The steel door to the outside creaked open and Ephraim Imran entered the room with a dive-roll-and-recover that would have done credit to a much younger man, and then rose to his feet, tracking Dov's Korriphila across the carnage. He was followed immediately by Zev, who rose to his feet in a half-squat, Dunfey's stolen pistol held out in front of him, Imran's medikit strapped tightly to his back.
It was almost all over.
Shimon was kneeling over Dov. "Medic, here," he said.
"In a sec." Ephraim Imran dropped a hand to the Sergeant's neck. "Shit. Tzvi's dead."
"Move your ass, man," Yabotinsky said. The balding little man wasn't interested in displaying emotions.
Imran was already working his way past Yehuda Nakamura's and Yehoshua Bernstein's bodies before joining the old man over Dov.
I'd finished off my own two adversaries seconds ago, eons ago, and had stooped to recover the leader's wiregun from where Dov had dropped it.
"Shut up, all," Menachem Yabotinsky shouted, his eyes fixed on the Vators crowding against the wall.
"Tzvi?" he asked, more out of long-established practice than any belief that the Sergeant would still be alive.
No answer.
The Sergeant's body was over by the door that he had unbarred. I walked to him and covered his face. It wasn't right that the rest of them should look at him like this.
Zev laid a hand on my shoulder, but I shrugged it off.
"Moshe?"
"Gut shot," Stern said, easing himself down to the floor, the barrel of the gun never drooping. "I can manage."
Some of the Vators were screaming and some were shouting, but it all blended together in a mess of sound.
"Yehuda?"
No answer.
"Yehoshua?" Old Yehoshua lay where he had fallen, un-moving, his eyes distant.
Again, no answer.
"Dov?"
"Stable," Imran said. "I think he's going to make it, although he's going to need a lot of work. He's got a sucking chest wound, but it's the right side." He and Shimon crouched over the big man. "Bring him in," he called.
"Tetsuo?" Menachem Yabotinsky called out, not taking his eyes from the Vatore huddling in the corner.
"Unhurt," I said, realizing that I was lying when I noticed that I was pressing my hand to my aching side. I'd probably worsened the broken rib. But I'd been lucky. The Vators had concentrated on shooting targets, and left me to take out my two guards without being shot at much. I had a dim memory or something whizzing past my ear, but whoever it was hadn't been allowed any more shots.
"Tetsuo, if you're unhurt, I got something for you to do." Imran didn't raise his head as he worked over Dov.
"What do you need?"
"I've got the prefect stashed in the outer room. Drag the hero in here, will you?" He tossed a hypo at me. "Give him this, right on the wound on his arm."
"Will do."
From behind me, I heard a familiar voice. "Stuarti," the major said, announcing himself. "Safe to come in?"
Menachem Yabotinsky was still in charge. "Come," he said. "Tetsuo, watch them."
As I turned, I took another look at the bodies of the father and daughter. It occurred to me that if I'd killed Shimon when I was supposed to, back on Indess, I wouldn't have to be standing here, looking down into the dead face of a man whose last sensation had been the taste and smell of his own daughter's blood and brains—but then it occurred to me that I didn't really have to look, so I looked away.
Zev and Stuarti led Ambassador Adazzi into the killing ground. Zev held Dunfey's pistol out in front of him, not quite pointing it at anyone as he took in the scene, his face as impassive as Stuarti's. The ambassador was white-faced. Apparently he hadn't seen a lot of dead people before.
"Just old, worn-out soldiers," Stuarti said. "And unarmed."
It really looked more impressive than it was. If we'd given them any warning, they'd have handled themselves better, but it had been easy for the Vators to see a bunch of old men as no threat at all. And there had been no warm-up, no anthropoid chest-beating.
A wrinkled old man had just reached up and stuck his finger in an eye, that was all.
Menachem Yabotinsky was at my side; he held open his hands for the wiregun. The surviving Vators crowded even tighter against the wall, milling like sheep. I handed it over.
"Zev, I'll take the hero's gun, too," he said.
