Not For Glory (4 page)

I never really liked Zev, which wasn't a problem. You're not supposed to like your partner. I mentioned that once, to a new Section draftee I was training. He asked why. "Because it doesn't hurt so much when you have to shoot him for going lame on you," I said. He thought that was a figure of speech, until the first time he went offplanet on a Section assignment—and one cold, wet night in a forest in Thuringia, broke his leg.

"I heard your signal," Zev finally said, when there was nobody around to overhear us. "Rivka?"

"She wants to see me. Us." I nodded. "But we're going to meet Ari, first."

He frowned at that. "Not a good idea to buck the deputy, Tetsuo."

"You want to do something about it?"

"Not me." He smiled, a gap-toothed whiteness that seemed overly bright in a face the color of bitter coffee that's been lightened with only a hint of milk. "Not me. I'm your
partner
."

"Right."

Zev at my side, I limped my way out into the corridor and the warrens, toward the tube.

CHAPTER TWO

The Bear and the Lion

Metzada, Port

Personnel shuttle elevator

12/20/43, 1228 local time

There aren't any real surprises when the first troop skipshuttle lands on Metzada. It lands; it's taxied to the elevator; it's lowered into Metzada; a group of men, some of them short a few pieces, all of them bone-tired, get off.

Simple.

Straightforward.

We've been in contact since the transport cleared the Gate, and appropriate notices have already been distributed to clan and family of the dead and wounded; widows and orphans are entitled to know, as soon as is possible, that they are widows and orphans. Clan elders have been alerted to station seniors near tube entrances to turn back family members whose understandable want to see wounded loved ones would, if acted upon, interfere with what has to be done.

At least, there aren't supposed to be surprises—even minor ones.

Emptying an orbiting troop transport is primarily a problem in logistics. When I was a boy I was fascinated by logistics, and thought I might like to specialize in it. The science and art of matching materiel to needs has always enchanted me. I was tapped—too early, in my opinion—for Section, and I never had the chance to study it formally, but the fascination remains, and maybe some of the orientation.

My uncle Shimon, for example, has always talked of Patton's Third Army's relief of Bastogne as the greatest cavalry maneuver of all times. He's right, of course, but to me, it's the most beautiful logistics exercise in history. The trick wasn't just pulling an army out of a winter battle, turning it ninety degrees, and marching it a hundred-fifty kilometers to launch an attack, it was to make sure that when Patton's troops started the attack, enough supplies would arrive that they could finish it. A gorgeous exercise. . . .

The problem of landing a regiment starts skyside. Let me give you the numbers: the ships the Thousand Worlds uses as troop transports each have only two shuttlebays, one port, one starboard. A skipshuttle can hold only a few more than five hundred men—fewer if there are wounded among them. If we're lucky, there's about two thousand Metzadans in the troop transport.

Two trips per ship, right? Two waves, two orbits, yes?

No. Remember, we still have to get a skipshuttle back up to the transport for the third and fourth wave, and, practically speaking, only one skipshuttle can leave or depart per orbit. Now, if we didn't have to reuse the specific skipshuttles that came with the transport, it'd be easier. But TW pilots fly the shuttles, and each of them will fly only his own ship. Which means that even after his ship touches down and we unload it, we still have to boost it back up to the surface, haul it five klicks down the runway to the TW laser launcher, and let them refit it for launching.

Minimum turnaround time on a skipshuttle is about eight hours; the ablative launch engines are basically just popped in after the casing and ashes of the previous engine are cleaned out; filling the maneuvering tanks, testing and—if necessary—blackboxing avionics packages takes a while.

But there's no operational bottleneck there; that's all as fixed as the movements of the planets in the sky. The only bottleneck we can do something about is down here.

Medical has long been alerted: operating rooms are heated up to handle priority cases; surgeons and assistants have been put through a forced-sleep regimen and wakened just early enough so that they'll be over their early-morning drowsiness when the skipshuttle touches down. Emergency-medicine specialists, both physicians and medicians, are hustled to the port, medics stripped from homebound regiments and slotted into support companies to give the doctors what help they need.

The transport orbiting above has to be cleared quickly, and in the appropriate order: the wounded first, followed by the unwounded troops, and finally the officers and the commander. Officers—except for wounded, of course—are first-down-last-up offworld; returning to Metzada, they're first-up-last-down.

