“Nor of your species,” said the general. “But—just as one stoops down when addressing a child—I am addressing you in a form that you can understand, one that, to your mind, embodies authority and command. As a general officer of the O.K.W.”
“What do you want?” asked von Rheydt harshly.
“Simply this,” said the officer, rising from the desk. His chrome leather boots clicked on the floor as he paced back and forth, hands interlocked behind his back, a cloud of cigar smoke trailing behind him. He began to speak, looking sharply at the seated captain each time he turned. “You are familiar with war, Hauptmann von Rheydt. As are your two comrades. Well, envision, if you can, a war that encompasses a galaxy and that has lasted for well over a million of your years. A war in which entire races are developed, deployed and used as weapons, as you develop new tanks or rifles.”
In spite of what it meant, von Rheydt knew the man was telling the truth. He shook his head. “And the fact that, as you say, I am dead?”
“You were dead,” the general corrected gravely. “Until we intervened. But we are offering you, and your companions, the chance to return.”
“How?”
“By fighting.”
“Fighting for you? In this war of yours?”
“Not quite. Let me explain a little further.” The general stopped pacing, crossed his arms and looked down at the captain. A wreath of cigar smoke gradually encircled the hard features. “Your race has always been puzzled by its own killer instincts, plagued by its own love for war. To you it was tragic, inexplicable. It seemed contrary to all the laws of evolution, for it killed off not the old and weak, but the young and strong. Correct?”
“Yes.”
“Your race, Captain, has been, shall we say, in development. Forced development. To forge a warlike race, one must have wars.”
“That is obvious, Herr General. The Fuhrer has said that himself.”
“Yes,” said the general, looking at the ceiling. “The Fuhrer… we will have to recall him soon and cover his disappearance in some convincing manner. But back to the subject at hand. Your species has developed very promisingly. It can be very useful, to us, if…”
“If?”
“If you prove yourselves to be an effective weapon in a test. Tell me, Captain, if your army had developed two types of hand grenade and wished to determine which of the two would prove a more effective weapon, how would it go about it?”
“Well, the answer would be to conduct a comparative evaluation,” began von Rheydt, and then he saw it. “There is another race of warriors,” he said flatly. “Another one of your ‘weapons projects.’”
“Very good!” said the general, smiling. “Correct. Please go on.”
“Somehow, I don’t know how, you’ve been able to… go back in time and pick up the other two men, Casca and Mbatha. Roman and Zulu and German—your choice for the most warlike races of earth’s history, I suppose. And now you will match us against the others, I suppose.”
“Exactly,” said the general, raising his eyebrows in pleased surprise and perching one leg on the edge of his desk. “An intelligent species as well as a warlike one. Very good, Captain.”
“But why pick us?” asked von Rheydt. “Front-line soldiers, all three of us. If you had all history to choose from, why not Napoleon, or Caesar, or Frederick the Great? They were true men of war.”
“Not quite,” said the general. He tapped the cigar into a glass ashtray and examined the glowing tip. “The men you name were leaders, not soldiers. Since, in this war, we will provide all necessary leadership, they would be of little value to us. No, what we value in our weapons is different. Take the three of you. Stalingrad, Teutoburgium, and Ulundi—all battles in which a body of professional soldiers, abandoned, almost leaderless, and greatly outnumbered, stood and fought to the death because they valued obedience above life.”
Von Rheydt sat motionless. The general went on: “We need soldiers like that. So far in your history your three cultures have shown us what we can expect from the human race at its most disciplined, most obedient and most unthinking best.”
“As you say,” said von Rheydt slowly. “We are soldiers, then. But what good will our victory do for our race? Make mankind a pawn in a struggle we know nothing about?”
“It is that or extinction,” said the general quietly. “To put it in army terms, Captain, the Human project is at the crossroads. It must now either be put into full production or it must be liquidated and the resources shifted to another project. I’m sure you realize, Captain, that in total war there is no other way.”
Von Rheydt stood up stiffly, put one hand on his dagger and clicked his heels. His other hand shot out in a quivering salute.
