by Rick Shelley
Lon had no trouble staying alert while the patrol was in Hope, but after they had left the town and were halfway back to camp, exhaustion sprang its own ambush on him. He found himself yawning repeatedly, and the more he attempted to stifle the yawns, the more insistent they became.
Carl Hoper was already asleep in the tent he shared with Lon. There were no beds, nothing more than the bedrolls they would have slept on anywhere in the field. But the tent made a considerable difference, as much psychological as physical. Lon opened up his bedroll and twisted the capsule that inflated the air mattress. By the time it was ready he had taken off his pack harness and web belt. He sat on the inflated mattress to take off his boots, grateful for the relief.
With a little luck I might get five hours' sleep, Lon thought as he sat cross-legged on his bedding. A protracted yawn. He sighed, then maneuvered himself into CAPTAIN
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the sleeping bag. He moved his helmet next to his head so he would hear a call on the radio, and felt for the position of his rifle and pistol—just in case. His hand remained on the butt of his pistol. Lon had already fallen asleep.
Lon jerked awake with a start. His forehead was covered with perspiration. His heart was beating too fast. He fe!t as if he were gasping for air. His hand closed around the butt of his pistol, and he started to sit up before he realized it had only been a dream that had wakened him. He let go of the pistol and took a deep breath, flopping back onto the mattress.
The substance of the dream had already escaped his memory. All he could recall was thunder, a constant drone of distant thunder that had somehow been transformed into the similar sound of artillery fire—big guns, howitzers or tank cannons, not the mortars he had faced in the mountains.
Lon knew how those weapons sounded, though he had never been in combat where either was present. The Corps had both armor and artillery, but they were ancillary branches, used only when necessary and practical. Lon had led his men in training exercises that included tanks or self-propelled guns. He had observed both on the firing ranges, part of his indoctrination into the capabilities of the Corps while he was a cadet.
He lay motionless, eyes closed, trying to get his body's rhythms back to normal so he could sleep again. But the sounds of the thunder, or artillery, echoed in his head. There was neither storm nor barrage anywhere near Hope. No attack was under way. The only sound close was the soft snoring of Carl Hoper five feet away.
This is ridiculous, Lon told himself when it became clear that he was not going to get right back to sleep. You haven't even seen any artillery here, and you've never been afraid of thunder. There was no overt danger close, no great likelihood of combat in the near future.
Ridicu-lottp, Lon thought again, with more force, as if the word 140
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alone might conquer the subconscious fears that had forced the dream on his mind. It's not even likely to rain for at least another two or three weeks.
Lon picked up his helmet and tilted it so he could look at the timeline on the visor. It was just after oh-three-thirty, the middle of the five hours he had hoped to sleep.
If I'm not going to sleep, I might as well do something useful. He got out of the sleeping bag and pulled on his boots, then strapped on his web belt and pistol and put on his helmet. / can have a look around and make sure that the guards are where they should be. And visit the latrine.
A slight breeze made the night more comfortable outside than in the tent. Lon felt sweat evaporating, rapidly enough to give him a chill even though the temperature was above seventy. He stood near the tent flap for several minutes, turning slowly and looking around, the night-vision system of his helmet giving him an excellent view. He spotted two sentries walking posts on the perimeter of the company's bivouac area. At least one of them spotted
Lon. There was no challenge, though. Lon's helmet was switched on; a blip on the head-up display of the sentry's visor would tell him he was friendly.
Lon turned to gaze toward Hope. There was no haze of light above the town, the way there always was over Dirigent City or any sizable community on Earth. No neon signs or mercury-vapor streetlights. It was a farming town, with little nightlife. The sky was clear, pocked with stars strewn carelessly across the heavens. There was not a cloud to be seen, off to the limits of vision. No thunder would scar this night.
While he walked toward the latrine at the edge of camp, Lon spotted the two other sentries.
He did not bother them and tiiey did not bother him. By the time Lon returned to his tent, he had calmed down considerably. His pulse and breathing were approaching normal, and he was starting to feel sleepy again.
But sleep was still slow in returning. Eventually, though, it came.
Seventh Regiment settled in as if it might be staying indefinitely. In 2nd Battalion's camps around Hope, each morning started with calisthenics and running—before the temperatures neared their maximums, more than one hundred degrees every day.
Far to the northeast, the rest of the regiment established a similar regime in the foothills of the mountain chain that separated the two Aldrinian colonies. The invading Eastmen continued to withdraw, pulling back across the continental divide. The Westers who had been part of the fight in the mountains were east of the mercenaries, higher. They had not attempted to pursue the Eastmen to the far side of the chain.
' "This is the position Colonel Flowers is taking with West,'' Colonel Black told his officers the day after the surrender of Hope. ' 'We turned back the invasion in the north and accepted the surrender of the intruders in the south, according to the terms of our contract. What remains is for the governments to reach a political resolution of their differences. In the meantime we are on the scene and prepared to defend West against further attack, again, according to the terms of our contract." He gave no details of the various demands and protests that West's government was making. The turnover of Hope was high on the list, but they had taken no action to enforce that demand. No troops were being ferried south.