Everybody has a place around the huge combination elevator/airlock that lowers the skipshuttle down into Metzada—you're "on" Metzada when the wheels touch down on the frigid runway; you're "in" Metzada when you're underground, where we live. There are eighteen airtight doors circling the bottom of the shaft; no matter how the skipshuttle is positioned, the rear engines are going to block at least three of them, four if it's not positioned quite right on the elevator.

But that still leaves at least fourteen usable doors. Even if you assume it's going to take as much as five seconds apiece to clear a wounded man through a door—it won't, not if the litter carriers are moving—you'd think we could empty a five-hundred man skipshuttle in less than six minutes.

The bottleneck is higher up: the TW skipshuttles only have two exit doors, and the trick is to move in and move the wounded quickly through those. We're lucky if we can empty a skipshuttle in half an hour.

Everybody is there waiting as pumps whir and whine to first purge the lock of as much of the outer air as possible, and then hiss as it adds real, breathable air.

The doctors call what they do triage, but it isn't.

Combat men know what triage is; women don't.

Triage is where you shunt aside those who don't need help because they're not badly hurt—they get treated later—set aside those who are already dead but don't know it—they get buried later—and give priority treatment to those you might be able to save.

Everything to save a life, sure; nothing but the minimum maintenance possible gets done offplanet. Reconstruction is saved for the experts, for the women. For one thing, all medics and medicians are, obviously, men—and they're trained to leave what they can to the real doctors.

Like the fourth-best reconstructive surgeon on Metzada: my second wife—who, by the way, has a subspecialty in emergency medicine. Overachievement runs in the family.

Suki didn't notice me as the tube doors wheezed open and I walked into the hallway around lock twelve.

A fat, balding senior sergeant with a logistics pin on his collar walked over to me. He shook hands with me, then with Zev.

"Sofaer," he said, introducing himself. We tend to be rigorous in our informality on Metzada.

"Yes, Sergeant. How goes it?"

"We have a . . . minor problem here."

"Anything I can help with?"

He shrugged. "Perhaps."

"Skipshuttle on runway,"
speakers blared. "
ETA five minutes."
The team of twenty khaki-clad medics, three white-suited nurses, and two doctors lolled near their airlock, continuing their quiet conversations, as though they hadn't heard. Two medicians played a quiet game of gin over in the corner, while a doctor and her medic assistant involved themselves in some heated but quiet discussion. Everything and everyone was ready to move; there was no need to stand at attention while waiting.

"An unloading problem," Sofaer said. "One of the high-priorities wants to offload last. A bit of laxity in discipline, it seems—in the Third Battalion?" He glanced at me, curious.

So was I. Bad discipline doesn't run in my brother's battalion, although it sometimes seems that way to outsiders. He carries traditional Metzadan informality farther than traditional, although not much farther.

Suki glanced once again through the clear plexi, as though to reassure herself that, indeed, the speakers were telling the truth and the skipshuttle wasn't yet at the bottom of the elevator shaft. She brought her hand up to her throat and whispered into the microphone, then waited for a moment, listening to the voice over her headphones before nodding and yessing.

She was playing with her bun, pretending to tuck a loose strand of black hair back where it belonged, back under the headphone strap, when she first saw me. Momentarily, annoyance swept across her face.

"Business," I said, dismissing the unvoiced objection with a word. She wouldn't want me joggling her elbow any more than I'd want her joggling mine.

She nodded. On Metzada, business trumps everything.

I don't want to describe her. A man's description of his favorite wife has always seemed to me to necessarily either traffic on matters that are properly private—or be manifestly superficial. Let's just say that she's a slim but lovely woman, whose body shows little evidence of having borne three children—two of them by Shlomo, one by me—and whose long black hair is always bound up in public.

Little enough of my life is private. Her waist-length hair enfolding the three of us is something I'll set off, sequester from the rest of my life, shared only with Rachel. It was something I had always envied my brother. Yes, I had lusted after my brother's wife, and when he died, I married her.

The second is common on Metzada; the first was wrong.

When I meet God, I'm going to ask Him why. Not that it'll be my first question.

"ETA four minutes."

Zev, Sofaer and I huddled around her while she spoke into her microphone.

"No," she said to the distant listener. "You tell him that he is to come out when he's assigned to, just like—he won't—? Then have Ari tell him. Dammit, you know that he doesn't take to regeneration—I've got him projected for the OR with the rest of the criticals, and that means he goes right in. No, I've got a schedule to meet, too—there's a brand new right supraorbital ridge sitting in the mold waiting for . . . never mind. Just tell him to get out in the prescribed order."

