Gordon R. Dickson - Childe Cycle 05 (21 page)

Ian pressed the button again.

Again we waited, and there was no response.

Ian pressed the stud. Holding it down, so that his voice would go with the sound of its announcing chimes to the ears of those within, he spoke.

"This is Commander Ian Graeme," he said. "Blauvain is now under martial law, and you are under arrest in connection with the assassination of Field Commander Kensie Graeme. If necessary, we can cut our way in to you. However, I'm concerned that Held Commander Graeme's reputation be kept free of criticism in the matter of determining responsibility for his death. So I'm offering you the chance to come out and surrender."

He released the stud and stopped talking. There was a long pause. Then a voice spoke from the annunciator grille below the screen, although the screen itself remained blank

"Go to hell, Graeme," said the voice. "We got your brother; and if you try to blast your way in here, we'll get you, too."

"My advice to you," said Ian—his voice was cold, distant, and impersonal, as if this was something he did every day, "is to surrender."

"You guarantee our safety if we do?"

"No," said Ian. "I only guarantee that I will see that Field Commander Graeme's reputation is not adversely affected by the way you're handled."

There was no immediate answer from the screen. Behind Ian, Charley looked again at his wrist unit.

"They're playing for time," he said. "But why? What good will that do them?"

"They're fanatics," said Pel, softly. "Just as much fanatics as the Friendly soldiers were, only for the Blue Front instead of for some puritan form of religion. Those three in there don't expect to get out of this alive. They're only trying to set a higher price on their own deaths—get something more for their dying."

Charley ap Morgan's wrist unit chimed.

"Time's up," he said to Ian. "The enlisted men are moving into the suburbs of Blauvain now, to begin their search."

Ian reached out and pushed the annunciator stud again, holding it down as he spoke to the men inside.

"Are you coming out?"

"Why should we?" answered the voice that had spoken the first time. "Give us a reason."

"I'll come in and talk to you if you like," said Ian.

"No—" began Pel out loud. I gripped his arm, and he turned on me, whispering. "Torn, tell him not to go in! That's what they want."

"Stay here," I said.

I pushed forward until Charley ap Morgan put out an arm to stop me. I spoke across that arm to Ian.

"Ian," I said, in a voice safely low enough so that the door annunciator would not pick it up. "Pel says—"

"Maybe that's a good idea," said the voice from the annunciator. "That's right, why don't you come on in, Graeme? Leave your weapons outside."

"Tom," said Ian, without looking either at me or Charley ap Morgan, "Stay back Keep him back, Charley."

"Yes sir," said Charley. He looked into my face, eye to eye with me. "Stay out of this, Tom. Backup."

Ian stepped forward to stand square in front of the door, where a beam coming through it could go through him as well. He was taking off his sidearm as he went. He dropped it to the floor, in full sight of the screen, through the blankness of which those inside would be looking out.

"I'm unarmed," he said.

"Of that sidepiece, you are," said the annunciator. "Do you think we're going to take your word for the rest of you? Strip."

Without hesitation, Ian unsealed his uniform jacket and began to take off his clothes. In a moment or two, he stood naked in the hallway, but if the men in the suite had thought to gain some sort of moral advantage over him because of that, they were disappointed.

Stripped, he looked—like an athlete—larger and more impressive than he had, clothed. He towered over us all in the hall, even over the other Dorsai there; and with his darkly tanned skin under the lights he seemed like a massive figure carved in oak

"I'm waiting," he said, after a moment, calmly.

"All right," said the voice from the annunciator. "Come on in."

He moved forward. The door unlatched and slid aside before him. He passed through and it closed behind him. For a moment we were left with no sound or word from him or the suite; then, unexpectedly, the screen lit up. We found ourselves looking over and past lan's bare shoulders at a room in which three men, each armed with a rifle and a pair of side-arms, sat facing him. They gave no sign of knowing that he had turned on the annunciator screen, the controls of which would be hidden behind him, now that he stood inside the door, facing the room.