“You will find us good soldiers,” he said.
“I hope so,” said the general. “Tell the others, Captain. Ten hours from now, the three of you will fight. I suggest that you all get some sleep.” The high-pitched note of an opening hatch came from behind the rigid German, “Dismissed!”
Von Rheydt pivoted smartly and marched out. Outside, in the corridor, he turned. The door was not yet closed, and he caught a glimpse, not of a stiff O.K. W. general at a German army desk, but of something that sent him, mind reeling, stumbling down the corridor.
* * *
Von Rheydt’s school Latin seemd to be coming back; Casca, listening at the grille, nodded slowly and frowned as he finished his explanation of the upcoming test. “I have been thinking, German. The framea (spear?) could not have healed like this.” He drew up a dirty tunic and showed von Rheydt a smooth, unmarked chest covered with curly black hair. “When will we go into battle?”
“About nine hours from now.”
“I am ready,” said the centurion. “I found some arms in my room. I will sleep, I think, before the contest of the gods.”
“The gods? …Yes,” said von Rheydt, realizing the inadequacy of his Latin to explain alien races and galactic wars to a man who thought the earth flat. “Yes, sleep well, Junius.”
Mbatha was not at his grille. Von Rheydt drew his dagger, stuck it through the bars and rattled it to attract the Zulu’s attention. An instant later he froze as the point of a broad-bladed, razor-sharp assegai touched his throat.
Von Rheydt smiled as he let go of the dagger, which the African took and examined critically, at last pulling back the assegai and returning the knife to the German.
“We must fight soon, Mbatha,” said von Rheydt in English. “You, me, and Casca, the other man with us. We must win. If we lose, we die.”
“Fight English? Fight you and Casca?”
“No, you do not fight us,” said von Rheydt desperately, thinking that the three of them might have to act as a team in a very few hours; having one man suspicious of the other two might kill them all. The Zulu had fallen fighting white men; to him all whites were the hated English. “I am not English. Casca is not English. We three men fight three… devils.”
“Devils?” said the African.
“Spirits. Ghosts.”
“Ghosts,” repeated the Zulu, deadpan. “Warriors cannot fight ghosts, u-Rheydt.”
“We don’t have a choice, Mbatha. We fight in the morning. In one sleep.”
“I sleep now, u-Rheydt,” said Mbatha and left the grating. A scraping sound came from his room for a few minutes, and then silence.
Von Rheydt went back to his bunk and sat down, eased his boots off. He had a light meal of tinned sausage and biscuit from the ration pack and found what tasted like vodka in the canteen. When he had finished his meal, he lay back on the bunk, placed the Luger under his pillow and fell into a heavy sleep.
“Captain von Rheydt,” said the voice in his dream, and he jerked awake. “It is time,” said the voice, and as its meaning sank in, he came slowly back to reality.
He went to the grilles and made sure that Mbatha and Casca were both awake. They were, looking around their rooms; they must have heard the voice as well. As von Rheydt pulled on his boots, he wondered, I
n what language had it spoken to them?
He stood up, stamped his feet into the boots and walked to the pile of gear. He buckled on the scabbard of the dress saber over his pistol belt and stuck the dagger under it. He tightened the belt of his uniform trousers and tucked the cuffs into his boots. Finally he walked back to his bunk, took the pistol from under his pillow, checked the chamber, tucked the gun into its holster and buttoned the leather flap over it.
He was tightening the leather chinstrap of his helmet when the door bonged. With a last look around, he picked up the canteen, slung it from his shoulder and stepped out into the corridor.
Mbatha was already there waiting, and von Rheydt’s eyebrows rose.
The Zulu was big—muscular as well as tall. His broad, bare chest was crisscrossed with dark, puckered scars. A short skirt of animal pelt fell from waist to mid-thigh, and at elbow and knee blossomed fringes of white feathers. The African was carrying a short thrusting spear at his waist, a slightly longer one in his right hand and an oval cowhide shield on his back. A necklace of yellow animal teeth clicked against his chest.
