But he can't do it. I may be a butcher, but—
—I was one of the best in the Section, and I'd been one of the old woman's favorite utility fixers for the better part of five years and two promotions, one of which even shows in the star I wear on each shoulder.
Still, I am definitely the kind of person who has to carry an exit-pill when he's carrying more knowledge in his head than is safe. I know a few iron men, several who can go through unbelievable agony without it showing on their faces. Dov is like that. The Sergeant, sure. Zev, sometimes. Benyamin was, too. I've seen pictures of Benyamin standing next to Dov, and I know that my brother wasn't as much of a giant, but that's not the way I remember him.
Benyamin was a hero.
I'm not. I threw back my head and screamed, until I thought my lungs were on fire.
The thing about physical therapists is that they just don't care. She pushed down, and I pushed back with my leg, until the chorus of agony reached a crescendo that made me think the whole universe was going to split open.
At that moment, the phone on the wall chimed twice, then three times.
"My signal! My signal!" I shrilled, suddenly a child excused from a spanking.
"Ten seconds." With a skill that came from years of practice in handling barely-compliant flesh, P'nina eased me back to the table with one hand and strapped my knee down tightly, while another snatched up a cotton ball and bottle of alcohol from the porcelain-topped stand at her side. She quickly cleaned and sterilized a spot near my knee, dropped the bottle back on the white table, tossed the cotton ball toward the recycler, brought up, readied, and stuck in a needle.
I know it was a sharp needle, expertly applied. But NoGain turned what should have been a brief pinch into an awful stabbing—
—knife rises and falls of its own volition, drinking blood, stabbing down into what had been a face, again and again, all concentration, all skill gone.
Skills come and go, when it's real. In the final analysis, everything fails us.
The knife falls from my hands; I crouch there in the blood and the mud and the shit, and weep.
Reflexively, I clean my knife on a dead man's shirt, then, using the kinder guardsman's spear as a crutch, I pull myself up. Balancing on my good leg, I hobble off into the night, not stopping for a moment to bid the corpses farewell.
Gestures don't belong in Section. We are what we are.
Sometimes, though, I just don't know what I am. Sometimes, it feels like the part of me that was little Tetsuo Hanavi has vanished—
—which quickly vanished, as a warm glow spread from the spot where the needle had gone in.
There are no nerves for pleasure, but I'll tell you what pleasure is: it's when pain goes away in a spreading cloud of warmth.
I basked in the glow as I snapped my fingers and pointed to the phone.
"You can get it yourself in a moment. Be good for you." She unstrapped me, then folded her ample arms over her ample bosom.
I glared once. It's called command presence, and something even an imitation general is expected to be able to produce upon demand.
Surprising both of us, it worked: she uncrossed her arms and tossed me the phone.
"Tetsuo Hanavi," I said, gesturing at P'nina to leave the room. "I'm not alone; wait a moment." If it was important enough to interrupt me in PT, it was something P'nina didn't have the need to know.
She slid the door shut behind her. In the waiting room outside, there were other patients. A lot of us need putting back together; four of them were waiting for their turn in P'nina's gentle hands.
"We're alone," I said, reaching over to the dressing table for my pants and struggling to get my bad leg in first.
"I need something done," the old woman's voice husked in my ear. "Are you fit to travel?"
Since she could have punched up the latest medical report on me—she'd probably just done so—the question wasn't whether or not I was in peak condition, but whether I thought I could travel on a cane and arrogance, at least for the time being.
"Yes." Although I wouldn't require the cane. You learn to give up crutches as soon as you can.
"How soon can you be here?"
I glanced at my thumbnail and then shrugged before remembering that this was voice-only; when I'm home, I sometimes let myself not pay enough attention to what's going on. It's a luxury. "In case you've forgotten, the Twentieth is only an hour or so out. If it can wait until then, let it. I want to meet the first shuttle."
My brother's, Ari's, regiment is the Twentieth.
