Gordon R Dickson, page 17
Stripped, he looked—like an athlete—larger and more impressive than he had, clothed. He towered over us all in the hall, even over the other Dorsai there; and with his darkly tanned skin under the lights he seemed like a massive figure carved in oak.
“I’m waiting,” he said, after a moment, calmly.
“All right,” said the voice from the annunciator. “Come on in.”
He moved forward. The door unlatched and slid aside before him. He passed through and it closed behind him. For a moment we were left with no sound or word from him or the suite; then, unexpectedly, the screen lit up. We found ourselves looking over and past Ian’s bare shoulders at a room in which three men, each armed with a rifle and a pair of sidearms, sat facing him. They gave no sign of knowing that he had turned on the annunciator screen, the controls of which would be hidden behind him, now that he stood inside the door, facing the room.
The center one of the three seated men laughed. He was the big, black-bearded man I had found vaguely familiar when I saw the solidigraphs of the three of them in Ian’s office; and I recognized him now. He was a professional wrestler. He had been arraigned on assault charges four years ago, but lack of testimony against him had caused the charges to be dismissed. He was not as tall as Ian, but much heavier of body; and it was his voice we had been hearing, because now we heard it again as his lips moved on the screen.
“Well, well, Commander,” he said. “Just what we needed—a visit from you. Now we can rack up a score of two Dorsai Commanders before your soldiers carry what’s left of us off to the morgue; and St. Marie can see that even you people can be handled by the Blue Front.”
We could not see Ian’s face; but he said nothing and apparently his lack of reaction was irritating to the big assassin, because he dropped his cheerful tone and leaned forward in his chair.
“Don’t you understand, Graeme?” he said. “We’ve lived and died for the Blue Front, all three of us—for the one political party with the strength and guts to save our world. We’re dead men no matter what we do. Did you think we don’t know that? You think we don’t know what would happen to us if we were idiots enough to surrender the way you said? Your men would tear us apart; and if there was anything left of us after that, the government’s law would try us and then shoot us. We only let you in here so that we could lay you out like your twin brother, before we were laid out ourselves. Don’t you follow me, man? You walked into our hands here like a fly into a trap, never realizing.”
“I realized,” said Ian.
The big man scowled at him and the muzzle of the heat rifle he held in one thick hand, came up.
“What do you mean?” he demanded. “Whatever you think you’ve got up your sleeve isn’t going to save you. Why would you come in here, knowing what we’d do?”
“The Dorsai are professional soldiers,” said Ian’s voice, calmly. “We live and survive by our reputation. Without that reputation none of us could earn our living. And the reputation of the Dorsai in general is the sum of the reputations of its individual men and women. So Field Commander Kensie Graeme’s professional reputation is a thing of value, to be guarded even after his death. I came in for that reason.”
The big man’s eyes narrowed. He was doing all the talking and his two companions seemed content to leave it that way.
“A reputation’s worth dying for?” he said.
“I’ve been ready to die for mine for eighteen years,” said Ian’s voice, quietly. “Today’s no different than yesterday.”
“And you came in here—” the big man’s voice broke off on a snort. “I don’t believe it. Watch him, you two!”
“Believe or not,” said Ian. “I came in here, just as I told you, to see that the professional reputation of Field Commander Graeme was protected from events which might tarnish it. You’ll notice—” his head moved slightly as if indicating something behind him and out of our sight, “I’ve turned on your annunciator screen, so that outside the door they can see what’s going on in here.”
The eyes of the three men jerked upwards to stare at the screen inside the suite, somewhere over Ian’s head. There was a blur of motion that was Ian’s tanned body flying through the air, a sound of something smashing and the screen went blank again.
We outside were left blind once more, standing in the hallway, staring at the unresponsive screen and door. Pel, who had stepped up next to me, moved toward the door itself.
“Stay!” snapped Charley.
The single sharp tone was like a command given to some domestic beast. Pel flinched at the tone, but stopped—and in that moment the door before us disintegrated to the roar of an explosion in the room.
“Come on!” I yelled, and flung myself through the now-open doorway.
It was like diving into a centrifuge filled with whirling bodies. I ducked to avoid the flying form of one of the men I had seen in the screen, but his leg slammed my head, and I went reeling, half-dazed and disoriented, into the very heart of the tumult. It was all a blur of action. I had a scrambled impression of explosions, of fire-beams lancing around me—and somehow in the midst of it all, the towering, brown body of Ian moving with the certainty and deadliness of a panther. All those he touched went down; and all who went down, stayed down.
Then it was over. I steadied myself with one hand against a half-burned wall and realized that only Ian and myself were on our feet in that room. Not one of the other Dorsai had followed me in. On the floor, the three assassins lay still. One had his neck broken. Across the room a second man lay obviously dead, but with no obvious sign of the damage that had ended his life. The big man, the ex-wrestler, had the right side of his forehead crushed in, as if by a club.
Looking up from the three bodies, I saw I was now alone in the room. I turned back into the corridor, and found there only Pel and Charley. Ian and the other Dorsai were already gone.
“Where’s Ian?” I asked Charley. My voice came out thickly, like the voice of a slightly drunken man.
