“I’ve got men along the tops of the bluffs all the way above the Neulanders on both rivers,” said the voice of Marc, “and I’ve got at least two energy-rifle companies down on the flats at the foot of the bluffs behind their rear guards, keeping up fire into them.”
“Pull those rifle companies back,” Cletus said. “There’s no point in risking a man we don’t have to risk. And I want you to have your men on top of the bluffs stay there, but slacken off on their firing. Do it gradually, cut it down bit by bit until you’re just shooting into them often enough to remind them that we’re there.”
“Pull back?” echoed Marc. His face came back into the screen, frowning. “And slacken fire? But what about the rest of you down in the town there?”
“We’re going to attack,” said Cletus.
Marc stared out of the screen without answering. His thoughts were as visible as though they were printed in the air before him. He, with better than three thousand men, was being told to back off from harassing the rear of an enemy force of more than six thousand—so as not to risk casualties. Meanwhile, Cletus, with less than six hundred men, was planning to attack the enemy head on.
“Trust me, Colonel,” said Cletus softly into the phone. “Didn’t I tell you all a week ago that I planned to get through this battle with as few men killed as possible?”
“Yes, sir…” said Marc, grudgingly, and obviously still bewildered.
“Then do as I tell you,” said Cletus. “Don’t worry, the game’s not over yet. Have your men slacken fire as I say, but tell them to stay alert. They’ll have plenty of chance to use their weapons a little later on.”
He cut the connection and handed the phone back to Eachan.
“All right,” he said. “Now let’s see about mounting that attack.”
Thirty minutes later, Cletus was riding with Eachan in a battle car that was sliding along on its air cushion ten inches above the water flooding the town, water that was now ankle-deep, even here at the upper edge of the town. He could see, moving ahead of him, spaced out in twenty-yard intervals and making good use of the houses, trees and other cover they passed, the closest half dozen of his Dorsai troopers in the first line of attack. Immediately in front of him, in the center of the control panel of the battle car, he could see a small replica plotting screen being fed with information by a remote circuit from the main plotting screen under Eachan’s control at Dorsai HQ in the town behind him. It showed the Neulanders forming up at the base of the vertical wall of stone and earth where adjacent river bluffs came together. Their line stretched right across the some six hundred yards of sandy soil making up the neck of the land that connected the foot of the bluffs with the broader area of slightly higher ground on which the town of Two Rivers was built.
Only the apparent width of the neck of land showed on the plotting screen, however. Its actual width was lost now in an unbroken sheet of running water stretching from the bluffs on what had been the far side of the Whey River to the opposite bluffs on what had been the far side of the Blue. Under that gray, flowing sheet of liquid it was impossible to tell, except for the few small trees and bushes that dotted the neck of land, where the water was ankle-deep and where it was deep enough for one of Wefer’s Mark V’s to pass by on the bottom, unnoticed. Cletus had warned the attacking men to stay well toward the center of the enemy line, to avoid blundering into deeper water that would sweep them downstream.
The attackers paused behind the cover of the last row of houses and dressed their line. The enemy was only a few hundred yards away.
“All right,” said Cletus into his battle phone. “Move out!”
The first wave of attackers rose from their places of concealment and charged forward at a run, zigzagging as they went. Behind them their companions, as well as the strongpoints with a field of fire across the former neck of land, opened up on the enemy with missile weapons.
The Neuland troops still standing on the dry footing of the slightly higher ground at the foot of the bluffs stared at the wild apparition of rifle-armed soldiers racing toward them, in great clouds of spray, with apparent suicidal intent. Before they could react, the first wave was down behind whatever cover was available, and the second wave was on its way.
