Starfist: Lazarus Rising (15 page)

Everywhere he turned, Zechariah thought, there were problems. But problems were the lot of mankind. He lifted the glass to his lips.

"Zechariah?"

He whirled in surprise. "Why, Charles! Please, sit down. Share this beer with me."

Charles entered the dim circle of light that illuminated the kitchen table.

"My God, Charles! What happened to you?" Zechariah stood and moved to help him into a vacant chair. "Consort! Comfort! Come here!" he yelled.

Both women appeared, still in their night clothes. "Charles, what happened to you?" Consort asked. He only shook his head. She put Comfort to heating water and carefully took Charles's bloodstained shirt off. He groaned. "I think you have broken ribs, Charles. I'll bind them up, but you'll have to take it easy for a few days."

"No. I'm going to be at formation tonight."

Consort stood back, looked sternly down at Charles and said, "You are in no condition to be at formation."

Charles nodded. "But I've got to show up tonight, Consort."

"Here." Zechariah handed Charles the half-full beer bottle. "Drink up! You need this a lot more than I do."

Consort made a wry face at her husband. "Into that stuff again, Zechariah?"

He shrugged. "It's the last of its breed, Connie, and I've come to learn, in the wisdom of time and with the guidance of God, that a man and his beer should never be separated."

"When we're safe at last," Charles said, "I'm bringing a Dragonload of cold beer down here and we're going to drink it all by ourselves, Zechariah."

"What's a Dragon?" Consort asked, setting a steaming pan of water and some rags on the table. She was perspiring, and a strand of loose hair hung down one side of her face. She smelled fresh in her white undergown.

"I don't know," Charles answered, then yelled "Owww!" as Comfort began washing the clotted blood off the side of his head.

"More important, where's the ‘back’ from which you are bringing the beer here?"

Zechariah chuckled.

"Elneal!" Charles said sharply and groaned at the pain it caused in his head. "I remember I had beer on a place called Elneal." It came back to him: he'd killed a man on Elneal, wherever that was.

"You'll need a dozen or more stitches to sew up this hole in your head, Charles,"

Consort said, not paying attention to his ramblings. "I'll give you some analgesic tea.

That will relax you and dull the pain. Comfort, would you mix it up for me, dear?

Next, get the poultices ready. The poultices will prevent infection, Charles, and aid healing."

"What happened, Charles?" Zechariah asked.

Charles finished the beer in one long gulp and burped loudly. " 'Scuse me, ladies.

Someone jumped me. Two of them. I don't know who they were or why they did it."

Zechariah did not believe Charles didn't know who'd attacked him or why, but
he
certainly knew why they did it. Some of the younger men were jealous of Charles and Comfort, and some thought he was a spy. But he kept that to himself. Like all the members of the City of God sect, his people were wary of strangers.

"Ugh," Charles muttered as he sipped the tea, "this stuff tastes positively awful."

But he drank it all anyway. "Now what?" He looked at the Brattles and burped again.

"Damned good beer, Zechariah!"

The next thing Charlie knew, he was dreaming. He was standing outside a complex of some sort consisting of wooden buildings. The day was overcast, cool and windy, and there was the smell of fish in the air. Before him stood rank after rank of young men in uniform. Their faces were hard, but some, he could see, had tears in their eyes. Strange, very strange, he thought. But they kept their gaze straight ahead, staring right through him. In the closer ranks he recognized the faces and tried to call out their names, but nothing would come. He turned around, and behind him stood several more men dressed in resplendent uniforms, standing on a low dais. "Dress reds!" he tried to say. He recognized them too, and his heart soared with joy, but he could not get their names out either. He tried, but it was as if his throat were stuffed with sand; no sound would emerge. One of the men on the dais, someone Charles realized he'd known for a long time, stared at him in astonishment and said, "Charlie!

We thought you were dead!" Then the men in ranks began to chant, "Charlie!

Charlie! Charlie!"

"Charles? Charles?" Comfort shook him gently awake. She put a cool, soft hand on the side of his face.

"Comfy? I was dreaming," he gasped as he tried to roll on his side to see her better.

"Lie still, Charles. Mother sewed up the laceration in your head and I put on the poultices. Your ribs will heal in a few weeks."