She looked over at me. I raised an eyebrow.

"Dov," she said, putting her hand over her microphone. "He says he's coming out with Ari."

Zev smiled. "Dov. Figures."

"That it does." I nodded. "I'll handle it, Sergeant."

Sofaer ingratiated himself to me by accepting that with a nod, walking away, and jacking in his own headset a few meters away.

There are thousands of Dovs on Metzada. But when somebody in the family uses the name without a modifier, it means Master Private Dov Ginsberg.

"What kind of injury?" I didn't see what the problem was. If Dov were awake enough to discuss the matter, his injuries were at least ten days old. Another few minutes could hardly make a whole lot of difference. If he were under treatment, the treatment could be expanded to include an appropriate sedative.

The women in my life seem to read my mind; it annoys the hell out of me. "Not an injury," she said. "And I don't want him already doped up when the anesthesiologist gets her hands on him." She shook her head. "It was shipboard—he's got a hot appendix. Lahav has been pumping him full of valda oil and antibiotics, packing his belly with ice, and sitting up with him for the past week. He should have cut. It's a hell of a lot easier than a godamn bowel resection, which the medicians do all the damn time, but you goddamn men don't have any self-confidence with a knife, unless you're using it to . . . Can you help?"

"Let's see." I pulled my own headset off my belt, plugging it in next to hers as I set it on my head. "Inspector-General Tetsuo Hanavi," I said. "Give me Ari."

"ETA three minutes. Shuttle on elevator."
The stone walls vibrated with the sound of distant machinery.

He must have been in the same compartment as the senior medic; it was only a half-second until I heard my baby brother's firm baritone. "Yes, Tetsuo?"

"What the fuck is going on?" I asked, politely.

Zev snickered. He and Ari did not get along. Some people in Section develop a bit of scorn toward those who bear weapons openly, who don't have to pretend.

"Nothing I can't handle," Ari said. "Dov's right here with me. He can hold out another few minutes—he figures he's responsible for me until we're in Metzada."

My uncle Shimon told Dov to watch out for Ari. Dov tends to interpret instructions his own way. Or, rather, the way he thinks Shimon would want him to.

Great. Just what I need, I thought, to get caught in a disagreement between my brother and my wife. Or, more properly, it was Inspector-General Tetsuo Hanavi being caught in a dispute between Lieutenant Colonel Ari Hanavi and Dr. Tetsuko Hanavi.

Ninety-nine percent of me being inspector-general is a fraud; my number-one deputy, a master colonel, is really the IG; I wear the stars both as a cover for my real profession and to keep busies out of Zachariah's hair. Trouble was, this fell into the one percent that isn't.

Usually a problem. Not this time. "Put him on," I said, as I turned my face toward the wall. A whisper is as good as a shout, sometimes.

"One second, then."

"ETA two minutes."

"Yes, sir." It was Dov's voice, flat, emotionless. Real emotion was a part of him that got chopped off long before I ever met him.

"I may be leaving to pay a call on Uncle Shimon shortly." I whispered. "Perhaps within a week. If you have medical clearance, I'll put in for you to go with me. No promises, but I'll put in for it. If you have medical clearance."

There was no answer.

"Dr. Hanavi is your doctor. She will provide medical clearance, if anyone does."

Still no answer.

"You're going to have to spell it out," Zev said. "He's not too bright, our Dov."

I put my hand over the mouthpiece. "Shut up, Zev.—Dov," I went on, taking my hand away, "she won't provide medical clearance if she's angry with you. And I'll have to go see Shimon alone. For whatever purpose I'm assigned."

That registered. "Understood, sir. I will leave the shuttle with the wounded, sir."

I unplugged the phones. "We're all set," I said as I turned to Suki, and went personal long enough for a quick kiss on the lips. "And with—"

"ETA one minute."

"—one minute to spare."

We pay for the life of our people with pieces of ourselves.

Sometimes that's a figure of speech; often it's literal. The teams of stretcher-bearers first brought down men who were missing pieces.

It was a bloodless affair. Outward bleeding had been stopped for hundreds of hours.

"I'll wait here while you have your little reunion." Zev snickered again.

"Just what I was going to suggest." Asshole.

As the stream of stretcher-bearers worked its way from the shuttle toward the doors, I ducked my head as I stepped out into the frosty air, then dodged to one side to avoid two thickset medicians carrying the upper two-thirds of a man on a stretcher. He was missing from about the thighs down.