The center one of the three seated men laughed. He was the big, black-bearded man I had found vaguely familiar when I saw the solidigraphs of the three of them in lan's office; and I recognized him now. He was a professional wrestler. He had been arraigned on assault charges four years ago, but lack of testimony against him had caused the charges to be dismissed. He was not as tall as Ian, but much heavier of body; and it was his voice we had been hearing, because now we heard it again as his lips moved on the screen.

"Well, well, Commander," he said. "Just what we needed—a visit from you. Now we can rack up a score of two Dorsai Commanders before your soldiers carry what's left of us off to the morgue; and St.

Marie can see that even you people can be handled by the Blue Front"

We could not see lan's face; but he said nothing and apparently his lack of reaction was irritating to the big assassin, because he dropped his cheerful tone and leaned forward in his chair.

"Don't you understand, Graeme?" he said. "We've lived and died for the Blue Front, all three of us—for the one political parry with the strength and guts to save our world. We're dead men no matter what we do. Did you think we don't know that? You think we don't know what would happen to us if
we
were idiots enough to surrender the way you said? Your men would tear us apart; and if there was anything left of us after that, the government's law would try us and then shoot us. We only let you in here so that we could lay you out like your twin brother, before we were laid out ourselves. Don't you follow me, man?

You walked into our hands here like a fly into a trap, never realizing."

"I realized," said Ian.

The big man scowled at him and the muzzle of the heat rifle he held in one thick hand, came up.

"What do you mean?" he demanded. "Whatever you think you've got up your sleeve isn't going to save you. Why would you come in here, knowing what we'd do?"

"The Dorsai are professional soldiers," said lan's voice, calmly. "We live and survive by our reputation.

Without that reputation none of us could earn our living. And the reputation of the Dorsai in general is the sum of the reputations of its individual men and women. So Field Commander Kensie Graeme's professional reputation is a thing of value, to be guarded even after his death. I came in for that reason."

The big man's eyes narrowed. He was doing all the talking and his two companions seemed content to leave it that way.

"A reputation's worth dying for?" he said.

"I've been ready to die for mine for eighteen years," said lan's voice, quietly. "Today's no different than yesterday."

"And you came in here—" the big man's voice broke off on a snort. "I don't believe it. Watch him, you two!"

"Believe or not," said Ian. "I came in here, just as I told you, to see that the professional reputation of Held Commander Graeme was protected from events which might tarnish it. You'll notice—" his head moved slightly as if indicating something behind him and out of our sight, "I've turned on your annunciator screen, so that outside the door they can see what's going on in here."

The eyes of the three men jerked upwards to stare at the screen inside the suite, somewhere over lan's head. There was a blur of motion that was lan's tanned body flying through the air, a sound of something smashing and the screen went blank again.

We outside were left blind once more, standing in the hallway, staring at the unresponsive screen and door. Pel, who had stepped up next to me, moved toward the door itself

"Stay!" snapped Charley.

The single sharp tone was like a command given to some domestic beast. Pel flinched at the tone, but stopped—and in that moment the door before us disintegrated to the roar of an explosion in the room.

"Come on!" I yelled, and flung myself through the now-open doorway.

It was like diving into a centrifuge filled with whirling bodies. I ducked to avoid the flying form of one of the men I had seen in the screen, but his leg slammed my head, and I went reeling, half-dazed and disoriented, into the very heart of the tumult. It was all a blur of action. I had a scrambled impression of explosions, of fire-beams lancing around me—and somehow in the midst of it all, the towering, brown body of Ian moving with the certainty and deadliness of a panther. All those he touched went down; and all who went down, stayed down.

Then it was over. I steadied myself with one hand against a half-burned wall and realized that only Ian and myself were on our feet in that room. Not one of the other Dorsai had followed me in. On the floor, the three assassins lay still. One had his neck broken. Across the room a second man lay obviously dead, but with no obvious sign of the damage that had ended his life. The big man, the ex-wrestler, had the right side of his forehead crushed in, as if by a club.