Before von Rheydt could speak, there was a rattle of metal, and the German turned to see Junius Cornelius Casca raise a hand in greeting to the Zulu.
The centurion’s dirty tunic was gone, hidden by a burnished corselet of horizontal hoops of steel. Leather padding showed under half-hoops of deeply gouged metal protecting the shoulders; the swelling muscles of his arms were bare. A coarse brown-woolen skirt or kilt fell to his knees, and he wore heavy sandals. One big, tanned hand rested on the sheath of a short sword and the other was curled negligently around a square shield, embossed with a wing-and-thunderbolt design. A short, plain dagger rode at his waist, and in spite of the Roman’s short stature, the plumes of his centurion’s helmet nodded above the taller men. Casca reached out an arm and gripped their hands solemnly, one at a time.
Von Rheydt looked at the two of them, the tall Zulu and the stocky Roman. “If it is the fate of a soldier to die,” he said aloud in his own tongue, “to do it with such men as you is an honor.”
They did not understand his harsh German, but they understood that it was a compliment and they nodded grimly. At that moment, one end of the corridor went dark, and they began to march three abreast in the direction of the light. The clang of bronze and steel echoed away in front of them.
The hatch closed behind them, and von Rheydt whispered, “My God.” A low grunt of surprise came from Casca. The three men stared around.
They were in a gigantic amphitheater, and it was empty. Von Rheydt looked back, seeing a high wall without a trace of the door through which they had entered. Firm sand grated under their feet, and a red sun above them cast a bloody glow over empty tiers of gray metal seats, stretched to meet a deep violet sky.
Metal scraped as Casca drew the short sword and balanced it at waist level. “In your country, German, do you have the circus?” he asked in his strangely corrupt Latin. “That is what this is like. I have seen the gladiators fight in the imperial city. And now we fight—before the throne of Jove.”
Von Rheydt looked at Mbatha, who returned his look without visible expression. “The u-Fasimba do not fight ghosts,” said the African slowly. Then the short spear pointed with the speed of a striking snake. “But those… those are not ghosts.”
Across the flatness of sand, through the atmosphere shimmering with heat, three dark figures stood against the wall of the amphitheater.
Von Rheydt unslung the canteen from his shoulder, took a mouthful of vodka and handed the canteen to the Zulu. When Casca handed it back to him, it was empty, and he dropped it to the sand and drew his saber.
Mbatha started forward at a jog-trot, and Casca and von Rheydt followed, their steps thudding on the hard-packed sand. The figures opposite them swung into motion too, and the two groups, men and others, closed rapidly.
Fifty meters apart, they both stopped, and von Rheydt’s eyes narrowed.
The enemy was not human. From a distance they had resembled men, upright, bipedal, two-armed. But from this distance the differences were horribly evident.
The aliens were taller and thinner than men, but there was no appearance of fragility. They had long hair of a brassy color. Skin tone? von Rheydt wondered. Thick, small footpads, like a camel’s. The necks were long, leading to a ridiculously small knob of a head. There was no clearly defined face, though he could make out large, dark eyes fixed on the men.
A sound next to him made him turn his head. Casca, eyes fixed on the enemy, had fronted his sword and was murmuring a prayer; when he caught von Rheydt’s eyes on him, he grinned but didn’t stop. Mbatha had been silent, scrutinizing the enemy; but then he turned his back contemptuously to them and addressed the German.
“We fight, u-Rheydt?” he said. “You—Casca?”
Von Rheydt nodded. “We fight.”
Casca finished his prayer and brought the square shield up to cover his breast. Mbatha turned back; and von Rheydt, drawn saber in his right hand, Luger in his left, walked between the armored Roman and the hide-shielded Zulu toward the waiting aliens.
As they closed, he could see variations in their equipment and dress. They must be of different times too, he thought. One of them seemed to be sheathed in a blue-metal armor and carried a long staff of the same material. Von Rheydt nudged Junius, pointed with his saber; the Roman nodded, teeth bared, and fixed his eyes on that one. Another was almost naked, and its weapons were two curved, glittering scimitars; Mbatha was already turning toward it when things began to happen.