"What time is it?"

"An hour after sunrise."

Charles lay back on the pillows. "Let me lie here for a while, Comfy? I
have
to make the muster tonight. Ohhh, that potion your mother gave me really works!" He took Comfort's hand in his own. "Seems we just can't stay away from each other, doesn't it? You're always there when I need you the most, young lady."

"I always will be, Charles," she said softly. She glanced at the doorway and added, "Charles, you have visitors." He looked, and saw Colleen and Hannah Flood, both with worried expressions on their faces. They came in and knelt beside Comfort.

"We were worried about you, Charles," Hannah clucked. Colleen put her hand on Charles's arm and rubbed it affectionately.

"I'll marry you all," Charles chuckled, but it came out sounding more like a croak.

At first none of the women made any response, and then they all laughed.

"The sound of women laughing is the best medicine for a man," Zechariah said from the doorway, "as long as they didn't cause his injuries. Well, how's our wounded soldier?"

"The womenfolk of this household should open their own health maintenance organization, Zechariah." Charles grinned.

Zechariah nodded. "Ladies, leave us for a moment, would you?" When the women had repaired to the kitchen, Zechariah sat at the foot of the bed. "We are making progress on our defenses, Charles. Consort wishes you to remain here under her care for a couple of days. I can supervise the men. They know what to do anyway.

But you know, the growing season is upon us. We can't subsist forever on beef and potatoes, and our cattle herd is shrinking every day. We must soon resume farming in the daylight."

"I know. When the time's ready, let's do it. Who knows, Zechariah, maybe we're safe now. Maybe the threat has gone away. We've been living here for weeks and nobody's come this way except the black woman and her child."

Zechariah nodded. "You know, Charles, this world of ours was never heavily settled, not much beyond this continent—Paradise, we call it. The other places," he shrugged, "nobody had much contact with the people in Eden and Nirvana. At some point, Charles, we should try to make contact with the government in Haven, despite what the black woman has told us about what the soldiers did to her people. Also, the Confederation of Human Worlds has—or had—an embassy in Interstellar City.

We need to find out what's going on in the rest of the world."

"I agree, but discreetly, Zechariah, very discreetly. Now, tonight I'm making muster. I want to be there when the guard is changed, and I want to see the other men before they go off to the fort. I may not be able to last all night long, but I'm going to be there. No one is going to stop me. I have my reasons. Agreed?"

"Very well, you hard-headed old soldier."

The watchers who assembled after dusk in the meetinghouse consisted of the Rowley family—Paul, the watch master, and his four daughters, Amana, Leah, Adah, and Timna, all of them over the age of fifty. Charles greeted them warmly but perfunctorily. It was his impression that mature women given an important job took it seriously. Paul, he knew, was more than capable of posting the guard and keeping them on their toes.

It was the fort detail he most wanted to inspect. After the night watch had been sent out to relieve the day shift, he addressed the men sitting in the pews before him.

By then everyone had heard about him being assaulted. With considerable effort, he suppressed the pain he felt at every movement. The poultice over the wound on the side of his head was kept in place by a white bandage Comfort had prepared for him, so he looked to the men very much like the valiant wounded soldier they thought him to be.

The meetinghouse was dimly lit with small oil lamps, and heavy drapes had been pulled tight over the windows to black the place out. Charles paced back and forth, his shadow looming enormously above the pulpit, telling them what a good job they'd all done and how it was nearly complete. He mentioned the discussion he'd had with Zechariah that morning, about sending someone to Haven to make contact with any survivors there, that the mission would be dangerous, and that he would lead it. While he spoke, he looked very carefully at each man. He stopped in front of Spencer Maynard, who concentrated on the back of the man in the pew in front of him as Charles continued looking at him while speaking.

"So when we go to Haven, men, I'm going to pick only the stoutest hearts among you. Spencer, I think I'd like to have you go along with me. What do you say? By the way, that's a pretty nasty-looking shiner you got there. How did it happen?"

"I, ah, ran into a door in the dark, Charles," Spencer muttered.

"Must have been a damned nasty door, Spence."

