Not For Glory (5 page)

Don't talk about regeneration therapy. It doesn't always work, and when it does, it takes a bitch of a long time to regrow anything that's both major and peripheral, like a pair of legs. Two years, minimum, until you'll see baby-pink toenails; another year until new muscles learn to work hard enough to match the ones they've replaced. And that's if you push hard on your therapy sessions.

The stretcher cases ended, followed by the walking wounded.

The next man, walking quickly, not at all supported by the medician at his right, seemed unhurt, save that his hands were missing.

The next one, an uninjured man supporting each arm, half-guiding, half-carrying him, had a well-bandaged face, his features swathed in cloth like a mummy. Eyes aren't too bad. Unless the nerves leading back to the brain have been thoroughly damaged, it only takes about six months to grow them back, six months of walking around in the dark.

The next was Master Private Dov Ginsberg.

Dov was a huge and ugly man; his ragged hairline came to within a couple of centimeters of his heavy brows. From within deep sockets, two seemingly unblinking eyes stared coldly at the world as he walked down the stairway from the skipshuttle all by himself, one thick hand pressed against his abdomen, as though trying to hold himself together.

He brought his free hand up against the side of his face, a sound like a butcher slapping a side of beef, then walked out of the line of walking wounded, gesturing me to accompany him.

It's not his size that makes Dov what he is, although that and his strength helps. I'm not sure what it is, really; it's Something Extra. A Talent, Rachel calls it, like the way her mother can work miracles with a cube of rock and a chisel.

It's not his training in hand-to-hand—he's never had any. Master Private Dov Ginsberg is something else. Leave it at that.

"You say you are going to see Shimon." The voice didn't quite match the body. It's almost high-pitched, not at all the basso rumble you'd expect, and it cracks at unexpected moments. That's about the only thing that does. Dov's loyalty to Shimon Bar-El never wavered. It's a personal matter, going back to before his name was either Dov, or Ginsberg—before he was a Metzadan or a Jew.

"I said perhaps." I shrugged. "The old woman got a letter from him. He says he has some knowledge Metzada wants. If it's important enough to involve us, it may—
may
—be important enough to bring you in on." I didn't go into detail.

He thought that over for a moment. "You won't try to hurt him this time, sir." It wasn't really a question. Or a threat Just random movements of his mouth, while he tried to figure out what Shimon would want him to do.

"Don't be silly," I said. "Of course not." Unless it was necessary. Which he knew as well as I did. He also knew that I'm an inveterate liar. That comes with the job.

But Dov had learned long before that he couldn't kill everyone in the universe who might want to hurt Shimon Bar-El. "I will see you before you leave, sir," he said. "Whether it's with me or without me."

"Very well."

Wordless, he limped off, pressing his hand to his side. At the door, the medicians with Suki hustled him into a wheelchair and rolled him out of sight.

The stream of wounded ended, to be replaced by the rest of the shuttle's human cargo.

I nodded. In the back of my head I'd been keeping a running—or is that limping?—count of the wounded.

Everything can be reduced to numbers. We see six men screaming in pain, lying on the ground, or lying white-faced, eyes distant and unfocused, too far gone to cry. Next to them, we see one man lying dead, and we turn that into a statistic: Metzadan casualties run about five or six injuries to one death. I'd counted two hundred and twelve injured men coming off the shuttle; deaths would run thirty-five and a third, statistically speaking.

There's something special in the face of a soldier getting off a troop carrier; it's the kind of relief you can see in combat when the shot hits the next man.

I made it home, it says. As I always knew I would.

The survivor guilt hits later.

The stream of khaki-clad men thinned, then ended, and there was a still moment before he appeared in the door, looking good, but haggard.

My baby brother. Ari Hanavi. When we played as boys, all of us called him the General, even then. We always knew Ari was going to wear stars someday, if he lived. Real stars, not the phony ones the inspector-general wears.

When I was a boy, the generals I saw and heard about—except for Uncle Shimon—were all stern, strong-jawed types. The sort of man who you just
know
could have been a master private if he had only decided to refuse promotion. I've since learned that that's not always true. One of the best generals I've ever met looks more like a shopkeeper than a soldier. Uncle Shimon always looks like an unmade bed.

