And the scene would be repeated, up and down the river, as the Eighteenth shortened the Neu Hunse this night, putting the ownership of a good portion of Dutch territory into question.
No, it wasn't over. We'd have to get back downriver; surely whoever was commanding the Dutch irregulars would try for one last push before his command collapsed underneath him, and the Eighteenth and the French forces would have to hold the line.
The Eighteenth would hold. Even without the French forces.
And Phillipe Montenier would win, at least in the short run. It would surely take more than the remaining five years of our contract for the Dutch to straighten things out well enough to support a unified fighting force. More likely than not, they'd fragment and end up feuding among themselves for most of a century. The French could play divide and conquer, and their coffers would overflow.
For now. But that was enough. A neat, clean solution.
A shot shattered the silence.
One of Yonni's men pitched forward as leaves rattled to reveal a dark form rising, dropping one flindock rifle, bringing another to bear.
No orders were issued; none were necessary. A hail of arrows cut through the darkness, were rewarded by a shrill scream.
I'd already pushed Shimon down, and was covering him with my own body.
"Who the fuck was—?"
"We got that one. Anybody got another target?"
"I got him, I know I got him. Anybody see anything else?"
"Shit, David's hurt bad. Medician, we need the fucking medician over here."
Yonni was down near us, his runner already at his side.
"Message to Lieutenant Goldblatt," he whispered. "Pass up and down the line. From: me. Location: half-klick south of Haugen house, grid—Yisroel, what's the grid? Fine—grid 1353. Text begins: shot fired, one enemy spotted, down. Reconnoiter, and take the Haugen house if advisable. Likely this was an isolated householder, but don't assume; I will advise. Sound retreat if a section-sized or larger force is encountered, or if you get any evidence of such a force. In any case, at 0200 hours or upon receipt of this message, all forces are to begin withdrawal, if they have not already done so. Go." The runner crept off into the night.
"Issur," Yonni snapped out. "This one's yours. Take it. Tetsuo's good on a sneak; use him if you want." The old principle always applies: the person most competent to handle a given situation should be in tactical charge.
"Yes, sir." The lieutenant he'd indicated snapped out a series of orders, ending with: "Inspector-General Hanavi and I will take the point. Cover us."
I became Silence, and crept off into the night.
There were no other attackers, and it wasn't really a householder who had taken the shot at us. It wasn't even, as I'd hoped it would be, a householder's son, too young to go off to the wars.
It was a householder's daughter.
In fifteen minutes, having assured ourselves that there was nobody else in the immediate area, Issur Pinsky and I were standing over the body of a girl of maybe fifteen.
Just a child, really. I get awfully tired of fighting children.
She was quite dead. Arrows had taken her in the shoulder and chest, and one lucky shot had caught her in the right eye, shoving almost ten centimeters of shaft and blade into her brain.
But she was just a girl, wearing the unisex uniform of a Dutch farmer: a dull gray hempwood-cloth shirt and trousers. A silly thought occurred to me, about how the fabric didn't take dyeing well, and about how that probably meant that you could wash the blood and the piss and the shit out of it fairly easily.
Issur Pinsky pulled her shirt up over her eyes, but that didn't look right, a fifteen-year-old girl lying on the ground with her breasts exposed to the gaze of a couple of bastards like us, so he pulled the shirt back down and turned the body over.
"Just a kid, defending her turf, instead of running. Idiot." He shrugged. "No big deal."
"No big deal," I echoed.
He sighed. "Glad this sort of shit doesn't bother me," he said, as he picked up the girl's flintlocks, his knuckles white around their barrels.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
"All the Stars in All the Galaxies . . ."
Alsace, Northern Continent
Somewhere on the Neu Hunse
04/03/44, 0719 local time
Shimon took me aside the next morning, as we were packing up for the trip down south. Our squad had an easy first day; we were scheduled to move only thirty klicks, to a rendezvous, where we'd be joining up with two other squads. Running a dispersal in reverse is even trickier than running the dispersal in the first place; the idea is to get as much of your force concentrated as quickly as possible.
"Got something for you," he said. "Let's take a walk."
"Make it quick, you two," Yonni Davis said. He was already shrugging into his pack. "We're pulling out in fifteen minutes."
"Won't take long," Shimon said.
