There was more firing from inside the cave.
“Aye-aye,” Mark said. He gunned the engine and lifted out in a whirling loop to confuse the ground fire. Someone was still aboard; the Gatling chattered and its bright stream raked the rocks around the open area below.
Where was Green A-One? Mark glanced at the map in front of the control stick. There was gray and white matter, and bright red blood, a long smear across the map. Mark had to lift Bates’ head to get a bearing. More blood ran across his fingers.
Then the area was ahead, a clear depression surrounded by hills and rocks. Men lay around the top of the bowl. A mortar team worked mechanically, dropping the shells down the tube, leaning back, lifting, dropping another. There were bright flashes everywhere. Mark dropped into the bowl and the flashes vanished.
There were sounds: gunfire, and the whump! whump! of the mortar. A squad rushed over and began loading wounded men into the machine. Then the sergeant waved him off, and Mark raced for the rear area where the surgeon waited. Another helicopter passed, headed into the combat area.
The medics off-loaded the men.
“Stand by, Fuller, we’ll get another pilot over there,” Savage’s calm voice said in the phones.
“No. I’ll keep it. I know the way.”
There was a pause. “Right. Get to it, then.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
The entrance to the Boss’s cave was cool, and the surgeon had moved the field hospital there. A steady stream of men came out of the depths of the cave: prisoners carrying their own dead, and Falkenberg’s men carrying their comrades. The Free State dead were piled in heaps near the cliff edge. When they were identified, they were tossed over the side. The regiment’s dead were carried to a cleared area, where they lay covered. Armed soldiers guarded the corpses.
Do the dead give a damn? Mark wondered. Why should they? What’s the point of all the ceremony over dead mercenaries? He looked back at the still figure on the bed. She seemed small and helpless, and her breath rasped in her throat. An I.V. unit dripped endlessly.
“I expect she’ll live.”
Mark turned to see the regimental surgeon.
“We couldn’t save the baby, but there’s no reason she won’t have more.”
“What happened to her?” Mark demanded.
The surgeon shrugged. “Bullet in the lower abdomen. Ours, theirs, who knows? Jacketed slug, it didn’t do a lot of damage. The colonel wants to see you, Fuller. And you can’t do any good here.” The surgeon took him by the elbow and ushered him out into the steaming daylight. “That way.”
There were more work parties in the open space outside. Prisoners were still carrying away dead men. Insects buzzed around dark red stains on the flinty rocks. They look so dead, Mark thought. So damned dead. Somewhere a woman was crying.
Falkenberg sat with his officers under an open tent in the clearing. There was another man with them, a prisoner under guard. His face was hidden by the tent awning, but Mark knew him. “So they took you alive,” Mark said.
“I seem to have survived.” The Boss’s lips curled in a sneer. “And you helped them. Fine way to thank us for taking you in.”
“Taking us in! You raped–
“How do you know it was rape?” the Boss demanded. “Not that you were any great help, were you? You’re no damned good, Fuller. Your help didn’t make a damned bit of difference. Has anything you ever did made any difference?”
“That will do, Chambliss,” Falkenberg said.
“Sure. You’re in charge now, Colonel. Well, you beat us, so you give the orders. We’re pretty much alike, you and me.”
“Possibly,” Falkenberg said. “Corporal, take Chambliss to the guard area. And make certain he does not escape.”
“Sir.” The troopers gestured with their rifles. The Boss walked ahead of them. He seemed to be leading them.
“What will happen to him?” Mark asked.
“We will turn him over to the governor. I expect he’ll hang. The problem, Fuller, is what we do with you. You were of some help to us, and I don’t like unpaid debts.”
“What choices do I have?” Mark asked.
Falkenberg shrugged. “We could give you a mount and weapons. It is a long journey to the farmlands in the south, but once there, you could probably avoid recapture. Probably. If that is not attractive, I suppose we could put in a good word with the governor.”
“Which would get me what?”
“It would depend on him. At the least he would agree to forget about your escape and persuade your patron not to prosecute for theft of animals and weapons.”
“But I’d be back under sentence. A slave again. What happens to Juanita?”
“The regiment will take care of her.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Mark demanded.
Falkenberg’s expression did not change. Mark could not tell what the colonel was thinking. “I mean, Fuller, that it is unlikely that the troops would enjoy the prospect of turning her over to the governor. She can stay with us until her apprenticeship has expired.”
“So you’re no better than the Boss after all!”
“Watch it,” one of the officers said.
“What Colonel Falkenberg means,” Major Savage said, “is that she will be permitted to stay with us as long as she wishes. Certainly we lack for women; but there are some slight differences between us and your Free State. Colonel Falkenberg commands a regiment. He does not rule a mob.”
“Sure. What if she wants to come with me?”
“Then we will see that she does. When she recovers,” Savage said. “Now what is it you want to do? We don’t have all day.”
What do I want to do? Lord God. I want to go home, but that’s not possible. Dirt farmer, fugitive forever. Or slave for at least two more years. “You haven’t given me a very pleasant set of alternatives.”
“You had fewer when you came here,” Savage said.
