Hero (24 page)

"Very good, sir," Matteotti said. "Orders?" he asked, perhaps a touch too crisply.

"Standing orders remain in force, until I have a chance to review them," Ari answered, as custom required. "I've set up an officer's call for—" he glanced down at his thumbnail "—seventy-three minutes from now. I want you to be ready for a few changes. And for an attack order." He pulled out the flimsies and handed them to the sergeant. "You can take a look."

"Now, sir? Or—"

"If I wanted you to look later, Sergeant, I would have
told
you later."

Matteotti nodded, his face studiously blank as he looked over the orders.

Ari let himself smile. So far, so good. It wasn't important to Matteotti whether or not he liked Ari personally, but in any case Matteotti didn't hold it against him. An officer taking over a new outfit always has to step on a few toes to assure everyone—including himself—that he's really in command.

"Tomorrow night, sir?"

"That's right, First," Ari said, hoping he sounded more than confident, less than cocky. It sounded crazy to him, too. But Meteorology reported that storm clouds were rolling in from the west, and it would be best to get the assault over with before the storm.

Or maybe it was just best to get it over with. Period.

"As far as the watch goes tonight, I don't want any laxity," Ari said. "I want a half hour of full darkness prep—none of this red-goggle nonsense." Actually, there's nothing wrong with twenty minutes of red goggles followed by ten minutes of darkness prep. But a new commander must take command.

Ari was sure that Matteotti knew what his new CO was doing, but all the sergeant said was, "Yes, sir."

"You can take it easy on the 'sirs,' First Sergeant. Now, I want you to set up a new watch list for tonight. Other than yourself, there are to be no exemptions. Everybody else in the company stands a watch tonight. The company clerk, the cooks, the exec—everybody. Specifically including me."

Matteotti muffled a complaint.

"Well, what is it?"

"Two things, sir. First, we don't have near enough slots where we need to put everyone on watch tonight. Second, if I put sergeants on guard tours, we don't have enough officers for corporals-of-the-guard—"

"Well, then you'd better go designate some more watch posts, hadn't you? Second, this is guard duty, not combat—rank isn't an issue. You can put Private Ginsberg and me on—" he glanced down at his map "—Post Three. The midnight to 02:00 watch."

Matteotti hesitated, then seemed to decide not to ask who to put on as corporal of the guard over him. "Yes, sir. If everybody else is taking a watch, sir, maybe it would be better if I did, too?"

"No; case closed," Ari left it at that. He didn't plan on spending the rest of his life explaining orders, and he particularly didn't want to have to explain even that. "Now, I sent for the exec at the same time I sent for you. Where is he?"

"Sir, Lieutenant Stuarti may be sleeping in his tent. He was in charge—"

"Captain," Dov put in, "I got the word. He's a drunk."

Ari sneered. "And Shimon put him in charge of Bet Party? So much for the famed Shimon Bar-El intelligence. First Sergeant, you've got things to do. Dov and I will go wake the lieutenant."

Matteotti straightened. "Yes, sir."

"Okay, First, you look like you've got something on your mind. Spit it out."

Matteotti shrugged. "Nothing much, Captain. It's just that, shit, Captain, I know you're doing the best you can, but I don't know that these guys have any more in them."

"They'd better, First. Dismissed." Ari turned away, trying to look theatrically lost in deep thought. A commander was supposed to think deep thoughts.

Ari hoped that, at the least, both Dov and Matteotti were thinking the same thing that he was: that he didn't do a bad job of imitating a company commander. At least, as long as there weren't shots being fired in his ear.

Of course, that was the only time that mattered. The rest of it didn't count, unless he fucked up.

Now let's see if I can tear my exec a new asshole, and then bullshit my way through a staff meeting.

Paulo Stuarti lay snoring in his tent, a carefully corked bottle cradled in one arm, the other flung over his eyes to ward out the mottled daylight. He was a tall man, his thin, mustache several shades darker than his sun-bleached hair.

Dov, as per Ari's orders, had procured a bucket of water.

"Do it."

Dov dumped the pail over the Casa's torso and tossed the bucket aside.

Stuarti straightened with a jerk. "Basta—" he was reaching for his pistol belt when Dov caught his hand with a meaty thunk.

Stuarti sputtered and coughed as Dov jerked him to his feet.