I once had four brothers. Ari, Shlomo, Kiyoshi, and Benyamin; Ari the baby, Benyamin the oldest.
The line of dead stretches out past my vision. I can only make out a few of the closer faces, sometimes just my brothers'.
I see traces of Kiyoshi's face when I look in the mirror. It's not just that we were similar-looking; it's that the blond blandness of our faces is always belied by our Nipponese first names. I never liked Shlomo. I will always remember Benyamin.
Family Hanavi and clan Bar-El memorialize Shlomo, Kiyoshi, and Benyamin yearly, at the Yarzheit ceremony, along with all the others of the legions of the dead.
I remember them every day.
My brother, Ari. . . .
Fingers clacked on keys in the background. "I'd rather see you now," she decided. "If I send you on this one, your team is leaving in a week, at the outside. You'd be going with Alon to Thellonee. Which doesn't give you long to put a team together."
If! I thought.
"If," she answered. She can't read minds—it just seems that way at times. "Pinhas's trust in you to the contrary, I'm not sure it's right for you. It involves your uncle."
"Your uncle." I had two living uncles. She wasn't talking about the Sergeant.
"We've gotten a note from him," she went on. "Quote: 'Freiheimers are rivetting their tanks. I know something else of use to you. But I am valuable where I am.' End of quote; and end of message. It was smuggled in via an Orogan trader. I'm having the first part researched, but I can already interpret the second part to mean either that he puts a high price on what he knows, or that he wants you to get him out of whatever mess he's into. Or, more likely, both."
Probably both. Since he was exiled, Shimon had found that other armies besides ours could make use of his mind, although he had worked only on a consulting basis, and only in wars where Metzada was not involved.
A very clever man. He knew full well that neither the government, clan, nor the family would tolerate him bucking Metzada.
Still, the old woman is the second most devious person I know, but maybe she was reading a bit too much into twenty words from the most devious person I know.
"It can wait." Putting together a team, even quickly, wouldn't be a problem. I'd have Zev as my second, and grab whoever in Section was around. Not a nice bunch of people, but niceness is not an important quality in headsmen.
"I'll have Levine here in fifteen minutes," she said, as though that ended the matter.
The old lady's background is Foreign Service, not Section. She's never really understood that chain-of-command doesn't really work when you're usually on your own. The kind of independence of action you get used to in the field tends to stick when you're home.
Sometimes it tends to push you too far out on a tangent, makes you act too independently. I once had a partner who did that. Once.
In any case, I wanted to see my brother. It was one thing to read the flash that said he was still alive, that his injuries were minor; it's another to touch, flesh to flesh.
"I'll see you after the shuttle touches down," I said, then set the phone down when she didn't answer.
Better finish getting dressed.
I limped over to the side of the wall for my shoes, and then stooped to pick up the khaki shirt with the star on each epaulet.
There were far too few campaign ribbons above the left pocket for such hardware on the shoulders. One thing about being inspector-general is that you are,
officially, a noncombatant, and noncombatants don't earn campaign ribbons. The four ribbons are reminders of the days when I was a real soldier. The time when I was pretending to be something I wasn't, instead of pretending not to be what I am.
Whatever that is. A shochet, minus the ritual, at best.
I shrugged into the shirt and buttoned it before picking up my cane and heading for the door. I hung the cane on a hook by the door.
Eventually, you have to give up crutches, of all kinds.
Out in the waiting room, at the end of the row of four patients waiting for their turn with P'nina, Zev Aroni sat, waiting patiently, a briefcase on his lap, going through some paperwork. We have to actually do some IG things, to keep up appearances.
"I'm done, Sergeant," I said. "Let's go."
Zev's dark face was expressionless, as usual. Wordless, he accompanied me into the corridor as I limped toward the nearest tube entrance. Sergeant Zev Aroni was officially my aide—but as with most things in Section, appearances are true, but only part of the truth; Zev was my partner. Junior partner, usually. Not always.
