Colonel Read online

  In civilian practice, where the physician’s primary function was delivering babies, one doctor per one hundred thousand people was considered adequate … except on newer colony worlds, where birthrates were generally extremely high. In the Dirigent Mercenary Corps there was one physician for each regiment and one for each ship in the fleet. A regimental SMO did not function alone, though. Each battalion had seven medical technicians assigned to its headquarters detachment, and there were also two medtechs attached to every line company. They were qualified to perform basic medical tasks to stabilize casualties’ conditions, operate trauma tubes, and administer updates to individual HMSes. In addition, every man in the Corps received training in combat first aid—the techniques needed to keep a wounded soldier alive until he could be put in a trauma tube or treated by a medtech. Among colony worlds not affiliated with either Common wealth or Confederation, perhaps only Elysium had a better medical school than Dirigent.

  Major Norman reached Lon’s office in less than two minutes. The SMO was in his early forties, black hair and eyes, trim and athletic. He was one of the best tennis players in the Corps.

  “I’ve been expecting a call from you, Lon,” the major said after he closed the office door behind him.

  “Have a seat.” Lon gestured at the empty chair at the side of his desk. “Am I that predictable?”

  Norman shrugged. “I’ve been treating you for most of the last decade, Lon, and I know your medical history back to the day you joined the Corps. If there was ever a situation designed to aggravate your anxieties, this would be it. The whole regiment is going out on a major contract. Your son will be going along. And your wife is pregnant.” In garrison, the senior medical officers also staffed the base hospital and dealt with dependents as well as soldiers. “By the way, congratulations.”

  Lon squinted, and shook his head mildly. “To tell the truth, Doc, I’ve been so upset over the nightmares and all, that the pregnancy really hasn’t sunk in yet.”

  “You’re exhausted because you’re afraid to go to sleep at night. The only halfway decent sleep you do get is with a patch, which affects the body’s chemical balance, especially when you use them frequently. The nightmares drain you and wake you soon after a patch wears off. In addition, you have all the normal stresses of any commander readying his unit for a combat contract. You’re probably not eating decently either. Have I missed anything?”

  “I’m not getting my work done. My mind just mutinies, like this morning when I came in. I couldn’t even deal with my mail. I just had to get up and go stare out the window. I’m not thinking straight. I can’t concentrate. I can’t get the worries out of my head. The way I’m going, I’m afraid I’ll be a basket case by the time we get to Elysium, and I can’t afford that, even though I’m not go ing to be in overall command on the contract. There’s too much to do between here and there.”

  “Okay, Lon, we’ve been through this before, so you know the routine. “I’ll start by running a chemical assay to see how badly you’ve managed to get your brain chemicals out of whack and make sure there are no anomalies that might indicate an organic problem your HMS hasn’t been able to diagnose and treat. Then we’ll talk. Mostly, you’ll talk and I’ll listen. I’ll ask a few questions and maybe spout a few platitudes you’ve heard before. Then we’ll see where we are and what we need to do next.”

  Lon nodded. Norman pulled a small black case from his trouser pocket and opened it. He extracted a medpatch about a quarter inch in diameter from the case and peeled the backing from the adhesive side. The patch went high on Lon’s neck, over the spine, just below his hairline. Norman smoothed it in place, then took out a portable complink and spent half a minute keying instructions. By the time he had finished, the nanoagents in the patch had established communications with the molecular computers that regulated Lon’s HMS and were beginning to feed out strings of numbers and chemical formulas.

  “Okay, Lon. Tell me about the latest dreams,” Dr. Norman said, setting his complink on the edge of the desk, where he could continue to monitor it.

  There were no outside interruptions. Lon had set his complink to take messages but not to signal any calls, and he had told the duty sergeant downstairs that he was not to be interrupted for anyone less than the General. Lon talked—with assorted prompts and comments from Dan Norman—for nearly two hours. Norman took a final reading of the numbers on his complink screen, then removed the patch from Lon’s neck and tossed the patch in the trash can.