"I've got something for you," my uncle said, opening a map and handing me a flimsy. "The Bolivar's downriver schedule. If you can make forty klicks a day for the next three days, they have a stop at the Miles Rouper plantation, right here, just about dawn." He smiled. "You're a noncombatant, remember? Just be sure you hide in the trees until they arrive, and then quickly get yourself on board. Now, you'll want to make camp well off the paths—"
"Uncle, I'm not fifteen anymore."
He laughed as he handed the map over. I folded it and put it in my pocket. "So you aren't. Which leaves one bit of unfinished business between you and me. How you're going to explain to Rivka why you didn't kill me."
The words hung there between us.
"You can't do it, Tetsuo," he said. "You should have known that you couldn't, ever since Indess."
"When Yonni took me by surprise."
He snorted. "When Yonni took you by surprise? I've got a whole lot of respect for Yonni, but he's a clumsy ox. Even if he wasn't, Tetsuo, I know about your training. That's one of the reasons that Pinhas probably concurred with Rivka: I know too much about a lot. With your training, I bet that nobody can take you by surprise—not if you don't want them to, and certainly not Yonni."
He pulled a pair of tabsticks from his shirt pocket and thumbed them both to life, handing me one.
"You're saying that I wanted to be stopped. You're counting a lot on family loyalty, traitor."
For a moment, his lips whitened, but then he shrugged. "I'm counting on no such thing, Inspector-General. I'm counting on your sense of proportion, Tetsuo."
"You think I have some great sense of proportion?"
"Not at all." His voice softened. He cupped his hands together, then moved them apart, moving them alternately up and down a few centimeters, as though they were the scales of a balance. "You're a barbarian, Tetsuo." He extended his right hand just a little. "Put the welfare of Metzada, of Am Yisroel, on this side, and put the welfare of that girl we killed last night on this side," he said, now pushing his left hand forward. "Which weighs heavier for you? Which is more important to you, Tetsuo Hanavi?"
I shrugged. "Metzada. So?"
"Add the welfare of all of the Dutch of Alsace, and the French, and then put all of the rest of humanity on the other side of the scales, and which weighs heavier?"
I didn't answer.
"I know, Tetsuo. I know." He shrugged. "Metzada. Our people. Our tribe. A barbarian puts his tribe before all else, Tetsuo, and you are a barbarian. Put all the lives on all the worlds on all the stars in all the galaxies in my left hand, and there's still no contest," he said, a momentary quaver in his voice.
Shimon Bar-El shook his head. "That's why you didn't find my little joke funny. 'This thing that Ruth did, was it good for the Jews?' It isn't funny, because to you that's precisely the correct question, the central one, the only one that really counts. Not 'what are my orders' or 'what is the Law' or 'what do I want to do,' but 'is it right for Am Yisroel, is it good for the people of Israel, is it good for the Jews.' No matter how it may seem to ot
hers, that's how you make your decisions, Tetsuo Hanavi, that's the scale that you measure everything by."
Shimon Bar-El took a final puff, then ground the tabstick under his heel. "And that's why you won't hurt me, why you can't hurt me," he said, his eyes steady on mine.
"So stop pretending, and go home.
"You can't harm me, Tetsuo, because you know me, and you know what I am, and you know that I couldn't laugh at that joke, either."
PART FOUR
METZADA
There was a little city, and few men within it; and there came a great king against it, and besieged it, and built great bulwarks against it. Now, there was found in it a man poor and wise, and he by his wisdom delivered the city; yet no man remembered that same poor man.
—Ecclesiastes 9:14-16
CHAPTER TWENTY
"It Doesn't Matter"
Metzada, Bar-El Warrens
Hanavi family quarters
06/12/44, 2012 local time
Just over a thousand hours later, I was back on Metzada, walking down my home tunnel. I waved happily to cousins as I let my feet break into a run for the last klick. Homecoming is a joyous time in the Bar-El warrens; most Bar-El men spend far too much time offplanet.
I always see the children first. If it's daytime—not surface daytime, of course, but the twenty-four hour clock we use, always set to Jerusalem time—I pull them out of school. RHIP.
But it was night.
Rachel knows my habits even better than Suki. The moment I dropped my bag in the foyer, she led me down the hall and into my study. "Suki and I set it up as a nursery while you were offplanet."
I was a little surprised. "Not leaving them in creche?"
She sort of shrugged. "Not for tonight, not your first night home." She slid the door aside. "Suki'll be home in a couple of hours," she whispered. "She's doing a . . . mandouble reconstruction—"
"Mandible," I said. "Mandible."
She squeezed my hand and shook her head for a moment. "Your shuttle was down two hours ago," she said. It was a question. "I had to see the deputy."