It was not until the third wave had moved out that the Neulanders began to react. But by this time the fire from the attackers—as well as the slightly heavier automatic fire from the strongpoints—was beginning to cut up their forward lines. For a moment, disbelief wavered on the edge of panic. The Neuland troops had been under the impression that there was no one but a token force to oppose them in Two Rivers—and that it would be a matter of routing out small pockets of resistance, no more. Instead, they were being attacked by what was clearly a much greater number of Dorsais than they had been led to believe were in the town. The front Neuland line wavered and began to back up slightly, pressing in on the troops behind them, who were now crowding forward to find out what was going on.
The confusion was enough to increase the temporary panic. The Neuland troops, who had never fought a pitched battle before, for all their Coalition-supplied modern weapons, lost their heads and began to do what any seasoned soldier would instinctively have avoided doing. Here and there they began to open up at the charging figures with energy weapons.
At the first touch of the fierce beams from the weapons, the shallow water exploded into clouds of steam—and in seconds the oncoming Dorsais were as effectively hidden as though the Neulanders had obligingly laid down a smoke screen for their benefit. At that the panic in the first few ranks of the Neulanders broke completely into a rout. Their forward men turned and began trying to fight their way through the ranks behind them.
“Back!” Cletus ordered his charging Dorsais by battle phone. For, in spite of the temporary safety of the steam-fog that enveloped them, their mere handful of numbers was by now dangerously close to the mass soldiery of the Neulanders’ force, as his plotting screen reported, even though vision was now obscured. “Get back! All the way back. We’ve done what we set out to do!”
Still under safety of the steam-fog, the Dorsais turned and retreated. Before they were back to the cover of the houses, the steam blew clear. But the Neulander front was still in chaos, and only a few stray shots chased the attackers back into safety.
Cletus brought them back to Dorsai HQ and climbed stiffly out of the battle car, whose air cushion hovered it above more than seven feet of water now lapping at the top of the steps leading to the main entrance of the building. He made a long step from the car to the threshold of the entrance and limped wearily inside toward the command room.
He was numb with exhaustion and he stumbled as he went. One of the younger officers in the building stepped over to take his arm, but Cletus waved him off. He limped shakily into the command room, and Eachan turned from the plotting screen to face him.
“Well done, sir,” said Eachan slowly and softly. “Brilliantly done.”
“Yes,” replied Cletus thickly, too tired to make modest noises. On the screen before him the Neulanders were slowly getting themselves back into order. They were now a solid clump around and about the foot of the bluff. “It’s all over.”
“Not yet,” said Eachan. “We can hold them off awhile yet.”
“Hold them off?” The room seemed to waver and threaten to rotate dizzily about Cletus’ burning eyes. “You won’t have to hold them off. I mean it’s all over. We’ve won.”
“Won?”
As if through a gathering mist, Cletus saw Eachan staring at him strangely. A little clumsily, Cletus made it to the nearest chair and sat down.
“Tell Marc not to let them up to the top of the bluffs unless they surrender,” he heard himself saying, as from a long way off. “You’ll see.”
He closed his eyes, and seemed to drop like a stone into the darkness. Eachan’s voice reached down after him.
”…Medic, here!” Eachan was snapping. “Damn it, hurry up!”
So it was that
Cletus missed the last act of the battle at Two Rivers. From the moment of the Neulanders’ momentary panic at being attacked by the Dorsais under Cletus’s direction, trouble began to beset the six thousand soldiers from Neuland. It took them better than half an hour to restore order and make themselves ready to move forward upon the town again. But all that time the river level, raised by the work of Wefer’s Mark V’s, had been rising. Now it was up over the knees of the Neulanders themselves, and fear began to lay its cold hand upon them.
Ahead of them were certainly more Dorsai troops than they had been led to expect. Enough, at least, so that the Dorsais had not hesitated to mount an attack upon them. To go forward might cause them to be caught in a trap. Besides, to go forward was to go into steadily deepening water. Even the officers were uncertain—and caution suggested itself as the better part of valor. The word was given to withdraw.
In orderly manner, the two halves of the Neuland invading force split up and began to pull back along the river flats down which they had come. But, as they backed up, in each case, the width of the flat narrowed and soon the men farthest away from the bluff found themselves stumbling off into deeper water and the current pulling them away.