I never really liked Zev, which wasn't a problem. You're not supposed to like your partner. I mentioned that once, to a new Section draftee I was training. He asked why. "Because it doesn't hurt so much when you have to shoot him for going lame on you," I said. He thought that was a figure of speech, until the first time he went offplanet on a Section assignment—and one cold, wet night in a forest in Thuringia, broke his leg.
"I heard your signal," Zev finally said, when there was nobody around to overhear us. "Rivka?"
"She wants to see me. Us." I nodded. "But we're going to meet Ari, first."
He frowned at that. "Not a good idea to buck the deputy, Tetsuo."
"You want to do something about it?"
"Not me." He smiled, a gap-toothed whiteness that seemed overly bright in a face the color of bitter coffee that's been lightened with only a hint of milk. "Not me. I'm your partner."
"Right."
Zev at my side, I limped my way out into the corridor and the warrens, toward the tube.
CHAPTER TWO
The Bear and the Lion
Metzada, Port
Personnel shuttle elevator
12/20/43, 1228 local time
There aren't any real surprises when the first troop skipshuttle lands on Metzada. It lands; it's taxied to the elevator; it's lowered into Metzada; a group of men, some of them short a few pieces, all of them bone-tired, get off.
Simple.
Straightforward.
We've been in contact since the transport cleared the Gate, and appropriate notices have already been distributed to clan and family of the dead and wounded; widows and orphans are entitled to know, as soon as is possible, that they are widows and orphans. Clan elders have been alerted to station seniors near tube entrances to turn back family members whose understandable want to see wounded loved ones would, if acted upon, interfere with what has to be done.
At least, there aren't supposed to be surprises—even minor ones.
Emptying an orbiting troop transport is primarily a problem in logistics. When I was a boy I was fascinated by logistics, and thought I might like to specialize in it. The science and art of matching materiel to needs has always enchanted me. I was tapped—too early, in my opinion—for Section, and I never had the chance to study it formally, but the fascination remains, and maybe some of the orientation.
My uncle Shimon, for example, has always talked of Patton's Third Army's relief of Bastogne as the greatest cavalry maneuver of all times. He's right, of course, but to me, it's the most beautiful logistics exercise in history. The trick wasn't just pulling an army out of a winter battle, turning it ninety degrees, and marching it a hundred-fifty kilometers to launch an attack, it was to make sure that when Patton's troops started the attack, enough supplies would arrive that they could finish it. A gorgeous exercise. . . .
The problem of landing a regiment starts skyside. Let me give you the numbers: the ships the Thousand Worlds uses as troop transports each have only two shuttlebays, one port, one starboard. A skipshuttle can hold only a few more than five hundred men—fewer if there are wounded among them. If we're lucky, there's about two thousand Metzadans in the troop transport.
Two trips per ship, right? Two waves, two orbits, yes?
No. Remember, we still have to get a skipshuttle back up to the transport for the third and fourth wave, and, practically speaking, only one skipshuttle can leave or depart per orbit. Now, if we didn't have to reuse the specific skipshuttles that came with the transport, it'd be easier. But TW pilots fly the shuttles, and each of them will fly only his own ship. Which means that even after his ship touches down and we unload it, we still have to boost it back up to the surface, haul it five klicks down the runway to the TW laser launcher, and let them refit it for launching.
Minimum turnaround time on a skipshuttle is about eight hours; the ablative launch engines are basically just popped in after the casing and ashes of the previous engine are cleaned out; filling the maneuvering tanks, testing and—if necessary—blackboxing avionics packages takes a while.
But there's no operational bottleneck there; that's all as fixed as the movements of the planets in the sky. The only bottleneck we can do something about is down here.
