Mercenary (40 page)

By day Roulette shared the ongoing preparations for the encounter. I knew she had extensive knowledge of pirate ways, and that she was sharing her information with the other officers; she was invaluable in this respect. Shrapnel, too, was working with Sergeant Smith to train special forces; the two got along well together, and there was a lot to do. One good man can be worth as much as a cruiser!

Like the Mongols, we were alert to the ways of the enemy. My use of the term horde above is, in part, facetious; we were no horde, and neither were the original Mongols. We were a disciplined, potent fighting machine, as they had been. Battles are seldom won by hordes.

By night Rue was mine, in her fashion. I have stressed that emotional love was no part of my military experience, yet to the extent I was able, I was smitten by her. It was not merely that she was the loveliest creature I had encountered, in every physical way the personification of beauty and sex appeal, though that was certainly a significant part of it. It was not that she was intelligent and spirited, though I liked that, too. It was no longer that she was forbidden fruit; now that fruit was in my possession. It was not that she was a nice person, for she was not; she was a tempestuous, strong-willed, sharp-tongued wench with redeeming qualities to balance it out. I think mainly it was the challenge that she represented; specifically, the emotional challenge. For if I did not love her, neither did she love me. She understood, as well as I did, the nature of this marriage; it was a necessary device to facilitate a necessary alliance. I had already made and broken one marriage for the benefit of the unit and might do so again; she had no absolute security. Yet I could not think of any man-woman relationship as purely political, not when it involved sex. Not when the woman was as vibrant and desirable as Rue. And I think she had some similar reservations.

She was in some ways a wild creature, controlled but not tamed. I wanted to tame her, specifically, in bed. I wanted sex my way. Gentle and loving and mutual. And she simply didn't understand. “You promised not to make me beg,” she reproached me.

“Nonviolence is not begging!” I protested. “I want you to respond without humiliation or pain.”

She looked at me as if I were uttering something disgusting. She had been raised to believe that rape was the natural order, and that a woman could only enjoy sex as an adjunct to some sort of distress.

Anything else was obscene. She literally could not turn on unless treated roughly. If I refused to be rough, she simply lay there and tolerated me; her code did not permit her to resist me anymore, whatever she implied in public. The code varied from band to band and clan to clan, but she was true to her variant.

Inevitably I found I had to strike her, or revile her verbally, to make her happy.

And so it seemed I had won the sexual battle, on the nuptial night, but lost the war. I had raped Roulette but could never share any other kind of sex with her. This promised to become a minor private hell, for I desperately wanted that other kind of relationship. I was a prisoner of her nature.

On one occasion, when we had come to an unsatisfactory culmination, I heard her singing faintly: “And every day that your garden is waste, / Will spread all o'er with rue, rue...” In a fury of embarrassment, I left the chamber. But on the next occasion, when she started the song, I struck her on the shoulder with what minimal roughness I could get away with, and she stopped, and it was better. She was training me.

Our fleet arrived at what we code-named the Danube: the larger, denser river of sand that sheltered the Marianas' base. We had split into three groups with the wings proceeding first, scouting the territory for resistance or ambush. When it turned out there was none, our center group accelerated at 1.5 gee and closed the gap rapidly. All three arrived at the Danube together, perfectly coordinated. My staff was competent about maneuvers.

But observing this in my role as King Bela of Hungary, I refused to be tempted by the seeming delay of the Mongol center. I remained safely ensconced beyond the river. Let the Mongols cross the single ford; I would mow them down while they were vulnerable, and if they did manage to cross, they would still be fighting with their backs to the river: an uncomfortable situation. The advantage was all mine, as long as I waited and forced them to come to me.

Indeed, my assessment was accurate, for the Marianas did not come out to meet us. Mondy's sources informed us that they had a fine and ready fleet, well disciplined and well supplied, probably able to defeat ours in open battle. But they were canny, waiting for us to commit ourselves, knowing that it would be ten or twelve days before our unit under Straight could join us, and that they could choose to attack us at any time before then. They could afford to wait while our supplies diminished.