As more and more Neuland troopers were swept out into the main river current, struggling and splashing and calling for help, a new panic began to rise in the ranks of those still standing in shallow water. They began to crowd and jostle to get close to the bluff. Soon their organization began to dissolve. Within minutes, soldiers were breaking away from the ranks and beginning to climb directly up the bluffs toward the safety of high ground overhead.
But it was at this moment that Marc, following Cletus’ earlier written orders, gave the command to his Dorsais lined up along the top of the bluff to fire down into these refugees from the rising waters… And it was all over but the shouting.
They did not even have to call on the Neulanders to surrender. The panic-stricken colonists in uniform from over the mountains beyond Etter’s Pass threw away weapons and began climbing the slope with their hands in the air, at first only a few, then mobs. By the time the sun was touching the western horizon, more than six thousand soldiers—as it was later to turn out, better than 70 per cent of Neuland’s army—sat huddled together as prisoners under the guns of their Dorsai guards.
But Cletus, still unconscious, knew none of this. Back in a room of the Dorsai HQ in Two Rivers, a prosthetic physician flown up from Bakhalla was straightening up from his examination of Cletus’s swollen left knee, his face grave.
“How is it, Doctor?” asked Eachan Khan, sharply. “It’s going to mend all right, isn’t it?”
The physician shook his head and looked at Eachan soberly. “No, it isn’t,” the physician said. “He’s going to lose the leg from just above the knee.”
16.
“Prosthetic knee and ankle joints—in fact, prosthetic lower limbs,” said the physician, patiently, “are really excellent. Inside of a couple of months after you’ve adapted to the prosthetic unit, you’ll find yourself almost as mobile as you were before with that limp. Of course, no one likes to face the thought of an amputation, but—”
“It’s not the thought of an amputation that worries me,” interrupted Cletus. “I’ve got things to do that require two flesh and blood legs. I want a surgical replacement.”
“I know,” answered the doctor. “But you remember we ran tests on you and you’ve got an absolute level of rejection. All the evidence is that it’s a case of psychological, not physiological, rejection. If that’s the case, all the immune-supressant drugs on the list can’t help you. We can graft the leg on but your body’s sure to reject it.”
“You’re sure it’s a case of psychological rejection?” said Cletus.
“Your medical history shows you have a uniformally successful resistance to hypnosis, even under ordinary drugs,” the doctor answered. “We find that kind of resistance almost always in people who exhibit psychological rejection of grafted organs, and whenever it’s found we always—without exception—have psychological rejection. But just to put it to the test, I’ve brought along one of the new synthetic parahypnotic drugs. It leaves you conscious up to safe levels of dosage, but it absolutely anesthetizes volition. If you can resist hypnosis with that in you, then the resistance is below the levels even psychiatry can reach. It’s probably a genetic matter. Do you want to try it?”
“Go ahead,” said Cletus.
The doctor fastened the band of a hypnospray around Cletus’s forearm, with the metered barrel of the drug poised above a large artery. The level of the liquid in the barrel of the spray was visible. Resting his thumb and little finger on Cletus’s arm on either side of the band, the doctor placed the top of his forefinger on the spray button.
“I’ll keep asking you your name,” he said. “Try not to tell me what it is. As you continue to refuse, I’ll keep stepping up the dosage level. Ready?”
“Ready,” said Cletus.
“What’s your name?” asked the doctor. Cletus felt the cool breath of the hypnospray against the skin of his forearm.
Cletus shook his head.
“Tell me your name?” repeated the doctor.
Cletus shook his head. The cool feeling of the spray continued. Slightly to his surprise, Cletus felt no lightheadedness or any other indication that the drug was working on him.
“Tell me your name.”
“No.”
“Tell me your name…“
The questioning continued and Cletus continued to refuse. Abruptly, without warning, the room seemed filled with a white mist. His head whirled, and that was the last he remembered.