But my brother fits the stereotype, at least on the outside. And he carried the double oak leaves of a lieutenant colonel on his shoulder like they were a pair of stars.

He paused a moment in the hatch, spotted me, then bounded down the stairs two at a time, apparently not having to readjust himself to Metzada's 120 percent of the standard gravity the transports keep. His knapsack was on his back, and the ancient IMI Desert Eagle he always uses as a sidearm—he may as well carry a handgun; he's a lousy shot, anyway—was in a snapped-down holster at his hip. His hand strayed to tighten his web gunbelt; Ari may have been ready for the heavy gee of home, but his gunbelt wasn't.

Ari always makes a fetish of carrying his own gear. I think that's a rebellion against Uncle Shimon, who always went into battle carrying nothing more than a notepad and a few spare stylos. There's something to be said for doing it your own way, no matter what that way is.

Behind him, loaders closed the skipshuttle's hatches and pulled the rolling stairways away, shooing all of us toward the doors.

He extended his hand as we walked toward the nearest door. His handshake was firm and warm. The only injury that I could see was on his left hand, and that covered by a clean bandage.

He dismissed my look of concern with a quick pursing of his lips.

"I see you made it," I said.

He shook his head, dismissing that. "Problem." He was still in general-officer mode. "We had some men captured by the Legion. They caught a platoon assault group during a sweep."

"And?"

"Some legionnaires decided to make Haim Elazar talk. They cut off his hands."

I nodded. About the only other way a man can lose both of his hands without getting killed is in bomb-disposal work.

"They hacked them off," Ari said. "For practice. For fun."

"What happened to the platoon?"

He smiled. "A very pretty diversion and rescue. We got all the live ones out. 'The Legion may be tough—' "

" '—but they're still dumb.' "

The French Foreign Legion is still, after all these centuries, an army of moderately well-trained scum soldiers, but they're scum soldiers under tight discipline, always commanded by Saint Cyr officers, although the Legion's home is now on Thellonee, rather than Corsica, for obvious reasons: it's a hell of a lot easier to recruit scum on Thellonee than anywhere else.

Neither Metzada nor the Legion would like to get into a private war, which would serve neither the interests of Greater France nor of Metzada—so we tend to tiptoe around each other. They do more tiptoeing, and that's the way we like it. Rule of thumb: Metzadan line troops can, all things being equal, beat Legion scum soldiers about eighty percent of the time, but the only general to do so without taking horrible casualties has been Shimon Bar-El.

Our casualties are the only ones that count. Casualties among legionnaires don't matter to the French; that's the advantage of using scum soldiers. They're usually people you'd have to jail or shoot anyway.

As we stepped through the door, two gray-suited loaders slammed it shut and then spun-locked it.

There were easily forty soldiers crowding the lock, waiting for Ari, rather than rushing off to their families. That's one of the perks of being a line officer: you get the chance to earn some loyalty. People do things for you that they don't have to.

A tired-faced private who looked, and probably was, about seventeen, spoke up. "What's happening about Haim, Ari?" He called my brother by his first name, but he made it sound like he was saying "sir."

Ari raised his voice. "Everybody,
go home.
I've put in the complaint." He looked over at me. "You'll get the official charge later. For now?"

"I'll get busy on it, as soon as I see the deputy premier. Which will be any time now. But I'll still need the paperwork."

"You'll have it. I'll do it tonight."

"
Sure
you will, Ari." Zev snorted. Sometimes Zev didn't have the brains God gave Frenchmen.

Two sergeants and three privates started to turn toward him, desisting when Ari gave a quick shake of his head.

"Families," he repeated. "Go."

The question would be how to deal with it, and that would be at least partly political. We had long had an explicit POW agreement with the Legion commandant; my quasi-deputy had negotiated it himself, back before I became IG. Basically, full Geneva rights adhere to prisoners properly belonging to the Legion and Metzada—and each command was responsible for punishing any lapses of its own people, and denying tactical advantage to any unit where infractions occur.

A medician pushed his way through the crowd, a phone in his hands. He jacked the base into the wall. "The deputy wants to see you now, she says."

Ari raised his eyebrows. "Something hot?"

"Family matter," I said, as I decided to take Rivka's "you" to mean all three of us. I held out my hand for the phone; the medician handed it to me.