Rivka is furious. I can tell because her voice is flat, emotionless. Pinhas always looks the same; his face is a mirror to his thoughts in exact proportion to his willingness for it to be.
Alon isn't sure; he had a taste of what Shimon's capable of on Thellonee.
"You let him live," she says.
I shrug. "He'll probably go back to Thellonee and set himself back up in a consulting business. He'll be more careful this time—or maybe not. Doesn't matter. I'm sure he's not going to do anything to harm Metzada. Something he said." I shrug.
Pinhas doesn't ask me any questions. He knows better. What would I say?
"I thought it was the right decision," I go on. "We're better off with him alive than with him dead."
"And I'd best either back you up or have you court-martialed?"
"Want to hear my preference?"
Pinhas laughs. "No, no. You might give the wrong answer. We'll let it go again, Tetsuo. Maybe you're right."
"Pinhas. . . ."
"No, Rivka." He shakes his head. "You'll have to fire the two of us. Or worse."
Alon finally speaks up. "What did he say to you?"
"He told me a joke." I purse my lips, then shake my head. "You wouldn't understand."
Alon isn't disposed to leave it at that, but Rivka sighs, then hands me another indigestible cupcake. "If the Neuva thing wasn't heating up so quickly, I might find you more expendable," she says.
Pinhas shakes his head. "Rivka, he just got home."
"And he'll be leaving in ten days. I've got some things I want done on Neuva. Maybe you can even find a way to get close to the Freiheimer general staff," she says as she turns to me. "And since it worked so well, I'll give you a half dozen expendables, again." She raises a hand. "Not Dov—he's going to Casalingpaesa as your brother's bodyguard. Can you put another team together in that time?"
I'm already reaching for the phone; punch an already memorized combination.
"Menachem Yabotinsky," he says.
"Tetsuo Hanavi here. Can you find five friends in the next ten days?"
"What for?" he asks.
"You care?"
"Nah." He doesn't hesitate. "Old, retired, expendable?"
"Yeah."
Through the phone, I can barely hear metal tinging off stone. "Imran and Stern okay for two?"
"They're fine."
"I'll find you another three. One thing, though."
"Yes?"
"Any chance we get to kill some grown-ups this time?"
"Tetsuo, what is it?" Rachel asked.
"I've got to go away again, in ten days," I said.
"No," she said, her black hair whipping around her face like Celia's had, when she and her peacemakers had escorted me into the shuttle at Port Marne. "No, you just—"
"Business," I said.
"Good work," Celia says, her voice dripping with sarcasm. "Very, very good. Now the Dutch will start fighting among themselves and the French will walk all over them. Seventy-five percent taxes? Nonsense—Montenier will probably carve the upper river into French holdings and turn the Dutch into peons."
I nod. It's true, of course.
The two youngest children were in their cribs. Devorah was sound asleep, curled tightly in her blankets.
I let my hand rest against the back of her head for a moment. I've always wondered why the hair on my children's heads is so much softer, so much finer than anybody else's.
"Tetsuo Hanavi, how can you be proud of what you do for money?" von du Mark asks, sneering. "For filthy money?"
Little Shlomo was sleeping restlessly, as though he knew what his own future held, starting in about fourteen years. Fourteen years . . . I used to think that was forever.
"Take your time, Shlomo," I whispered. "There's no rush."
"A bit of good news," Rachel whispered. "That new shipment of medicines came in just last week. All of the children's immunizations are up to date."
"Mmm . . . what came in?"
She shrugged. "First installment from Casalingpaesa," she said, pronouncing the foreign syllables awkwardly.
No, Celia, nobody ever fights for money.
Still asleep, Shlomo reached out and grasped my forefinger, gripping it more tightly than his little hand had any right to.
We don't fight for money. We fight, and we kill, and we die, for the credits that keep Metzada alive. The distinction is important.
"What did you say?" Rachel asked, wrapping her arms around my waist as she pressed herself tightly against me. "Tetsuo, what is it?"
I shook my head as Shlomo's grip grew stronger.
"Doesn't matter," I said.
About the Author
JOEL ROSENBERG is the author of the bestselling Guardians of the Flame fantasy series, as well as of two science fiction novels, Ties of Blood and Silver and Emil and the Dutchman, all available in Signet editions. Joel and his wife currently make their home in Minneapolis.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE:
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
PART TWO
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
PART THREE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
PART FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY
About the Author
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