Not For Glory (17 page)

I shook my head. "No. Let's get—"

"But we earned—"

"Save it,"
Levin snapped. He shrugged an apology at me. "Sorry, sir. My fault."

I was beginning to like Skirmisher-Sergeant Sid Levin. He took responsibility for his man. He'd probably chew the boy's head off later, out of my sight—but any discipline should properly come from him, not me.

A blast from the boat's steam whistle spun me around, the pistol coming up as if by its own volition.

At the motion, Shimon shook his head. "Asshole. Did you check to see whether or not it's loaded?"

I shrugged. There isn't a way to do that with a flintlock. Oh, you can open the pan to see if it's primed, and you can push the tamping stick down the bore to see if there's something in there, but you can't tell if it's been loaded unless you loaded it yourself.

Which I already knew. I guess I was a bit more shaken than I'd thought. I cocked the piece, then pointed the gun at the nearest of the Dutch corpses before pulling the trigger.

The gun went off with a cloud of acrid smoke, and a loud bang; the body barely shook from the bullet.

"It was loaded," I said, stooping to retrieve a powderhorn and shoulderbag from one of the dead men. "It looks like the captain's a bit nervous," I said. "Let's get aboard."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

"This Thing that Ruth Did . . ."

Alsace, Northern Continent,

Dutch Confederation Territory

Somewhere on the Neu Hunse

03/07/44, 2207 local time

The nights on Alsace are bright. Its moon is even larger than Earth's, and a trifle closer to Alsace than Luna is to Earth. You'd think that the tides would be the cause of the dramatic rising and falling along the banks of the river—but you'd be wrong. It's nothing so exotic; it's all caused by the spring thawing up in the mountains. While we were well into spring, in some spots along the banks the high-water marks stood two, three meters above low-water.

I stood at the
Bolivar
's stern rail, watching the stars dance on the water behind us, spray from the twin paddlewheels giving me an occasional jolt when the light breeze would catch it and blow it my way.

As we passed by another of the riverfront houses belonging to the wealthier Dutch hempwood planters, the boat slowly turned to follow one of the river's immense curves. It reminded me of a passage from Twain, so I pulled out the copy of
Life on the Mississippi,
and thumbed the pageglow on.

The water cuts the alluvial banks of the "lower" river into deep horseshoe curves; so deep, indeed, that in some places if you were to get ashore at one extremity of the horseshoe and walk across the neck, half or three-quarters of a mile, you could sit down and rest a couple of hours while your steamer was coming around the long elbow, at a speed of ten miles an hour, to take you aboard again.

I hadn't truly understood that from looking at the topo maps; it had only been an intellectual game.

Here on Alsace, it came alive. As the river turned endlessly, it often would have been possible to leave the
Bolivar
at one of its stops and catch up with it by walking straight across one of the Dutch plantations while the boat followed the twists in the river.

In fact, despite the fact that the paddlewheel was almost twice as fast as the sort Twain described—the boilers were of offworld manufacture, and could easily hold twenty times the pressure—I could have walked the eight hundred klicks from Leewenhoek to Marne in little more than three times the thirteen local days it would take us to steam the distance.

Lay a ruler on the map and it will read out as eight hundred klicks; measure in all the twists and turns, and you'll find that the trip is more than eight times that distance.

Figuring orbits is a lot easier than dealing with a twisting river. . . .

Shimon was standing beside me; I hadn't heard him walk up. That was bad. You should always pay attention. I learned that a long time ago.

A tabstick dangling from the corner of his mouth, he leaned back against the rail. "Sorry about Zev," he said simply.

"Thanks."

He turned and faced the water, and we just stood there for a few minutes, side by side, watching the water and smoking our tabsticks until he said, "Figured it out yet?"

"What?"

"The fix." He blew a puff of smoke out into the darkness, and then tapped a fingernail against the book.

"Maybe." I shrugged. I had glimmerings, but that was all. "Want to tell me right now?"

"Nah. Too tempting." We both considered the churning water below. "Two things you've got to remember, Tetsuki. First is that the Dutch aren't a nation, not here. They're a confederation—during peacetime, the families were feuding with each other more of the time than not." He fell silent.

"And the other?"

He chuckled. "The other is a joke that we both wouldn't find funny." He looked at me a long time. "Sometimes I think you don't even understand yourself, nephew mine."

He was either talking nonsense, or talking over my head. "Maybe so," I said. It seemed like the thing to say. Maybe it was. The sky didn't split open and vomit fire on me. That's always a good sign. "You want to tell me the joke?"