I opened the phone, said, "On our way," listened for a second, heard nothing, snapped it shut, and handed it back.

CHAPTER THREE

"Make It Look Like an Accident"

Metzada, Bar-El Warrens

Effron family quarters

12/20/43, 1348 local time

I've always thought that we live too close to our archetypes.

It's rare that we get a general who doesn't think of himself as Ariel Sharon, Mickey Marcus or David Warcinsky, unless he thinks of himself as another King David. Too many privates think of themselves as Samson in the Temple. Colonels in assault battalions tend to think they're Yonatan Netanyahu. I never met a male politician who didn't think he was really Moses, going to lead us back to Earth, back home to Eretz Yisrael. I doubt there's a female politician who doesn't, in her heart of hearts, think of herself as Golda Meir.

Except for the age and the hair, Deputy Premier Rivka Effron didn't look the part. She was a short, slim woman, who looked about sixty, and had looked about sixty for the past ten years. Her gray hair was tied in a tight bun, only a few strands out of place. She tried to pat them back into place as she ushered us out of the public corridor and into her quarters.

"You're late," she said to me, softening the words with a smile that she didn't mean. "We were going to start without you. Welcome back, Ari," she said.

She didn't mean it. She meant,
What are you doing here?

"Thank you, Aunt Rivka," he said, as though he meant it. Which he didn't.

Just to be sociable, I would have said something I didn't mean, but I couldn't think of anything really good.

"Aunt Rivka," I said. That was close enough. She wasn't really our aunt, but my mother's sister's aunt—call that whatever relationship you want to. Well, actually, Aunt Leah is really what people on other worlds would call my mother's half-sister, although we don't use the "half" designation in Metzada. Those who are blood of my blood and bone of my bone are not half of anything.

Modest living is part of the Golda image; except for the walk-in kitchen on one end and the private shower and toilet on the other, the apartment was a typical one-room, suitable for up to three adult bachelors or a single or paired widow with no children at home: basically, a single, a box four meters square, two and a half meters high. Inside was a couch that could convert into a bed at night, a table, and a dozen chairs stacked in the corner for visitors. In the far corner of the room, a desk with a terminal stood next to the delivery tube. The rug was a simple surface-grass mat.

An old copy of a Chagall print decorated the far wall; on the stone coffee table there was a bust of Rivka's second husband Yaacov that, even to my untrained eye, was clearly the work of Rachel's mother.

Two of the chairs had been unstacked, and both were occupied: one by tall, ganging Pinhas Levine, chief of Section—my boss—the other by Senior General David Alon, who was the new DCSOPS, Deputy Chief of Staff, Operations.

Zev gave me a sideways glance as though to say that he didn't think there was any coincidence in that. Nor any danger, really; everyone in the room was among the small number who knew what I really do for a living.

"Tetsuo, Zev, Ari," Levine said, pronouncing our names like ticks on a drumhead. He settled his glasses forward on his nose and picked up a sheaf of flimsies.

Alon didn't say anything; he just set down his coffee cup and sat back in his chair, running stubby fingers through thinning hair before folding his hands over his barely-bulging belly. At fifty or so, he was losing both the minor battle of the receding hairline and the more significant campaign against the slide of his chest down toward his waistline, but the war was by no means over.

Zev unstacked a chair and handed it across the table to me; I set it down for Ari and took the next one for myself.

Rivka gestured us to sit while she went into the kitchenette, coming out with a fresh thermos-pot of coffee and a stack of rolls. "Please. Just out of the oven."

And into the recycler, if there's a God.

I repressed a shudder as I poured myself a cup of the weak coffee—on Metzada, luxury items tend not to be very luxurious—and picked up one of the rolls, biting tentatively, while Zev and Ari did the same.

It tasted horrible. Too little salt, too lumpy, and the bottom of it was burnt.

A logical necessity, really; ever since the days of David Warcinsky and the exile to Metzada, we've taken our meals in communal dining halls. Cooking is a profession: it takes a long time to learn how to do it well. Ancient traditions to the contrary, not every woman can cook well, any more than every man can be a great warrior. It's necessary for us, all too often, to force men beyond their abilities in the field; women in the kitchen are a different matter.