"Officially, Ambassador," I said, "we got into trouble and the prefect saved our asses, demonstrating unusual courage and great blahblahblah. We wanted you to see it unofficially. So you can have some understanding of what you're bidding on. What you can either hire or face . . ."
No, you don't get used to the smell of the dead and the cries of the dying. But there are times when you can affect to be unbothered by it, and wave that affectation in front of a civilian, threatening him with your barbarity.
He tried for a bit of composure, and found it. "Impressive," he said, "I can count twelve of them dead, for only three of yours." He knew it was the wrong thing to say as soon as the words were out of his mouth, but they hung in the air.
Menachem Yabotinsky looked at him. "Twelve for only three. I guess that doesn't impress you enough." Menachem Yabotinsky smiled. It wasn't a grin; it was the rictus a wolf uses, to free his teeth to sink into another's flesh. Adazzi would always remember that smile.
Zev echoed what we all were thinking. "You really shouldn't have said that, Ambassador."
"I count thirty-seven to three," Menachem Yabotinsky said. "And no matter, we would have had to use Dunfey's gun a few times, anyway."
"What do you mean—?"
Menachem Yabotinsky brought up both wireguns, and thumbed them both to full automatic.
It wouldn't have made a difference to a military man, but we wouldn't have had to persuade a soldier that Metzada is the best there is. Giacometti and Stuarti already knew just how good we are, but that hadn't convinced Adazzi.
For Adazzi, it had to be something different. Show him a taste, just a little taste of brutality, and then let him think long and hard about what uniforms he wanted men like Yabotinsky to see, as they looked over their sights. Adazzi raised a hand. "No, don't—" The Vators started screaming.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Company C
Thellonee, New Britain
New Portsmouth Port Facility
01/15/44, 2211 local time
It had been a long day and a half since the shooting, most of it spent shrugging. But the local police really had two distinct choices: to see us as rescued victims, and Dunfey as our heroic rescuer; or to see him as a dupe and then try to work out what we were, no matter how bad that made him—and them—look.
Cops protect their own; while the questioning had been lengthy, it had also been pro forma: the still-groggy Dunfey was in line for a promotion, and we were all dutifully grateful to him. I don't know who among the cops really believed the bullshit, but nobody was going to announce that the emperor was butt-naked, so it was all right.
We gathered around the table in the living room of our suite, some of us the worse for wear.
I was the least-injured of the injured, and my retaped ribs were only a distant ache. Dov wasn't with us; he was in the Preserve hospital, in stable condition. The big man was deadly at hand-to-hand, but that doesn't armor anyone against bullets.
Neither does innocence. I guess I should have felt bad about the merchant and his daughter dying, but you get used to that sort of thing; they weren't the first innocents to die in a crossfire, and they wouldn't be the last.
The doctors at the Preserve hospital may have been mainly men, but they did a good job on Moshe Stern, doing a keyhole bowel resection, pumping him full of antibiotics and painkillers, and then releasing him twenty-four hours later—granted, against their advice. He was more propped up than sitting up.
Yabotinsky was just tired. He yawned broadly, scratched at his scalp, then reached for the whiskey bottle, pouring for himself and the other oldst
ers.
"You sure you should be drinking?" Zev asked Stern.
"No," Stern said, as he reached for his glass.
I turned to Ephraim Imran. "Any chance of Dov being able to travel shortly?"
"Depends what you mean," Imran said. His eyes seemed to have trouble focusing; his voice was ever-so-slightly slurred. "They say I can have him fit for a stretcher tomorrow. He can take a launching, although he won't like it much."
Shimon Bar-El shook his head. "Leave him be. Leave him be. We're not going to need him for the fix I have planned. All we need is a bit of time."
I looked long and hard at my uncle, but he either didn't notice or didn't care.
The Sergeant was dead. He'd loomed larger over my life than almost anybody, including my own father. He'd trained me as a soldier, and had watched my back during my first firefight, way back when.
And I hadn't even been watching him while he died; I'd been too busy trying to kill a couple of seventeen-year-old hoodlums.
There are some things you don't get used to. Having people you love dying on foreign soil is one of them.