He drifted back into a weariness, to find the doctor standing over his bed. The hypnospray was unstrapped from his arm.
“No,” said the doctor, and sighed. “You resisted right up to the point of unconsciousness. There’s simply no point in trying a transplant.”
Cletus gazed at him almost coldly. “In that case,” he said, “will you tell Mondar the Exotic Outbond that I’d like to talk to him?”
The doctor opened his mouth as if to say something, closed it again, nodded and left.
A nurse came to the door. “General Traynor is here to see you, Colonel,” she said. “Do you feel up to seeing him?”
“Certainly,” said Cletus. He pressed the button on the side of the bed that raised the head section, lifting him up into a sitting position. Bat came in the door and stood beside the bed looking down at him; his face was like a stone mask.
“Sit down, sir,” Cletus said.
“I’m not going to be here that long,” said Bat.
He turned about to close the door of the room. Then he turned back to glare down at Cletus.
“I’ve just got two things to tell you,” he said. “When I finally smashed the door open on the arms locker in your office and got a gun to shoot the hinges off the door, it was Sunday afternoon, so I made sure I got secretly out of town and phoned Colonel Dupleine quietly, before I made any fuss. You’ll be glad to hear, then, there isn’t going to be any fuss. Officially, I had a slight accident Friday afternoon a little ways outside of Bakhalla. My car went off the road. I was knocked unconscious and pinned in it. I wasn’t able to get out until Sunday. Also, officially, what you did up at Two Rivers in capturing those Neulanders was done at my orders.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Cletus.
“Don’t butter me up!” snarled Bat, softly. “You knew I was too bright to go around raising hell about your putting me out of the way until I’d found out what the score was. You knew I was going to do what I did. So let’s not play games. You locked me up and nobody’s ever going to know about it. But you captured two-thirds of the Neuland armed forces and I’m the one who’s going to get most of the credit back in Geneva. That’s the way things stand, and that’s one of the two things I came to tell you.” Cletus nodded.
“The other thing’s this,” Bat said. “What you pulled off up there at Two Rivers was one h
ell of a piece of fine generalship. I can admire it. But I don’t have to admire you. I don’t like the way you work, Grahame, and I don’t need you—and the Alliance doesn’t need you. The second thing I came to tell you is this—I want your resignation. I want it on my desk inside of forty-eight hours. You can go back home and write books as a civilian.”
Cletus looked at him quietly. “I’ve already submitted my resignation from the Alliance Military Service,” he said. “I’m also giving up my citizenship as an Earth citizen. I’ve already made application for citizenship on the Dorsai, and it’s been accepted.”
Bat’s eyebrows rose. For once his hard, competent face looked almost foolish. “You’re skipping out on the Alliance?” he asked.
“Completely?”
“I’m emigrating, that’s all,” said Cletus. He smiled a little at Bat. “Don’t worry, General. I’ve no more interest in making public the fact that you were locked in my office over part of the weekend than you have. We’ll assume a Neulander spy got into the office, found himself trapped and managed to break his way out.”
Their eyes met. After a second, Bat shook his head. “Anyway,” he said. “We won’t be seeing each other again.”
He turned and left. Cletus lay gazing at the ceiling until he fell asleep.
Mondar did not show up until the following afternoon; he apologized for not coming sooner.
“The message saying that you wanted to see me was sent through the regular mail,” he said, sitting down in a chair at Cletus’s bedside. “Evidently your good physician didn’t see any urgency in your asking for me.”
“No,” said Cletus, “it’s outside his area of knowledge.”
“I think he assumed I’d have to tell you that I—or we Exotics, that is—couldn’t help you either,” said Mondar, slowly. “I’m afraid he may have been right. I called the hospital after I got your message and talked to someone I know on the staff here. I was told you’ve got a problem of almost certain psychological rejection of any organ graft”
“That’s right,” said Cletus.
Tactics of Mistake Page 16