Medical has long been alerted: operating rooms are heated up to handle priority cases; surgeons and assistants have been put through a forced-sleep regimen and wakened just early enough so that they'll be over their early-morning drowsiness when the skipshuttle touches down. Emergency-medicine specialists, both physicians and medicians, are hustled to the port, medics stripped from homebound regiments and slotted into support companies to give the doctors what help they need.
The transport orbiting above has to be cleared quickly, and in the appropriate order: the wounded first, followed by the unwounded troops, and finally the officers and the commander. Officers—except for wounded, of course—are first-down-last-up offworld; returning to Metzada, they're first-up-last-down.
Everybody has a place around the huge combination elevator/airlock that lowers the skipshuttle down into Metzada—you're "on" Metzada when the wheels touch down on the frigid runway; you're "in" Metzada when you're underground, where we live. There are eighteen airtight doors circling the bottom of the shaft; no matter how the skipshuttle is positioned, the rear engines are going to block at least three of them, four if it's not positioned quite right on the elevator.
But that still leaves at least fourteen usable doors. Even if you assume it's going to take as much as five seconds apiece to clear a wounded man through a door—it won't, not if the litter carriers are moving—you'd think we could empty a five-hundred man skipshuttle in less than six minutes.
The bottleneck is higher up: the TW skipshuttles only have two exit doors, and the trick is to move in and move the wounded quickly through those. We're lucky if we can empty a skipshuttle in half an hour.
Everybody is there waiting as pumps whir and whine to first purge the lock of as much of the outer air as possible, and then hiss as it adds real, breathable air.
The doctors call what they do triage, but it isn't.
Combat men know what triage is; women don't.
Triage is where you shunt aside those who don't need help because they're not badly hurt—they get treated later—set aside those who are already dead but don't know it—they get buried later—and give priority treatment to those you might be able to save.
Everything to save a life, sure; nothing but the minimum maintenance possible gets done offplanet. Reconstruction is saved for the experts, for the women. For one thing, all medics and medicians are, obviously, men—and they're trained to leave what they can to the real doctors.
Like the fourth-best reconstructive surgeon on Metzada: my second wife—who, by the way, has a subspecialty in emergency medicine. Overachievement runs in the family.
Suki didn't notice me as the tube doors wheezed open an
d I walked into the hallway around lock twelve.
A fat, balding senior sergeant with a logistics pin on his collar walked over to me. He shook hands with me, then with Zev.
"Sofaer," he said, introducing himself. We tend to be rigorous in our informality on Metzada.
"Yes, Sergeant. How goes it?"
"We have a . . . minor problem here."
"Anything I can help with?"
He shrugged. "Perhaps."
"Skipshuttle on runway," speakers blared. "ETA five minutes." The team of twenty khaki-clad medics, three white-suited nurses, and two doctors lolled near their airlock, continuing their quiet conversations, as though they hadn't heard. Two medicians played a quiet game of gin over in the corner, while a doctor and her medic assistant involved themselves in some heated but quiet discussion. Everything and everyone was ready to move; there was no need to stand at attention while waiting.
"An unloading problem," Sofaer said. "One of the high-priorities wants to offload last. A bit of laxity in discipline, it seems—in the Third Battalion?" He glanced at me, curious.
So was I. Bad discipline doesn't run in my brother's battalion, although it sometimes seems that way to outsiders. He carries traditional Metzadan informality farther than traditional, although not much farther.
Suki glanced once again through the clear plexi, as though to reassure herself that, indeed, the speakers were telling the truth and the skipshuttle wasn't yet at the bottom of the elevator shaft. She brought her hand up to her throat and whispered into the microphone, then waited for a moment, listening to the voice over her headphones before nodding and yessing.
She was playing with her bun, pretending to tuck a loose strand of black hair back where it belonged, back under the headphone strap, when she first saw me. Momentarily, annoyance swept across her face.
"Business," I said, dismissing the unvoiced objection with a word. She wouldn't want me joggling her elbow any more than I'd want her joggling mine.
She nodded. On Metzada, business trumps everything.
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