Zev seemed unmoved by the whole thing. "Fix?"
Bar-El nodded. "A fix. Actually, you'd be better off giving me command of the whole Rand campaign, but I knew you wouldn't do it, so I found another fix."
"Who'd you get it from?" Zev asked. "And what is it?"
"You seem to think I'm stupid, but I hope you don't think I'm that stupid," Shimon Bar-El said. "For one thing, the walls may have ears. Which is why I'm not going to tell you where I got the other information, other than that it was before I . . . overreached myself with the Vators."
In the back of my mind, I'd been wondering about that, but his explanation made sense. We knew he'd been doing some consulting work; possibly he'd picked up the news about the Freiheimer tanks during that time, before he'd become a prisoner of/adviser to the Vators.
"As to the fix, it's a bit soon to tell you what, but I don't mind telling you where: Alsace."
Alsace.
We all sat silent for a moment. It really didn't matter which campaign Shimon thought he had a fix for; there would have been people we cared about in any. There always are, anywhere Metzada goes.
But Alsace. Benyamin was on Alsace, part of the new Eighteenth, under Yonni Davis.
David Alon walked into the silence, a sober grin threatening to become tastelessly broad. "We've wrapped up the contract with Casalingpaesa," he said. "On reasonable terms."
The room probably wasn't bugged, but there was no sense in taking chances. What he meant was we've got a deal that would be pretty good, even if we didn't know that an armor strike is going to go through Freiheimer armor like hot lead through butter.
"What kind of force? Did they go for a division, or—?"
"Two. One armor, one line infantry," he said, trying to keep the pleasure out of his voice, failing miserably. He'd been trying to get them to go for one division.
"Good," Shimon said. "You're leaving for Metzada tomorrow?"
Alon thought about not answering for a moment, but then he shrugged. "Yes, I am."
"Good, again. Have a message passed to Davis, via the next courier. Just tell him that the IG is on his way. With me in tow."
One of the things about my uncle that always annoyed me was his ability to skip past the preliminaries. It was obvious that he wasn't going to tell us what kind of fix he had planned for the Alsace situation, and that I didn't dare press him too hard—but would insist on accompanying him there.
Alon's face went grave. "We'll be taking the bodies with us," he added quiedy. "The Constabulary just delivered them. They're in cold storage in the basement."
"Wait one minute, General." The glaze was suddenly gone from Yabotinsky's eyes. "We do not carry bodies with us. We are buried where we fall. Tzvi, Yehuda and Yehoshua died for Metzada."
It's long been a tradition, ever since David Bar-El created the Metzada Mercenary Corps, that those serving it are buried where they die, not carried back.
Alon shook his head slowly. "It wasn't official, here or home. Officially, here, they were visitors regretfully killed by youth gang members, despite Prefect Dunfey's heroic efforts. Officially, at home, they were retired old soldiers, helping the inspector-general out with a youth-crime survey, not on duty. The Prefecture returned the bodies to us just an hour or so ago, and I don't want to make a fuss about trying to find burial plots here."
The years fell on Menachem Yabotinsky's shoulders, and he was just a bald man sitting uneasily in a chair, too much whiskey muddying his tired brain.
"Eph," he said. "Help me to bed."
He rose, unsteady, and Ephraim Imran was at his side, helping him from the room. Alon opened his mouth, as if he were going to say something, but there wasn't anything to say and he closed it.
"Sit down, David," Shimon Bar-El said, pushing the whiskey bottle to him.
Moshe Stern intercepted it, and poured himself another hefty slug with a trembling hand.
"As Sergeant Aroni was saying, I don't think that's a good idea, not with a healing gut-wound," General Alon said.
Stern sat silently for a moment. "You know, General, I don't give a shit what you think." He knocked back a slug and poured himself another, then slammed the bottle down in front of Shimon Bar-El. "You any good at lying, Bar-El?"
Shimon Bar-El nodded. "Fair. Why?"
"Because you're about to tell me that what you've got in your head is going to save more of our lives than getting you out of there has cost. And I want to see if I can guess if you're lying."