"Eh?"

"The joke, the one I won't find funny."

He considered the end of his tabstick, then threw it overboard. "There was a sport, back in the twentieth century—in the US, pre-NAF—called baseball. Never mind the details—I don't quite understand them myself—but you have to know that the points scored were called 'runs,' and that for a man to score even forty of these points during a whole year was quite good, and nobody had ever scored sixty runs in one year until a man named George Herman Ruth did. You got all that?"

"Baseball. Sixty runs. George Herman Ruth. Got it."

"Good boy. Now the joke: Yankele comes running up to his grandfather. 'Zayde, Zayde,' he says. 'George Herman Ruth just scored sixty runs.'

"The grandfather sits for a long time and thinks, apparently puzzling over something important. Finally, he raises an eyebrow and looks over at Yankele. 'Yankele,' he says, 'this thing that Ruth did—is it good for the Jews?' " He lit another tabstick. "Funny, eh?"

I shrugged. "Not at all."

He smiled for a moment. "Exactly, Tetsuki, exactly. To you and to me, it isn't funny at all." He clapped a hand to my shoulder. "I'll leave you to your reading."

I must have read the next section a hundred times. It was all there. Shimon hadn't distracted me with his joke that wasn't funny. I had it. Even I could turn it all over to Yonni Davis now. There wasn't any more reason to keep Shimon Bar-El alive.

On the other hand . . . maybe I was missing something. I've always been a staff officer, specializing in slipping off and making people unexpectedly dead, not organizing a disperse-and-reform. Maybe I was missing something. And besides, Shimon would be able to implement it better than I could, better than anyone else could.

A while longer. I could let him live a while longer.

There was a whisk of leather soles on the deck behind me. This time I wasn't surprised. I shut the book, trying not to seem too hurried.

"Good evening, Inspector-General." Celia von du Mark stood nearby. Only one of her peacemakers was with her, a careful five paces behind.

The pages were still glowing; I thumbed them off. No need to draw attention to the book. It wouldn't have hurt if she'd read most of it, but the passages I'd been reading . . . well, there were things in there that she didn't need to know.

"Call me Tetsuo." I shot a glance at the upper deck, behind the wheelhouse. Soloveczik, the young skirmisher who had wanted to exercise standard booty rights, was up there, on guard. Well, he might not have been much on discipline, but he was a good shot.

"I'd rather not," she said. "I really don't like getting friendly with murderers," she added, in a voice so flat and even as to suggest that she was commenting on the weather.

"The docks today?" I pulled a tabstick from my pocket and struck it to life. In the darkness, the end glowed with a comforting redness. "That bothering you?"

"Yes." She held out her fingers in a V. I passed her the tabstick and lit myself another. A slow draw, then, "Filthy habit."

"Smoking? Or killing?" I shrugged. "We've got both on our consciences, you and me. If you have a conscience, that is."

"Me?" She was offended; Celia von du Mark was not used to getting lectures on morality from such as I.

"You. You could have had your peacemakers disperse the mob. It might have taken a whole ten seconds. Not that you give a damn about my sergeant, but it would have kept some locals alive."

She snorted. "You know a lot about mobs, eh?"

"Standard part of officer training on Metzada. Now," I said, warming to the subject, "Africans are tricky, but . . . take your basic Eastern mob—Pharsi, Indians, Hmong, Chinese, like that. Present them with a superior force and they martyr themselves all over you. Messy. But when you've got Westerners, almost any organized group can make them run. Usually." I spent a moment examining the glowing head of the tabstick, then flicked it overboard. "Doesn't always work. But it usually does. It would have, today."

"You're saying that I could have saved their lives."

"Exactly. They would have known that they couldn't stand up to wireguns. You," I raised my voice and called out to her guard, "how many rounds do you have in a clip? Fifty? Seventy?"

"Plenty."

I shrugged. "It really doesn't matter. The Dutch would have known that they couldn't stand up to your peacemakers' fire. In order to get the same result out of Levin's three bows, we had to kill."

She was silent for a long moment. Then, "You're just trying to rationalize your way out of it."

"Or you are. Or both. Fact: five men died today. I don't know that the lives of one Metzadan sergeant or a few reasonably nice Dutch settlers are properly any of your concern—"

"Don't you
dare
say that to me. You hated them enough to—"

I silenced her with a snort. "No, I didn't hate them. Matter of fact, Sweelinck impressed me as a good man, trying to make the best of a bad situation. Hell, Celia, if he'd really wanted me dead, I'd be cold by now. Decent man—had to work himself up to it."