I was of mixed emotions. I knew we had to beat the pirates and that Emerald had a strategy to do this that the others believed would work. But as King Bela I could not see how a Mongol victory was possible. The Mongols had to cross the Danube—and be vulnerable.

“I'm glad I'm not on your side,” Rue remarked smugly. I whammed her on her delightful derriere, and things proceeded from there. I hated to admit it, but there was a certain pleasure in roughness. I had never had as intense an experience as the nuptial rape. Could her way be right?

Emerald muttered something about the situation being wrong and ordered a strategic retreat. The Mongols had made no effort to cross the Danube but went back the way they had come.

What? As King Bela I gaped, then realized that once the Mongols had realized that they faced a superior force in an impregnable position, they had known that combat would be disastrous. So they had to back off, stalling for time until their missing unit caught up.

Did I want them to do that? I decided that was not in King Bela's best interest. Cautiously I deployed some of my forces across the Danube, ready to back off if this turned out to be a ruse. But it wasn't; my advance only hastened the retreat of the Mongols, who were no longer in fighting formation. It hadn't occurred to them that I might advance at this stage; their horses were pointed the wrong way.

In space, my strategy was echoed by the Marianas. Suddenly our fleet was in genuine retreat. Whatever Emerald had planned had gone wrong; the Marianas had stuck to conventional strategy, refusing to be spooked or cowed, and it had paid off. Conventional ways are conventional because they are basically sound; one deviates from them at one's risk.

Emerald seemed disgruntled when I met her. “Well, it just didn't make sense to cross the Danube in the face of a prepared, alert enemy force,” she said defensively. “So we moved back to give you some room; we can fight better in clear space, away from the river.”

“But you can't turn a formation on a dime in space,” I pointed out. “I'm coming out in forward-facing battle order, my van on your tail. If you pause to reform your formation, I'll tear you up. It's similar to the problem of a small ship trying to turn about in space, during pursuit.”

“You won't follow that close,” she said. “All we need is enough leeway to turn.”

“I won't give you that leeway.”

“You'll have to. We have faster ships than you do.”

“Not all of them,” I countered. “Any that lag will be lost, so you have to slow the main fleet to accommodate them. My own slower vessels can afford to trail; there's no foe behind us .”

Grim-faced, she turned away.

I had my victory, but it tasted of ashes, for I was in real life the commander of the fleeing force. We would probably survive this debacle, for the Marianas could not force us to fight, but we certainly couldn't win a battle we never fought. Our reputation would suffer, and the remaining pirates of the Belt would hold us in contempt. Our fleet would be intact, but my mission would become impossible.

We accelerated but so did the Marianas fleet, keeping pace, nipping at our stragglers. My assessment was correct; our fleet velocity was limited not by the acceleration of our fastest ships, but by that of our slowest ships, while the enemy's pursuit was the opposite. Their fastest harrying our slowest; that was the awful reality of an extended retreat.

Our strategic one-day withdrawal became a nonstrategic flight in the second day, and a virtual rout in the third. There was no longer any pretense of orderliness; our destroyers hung back only to protect our rear, and in this position they weren't too effective at that. We held our losses to a minimum, but the retreat continued; there was simply no way to turn it. On into the fourth day it went, back along the route we had come. Disaster!

We were now closer to the other river we had crossed, dubbed the Sajo. Beyond that was the Mohi Heath, after which this historic rout had been named. I did not know the details of it, but I knew the Mongols had not gone on to destroy Earth's Europe, so the outcome was clear. How could Emerald have chosen this as a model!

If only Straight had wrapped up his side campaign earlier! But his diversion had been necessary, Emerald had explained, to protect our flank from attack by the pirates' allies. Also, it provided our pirate ally with some excellent opportunity for plunder; that had been a tacit understanding. He was to plunder only pirate resources and leave the colonists alone, and I trusted his commitment on that—but the delay had proved deadly for us!

And what would we do when we came up against the River Sajo? We could not turn south along it for several reasons. First, we could not make the turn without getting torn up by the spearhead of the Marianas, and if we did complete the turn, our right flank would be exposed to their continuing attack.