  “Well?” Lon asked. Although it was January and the temperature in the office was kept at seventy-two degrees, he had been sweating through most of the ordeal.

  “Your brain chemistry is the worst I’ve ever seen it, Lon,” the doctor said. “And your blood is almost outside normal parameters. Much more and I’d suspect multiple malfunctions in your HMS controllers … and that doesn’t happen. You’re not going to like what I have to say, but it isn’t a suggestion. You and I are going to leave here together. Tell your sergeant that you’ll be back after lunch and can’t be reached. We’re going to the hospital and I’m going to stick you in a trauma tube—”

  “What?” Lon shouted.

  “You heard me. In a trauma tube. I suspect that it will only be for two hours or a little more, but that’s up to the tube. If you’re going to lead 7th Regiment on this contract, we’ve got to get your body—and your head—back in … balance as quickly as possible. While you’re in the tube, I’ll have the lab prepare special medpatches for you to use until just before we make our last Q-space transit en route to Elysium—sleep patches that will guarantee you eight full hours of undisturbed sleep every night, with added agents calculated to make certain your chemistry stays as close to proper balance as we can manage. We’ll also spend an hour or two together like this each day, and—depending on your progress—there might be another tube session before that final Q-space transit.”

  “Doc, with all the work that has to be done between now and Elysium, I don’t have that much time to waste. I’ll get by, the way I always have.”

  “Lon, I told you it wasn’t a suggestion,” Norman said, his voice getting softer, almost a whisper. “You’ll have to make time. Either we do this my way or I report you medically unfit for deployment and you stay behind.”

  Lon moved his gaze from the doctor to the top of his desk. He didn’t speak, though he wanted to shout protests. He knew that the doctor’s threat was not idle, and he also knew the potential consequences. It could mean the end of his career. Maybe that would be the easy way out, he thought.

  “You’re not the first commander to suffer this sort of problem, Lon,” Norman said. “You might be surprised to learn just how common it is. It’s something we can handle, but I’ve got to have your full cooperation or I can’t let you command on a combat contract. It’s that simple.”

  Slowly, Lon nodded. “We’ll do it your way, Doc.” If I do leave the Corps, it can’t be this way, he told himself.

  7

  When 7th Regiment fell in at 1300 hours Thursday, only one man was missing from the formation. His bus had been damaged by a landslide between Rainbow Falls and the airport, and he had missed his flight back to base. He would, however, arrive in time to leave with his battalion. Rainbow Falls was a popular resort, and it had frequent shuttle service. The later flight he had caught would arrive at Dirigent City’s public aerospaceport twenty minutes before the convoy of buses carrying the regiment was due to leave base. He would join his unit at the port.

  Lon took the manning reports from his battalion commanders, then dismissed the troops—sending them back to barracks to complete their preparations for deployment. When they fell out again, in ninety minutes, it would be to board the buses. The regiment’s heavy equipment, mostly the self-propelled guns and rocket launchers of the Heavy Weapons Battalion, had already been ferried up to the ships. The personal baggage of the troops would be going up to the ships shortly.

  “They look good, Colonel,” Lieutenant Co
lonel Ives said. “Raring to go.” He knew that Lon had been seeing the SMO, and—like most of the people who came in close contact with the commander—he had been able to tell that Lon was having some kind of difficulties. Seeing improvement in his boss was a major relief to Ives.

  Lon grunted. “Contract pay and the chance for a big bonus at the end, Tefford. I think that’s how we developed the tradition of giving the men three days off before a contract, so they could go out and blow all their money and be looking forward to earning extra.”

  Ives laughed. “Wouldn’t surprise me a bit. Of course, it could be that they just want to bathe in the intelligence of all the eggheads on Elysium.”