“Leave him alone,” said Charley. “You don’t need him, now. Those are the assassins there; and the enlisted men have already been notified and pulled back from their search of Blauvain. What more is needed?”
I pulled myself together; and remembered I was a policeman.
“I’ve got to know exactly what happened,” I said. “I’ve got to know if it was self-defense, or…”
The words died on my tongue. To accuse a naked man of anything else in the death of three heavily armed individuals who had threatened his life, as I had just heard them do over the annunciator, was ridiculous.
“No,” said Charley. “This was done during a period of martial law in Blauvain. Your office will receive a report from our command about it; but actually it’s not even something within your authority.”
Some of the tension that had been in him earlier seemed to leak out of him, then. He half-smiled and became more like the friendly officer I had known before Kensie’s death.
“But that martial law is about to be withdrawn,” he said. “Maybe you’ll want to get on the phone and start getting your own people out here to tidy up the details.”
—And he stood aside to let me go.
One day later, and the professional soldiers of the Exotic Expeditionary Force showed their affection for Kensie in a different fashion.
His body had been laid in state for a public review in the open, main floor lobby of the Blauvain City Government building. Beginning in the grey dawn and through the cloudless day—the sort of hard, bright day that seems impatient with those who will not bury their dead and get on to further things—the mercenaries filed past the casket holding Kensie, visible at foil length in dress uniform under the transparent cover. Each one as he passed touched the casket lightly with his fingertips, or said a word to the dead man, or both. There were over ten thousand soldiers passing, one at a time. They were unarmed, in field uniforms and their line seemed endless.
But that was not the end of it. The civilians of Blauvain had formed along either side of the street down which the line of troops wound on its way to the place where Kensie lay waiting for them. The civilians had formed in the face of strict police orders against doing any such thing; and my men could not drive them away. The situation could not have offered a better opportunity for the Blue Front to cause trouble. One heat grenade tossed into that line of slowly moving, unarmed soldiers, for example…But nothing happened.
By the time noon came and went without incident, I was ready to make a guess why not. It was because there was something in the mood of the civilian crowd itself that forbade terrorism, here and now. Any Blue Front activists trying such a thing would have been smothered by the very civilians around them in whose name they were doing it.
Something of awe and pity, and almost of envy, seemed to be stirring the souls of the Blauvain people; those same people of mine who had huddled in their houses twenty hours before, in undiluted fear of the very men now lined up before them and moving slowly to the City Government building. Once more, as I stood on a balcony above the lobby holding the casket, I felt those winds of vast movement I had sensed first for a moment in Ian’s office, the winds of those forces of which Padma had spoken to me. The Blauvain people were different today and showed the difference. Kensie’s death had changed them.
Then, something more happened. As the last of the soldiers passed, Blauvain civilians began to fall in behind them, extending the line. By mid-afternoon, the last soldier had gone by and the first figure in civilian clothes passed the casket, neither touching it nor speaking to it, but pausing to look with an unusual, almost shy curiosity upon the face of the body inside, in the name of which so much might have happened.
Already, behind that one man, the line of civilians was half again as long as the line of soldiers had been.
It was nearly midnight, long past the time when it had been planned to shut the gates of the lobby, when the last of the civilians had gone and the casket could be transferred to a room at Expeditionary Headquarters from which it would be shipped back to the Dorsai. This business of shipping a body home happened seldom, even in the case of mercenaries of the highest rank; but there had never been any doubt that it would happen in the case of Kensie. The enlisted men and officers of his command had contributed the extra funds necessary for the shipment.—Ian, when his time came, would undoubtedly be buried in the earth of whatever world on which he fell. Only if he happened to be at home when the time came, would that earth be soil of the Dorsai. But Kensie had been—Kensie.
“Do you know what’s been suggested to me?” asked Moro, as he, Pel and I, along with several of the Expedition’s senior officers—Charley ap Morgan among them—stood watching Kensie’s casket being brought into the room at Expedition HQ, “There’s a proposal to get the city government to put up a statue of him, here in Blauvain. A statue of Kensie.”
Neither Pel nor I answered. We stood watching the placing of the casket. For all its massive appearance, four men handled it and the body within easily. The apparently thick metal of its sides were actually hollow to reduce shipping weight. The soldiers settled it, took off the transparent weather cover and carried it out. The body of Kensie lay alone, uncovered; the profile of his face, seen from where we stood, quiet and still against the light pink cloth of the casket’s lining. The senior officers who were with us and who had not been in the line of soldiers filing through the lobby, now began to go into the room, one at a time to stand for a second at the casket before coming out again.
“It’s what we never had on St. Marie,” said Pel, after a long moment. He was a different man since Padma had talked to him. “A leader. Someone to love and follow. Now that our people have seen there is such a thing, they want something like it for themselves.”
He looked up at Charley ap Morgan, who was just coming back out of the room.
“You Dorsai changed us,” Pel said.
“Did we?” said Charley, stopping. “How do you feel about Ian now, Pel?”
“Ian?” Pel frowned. “We’re talking about Kensie. Ian’s just—what he always was.”