I can't always tell if somebody's lying or telling the truth, but sometimes I can. I knew he wasn't lying when he said:
"It was worth it, Moshe. It was worth it." Bar-El looked him straight in the eye. "Proof of my sincerity, I'm letting the obvious slide by without comment, let it go over some heads here and now."
Stern looked at him long and hard, then nodded and drank some more.
Alon raised an eyebrow. "What did you mean by that, Bar-El?"
Shimon didn't answer.
He never answered when he didn't want to. We'd find out soon enough, probably. I rose and walked to the window, glass in hand.
I looked out into the night. There were no landings scheduled tonight; the field was unlit. The darkness of the Preserve seemed about to reach out and grab at the city. The city probably deserved it.
I turned my back on the night.
Stern set his glass back down on the table, then slumped back in his chair. It was about all he could do; gut wounds take a lot out of you, and he really should still have been in the hospital.
Bar-El turned to Alon. "My regards to the deputy, and tell her to have the way cleared for the three of us on Alsace. Tetsuo, Zev and I will be relaxing here for a few weeks to be sure the message has gotten through, and then we're on our way—and see if she can arrange a mail drop for the Eighteenth at Circum-Thellonee; we'll carry it"
Zev looked at me, and I nodded. There was no way I was going to get him to tell us what sort of fix he had in mind for the Alsace problem, and if we were to drop blind into that mess, it could be very bad. Too easy for us to be made to disappear—much better to get a bit of a warning going.
We drank and talked aimlessly for a few minutes. There's always something about what you do after a fight that's special, even if what you do isn't particularly special in and of itself. I don't know if that makes sense, but it's always there. The time in the police station didn't count; that was part of the battle, that was among foreigners.
Here was different. Here I was with my own. What was left of them. The Sergeant was dead. I could feel my heart thud slowly in my chest, just the way it did during a NoGain session. Uncle Tzvi had been a pillar in my life, and now the pillar was gone.
They all die on me—my father, my brothers, the Sergeant—the bastards all die on me.
A klaxon started hooting somewhere.
"Fire alarm, fire alarm," sounded from speakers
that I hadn't seen, couldn't find even now.
Alon was already on his feet. "What's that—?"
"Don't be an ass, man," Shimon Bar-El said. "I'm surprised it took them so long."
"What?" Alon was halfway to his feet; Shimon waved him back.
"It's been too long for you, David Alon," said my uncle, Shimon.
Below, the darkness was shattered by fire: three coffin-shaped boxes blazing away into the night. Two men, one carrying an improvised spear, stood watch over the fire, probably to make sure that nobody put it out too soon. I hoped nobody would try to get past them. Yesterday had been a special case; I wasn't sure I could clear yet another homicide with the local authorities.
Moshe Stern forced himself to his feet, reeling with the pain. "It's Eph and Menachem," he said. "They're cremating the bodies. I wish I'd been strong enough to help them." He spoke quietly, his voice barely louder than a whisper. "You're not taking their bodies home, General. They will be buried where they fell." His face was unmoving, his voice level as he picked up the whiskey bottle and splashed some of the liquid more at than in the glasses on the table, then dropped the empty bottle to the carpeted floor. "You're senior, Shimon Bar-El."
"So I am." Shimon Bar-El stood slowly. He pursed his lips, opened his mouth, and then closed it. When he spoke, his voice was husky. "Friends, brothers, and cousins, a toast," he said, raising his glass. "To Company C, First Battalion, the old Eighteenth Regiment: the fire burns."
Stern nodded. "Company C."
We all drained our glasses, then shattered them against the wall.
Below, the fire burned a long time.
PART THREE
ALSACE
The Lord said to Gideon: "You have too many people with you for Me to let you defeat the Midianites, for your people will think that they have saved themselves. So, tell whoever is afraid to return home, to depart early from Mount Gilead."
Of the people, twenty-two thousand returned; ten thousand remained.
The Lord said to Gideon: "There are still too many. Bring them down to the water, and I will test them there; and I will decide who will go with you."
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