"Ah, it surely was," Spencer muttered, grinning sheepishly at the floor. Some of the men laughed, but almost instantly it dawned on them what Charles was intimating, and as a group they turned and looked hard at Spencer Maynard, whose neck flared brick red.

"Well, Spence, count yourself in, then. And by the way, old buddy, old friend, stay away from those ‘doors’ from now on. They come in pairs, know what I mean?"

From that day forward Spencer Maynard gave Charlie no more trouble, and whenever the projected expedition to Haven came up in conversations, he blurted out proudly that
he
, Spencer Maynard, was the first man Charles had picked to go along with him on that dangerous mission.

Dominic de Tomas had been right, every man has his price. For some, like Spencer Maynard, that consists only in being recognized as a man.

CHAPTER 11

Brigadier Sturgeon stood front and center on the reviewing stand facing out, looking over the Marines of 34th FIST. Rear Admiral Blankenvoort, commander of the Confederation Supply Facility and the ranking Confederation military officer on Thorsfinni's World, stood immediately to his right. The FIST's six senior staff officers and the FIST sergeant major stood in a single row extending from Sturgeon's left rear. Blankenvoort's six most senior were in a corresponding line to his right rear. From the front, the red-tunic-over-gold trousers, chests adorned with rows of rainbow ribbons suspending medals worn by the Marine officers, outsplendored the medals and gold-insignia-on-blue uniforms of the navy officers.

Forty paces directly to the front, Commander Van Winkle, the infantry battalion commander, faced the reviewing stand. Behind him was the battalion, nearly half of the FIST's strength, in company ranks. To the right, the composite squadron was arrayed in its sections. On the left stood the artillery battery, the transportation company, and the FIST headquarters company.

An icy hand gripped Sturgeon's heart as he looked out at his command and so graphically saw how many Marines he'd lost. Those men who had made planetfall on Kingdom at the beginning of the campaign, on that early, innocent day when they thought they were going in to put down a peasant revolt, wore their dress scarlets.

Scarlet-over-gold for the officers, scarlet-over-blue trousers for enlisted. Every one of them wore at least one medal on his chest, and a few had as many or more medals and decorations than Sturgeon. Far more than at the last formal FIST pass-in-review had wound stripes on their sleeves. The ranks of scarlet-tunicked Marines were studded with men in a less formal, rarely worn uniform—dress blues. Each of them also had at least one medal on his chest; many had more than one row of medals and decorations. Each of the Marines in blue had joined the FIST during the Kingdom Campaign as replacements for Marines killed in the campaign's first phase. As far as Sturgeon was concerned, far too many of 34th FIST's Marines wore blue.

There were holes in the formation, especially in the composite squadron. They represented Marines who had been killed on Kingdom and not yet been replaced.

Sturgeon couldn't tell whether the plethora of blue uniforms or the scattering of holes hurt more.

Well, when men fought, some men died, he told himself. A commander had to accept that; if he couldn't accept losses, he'd make mistakes that would cost more lives. What a commander had to strive for was to keep his own losses to a minimum while causing the greatest number of losses possible to the enemy—or at least more losses than the enemy was willing to accept. Sturgeon had to admit that he and his FIST had accomplished that on Kingdom.

He looked out over his command, saw the losses 34th FIST had suffered, and knew the Skinks had suffered far greater. It didn't make him feel any better about the Marines who had died, but it told him those deaths had not been in vain. "Now"

wasn't the time to suffer those deaths, "now" was the time to honor the dead.

The Skink commanders were willing to accept more losses than almost any human commander in all of history. A Skink unit had to suffer so many casualties that it was ineffective as a combat unit before it was ready to stop fighting and withdraw from the field of battle. Even then, if they couldn't retreat, they kept fighting until all were dead. Surrender was not an option. In the entire campaign on Kingdom, the Marines had only captured prisoners once. And another Skink unit had tracked the Skink prisoners down and killed them. What kind of beings would do that? Sturgeon wondered.

"Marines!" he said in a voice that barely needed amplification to reach everyone in the ranks before him. "In recent months we have lost many comrades in conflict with an implacable foe. Some of those Marines died in the commission of acts that saved the lives of their buddies, some when they refused to quit against impossible odds.