“What you all never understood,” said Charley, looking from one to the other of us.
“Ian’s a good man,” said Pel. “I don’t argue with that. But there’ll never be another Kensie.”
“There’ll never be another Ian,” said Charley. “He and Kensie made up one person. That’s what none of you ever understood. Now half of Ian is gone, into the grave.”
Pel shook his head slowly.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t believe that. I can’t believe Ian ever needed anyone—even Kensie. He’s never risked anything, so how could he lose anything? After Kensie’s death he did nothing but sit on his spine here insisting that he couldn’t risk Kensie’s reputation by doing anything—until events forced his hand. That’s not the action of a man who’s lost the better half of himself.”
“I didn’t say better half,” said Charley, “I only said half—and just half is enough. Stop and try to feel for a moment what it would be like. Stop for a second and feel how it would be if you were amputated down the middle—if the life that was closest to you was wrenched away, shot down in the street by a handful of self-deluded, crackpot revolutionaries from a world you’d come to rescue. Suppose it was like that for you, how would you feel?”
Pel had gone a little pale as Charley talked. When he answered his voice had a slight echo of the difference and youngness it had had after Padma had talked to him.
“I guess…” he said very slowly, and ran off into silence.
“Yes?” said Charley. “Now you’re beginning to understand, to feel as Ian feels. Suppose you feel like this and just outside the city where the assassins of your brother are hiding there are six battalions of seasoned soldiers who can turn that same city—who can hardly be held back from turning that city—into another Rochmont, at one word from you. Tell me, is it easy, or is it hard, not to say that one word that will turn them loose?”
“It would be…” The words seemed dragged from Pel, “hard…”
“Yes,” said Charley, grimly, “as it was hard for Ian.”
“Then why did he do it?” demanded Pel.
“He told you why,” said Charley. “He did it to protect his brother’s military reputation, so that not even after his death should Kensie Graeme’s name be an excuse for anything but the highest and best of military conduct.”
“But Kensie was dead. He couldn’t hurt his own reputation!”
“His troops could,” said Charley. “His troops wanted someone to pay for Kensie’s death. They wanted to leave a monument to Kensie and their grief for him, as long-lasting a monument as Rochmont has been to Jacques Chrétien. There was only one way to satisfy them, and that was if Ian himself acted for them—as their agent—in dealing with the assassins. Because nobody could deny that Kensie’s brother had the greatest right of all to represent all those who had lost with Kensie’s death.”
“You’re talking about the fact that Ian killed the men, personally,” said Moro. “But there was no way he could know he’d come face to face—”
He stopped, halted by the thin, faint smile on Charley’s face.
“Ian was our Battle Op, our strategist,” said Charley. “Just as Kensie was Field Commander, our tactician. Do you think that a strategist of Ian’s ability couldn’t lay a plan that would bring him face to face, alone, with the assassins once they were located?”
“What if they hadn’t been located?” I asked. “What if I hadn’t found out about Pel, and Pel hadn’t told us what he knew?”
Charley shook his head.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Somehow Ian must have known this way would work—or he would have done it differently. For some reason he counted on help from you, Tom.”
“Me!” I said. “What makes you say that?”
“He told me so.” Charley looked at me strangely. “You know, many people thought that because they didn’t understand Ian, that Ian didn’t understand them. Actually, he understands other people unusually well. I think he saw something in you, Tom, he could rely on. And he was right, wasn’t he?”
Once more, the winds I had felt—of the forces of which Padma had spoken, blew through me, chilling and enlightening me. Ian had felt those winds as well as I had—and understood them better. I could see the inevitability of it now. There had been only one pull on the many threads entangled in the fabric of events here; and that pull had been through me to Ian.
“When he went to that suite where the assassins were holed up,” said Charley, “he intended to go in to them alone, and unarmed. And when he killed them with his bare hands, he did what every man in the Expeditionary force wanted to do. So, when that was done, the anger of the troops was lightning-rodded. Through Ian, they all had their revenge; and then they were free. Free just to mourn for Kensie as they’re doing today. So Blauvain escaped; and the Dorsai reputation has escaped stain, and the state of affairs between the inhabited worlds hasn’t been upset by an incident here on St. Marie that could make enemies out of worlds, like the Exotic and the Dorsai, and St. Marie, who should all be friends.”
He stopped talking. It had been a long speech for Charley; and none of us could think of anything to say. The last of the senior officers, all except Ian, had gone past us now, in and out of the room, and the casket was alone. Then Pel spoke.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and he sounded sorry. “But even if what you say is all true, it only proves what I always said about Ian. Kensie had two men’s feelings, but Ian hasn’t any. He’s ice and water with no blood in him. He couldn’t bleed if he wanted to. Don’t tell me any man torn apart emotionally by his twin brother’s death could sit down and plan to handle a situation so cold-bloodedly and efficiently.”
“People don’t always bleed on the outside where you can see—” Charley broke off, turning his head.
We looked where he was looking, down the corridor behind us, and saw Ian coming, tall and alone. He strode up to us, nodded briefly at us, and went past into the room. We saw him walk to the side of the casket.