"If anything eomes up, we'll know in plenty of time to react," Black assured his officers. "The fleet has West under as close scrutiny as East. We'll know of troop 141
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movements or the dispatch of aircraft as soon as they begin, if not before."
Black vetoed the construction of defensive positions around the camps. "No matter the intent, it might seem provocative to the people of Hope. They would assume that we were preparing to defend ourselves against them, and we can't very well tell them differently, that we're more worried about our employers than we are about them. If we let East know of the rift, that might be all it takes to bring about trouble."
"I know it's better than fighting, but it's too damned complicated," Lon complained that afternoon after Colonel Black's briefing. Lon was sitting with Orlis, Hoper, and O'Fallon.
They had been eating supper—battle rations— in the captain's tent. "I'm beginning to wish that we could pack up and leave the Aldrinians to themselves."
"Wish for a cold beer while you're at it," Carl Hoper advised. "And-a weekend in Camo Town. One'11 do as much good as the other. No matter what, you've got to figure that we'll be here for another month at least. I can't see Colonel Flowers pulling us out without specific orders from the Council of Regiments. Right, Captain?"
Orlis nodded, chewing food. After he swallowed, he said, "I expect it will be considerably more than a month. This is one time when I'll be surprised if we pull less than a full six-month tour. I doubt our job will be finished until the colonies reach some diplomatic compromise, and that could take a lot longer than six months. We'll just have to make the best of things, hope that we won't have any fighting to do before we go home. I don't mind earning my money this way, even if it is hotter than hell."
"I don't miss the fighting, that's for sure," Lon said. "I can put up with anything that lets me take home all the men I came in with, alive and healthy. But I wish they'd get off t
heir asses and come to an agreement. Can't they see that they have to, one way or another? I mean, even on Earth the governments finally figured out that they had to operate as one entity."
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Hoper laughed. "Within very serious limits, as I recall," he said. "How many standing armies are there on Earth now?"
"About as many armies as continents, isn't it?" Orlis asked.
Lon nodded, reluctantly. "North American Union, Hispanic Confederacy, European Union, Pan-Africa, and Greater Asia. But mere hasn't been a real war in centuries, and not many border squabbles. You have standing armies, because if you don't, there's never time to raise and train one when the need arises."
"Besides, putting men under military discipline is a social necessity on Earth, isn't it?" Orlis asked softly. "Especially when you select potential troublemakers and make them part of the solution rather than the problem."
Lon shrugged. "There's some of that, in some of the armies, I guess," reluctant to admit that even the North American Union found that expedient.
"But will all those armies be able to prevent the final collapse on Earth?" That was O'Fallon, speaking for the first time. All of the others stared at the cadet.
"Doomsayers have been predicting imminent catastrophe for a thousand years or more, since Malthus," Lon said. "There have been crises, but people always manage to keep society functioning, one way or another. Nano-tech, the colonies, whatever."
"There were still some pretty scary die-offs," O'Fallon said, oblivious to the stares of the others. Only Lon was not looking directly at him now. "Plagues, wars, whatever. I studied Earth history a lot my last two years in school."
For a protracted moment, Lon merely stared at the meal pack in front of him. Thinking, feeling. Earth. Finally he took a deep breath and looked up, meeting O'Fallon's gaze.
"You're pulling on the wrong strings, Esau," he said quietly. "I'm not a Terran any longer. I'm as much a Dirigenter as you are. Maybe more. I chose Dirigent. I didn't just inherit it as an accident of birth." Maybe I 't have a lot of choice, he admitted to himself, not as 144
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long as I wanted to be a soldier, but I could have stayed on Earth and been a cop.
"Strings," Orlis said, letting the word hang until the others all looked at him. "I don't think anyone can escape the Earth strings. No matter how many generations our families have lived on Dirigent or Union or Buckingham, or any other world, the strings always go back to Earth. Think back, Lon, to when you first came to Dirigent. Do you recall the curiosity? The questions? All because you came from Earth directly instead of through genetic ancestry. I imagine you still run into that."
"Sometimes," Lon admitted. "Even Sara was excited at meeting a real Earthman. She had questions and preconceived notions, too." Lon looked at Esau when he said that. "You can't learn everything from a history text. Sometimes you can't really know a place without seeing it. I guess Earth, is both more and less than what people on Dirigent, and I suppose on other colony worlds, think. If you lumped together the populations of the ten most populous colony worlds, it wouldn't match the population of Earth even now, let alone in the early twenty-first century, when it reached its maximum. There are single cities, metropolitan areas, on Earth, maybe a dozen, that each have more people than the largest colony world mankind has settled. Of course there are problems. But with so many brains to tackle them, they do get solved, even if not always in the most efficient or elegant manner." He grinned. "Even if it's rarely efficient or elegant." It felt strange to be defending Earth. Strings. It was like the way he had been selected to look at the data on Aldrin, simply because it was assumed he would have a different perspective because he had been born and raised on the
moth-erworld.