  Lon grinned and shook his head. “I only wish smarts rubbed off that easily, Teff. We could rotate everyone in the Corps through Elysium, a battalion at a time, starting from the top. Make life a lot simpler for all of us.” That morning, Lon had conceded to Doc Norman that he felt better—“almost one hundred percent,” was how he put it, followed by a suggestion that perhaps they could forget about the rest of the course of treatment the SMO had prescribed. Norman had laughed and suggested that the rest of the treatment would remove the “almost.” Lon still had his worries—about Junior and about not failing his men—but he was managing them with less stress than before.

  The night before, an MR—message rocket—had arrived in-system from Elysium. The news the MR carried was mixed, but more good than bad. The New Spartan mercenaries had destroyed all of Elysium’s orbiting communications satellites and its fighters had interdicted all air travel between cities, but fighting on the ground had slackened off considerably in the four days following the departure of Chancellor Berlino from the system. In the twenty-four hours before the launch of the MR, there had been only a few small skirmishes between the Elysian defense force and the invaders. The mercenaries on the ground had moved to cut off all major routes into University City, stopping the flow of fresh produce and meat from the outlying farming districts, but that could not be called a real siege because the residents were, of course, able to fall back on replicators. Even if the siege could be total, it would take years before inefficiencies in the replicator system could cause serious shortages of raw materials for the nanotech assemblers.

  “It could mean that they were waiting for reinforcements,” Lon had told his staff and battalion commanders during a working lunch. “That makes more sense than to think that they’re just padding their contract, adding unnecessary days to the job. They certainly weren’t hired just for minor harassment operations unless it’s just another scheme to get the Elysians to submit to the CHW. Put the threat on the ground, then give them time to get frightened enough to accept whatever terms Union wants to grant.”

  “If it’s that,” Tefford Ives had said, “it could be a break for us. According to Chancellor Berlino, the CHW didn’t have a representative on Elysium at the time of the attack. That would mean that the mercenaries would have instructions to wait long enough for an exchange of MRs, and we might almost be there by the time they quit waiting.”

  “What if the government of Elysium gives up before we get there?” Vel Osterman, now a lieutenant colonel and commanding the regiment’s 2nd Battalion, asked. “Berlino is only the number two man. The president might have decided not to wait.”

  “I don’t think that’s likely,” Lon said. He shrugged. “If something like that does happen, then we’ve got ourselves a month’s cruise, paid for in advance … and then some. I don’t think anyone will complain too loudly.” Certainly not me, he had thought.

  The Dirigent Mercenary Corps had developed a ritual—almost a spectacle—for sending troops off on contract. Although there was a more than adequate aerospaceport on base, used to transport equipment and baggage to the ships, departing troops were bused through Dirigent City to the civilian port across town. When they returned from contract, they would come back the same way, paraded through the city … unless they failed to fulfill their contract. Then they would come in through the port on base.

  The dead always came home that way.

  With two regiments going out, the bus drivers had a hectic afternoon, taking one load to the port and then hurrying back for the next. Civilian traffic in the city remained snarled throughout. Two regiments also meant more noise than usual in the city because of the number of shuttles taking troops up to their ships. The civilian port was well away from the most heavily populated districts of Dirigent City, and the traffic patterns had been designed to minimize overflights, but there was still the noise of jets and rockets, especially when the shuttles went supersonic. It was no secret how many men were leaving, and the more soldiers who worked off-world contracts, the more money would be filtering back through the local economy.

  Colonel Hayley and his headquarters staff were in the first shuttle that took off. Lon and his staff would be in the last. The troops of 15th Regiment started moving from base ninety minutes before 7th Regiment was mustered for the deployment. By the time Lon received the final manning reports in the regimental area, the buses had arrived to take 1st Battalion to the port, and the buses to handle the rest of the regiment arrived at less than ten-minute intervals.

  “It amazes me that we can get this many people deployed all at once,” Lieutenant Colonel Ives told Lon while they were waiting for the staff car that would take them to the port. “Two regiments strain the system almost to the breaking point. Three would be a logistical nightmare. They’d almost have to hold one back a few hours to get anything accomplished.”