"You say you liked him but you had him killed?"

I shrugged. She didn't understand. "One has nothing to do with the other. As I was saying, I don't know if those lives were properly any of your concern, but if they were, then you let your judgment be swayed by an old grudge, by a desire to see me dead, without having the blood—"

"They weren't going to
kill
you! After we left you at the landing strip, I found Sweelinck. They were just going to rough you up a little, scare you off. That's all. And you—"

I snorted. "Don't talk nonsense. Even if that's true, even if that's what you arranged with Sweelinck and his friends, there's no way I could have known that. And if I had known, I really wouldn't have cared, Celia—"

"That's Inspector von du Mark."

"
Deputy
Inspector von du Mark. A bit of free advice: you'd be better off, instead of trying to figure out what I'm going to do and how to mess that up, looking out for yourself. You're not going to catch us violating any of your precious import regs. Besides," I added, just for a bit of misdirection, "if we already did, it's too late."

" 'Not going to catch us.' That sounds as though it would be fairly dangerous for me if I
did
catch you, doesn't it?"

"You're not thinking it through again. Metzada's position is always precarious; I'd hardly take the chance of killing even a Commerce Department
deputy
inspector."

"I saw one of your men eyeing the peacemakers' weapons. So tell me what you'd do if you found that you really needed, say, five wireguns."

"The only thing I could think of is that—given that we really needed five wireguns—it would be kind of convenient if six Commerce Department personnel had been killed in a Dutch ambush. All surviving witnesses would swear to that. The rumors would hurt; witnesses are dangerous."

She started to open her mouth to call for her guard; I silenced her with a quick shake of my head. "Go easy. You've got four deaths on your conscience. Isn't that enough for today?"

Celia gave me a long, slow look. "You might be bluffing. I don't think you'd really kill everyone aboard this boat, just to avoid a beating."

I just smiled. "Would you?"

"No, of course not. I—"

"Would rather take a beating. Which suggests you've never been on the receiving end of a good working-over."

"And you have."

"A few times." I shrugged. "I didn't like it much." I lit another tabstick. "I'm not bluffing, Celia. I can't afford to. Never, Deputy Inspector von du Mark,
never
try me. Metzada has a reputation, the Bar-El clan and its Hanavi family have a reputation . . . and I'm busy building one for myself. Don't try and find out if it's well-founded. Just take my word for it."

"Reputation is worth killing for?"

I smiled, remembering a deserted Kabayle hut on Endu.

"Easy, all. Tetsuo, it's your turn," the Sergeant says.

I nod; he kicks in the frame of the greased-paper window to distract those inside while I go in through the open door, rolling once, then bouncing to my feet.

"All clear," I say. The hut is deserted; the occupants have fled—but not too long ago, certainly not more than a few hours. The rocks from the central fire are still too hot to touch.

There's nobody here, but they've left behind almost everything. The multicolored blankets that they wear and sleep in, cooking pots, even a rack of spears, over against the far wall, away from the door. And not just spears, either. While they've taken all their guns, I find a box of cartridges over in the corner. They'd left in one hell of a hurry if they'd forgotten those.

Off in the distance, I can hear the bleating of goats. They've even left their livestock behind.

And then I see it, sitting on a shelf on the far wall: a wooden doll.

It's dressed in khakis and has the chain-circled magen David insignia on its left shoulder, a single stripe on its sleeves.

The Sergeant laughs. "A fucking demon doll," he says, as he takes it down from the shelf "No wonder they didn't want to hang around and greet us in person." There hasn't been a Metzadan in this part of Endu for fifty years.

"Well, Private, I think you deserve a promotion." He pulls a stylus from his pocket and adds another pair of stripes to the doll's sleeve, and then puts the doll back on the shelf.

"Okay, kill all the animals, smash everything except the doll, and then we move out. And keep your fucking eyes open. Next village might not be so easy," the Sergeant says.

"Perhaps," I said.

Without another word, she walked off. Thinking, no doubt, black thoughts. Wondering, certainly, what we had smuggled down to use on the poor, innocent Dutch.

It can get annoying when someone clever starts wondering, and just maybe Celia had developed a bit of cleverness in the past few years. Or maybe I'd lost some.

"Damn." I stared down at the book in the palm of my hand. It was too much of a risk keeping it around. A pity, that: an affection for books runs in my family. Still . . .

So I tossed it overboard, and watched it splash into the Nouveau Loire. Or Neu Hunse. The
Bolivar
steamed away from the ever-expanding ripples.