The farmer made a stretcher out of two pitchforks and a blanket, and they carried Oska Niemar to his daughter's, a quarter mile away, while the farm wife followed.

  The two women stripped and washed the old man. There wasn't much more they could do for him. Then, while the daughter put her two round-eyed children to bed, the farmer took a bottle of turpentine and splashed some on Niemar's wounded crotch as an antiseptic. When they'd put the old man to bed, the farmer and his wife went home again.

  Niemar's daughter wiped her hands on her apron. "My name's Seidra. I guess you heard them call me that."

  "Mine's Gull. Gull Kro." He looked at her straight. She was a handsome woman, strong, with strong hands and forearms.

  "You must be hungry," she said.

  Kro chuckled. "More like starved. I've been totin' your dad since midday. I was lost—don't know my way around here—and when he passed out, I got all tangled up with burns and blowdowns. Seemed I be
st not put him down, otherwise I'd a had to carry him over my shoulder like a sack of grain. And if his ribs are busted, like he thought, that mighta killed him."

  She'd already eaten, she and her two children, but she fried up salt pork and boiled two potatoes, sliced some bread, and got butter and buttermilk from the well-house. For gravy, she heated some cold stew. He ate ravenously, and she kept him company with a slice of bread.

  "Your dad said your man got killed."

  Seidra nodded.

  "How you gonna manage?"

  "I got cousins here at Wolf Creek, and a nephew that's thirteen. And my husband's uncle will help when he can. And Tissy is nine now, old enough to take on more of the housework."

  The talk dwindled then, as if she was sorting out the situation. When Kro had finished eating, she got up. "I'll show you Dad's cabin; you can sleep there. You'll prob'ly want to start for Burnt Woods tomorrow."

  Kro nodded. They walked through the twilight, she with an unlit candle. At the door, she lit the candle with a waxed match. The cabin was a single room, with a small, sheet-iron stove. It was orderly, the old man's clothes hanging from wooden pegs. He told himself that if he learned who cut the old man, he'd show him what suffering was all about.

  "This is it," she said. "There's roivan bark for kindling, if you want a fire. You got matches?"

  "A fire starter," he said.

  She nodded, still standing in the middle of the floor. "You been long from home?"

  He nodded. She closed the door and began to unbutton her blouse.

  "It's been a long time for me, too."

  33

  "Umm, Kelmer? I think we should go in the house."

  He hated to stop. Weldi Lanks kissed very nicely, her lips full and moist and exciting, and his hand had begun to stroke the back of her thigh. But this was not a good place for further developments.

  "I suppose you're right," he answered, and got reluctantly up from the narrow wooden bench in the rose arbor. It was dark, really dark, with a thick cloud layer cutting off the stars. The house was a vague something to their left, barely discernible. At least, he thought, the darkness had given them privacy, the most they'd had yet. Even the lookouts in the bell-tower of the village hall, assigned to watch the approaches to the president's house, couldn't see them crossing the lawn, he was sure.

  The house was unlit, from this side at least. Maybe they could sit together in the parlor for a while, he thought hopefully; her father was a man who went early to bed and was up with the birds.

  They went to the side porch. No uniformed guard was visible by the door but that didn't register with Kelmer. His mind was on Weldi. She wondered though, and looking around, her foot bumped something lying by the stairs, something heavy but yielding. Kelmer heard her gasp.

  "What's wrong?" he murmured.

  She hissed him silent, then whispered. "I think it's the guard!"

  He knelt and groped. It was a man, and his shirt was sticky with blood! "He's dead!" Kelmer whispered.

  He found the gun still holstered, and removed it. Then he stood, and setting the safety, shoved the pistol in the back of his belt. "Darling," he whispered, "go around to the front and tell the guard there. If he's—like this one, go to the rose arbor. I'm going inside."

  He thought she nodded. At any rate she turned and started round the wraparound porch. He went to the door, then changed his mind. Whoever the intruder was, he was there to kill the president, and he'd have to find his bedroom. Kelmer decided to be there waiting for him. It was a corner room upstairs, with large windows opening onto the roof; Weldi'd given him the tour.

  Getting onto the porch railing, Kelmer climbed a scrolled corner post and pulled himself onto the roof as quietly as possible, then began creeping along it toward the president's room. The roof sloped enough to give him nervous stomach, even without the tension inherent in the situation.

  When he'd rounded the corner, he could see a faint paleness at the president's window; there was a night light on inside. The window was open but screened. He recalled that the screens downstairs were held at the bottom by a hook. Even the villages were primitive here! With the pistol barrel he poked a hole in the screen, large enough for his finger. Then, disengaging the hook, he opened the screen, and looked in.