Looking up from the three bodies, I saw I was now alone in the room. I turned back into the corridor, and found there only Pel and Charley. Ian and the other Dorsai were already gone.

"Where's Ian?" I asked Charley. My voice came out thickly, like the voice of a slightly drunken man.

"Leave him alone," said Charley. "You don't need him, now. Those are the assassins there; and the enlisted men have already been notified and pulled back from their search of Blauvain. What more is needed?"

I pulled myself together; and remembered I was a policeman.

"I've got to know exactly what happened," I said. "I've got to know if it was self-defense, or…"

The words died on my tongue. To accuse a naked man of anything else in the death of three heavily armed individuals who had threatened his life, as I had just heard them do over the annunciator, was ridiculous.

"No," said Charley. "This was done during a period of martial law in Blauvain. Your office will receive a report from our command about it; but actually it's not even something within your authority."

Some of the tension that had been in him earlier seemed to leak out of him, then. He half-smiled and became more like the friendly officer I had known before Kensie's death.

"But that martial law is about to be withdrawn," he said. "Maybe you'll want to get on the phone and start getting your own people out here to tidy up the details."

—And he stood aside to let me go.

One day later, and the professional soldiers of the Exotic Expeditionary Force showed their affection for Kensie in a different fashion.

His body had been laid in state for a public review in the open, main floor lobby of the Blauvain City Government building. Beginning in the grey dawn and through the cloudless day—the sort of hard, bright day that seems impatient with those who will not bury their dead and get on to further things —the mercenaries filed past the casket holding Kensie, visible at foil length in dress uniform under the transparent cover. Each one as he passed touched the casket lightly with his fingertips, or said a word to the dead man, or both. There were over ten thousand soldiers passing, one at a time. They were unarmed, in field uniforms and their line seemed endless.

But that was not the end of it. The civilians of Blauvain had formed along either side of the street down which the line of troops wound on its way to the place where Kensie lay waiting for them. The civilians had formed in the face of strict police orders against doing any such thing; and my men could not drive them away. The situation could not have offered a better opportunity for the Blue Front to cause trouble.

One heat grenade tossed into that line of slowly moving, unarmed soldiers, for example… But nothing happened.

By the time noon came and went without incident, I was ready to make a guess why not. It was because there was something in the mood of the civilian crowd itself that forbade terrorism, here and now. Any Blue Front activists trying such a thing would have been smothered by the very civilians around them in whose name they were doing it.

Something of awe and pity, and almost of envy, seemed to be stirring the souls of the Blauvain people; those same people of mine who had huddled in their houses twenty hours before, in undiluted fear of the very men now lined up before them and moving slowly to the City Government building. Once more, as I stood on a balcony above the lobby holding the casket, I felt those winds of vast movement I had sensed first for a moment in lan's office, the winds of those forces of which Padma had spoken to me. The Blauvain people were different today and showed the difference. Kensie's death had changed them.

Then, something more happened. As the last of the soldiers passed, Blauvain civilians began to fall in behind them, extending the line. By mid-afternoon, the last soldier had gone by and the first figure in civilian clothes passed the casket, neither touching it nor speaking to it, but pausing to look with an unusual, almost shy curiosity upon the face of the body inside, in the name of which so much might have happened.

Already, behind that one man, the line of civilians was half again as long as the line of soldiers had been.

It was nearly midnight, long past the time when it had been planned to shut the gates of the lobby, when the last of the civilians had gone and the casket could be transferred to a room at Expeditionary Headquarters from which it would be shipped back to the Dorsai. This business of shipping a body home happened seldom, even in the case of mercenaries of the highest rank; but there had never been any doubt that it would happen in the case of Kensie. The enlisted men and officers of his command had contributed the extra funds necessary for the shipment. —Ian, when his time came, would undoubtedly be buried in the earth of whatever world on which he fell. Only if he happened to be at home when the time came, would that earth be soil of the Dorsai. But Kensie had been—Kensie.