"I don't mean to press," O'Faflon said, "but aren't brains at the core of the problem, why it has to get worse until a time comes when Earth can't handle things any longer?''
"What do you mean?" Lon asked.
"As far back as I can remember, all the texts said that CAPTAIN
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the intelligence of people who leave Earth averages above that of those who don't leave, gradually weakening the brain pool or whatever you want to call it. That each succeeding generation is that much dumber than the one before."
Lon laughed. ' 'And, of course, the inevitable corollary is that people on colony worlds are inevitably smarter and growing smarter all of the time."
O'Fallon's face reddened at Lon's laugh, but he did not back down. "Something like that," he insisted. "An easy assertion to back up statistically. Besides, it's logical."
"A thousand years ago, that might have been true," Lon said. "When all mankind had was what nature provided. But we've been tampering with natural selection almost that long. And now there is no drain on the average intelligence from people with extremely subnormal intelligence. Genetics and medical science have virtually eliminated the causes of retardation, and we have the means to correct physical irregularities that arise after birth.
Every generation the average intelligence increases, not just on the colony worlds but on Earth as well, and mechanical and electronic supplements to organic intelligence also improve."
Orlis and Hoper had leaned back, observing the dialogue between Lon and O'Fallon with considerable humor. Now the captain leaned forward, ready to end the discussion, or at least move it to other topics.
"He's right, you know, O'Fallon," Orlis said. "The average ten-year-old student today, on virtually any settled world, can solve math problems that Hinrik Nilssen couldn't even imagine when he was solving the equations that led to the Nilssen Drive we rely on to travel between stars and to give us artificial gravity. And all this talk is giving me a headache. Let's table it."
"Besides," Carl Hoper added, "this is one topic you can't argue with Nolan and win. He put a lot of study into it after he came to Dirigent, back when there were a k»| of people ragging him about the poor, befuddled of Earth."
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After a week camped near Hope, Lon noticed the heat less. The routine had not changed.
Second Battalion mounted patrols in and around the town at night, and took physical training first thing in the morning. There were no patrols in the town or near the satellite farms during the day. Late each afternoon Colonel Black held a briefing for his officers, generally with the news that there was no substantive news. The best he could offer was that there was no fighting going on anywhere on Aldrin. It was only at Hope that the mercenaries had physical contact with people from either colony. The bad news was there were no talks going on between the governments of the colonies, and contacts between headquarters of 7th Regiment and either side were rare, brief, and unproductive.
The people of Hope were slow to open up to the mercenaries. "I had hoped it would be faster," Black confessed to his officers a week after the surrender. "Maybe I was unrealistically optimistic. We did arrive as conquerors, not liberators, even though we stand ready to defend Hope if necessary."
"We don't have the right kind of contacts with them, sir," Captain Wallis Ames of Bravo Company said. ' "They see us sitting around out here during the day, surrounding their town.
At night, if they see us at all, it's as an occupying force patrolling their streets to make sure they don't sneak up on us. How else can they see us?"
Colonel Black hesitated before he replied. "There's a lot to that. The problem is balancing our security with the desire to develop better relations with the locals. Colonel Flowers left
the decision to me, how soon and how much we relax our security measures. We could substitute concealed electronic snoops for the patrols, but I'm not at all certain the locals would see that as any improvement. It would still indicate a lack of trust on our part, be an intrusion. We're going to be making a temporary adjustment starting tonight, cut the patrols down to a single fire team rather than a full squad. We'll leave a few minutes* gap between patrols as
well, rather than have one going in
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while the previous one is coming out. The next step might be just to arrange better locations for offsite observation, stay outside of town at night altogether, or just run one or two quick patrols. Look, we're feeling our way, and changes could come quickly, depending on what happens. This town is still our best key to the puzzle of Aldrin. We can't afford to screw up."
Two days later, just after morning exercises and breakfast, Lon was called to battalion headquarters—located in one of the rare stands of trees on the savanna. The rudiments of civilization had been brought in for Colonel Black and his staff, field desks and folding chairs, a small generator, electric lights. Colonel Black was sitting on one of the chairs in front of the two-room tent that served as his command post and quarters. There was a vacant chair near the colonel.
"Have a seat, Nolan," Black said after Lon saluted and reported formally. "Take a load off."
Lon sat, watching the colonel's eyes, trying to figure out why he had been summoned. Black noticed, and chuckled.
"Relax, lad," he said. "You're not in any trouble."
"That's always good to know, Colonel," Lon said.
"You know that I've been looking for an entree with the locals. Looking very hard," Black said. Lon nodded. * 'Yesterday Matt Orlis suggested that you might provide it"
"Me, sir?"
Black nodded. "You're the only officer in this battalion who was born and raised on Earth."
"How does that make any difference?" Lon asked.
The colonel shrugged. "I'm not certain that it does, but I mentioned the fact that I had an officer who came from Earth, and Major Esterling raised an eyebrow and said, 'Is that so?' I told him that you had studied at Earth's premier military academy but left shortly before graduation to join the DMC."
"And now he would like to have a chat with me?"
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Lon supplied, seeing where the discussion was going.