"So," she said, taking her seat between Levine and Alon, folding her hands primly in her lap. "Where do we stand?"

Ari looked puzzled. "I haven't put in the paper—"

"The Legion? It's not that. Forget about that." Alon drummed his fingers against his thigh. "It's not that. It's your uncle Shimon."

Levine tapped a flimsy. " 'Freiheimers,' he says, 'are rivetting their tanks. I know something else of use to you. But I am valuable where I am.' Through no coincidence, I'm sure, emissaries of both Freiheim and Casalingpaesa are offering for Metzada's services. We've meetings scheduled with both for just about a thousand hours from now, at the Thousand Worlds preserve on Thellonee."

He indicated Alon with a jerk of his chin. "David's leading a negotiating team. Tetsuo, we want you to go in under cover of it and talk to Shimon."

His face was grim. On matters of business, my boss's face is always grim. One of the things I like about him is that he never bullshits me, never tells me that I've got an easy one.

"It's not all bad." DCSOPS Alon grinned. "Both sides are so jittery they're each paying for travel and the rooms—so we make a profit, even if we turn both down. Which we won't; Freiheim will make an acceptable offer for a regiment to act as cadre, if nothing else. Going to be a deal."

Ari opened his mouth, and then closed it. I knew how he felt.

Ari earned his captain's bars on Neuva Terra under Shimon, fighting for the Casas, fighting the Freiheimers. Ari spent a lot of that time leading Casas; in fact, his first Metzadan command came later, on another world.

But it's credits that keep Metzada spinning. If the money was right, we'd sign on with Freiheim.

That's something even young light colonels ought to understand; it is something people with stars on their shoulders
must.
Metzada is a fragile operation, all too often; we need the offworld credits and the goods that they bring, and Freiheimer money is just as good as Casalingpaesan. Better, when there's more of it.

Levine smiled. "It seems that Shimon feels the same way you do. Does that suggest anything to any of you?"

Ari and Zev shook their heads.

"Nothing," I said, "except that it's important. And not obvious. And that he's in some kind of trouble or he wouldn't have been so cryptic. He wants us to bust him out of whatever mess he's gotten himself into." My uncle wouldn't have arranged a courier-carried message if it weren't important; he wouldn't have put it in the clear if its use were manifest.

"All true." Levine pursed his lips. "The first part didn't suggest anything to me, until I ran it by a couple of Armor boffins."

"Good men," Alon said. "They're working on the new Maccabee XI—"

"David," Levine said, stopping him. Technically, head of Section and DCSOPS are independent, and equals, but Levine reported daily to the premier; even the chief of staff sees the premier only weekly.

"Sorry."

Levine pushed his glasses back. "It seems that the old NAF Army—"

"United States Army," Alon put in. "Pre-NAF. Pre-unification."

"Quite. Well, it seems that for a while, on one model of tank, they used riveted hulls."

"World War II. M3 tanks."

"Trying to save time and money welding a few points." Lev quirked a smile. "Apparently they also saved the time and money a good test would have cost."

"Typical peacetime innovation that shakes right out in combat. It worked just fine," Alon said, "until the tank got hit. Even with a non-killing hit, often some rivets would break loose and rattle around inside."

I shrugged. So what?

Rivka Effron completed the thought. "They raided around the insides of the tank at bullet speeds, rattling right through the tank crews."

Levine eyed me and Zev levelly. We were expected to see the potentials there, in both directions.

Ari didn't; his eyes went wide. "Which means that a Casa armored cav strike would go through German armor like—"

"Freiheimer," Levine corrected patiently. "They are Freiheimers, not Germans."

Knowing Levine, I read it as a serious reproof, but Ari either didn't see that or didn't care. He just sat back in his chair, clearly satisfied, as though all that that meant was that we now had an edge for hiring on with Casalingpaesa, only pretending to deal with the Freiheimers in order to drive up the price, but . . .

As usual, he was missing the point.

It didn't just cut toward signing on with Casalingpaesa; it also meant that there was some profit to be made by selling a small bit of historical data to Freiheim. Consulting work can sometimes pay well, and you don't get your young men blown to bloody little gobbets when all you're selling is knowledge. Well, most of the time you don't.