In a second, the aliens seemed to shrink, from seven feet or so to almost human size. Von Rheydt blinked, then saw what had happened; the “heads” had been withdrawn into the deep chests, and the dark eyes peered over the edge of a protective carapace like a soldier peering from a trench. The brain must be inside the chest, he thought. Well, a bullet would reach it even there.
And even while von Rheydt blinked, the blue-armored alien had lifted a long arm and something swift left the long staff and fell toward him, too fast to dodge.
There was a terrifying loud clang, and a meter-long, blue-metal rod quivered in the sand at his feet. Casca’s shield twitched back and the centurion sent a mocking laugh at the being that was drawing another missile from a quiver on its back.
“Gratias,” said von Rheydt, and then the three men separated and he found himself face to face with the third alien.
Von Rheydt’s opponent stood solidly on two feet, neck stalk slightly extended, large, dark eyes fixed on the German. The smooth, brassy-looking skin was bare at the arms and legs but the trunk was covered with a flat black garment that looked incongruously like carbon paper…
But these were details that the captain noted only with his subconscious, for his attention was centered on the short rod that one brassy hand was bringing up stealthily to cover him.
Von Rheydt fired twice, rapidly from the hip. The nine-millimeter jolted his hand and the flat crack of it echoed back from the circled walls of the amphitheater. His opponent reeled back, then steadied, shook itself, and stepped forward, one hand going to its chest and the other raising the rod.
Electricity snapped, and von Rheydt’s whole body arced in a spasm. He fell heavily to the sand, face up but unable to move. The alien came toward him, towering up into the purple sky, and lowered the rod to point at von Rheydt’s chest.
He recovered movement and brought the saber around in a whistling arc. The alien jumped back but not in time to avoid the stroke, and the German’s arm tingled as if he had struck a lamp post. He scrambled back up, retrieving the automatic from the sand. The alien closed with him again, and the point of the saber grated against the black-jerkined chest. The alien backed off a little.
Von Rheydt looked at the saber point. Broken; the tip had gone with that wild slash to the legs. He looked again at his opponent, who was still backing away. Most likely it needed a little range to use the rod, which it was training on him again.
Von Rheydt was on the weapon in two bounds, crushing it into the sand under his boot. From the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of Mbatha and the nearly naked alien, both weaponless, straining in hand-to-hand combat. Von Rheydt reached his alien, placed the muzzle between the wide eyes and pressed the trigger. Only at the empty click did he see that the toggle link was up; there was no more ammunition.
At the same instant a grip of iron closed around his leg and he was jerked off his feet. Dropping the saber and the useless pistol, he fell on his enemy, hammering with his fists on its chest. He had hoped it was the garment that had deflected his bullets, but it was too flimsy; it was the carapace beneath it that was like steel, impervious to his fists and his weapons alike.
He was being crushed in a close hug when he found the ceremonial dagger in his hand and managed to slice it into the softer flesh of the “neck.” The grip loosened, and the two fighters sprang apart and circled warily under the red sun.
Von Rheydt panted, wiped sweat from his eyes with the back of his dagger hand. Pain began to throb in his crushed ankle and in his chest. His opponent’s sad eyes watched him unblinkingly as they circled, crouched, arms extended like wrestlers. The cuts on his half-extended neck gaped, but there was no trace of blood. The dark eyes flicked away from von Rheydt once, noting the ruin of its weapon, then slid back to follow the limping German.
Von Rheydt, circling to his right, stepped on something hard, stooped quickly and retrieved it: Mbatha’s short spear. He held it low, pointed up at those sad, interested eyes.
This makes it a little more even than hand-to-hand, thought von Rheydt. He felt quite cool, as he usually did once a fight had started. But the odds certainly seemed to favor the alien; that metal-hard skin, its great strength he had felt in his leg, the lack of an exposed brain. The very deliberation with which the creature moved gave an impression of terrible strength. The deliberation of a tank…
There Will Be War Volume IV Page 29