  There were two windows in the west wall and two in the south. The bed was near the southwest corner, to take advantage of breezes from either direction. The president lay on his side beneath the sheet. Kelmer couldn't hear a thing. Silently he let himself in. His right foot had barely touched the floor when he saw the bedroom door start to open, and froze.

  A man stood in the door with a submachine gun. He seemed not to see Kelmer, as if his eyes had found the bed and stopped there. Kelmer stood paralyzed, his pistol untouched in his belt, as the man raised his weapon. There was a boom from the hallway behind him, and the man spun, firing a burst down the hall. For a long frozen second, Kelmer stared, then another boom shocked him out of his momentary paralysis. The would-be assassin pitched forward on his face, and the president, in a nightshirt, was moving to the door with a large pistol in his hand.

  It was all over.

  Weldi had found the front door unguarded too, but instead of returning to the rose arbor, had slipped inside. She had the advantage of close familiarity with the house, and moved with certainty. In the parlor was a gun cabinet. Groping, she'd found it and taken out the first gun her hands met with, a double-barreled shotgun of about ten gauge. Without even checking to see if it was loaded, she'd crossed the living room to the stairs, and started up. Like Kelmer, she was sure her father was the target of assassins.

  It seemed to her she could sense someone in the hall above. She counted the carpeted steps, skipping the one that always squeaked. When she got to the top, she was unsure what to do. Then, at the far end of the hall, her father's door opened, letting faint light out, and not twenty feet in front of her she saw the back of a man who was not her father. She raised the shotgun and pressed on the trigger. Nothing happened. Then she thought, drew a hammer back with an audible click, and pulled again.

  The weapon boomed. The man in front of her was the second of two, and the hammer she'd cocked was to the full-choke barrel. A concentrated load of number three shot drove into his chest from behind, killing him instantly. At the same moment, the shotgun's powerful recoil, taking her by surprise, knocked her onto her back.

  The man in her father's doorway had turned and fired a burst down the hall, the slugs going above her where she lay. The president had started from his sleep with the sound of the shotgun, and with a single movement snatched up the pistol that lay on his bed table. He'd shot the remaining gunman in the back, through the heart.

  There'd been just the two. Weldi had killed one, her father the other. No one had even noticed Kelmer still seated on the windowsill.

  He followed the president to the door, where Heber Lanks switched on a light. The corpses lay in the hall, and Weldi was just getting to her feet. The shotgun lay on the floor. Kelmer crowded past the president and threw his arms around the girl, who clung to him shaking.

  Downstairs voices were shouting, and lights were turning on. "It's all right," called Heber Lanks. "Everything is all right."

  * * *

  Half an hour later, Kelmer Faronya was trotting down the road toward camp. He had mixed feelings, mostly not good. He'd frozen at the climactic moment. Yet if he hadn't, the gunman would quite possibly have seen him and fired. He'd be dead now. As it was, everything had turned out well.

  On the other hand, it seemed to him, his courage had failed utterly.

  34

  Gulthar Kro hiked the last sixteen miles to Burnt Woods on roads, the last five being on the main road from the south, ditched, graveled, and graded. The farm families in the Halvess settlement had accepted him as Smoleni; he'd continue as one.

  He'd burned the incriminating mapbook; he didn't need it now.

  The road passed through intermittent farmlands the last
few miles, emerging finally from a short stretch of swamp forest to enter continuous fields. Across them he could see Burnt Woods, more than a mile away. A formation of uniformed men came toward him down the road, double-timing, and he stepped aside onto the shoulder to watch them pass. He knew them at once, though he'd never seen any before—mercenaries; a company of them. They wore a uniform like none he'd ever seen; the cut was standard, but the color was mottled green and brown and yellow. The rationale behind it was obvious. And they weren't double-timing after all; their pace was considerably faster, a brisk trot. They wore packs, too; not combat packs or field packs, but pack frames with what appeared to be sandbags.

  What impressed Kro most about them was their sense of presence. He felt it as they passed; these were warriors, all the way. These were the men that had given Undsvin fits. To kill their commander might be even more difficult than he'd thought. As for escaping afterward—that, he judged, would be the real challenge.

  The road he was on ended at a junction, and instead of turning east into the village, he turned west toward the merc camp, to have a look at it. Nearing it, it seemed to him much the same as any regimental camp might be. Near its near side, he saw activity, and went to watch. He'd never seen gymnastics before. The difficulties would not have impressed the judges at a meet, but the exercises they did there were powerful and demanding, and they impressed Gulthar Kro deeply. He'd never seen anyone do giant swings before. And while he'd learned as a boy to stand on his hands, and even walk on them, the mercs kipped up and planched into handstands on horizontal and parallel bars. Beyond that they did tumbling runs, boots flying, shirttails flapping.