Zev spoke up. "So. Do we keep it or sell it? And to which side?"

Ari laughed. It was a full, deep-throated roar, not the hollow laugh that I have.

" 'To which side?' You stupid shit," he said.

Zev's expression didn't change, but a vein in his temple pulsed hard; the room suddenly grew colder. My partner had a wicked temper, and my brother has always had a big mouth.

"Zev." Levine eyed him coldly, his hands resting motionless in his lap. Zev looked at him, then back at me, then shrugged microscopically.

Rivka had missed the whole byplay. "Go on, Ari."

He looked from face to face, at all of us. "You all have been thinking the same thing? You think there's a chance that
Shimon Bar-El
would ever give you something you're going to end up selling to Germans?"

"Freiheimers,"
Alon said, less patience in his voice.

"David." Rivka Effron held up a skeletal hand. "Please. Go on, Colonel."

Dig your own grave.

"To you, perhaps they're
Freiheimers.
But to Shimon, they're Germans. To him, they're
Amalek.
" He turned to Zev. "Tell me: how would you feel about going up against, say, Amharic?"

Zev shrugged. His ancestry was largely Beta Yisrael, which accounted for his cafe-just-barely-au-lait skin. The Amharic had ill-treated his ancestors, called them Falasha, enslaved them, murdered them. My ancestors, too, for that matter, although there are no predominantly Beta Yisrael families in clan Bar-El, just adoptees.

"I find it
difficult
," he said, pursed mouth and sardonic tone making it apparent that he also found it
boring,
"to get excited about what somebody did yesterday, much less about what their grandparents did centuries back. Besides," he said as his smile reappeared, "if my ancestors hadn't taken a right when they should have gone straight, they wouldn't have ended up in Ethiopia. The past is dead."

"The past is dead," Alon agreed with a nod. "I'm going to try and get a deal on a whole division, and I don't care which side. If it's Freiheim, though, we're going to have to get something ahead of time for the Bar-El information so they can have their tanks retrofitted."

Ari turned to him. "You never served with my uncle, did you?"

"Not really." Alon shook his head. "We had companies at the same time under Cohen, but we were in different battalions."

"I know you didn't serve under him, or you'd know the verses." Ari's eyes went vague for a moment. " 'Write this for a memorial in the book, and
rehearse
it in the ears of Joshua, for I will
utterly
blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.' Not my emphasis; his. Or, 'I—I, Shimon Bar-El—remember what Amalek did to Israel, how he
set
himself against him in the way when he came up out of Egypt. Now go and
smite
Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and
spare them not
—' Remember, Tetsuo? Remember?"

I nodded, and shivered, remembering. It's one thing to hear the words in a typical one-room apartment, suitable for up to three adult bachelors or a single or paired widow with no children at home.

It's rather another to sit in a circle about a bonfire, the night before a battle, and watch a quiet pre-battle briefing of what had been a battered regiment, a plea for just one more push before we went home, turn into an exhortation that changed what had been fifteen hundred weary, battered men into fifteen hundred killers with ice in their blood, fire in their nerves, and death in their hands.

Don't tell me it doesn't stand to reason. I was there.

Ari threw up his hands. "Do I look to you like a religious?" he asked, fingers twirling at where earlocks would be. "Do you see payess here?"

Levine's face darkened; he was brought up religious. I was just as happy Ari didn't go on quoting: Levine would have come back with some Mishnah or Gemarah argument about how, in the context of Purim and the identification of Haman as an Amalekite—not to mention Deuteronomy 24:16—being Amalek was a matter of choice, not of ancestry. But that would have moved Ari as little as it would have Shimon, or me—for different reasons, in all three cases.

"I learned from Shimon, on Nueva," Ari said. "It wasn't just business there, not ever. It wasn't Metzada versus Freiheim—it was the Children of Israel versus Amalek. Tetsuo?"

Again, I nodded. I was there, and it was so. "You can talk about Shimon's Children's Crusade as an exception, but it really wasn't. Ask Dov. Unless Shimon's softening in his old age—which I don't believe for a moment—we can go ahead, explore it, but we'll find that there's no way that we can use anything Shimon Bar-El ever does for the benefit of Freiheim, or any other German colony."