And if we staved off that, where would we go? The Sajo was part of a tributary system to the Danube, joining it to the south. That was a cul-de-sac, a dead end. If we turned north we faced similar problems and would be heading into the mountains; in this case, the larger planetoids that we would have to maneuver around while under fire from the pirate van. No, our only choice was to funnel through the ford again, then try to prevent them from following. We could probably succeed in that, but it hardly mattered, for they would remain the clear victors in this embarrassing encounter.

“I'm glad I'm not a Mongol,” I muttered with something like gallows humor.

“Get it out of your system,” Rue advised, for we were in our chamber. “Rape me really hard.”

The awful thing was, she meant it. To her way of thinking, a major function of a married woman was to alleviate her husband's distress of any nature by serving as the violent object of his rage. He could beat her up and vent his passions on her body and be at ease with himself, all tensions abated.

I looked at her, standing there in her translucent negligee. She was so stunningly beautiful! Oh, I wanted her, but not this way. “I almost liked it better when you hated me,” I said.

She smiled sweetly. “I still hate you, Captain.”

I shouldn't have been surprised or shocked, but I was. My illusions about the nature of this marriage had taken another jolt. Suddenly it was too much. I was in humiliating retreat on both the military and romantic fronts, and here was my ultimate defeat: her continuing antipathy.

Something crumbled inside me. I dropped facedown on the bed and sobbed.

Dimly I heard her disgusted voice. “What the hell's the matter with you? No man does that, not even when he's dying of a gut wound. Stop it this instant!”

But I was overwhelmed by defeat. I continued to cry into the pillow.

“You damned gutless wonder!” she swore. “Quit it!” And she struck me on the back with her petite fist.

“I can't stand to see a man cry!”

I ignored her. She got on the bed, dug her hands into my side, and rolled me over. Through blurred eyes I saw her sitting beside me, absolutely helpless and furious. “You cursed baby!” she exclaimed. “What do I have to do to make you stop, treat you like a damned infant?”

“Yes,” I blubbered.

“Shit!” she said.

But after a moment she reconsidered. “Okay, jellyfish! You want it, you got it. Come here, baby.” And she lay down beside me, stripped her night clothing, and hauled my head roughly into her bare bosom.

“That better, you sniveling weakling?”

I turned my head, and my cheek slid across her smooth, full breast. I closed my eyes, imagining it was Helse's breast. Suddenly I was at peace. “Yes.”

“Oh, for God's sake!” she muttered, her efforts to shame me having failed. “I should smother you!” And she brought her free hand up to press her other breast at my mouth, preventing me from breathing through it.

I took her nipple into my mouth and sucked on it, a baby indeed.

“You bastard!” she swore, shuddering with outrage. “You spineless, ludicrous excuse for a man! That's disgusting! What the hell do you think I am?”

I closed my teeth, biting gently on her nipple. “Oh!” she exclaimed, but she did not draw away. “You're hurting me!”

Then she paused, evidently struck by a realization. “Do it again.”

I bit her again, lightly. “You sadistic brute!” she murmured, and pressed her breast closer in to my face.

Then it was my turn to pause in realization. She did not have to be truly hurt or degraded; she only needed a pretext. We were playing at the game of “baby,” and now she was getting into it. Perhaps we had found a compromise.

I held her close, and she held me close, and I worked on her divine breast. In due course she heated, physically, and became all soft and shivery against me. “Oh, God.” she whispered. “Oh, God...”

And so, in our askew fashion, we made peaceful and mutually satisfying love for the first time. Out of defeat had come a kind of victory.

Our fleet did funnel through the ford. Emerald did a masterful job of integrating our dispositions so that the Marianas were unable to capitalize on our constriction. We shot through the river pass at relatively high velocity, decelerating, so that our ships would be in position to defend the ford. Here, at last, was where our six-day retreat ended.

The Marianas had to decelerate also, for they did not care to subject their ships to the rigors of the river of sand and were unable to use the ford while our ships guarded it. They had no other way to cross, so were at a loss. Balked, they drew up before the ford, ready but unable to attack. Almost, I shared their frustration; it was not pleasant to have the prey escape. What should have been a phenomenal victory for King Bela had been reduced to a mere advance, owing to the accident of terrain.