"Get control of yourself, asshole," Ari said. "My name is Ari Hanavi, I'm your new commanding officer, and you've got one hour to report to the mess tent, looking like a good imitation of this company's exec." He spun on the balls of his feet and stalked away.

The NCO meeting broke up slowly, sullenly, until Matteotti cleared his throat, cueing the rest of the sergeants to get out.

Ari jerked his head at Lieutenant Stuarti. "You may as well go sleep it off," he said, letting disgust drip from his voice. "I'm not going to replace you as exec; I wouldn't know what to do with you if I did—"

Stuarti started to smile, relieved at getting off so easily.

"—except turn you over to the Distacamento de la Fedeltà."

That wiped the smile off Stuarti's face.

"Which," Ari finished, "I'm not going to do. One thing, though. You're not leading Bet Party; I'm giving that to Romano. You're going to be right up front, by my side."

Paulo Stuarti started to open his mouth, then closed it. Officially, the Casalinguese army had strong penalties for drinking on duty, and even an exec who is only acting as CO is always on duty. Facing Ari's disapproval wasn't quite the same thing as facing a DF hangman.

"Now get the hell out of my sight." Ari turned his back on him, watching Dov watch him go. He beckoned to Tetsuo, who had been taking it all in.

"So." Tetsuo quirked a smile at Ari. "You want to know how you did, eh?"

"Yes. Both at the officers' call and with the NCOs."

"You did well, I think."

"I hear a 'but'?"

"You're right to play it hard because you don't have any other choice, not with an assault tomorrow." Tetsuo looked from him to Dov. "But I think you'd best not let this go to your head, Captain."

"True. Particularly since I've got a favor to ask. I'd like a nice quiet recon of Anchorville, with special attention to its southern perimeter. Tonight."

Tetsuo started to look from side to side, then caught himself.

"Relax, Tetsuo, nobody else is going to know. I've got me and Dov on Post Three from midnight to two. You can slip out just after dark; that'll give you plenty of time to make like a ghost and give you a nice wide re-entry window, without anyone being the wiser."

"If you think it's so easy, would you like to come along?"

It was starting to look like Tetsuo was going to do it; Ari forced himself not to let out a sigh of relief. "No, I don't think it's so easy. As Galil was kind enough to point out to me, I'm a clumsy asshole. Even forgetting that I'm the CO, I couldn't go." He shook his head. "I wouldn't be any good."

"That's true," Tetsuo pulled a tabstick out of his pocket, puffed it to life and exhaled a deep cloud of blue smoke before answering. "Why not?"

Ari leaned on the side of the trench, looking out at how the field spread out under the stars. He was still vaguely disappointed by the sky; he had been hoping that he would see a world with a real moon before he died. The Sergeant used to talk about standing out in the light of a real moon at night, how special it was.

But there were only stars. Nueva Terra had three moons, but they were tiny, with a low albedo. Occasionally you could see lights moving in the sky at night, but those were as likely to be TW observation sats as they were the natural satellites. There was nothing romantic about either.

It was too dark, Ari decided. A guard post was different than an observation post: it was like being a hunted animal, not a hunter.

Sometimes Ari really liked the Thousand Worlds Commerce Department's restrictions on the importation of military tech, particularly on worlds of lower tech levels than Nueva. The restrictions were always on weaponry and support—but medical supplies weren't ever considered support, and communication gear usually wasn't.

Idiots. Everything has a military application, or implication.

If a Metzadan took a jecty arrow in the belly, he wasn't in the same position that a gut-wounded medieval peasant would have been. Not only would he be unlikely to die, but the battlefield medicians would have his bowel resected and patched and have him up on his feet and back in combat in less than a hundred hours.

Sometimes the rules favored the soldier. A set of night goggles would have been awfully handy, and never mind that the pack to carry them around weighed better than thirty kilos. But they were expensive pieces of equipment, and were not available to a line company in bad odor at Divisione HQ.

So he swept his eyes across the night. It didn't merely require wearing a blindfold before guard duty. He had to adapt to a whole different way of seeing. The area of the retina used for central vision was heavily laden with cone—color—cells, which needed plenty of light to function. At night, a watchman had to depend on the rod cells of his peripheral vision—he had to look without quite looking.