A party of prisoners was herded toward the tent. They stood looking nervously at the seated officers, while their guards stood at ease with their weapons. Mark licked his lips. “I heard you were enlisting some of the Free Staters.”
Falkenberg nodded. “A few. Not many.”
“Could you use a helicopter pilot?”
Major Savage chuckled. “Told you he’d ask, John Christian.”
“He was steady enough this morning,” Captain Frazer said. “And we do need pilots.”
“Do you know what you’re getting into?” Falkenberg wanted to know. “Soldiers are not slaves, but they must obey orders. All of them.”
“Slaves have to obey, too.”
“It’s five years,” Major Savage said. “And we track down deserters.”
“Yes, sir.” Mark looked at each of the officers in turn. They sat impassively. They said nothing; they did not look at each other, but they belonged to each other. And to their men. Mark remembered the clubs that children in his neighborhood had formed. Belonging to them had been important, although he could never have said why. It was important to belong to something.
“You see the regiment as merely another unpleasant alternative,” Falkenberg said. “If it is never more than that, it will not be enough.”
“He came for us, Colonel,” Frazer said. “When he didn’t have to.”
“Yes. I take it you are sponsoring him.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Very well,” Falkenberg said. “Sergeant Major, is he acceptable to the men?”
“No objections, sir.”
“Jeremy?”
“No objection, John Christian.”
“Adjutant?”
“I’ve got his records, Colonel.” Captain Fast indicated the console readout. “He’d make a terrible enlisted man.”
“But not necessarily a terrible officer?”
“No, sir. He scores out high enough. But I’ve got my doubts about his motivations.”
“Yes. But we do not generally worry about men’s motives. We only require t
hat they act like soldiers. Are you objecting, Amos?”
“No, Colonel.”
“Then that’s that. Fuller, you will be on trial. It will not be the easiest experience of your life. Men earn their way into this regiment.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You may go. There will be a formal swearing in when we return to our own camp. And doubtless Captain Fast will have forms for you to fill out. Dismissed.”
“Yes, sir.” Mark left the command tent. The times are out of joint, he thought. Is that the right line? Whatever. Does anyone control his own life? I wasn’t able to. The police, the Marines, the Boss, now these mercenaries—they tell us all what to do. Who tells them?
Now I’m one of them. Mercenary soldier. It sounds ugly, but I don’t have any choices at all. It’s no career. Just a way out of slavery.
And yet…
He remembered the morning’s combat and he felt guilt because of the memory. He had felt alive then. Men and women died all around him, but he’d felt more alive than he’d ever been.
He passed the graves area. The honor guard stood at rigid attention, ignoring the buzzing insects, ignoring everything around them as they stood over the flag-draped figures laid out in neat rows. A cool breeze came up from the sea. Winter was coming, and it would be pleasant on Tanith, but not for long.
AFTERWORD
by Jerry Pournelle
Every generation since Hiroshima has grown up in the shadow of nuclear terror. The official policy of the United States was to remain helpless, to refuse to defend our land and people.
On March 23, 1983, the president made an historic speech proposing to change the defense strategy of the United States from Mutual Assured Destruction—MAD—to Assured Survival.
The instant reaction from much of the intellectual community was to speak of Star Wars and call the president “Darth Vader.”
As months went by, the opposition did not decrease. In an editorial on October 23, 1983, the Los Angeles Times said:
“There is no guarantee that the system would shield the West from the missiles of the East. And if there were such a system, it would raise more terrifying questions. We cannot imagine the Soviet Union’s responding with restraint if confronted with a system that jeopardized its side of the balance-of-terror equation.
“Pressed about the risks of a defensive arms race, the president replied: ‘Well, would that be all bad? If you’ve got everybody building defense, then nobody’s going to start a war.’ An untested theory.
“The investment [in missile defenses] would again encourage dependence on technology at the expense of political ingenuity. The extraordinary research-and-development resources of the United States, as well as those of the Soviet Union, should be focused on the needs of a troubled world, not on new space weaponry.”
The Times concluded that defending America would be “a terrible mistake.”
That view seems to have been adopted by a large part of the media, with the support of a vocal group of academics and other intelligentsia.
I find it incomprehensible.
The first duty of any nation is to protect its citizens. The first duty of the United States of America is to “provide for the common defense.” We speak of “entitlement” programs; are not the people of the United States entitled to defense?
No one disputes that we should focus our ample research and development capabilities on the needs of a troubled world. One of the principal needs of that world is peace.
Peace is more than the absence of smoke and armies. Communist Party theorists call the “socialist world”—which includes not only the Soviet Union but also Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, the late Baltic Republics and the rest of the satellite empire—”the Peace Zone”; but calling them that does not make them peaceful.
Certainly the Poles do not think they have peace merely because they have an absence of war.
Harold Lamb calls his history of the great nomads of Central Asia The Earth Shakers. Throughout history the West has trembled at the march of the barbarians, and with good reason: Ghengiz Khan made a pyramid of more than a million skulls and so reduced the city of Samarkand that “three times the Horde rode over the place where the city stood, and not a horse stumbled.”
The last siege of Vienna by the Turks took place in 1683. In 1776 the great English historian Edward Gibbon could rejoice in the knowledge that cannon and stone fortresses had at last made Europe safe: The earth-shakers could no longer ride west to burn and slay.
The Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Latvians, Esthonians, Finns, Hungarians—all might disagree.
If we dare not defend ourselves now lest the Soviets fail to respond with restraint, what can we do when the Soviets have developed missile defenses? Have we already surrendered? Does nothing remain but to negotiate the terms of our slavery? But we have not come that far. We can, if we will, remain, for all our faults, the land of the free.
It would be simpler if by one supreme act of work and sacrifice, we could defend our land once and for all. Alas, we cannot do that. There is no perfect defense; there is no space-borne Maginot Line behind which we can hide. There is no single decisive, ultimate weapon that will save us forever.
Cannon and stone fortresses could not forever save Eastern Europe from the barbarians. Space weapons and ballistic-missile defenses cannot forever protect the West.
Technological war is dynamic warfare. It is silent and apparently peaceful, but it is nonetheless decisive. To refuse to engage in the Technological War would have exactly the same consequences as unilateral disarmament. History has taught that Appius Claudius the Blind spoke more truly than he knew: “If you would have peace, be then prepared for war.”
In these perilous times, preparation for war is serious business, carrying us far beneath the seas and far beyond Earth.
Ideally, we should not need to do that. Ideally, we should explore the depths of the seas and the limits of our solar system for the peaceful benefit of all mankind. I know few who would not prefer that. Yet—is not preservation of freedom a benefit to mankind? Is not keeping part of the world free of the Gulag a goal worth treasure?
Historically, peace has been bought only by men of war. We may, in the future, be able to change that. It may be, as some say, that we have no choice. It may be that peace can and must be bought with some coin other than the blood of good soldiers; but there is no evidence that the day of jubilee has yet come.
Until that day comes, guard your peace, for there will be war.
Books by Jerry Pournelle
FICTION SERIES
CODOMINIUM UNIVERSE
CoDominion
A Spaceship for the King (1973) also appeared as King David's Spaceship (1981)
Falkenberg's Legion
1 Falkenberg's Legion (1990)
2 Prince of Mercenaries (1989)
3 Go Tell the Spartans (1991) with S. M. Stirling
4 Prince of Sparta (1993) with S. M. Stirling
His Truth Goes Marching On (1975)
West of Honor (1976)
Silent Leges (1977)
The Mercenary (1977)
Future History (1980)
Falkenberg's Legions (1990)
The Prince (2002) with S. M. Stirling
Laurie Jo Hansen
1 High Justice (1977) [C]
2 Exiles to Glory (1978)
Moties
1 The Mote in God's Eye (1974) with Larry Niven
2 The Gripping Hand (1993) with Larry Niven also appeared as The Moat Around Murcheson's Eye (1993)
Reflex (1982) with Larry Niven
War World
1 The Burning Eye (1988) [A]
2 Death's Head Rebellion (1990) [A]
3 Sauron Dominion (1991) [A]
4 Invasion (1994)
5 Codominium: Revolt on War World (1992)
7 Blood Vengeance (1994) with Susan Shwartz and Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove and S. M. Stirling
Prolog (The Burning
Eye) (1988)
HEOROT
1 The Legacy of Heorot (1987) with Larry Niven and Steven Barnes
2 Beowulf's Children (1995) with Larry Niven and Steven Barnes also appeared as The Dragons of Heorot (1995)
INFERNO
1 Inferno (1976) with Larry Niven
2 Escape from Hell (2009) with Larry Niven
JANISSARIES
1 Janissaries (1979)
2 Janissaries: Clan and Crown (1982) with Roland J. Green
3 Janissaries III: Storms of Victory (1987)
JUPITER
1 Higher Education (1996) with Charles Sheffield
5 Starswarm (1998)
MAGIC GOES AWAY
Golden Road
1 The Burning City (2000) with Larry Niven
2 Burning Tower (2005) with Larry Niven
PLANET OF THE APES
Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1974)
TALES OF KNOWN SPACE
Man-Kzin Wars
2 Man-Kzin Wars II (1989) [A] with Larry Niven and Dean Ing and S. M. Stirling
5 Man-Kzin Wars V (1992) [A] with Larry Niven and S. M. Stirling and Thomas T. Thomas
The Children's Hour (1991) with S. M. Stirling
In the Hall of the Mountain King (1992) with S. M. Stirling
The Houses of the Kzinti (2002) with S. M. Stirling and Dean Ing
NOVELS
Birth of Fire (1976)
Lucifer's Hammer (1977) with Larry Niven
Oath of Fealty (1981) with Larry Niven
Footfall (1985) with Larry Niven
Fallen Angels (1991) with Michael F. Flynn and Larry Niven
OMNIBUS
Fires of Freedom (2009)
ANTHOLOGY SERIES
Far Frontiers
1 Far Frontiers (1985) with Jim Baen
2 Far Frontiers, Volume II/Summer 1985 (1985) with Jim Baen
3 Far Frontiers, Volume III/Fall 1985 (1985) with Jim Baen
4 Far Frontiers, Volume IV/Winter 1985 (1986) with Jim Baen
There Will Be War Volume III Page 39