  “This is all for show, Teff,” Lon said. “It would have made a lot more sense to send one regiment up this morning and the other now, or afternoon and evening, space things out one way or the other. But this is all to make sure the civilians really feel the size of the deployment. Rub their faces in it. ‘Look what we’re doing for you.’ Hell, if we had four regiments going out together they’d still try to do it all at once. Besides, two regiments going out on an open-ended contract is a big deal. You know how rare a job this size is. The Elysium contract damned near ensures a budget surplus for the year, even if we get the mission accomplished in only three months.”

  “As long as we come out on top,” Ives said. “We’ve never gone head-to-head with New Sparta on a large contract.”

  The parade through Dirigent City had been going on so long that few people on the streets paid any attention to the final buses or the staff car that carried Lon and his executive officer. It might take a little time before the civilians realized that the show was over. The empty buses would return to base by a more circuitous route, avoiding the main boulevard connecting base and port.

  Lon didn’t give the passersby much attention either. He was thinking about Sara and Angie, and the baby who wouldn’t be born for seven months. If this contract was extended, if 7th and 15th Regiments put in a full six months on Elysium, there was a chance that the baby would be born before Lon got home. A small chance, assuming I get home at all, Lon thought.

  For the moment, Junior did not occupy much of his father’s thoughts. Junior had come to the house the evening before, spent the night before deployment with the family. Junior had been somewhat more subdued than before his previous contracts, but not overtly nervous or apprehensive about the mission.

  Sara had been quiet and supportive, as always—watching Lon to see how he was handling the situation—but restrained, both with her husband and their son. Angie had been visibly upset, though she had tried to hide her emotions. Lon’s departures had long bothered her, and now she had to say good-bye to her brother as well, with no guarantee that either of them would return. Angie did not know that her father had heard her tell Sara, “I’ll never marry a soldier. I couldn’t stand it year after year, not knowing if he’d come home.” That’s the smart way, Lon had thought at the time, suspecting that she would change her mind, perhaps many times, before she married.

  Lon’s command shuttle was waiting near the military terminal building. The shuttles of hi
s 4th Battalion were just taking off. The shuttles of the Heavy Weapons Battalion would follow in three minutes. That would leave only the three craft that would carry Lon, his staff, and the regimental headquarters and service company. There had been no traffic tie-up in the air. The port’s controllers were efficient.

  “We’d better get aboard,” Lon told Ives. They were the only two who hadn’t boarded; their shuttle was the only one that had not yet “buttoned up” for the ascent. The command shuttle’s crew chief was standing in the one open hatch, waiting to seal it as soon as the last two officers got aboard. The two men walked toward the hatch, not obviously hurrying. “I’m going to ride up front with the pilots,” Lon said as they moved up the ramp and past the crew chief into the shuttle.

  The armada that had been gathered to take the two regiments to Elysium waited in a circular formation roughly two hundred miles above Dirigent, several hundred miles south and more than a thousand miles east of Dirigent City. Most of the ships would have been visible from the ground in daylight, but they were over deserted ocean and the desert that occupied much of the southeastern district of the world’s primary continent.

  There were ten of the new Raptor-class troop transports, each more than seven miles long and half a mile in diameter at the point of their greatest thickness. Each could carry a battalion of soldiers along with their equipment and supplies for more than four months, in more comfort than the older Dragon-class ships could manage. Three converted Dragons accompanied the fleet to carry additional supplies and munitions, including Long Snake, which had carried Lon on many contracts over the years. The heavy weapons of the two regiments were on Patton and Rommel, along with their mechanics and crews. Agamemnon and Odysseus each carried a squadron of Shrike II aerospace fighters. Sidon, the smallest ship in the armada, would be used primarily as a courier vessel, alternating duty with Tyre, which would not be accompanying this task force, traveling between Dirigent and Elysium on a monthly schedule … or more frequently, as dictated by conditions on Elysium. The two smaller ships would carry messages, supplies, and—if needed—bring home casualties who needed extended regeneration and rehabilitation treatment, and take replacements to Elysium.