Ari kept his eyes moving constantly, in short, quick, jerky movements, hoping to pick up any strange shape or movement with his peripheral vision, and hoping that there wasn't anything there.

"Captain," Dov hissed, his voice pitched to carry a couple of meters, no further. "I see him."

"Close an eye." Ari checked to see that there was a round in the flaregun he carried—at close range, they were a not-bad substitute for a rocket pistol, and would temporarily blind any open eye—and thumbed the safety off.

"Ari," a voice whispered from off to his left, "if you shoot me dead, I'll tell our mothers on you."

Dov made a patting motion. "It's him. Only him, Captain."

Wearing mottled fatigues, soft shoes and carrying nothing that resembled a weapon, Tetsuo stepped out of the darkness as if he were stepping out from behind a curtain. Ari didn't really know how he did that, but the black bundle he was arranging under his arm probably had something to do with it. There was a lot about his brother Ari didn't understand, and didn't want to know.

Without being asked, Dov pulled the canteen from his belt and tossed it to Tetsuo, who unscrewed the top and took a long pull.

"That cuts the dust," Tetsuo said. "I have a little good news and a lot of bad news. The bad news is that they've strung commo wire all over the place—even from the autogun emplacements." He shook his head. "Typical Frei discipline: even though they've got beaten fire zones as nice as I've ever seen, they've set up range cards for the guns. With their comm setup, unless you overrun them damn fast, they'll be able to walk artillery fire all over the place, using the autogun nests as forward observers. Spot for effect, eh?"

"What?"

"Old, bad artilleryman's joke. They're using white phosphorus rounds for spotting."

"So? Everybody does."

"Yeah. So the joke goes, if you've got a target that's mainly infantry, and you don't want to
just
kill them, you don't call in a load of frag—you call for the whole battery to fire the white phosphorus rounds, at three rounds a minute. Spot for effect."

Ari had seen the burn victims hauled out of the buses after the ambush. Horrible sight, and a worse smell. There was a sickly sweet odor that almost made him gag, even just remembering. He tried to change the subject. "What do you figure it'd take to neutralize the town?"

"Artillery?" Tetsuo shrugged. "Five hundred tons, minimum. Possibly a thousand. You're authorized around—"

"Ten tons. Eight battery threes. Just enough for harassment, and maybe a spot of interdiction—and then the battery's going to pull out. Meanwhile, they'll be able to call in whatever they want, and put it wherever they want."

"Perhaps," Tetsuo said. He broke into a crooked smile as he pulled a black plastic box out of his bundle. "Unless, of course, right before you assault, you were to flip up this guard and press this button. There are strong Commerce Department sanctions against the import of certain kinds of devices to some worlds. Of course, those sanctions apply if and only if you're caught."

Ari took the box and tucked it into a pocket. "And if I were to do that?"

"Well, the first thing I'd suggest is that you get rid of the box; it'll self-destruct about ten minutes after. Don't forget, now, you might get distracted—because as soon as you press the button, a small explosion will have taken out the Freiheimer central commo office. They've got it in the basement of the old church."

"That was the good news, I take it."

He shook his head. "Not really. I don't think it'll make much difference. They can still call in a barrage with a green flare, no? The last of the good news is that the Freiheimers are as tired-looking a bunch of soldiers as I've ever seen." Tetsuo sighed. "Almost as bad as your own, but only almost." He raised an eyebrow. "You want to argue for a change of plans? We've got about twenty-four hours until H-hour."

"No," Ari said, still wondering if he could do it. "We go."

Tetsuo raised the canteen. " 'Everybody comes back,' " he said, pronouncing the words the way they're supposed to be pronounced: matter-of-factly.

It was called the Mercenary's Toast. It was just a wish, an ambition, not a prediction, and certainly no promise.

Ari took the canteen.

"Fat fucking chance." He drank, but only a little.

"Beggin' your pardon, Captain, but it isn't going to work that way," First Sergeant Matteotti said. "I'm not in the habit of bringing up the rear." If anything, Matteotti looked more harmless than usual in full combat get-up—his bulky plastic body-armor parka and leggings made him look inflated. On the chance that he wouldn't want to keep his helmet on, he'd streaked camouflage paint on his forehead, all the way up and into his receding hairline.