The Far Side (96 page)

“You can’t.  I suppose you’re right, but it doesn’t sit well with those that are responsible for your safety.”

“Sir, if Norwich students wanted a safe life, they’d have gone to junior college.  This is why I matriculated at Norwich, sir.  This is the sort of thing I wanted to learn.  Here I am, a young man, sitting at a table with some of the most powerful people on this planet, sided by some of the smartest people from mine.  People from Norwich are here, helping to decide policy, deciding how to manage multiple crises.  I couldn’t ask for more, sir.”

“Your personal safety,” General Briggs told him.

“Sir, when you were in combat, were you more concerned with your duty or your personal survival?  I can’t believe it was your survival.  I didn’t decide on Norwich so I could grow old and sit at a fireplace, telling my children stories of what never was.  I want to do something, sir.”  Charles waved again at the table where they’d been meeting.  “I wanted to do civil affairs before this; now I can’t imagine doing anything else.  Andie Schulz, Kris Boyle -- you -- you are all trying to create a better world.  I can’t imagine a more noble thing to do with my life.”

“You want to do civil affairs?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Here or in Iraq?”

That stopped Charles.  “Honestly, sir, I don’t know.  I’ve learned a lot in the last two weeks; I don’t think it will matter much where I apply it.”

“Do you understand that at meetings like this, the leaders exchange personal messages?  Requests for information, above and beyond what’s been said -- and they also ask for personal favors?”

“I’m not surprised, sir,” Charles replied.

“Danei has asked if you would be available to return to her homeland with her.”

Charles nearly choked.

“You wouldn’t be as out of contact as all of that; we do have better radios and NASA tells us that they have rocket we can get through the Far Side door that can orbit a small comsat, given the lower gravity of the planet.  One won’t cut it, but a dozen or so would.  It might be six months or so until you’re in regular contact with home, but it would be coming.

“There is one tiny flaw, however,” the general ended with the statement.

“A flaw, sir?”

“Yes.  The B’lugi do not live twenty-six miles across the sea.  It’s about eleven thousand miles just to the southwestern tip of their continent, and four thousand miles further to B’Lugi.  Their voyage here was an epic journey, fraught with danger; it will likely be even more dangerous going back, because the Tengri are looking for her.”

“Me, sir?  Why would she want me?  I’m just a student!”

General Biggs smiled.  “Students don’t get requests from foreign potentates to award their highest honor to you.  Son, Melek has talked to the Arvalan king, Collum, and they want to give you two Chain Breaker tattoos.  Take those to B’Lugi and your future is assured.

“Your job would be to learn what you can about the B’Lugi, teach them what you can about America, and do what you can to put a crimp in the Tengri plans to conquer us all.”

“Colonel Levi asked me to go to Israel.”

General Briggs laughed.  “She asked me to go to Israel; she has asked Kris, Andie, Kurt and Ezra.  You should have felt slighted if she left you out.”

“I really don’t want to go to Israel, but I owe her so much...”

“You can pay her back by becoming a damn fine officer.  That would make her day.

“We are talking with the Arvalans.  We are going to offer Danei two hundred Arvalans to fill out her crew.  She is to teach them about sailing ships, and some of them will teach her people about P90s.  She takes them home and promises to send the Arvalans back the first chance she gets.  The betting is that even if she wasn’t desperate for a crew, she’d agree.  Andie really impressed her with her marksmanship demonstration.”

“Andie impressed me with her marksmanship demonstration,” Charles told his superior dryly.

“Do you understand that a similar demonstration got a two-hundred man warship to surrender, along with another hundred in the fort?”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Ezra said you impressed the Arvalans with a Barrett sniper rifle against the dralka.”

“Yes, sir.  It was clear by the end that the dralka weren’t stupid, but the Barrett just reached out further than they could comprehend.”

“Well, Ezra has another for you.  He says that you’ve made your chops, and all you have to do is sign on the dotted line and ten cases of ammo is yours.  Twenty thousand rounds.”

“I pray, sir, that I never have an occasion to use them.”

“If you wish to accept the assignment, we’ll take you home for a couple of weeks, and you can visit your family, friends and classmates.  Then you’ll come back here.  The Arvalans would need a few months to be able to muster supplies for this ship here at the rookery; so the B’Lugi will sail north to Arvala.  They would pick you up when they come back south in six or eight weeks.”

“Quarantine?”

“I know Jon Bullman, the head of the Office of Off-World Security.  You’ll have an exemption.”

“I want to do it then, sir.”

General Briggs nodded.  “One last thing, Cadet.”  He nodded to four people not so very far away.  Andie Schulz and Kris Boyle, who were talking with Melek and Chaba.

“Those two gave us this place and this opportunity.  Andie wants to give the Arvalans a fighting chance against the Tengri; now she has another ally.  She’ll do her best for them, too, even if they are fifteen thousand miles away.  Kris Boyle -- words fail me when I try to describe her.

“She needs time to process this.  All of this.  One day she will realize what the real task is, as Andie Schultz has come close to understanding.  This is, Cadet Evans, about the future.  We’ve a chance here to merge our world with another; a world with even more variety than we’re used to.”  He gestured west, where the Big Moon was just showing over the horizon.  “And there, Cadet!  Another challenge just as large as this one!

“Random Far Side doors are iffy.  Arvala isn’t iffy.  We have a good feel now for what’s here and what we’re up against.  We can do this.  We are going to do this!  This is a future that we can’t afford to mess up!”

* * *

It was late, and sensible people were asleep.  Andie Schultz, Linda Walsh, Kris Boyle, Kurt Sandusky, Ezra Lawson and Melek met high in the rookery, in the chamber that led to the emergency exit.

“A thousand dralka,” said Andie despondently.  “A dozen men dead, more than that wounded.”  She nodded at Melek.  “Nine Arvalans, two Americans and an Israeli are dead.  How is Colonel Levi going to report to her bosses that she lost someone here?”

“And the B’Lugi losses dwarfed what we experienced,” Kris reminded her.

Kurt homed in on Andie’s question, his voice harsh, “Because this place is dangerous.  Andie, I’ve never heard either you or Kris short-change that danger.  You warned General Briggs repeatedly that he was making a mistake.”

“They’re dead,” Andie said with finality.  “Why would anyone ever work for me again?  How can I keep the people I have?”

“Because,” Kurt told her bluntly, “you kept the other two hundred people here from Earth alive.

“You weren’t in charge of defensive dispositions, Andie -- I was.  I never imagined an attack from that many dralka.  Not only that, the dralka were clever.  They hooked around and came at Danei’s ship from the west and it looked they were coming at us on the headland from the west as well.  I was unprepared when the real attack at our position came from the south.

“I had only one of my men oriented south and Colonel Levi’s radioman was there to back him up.  The dralka swarmed them, killing them both.  They used the gap in our lines to try to break us.  Colonel Levi’s second in command sacrificed himself to slow that, and Colonel Levi waded into the middle of them without regard for her personal safety.  Her second in command his lost his right forearm, but at least he’ll survive.

“I pulled people out of the line facing west, and we got a handle on it.  They really don’t like machine guns.  I’d like to think that I could have pulled it out if Colonel Levi hadn’t have been there, but I’m dubious.”

Kris spoke up again.  “Cadet Evans said that the attack wasn’t something the B’Lugi were prepared for.  Their marksmanship is no better than the Tengri’s.  A lot of her people were killed with empty weapons -- it just takes forever to reload a musket.

“Cadet Evans pulled her back and gave her time to consider the threat.  She went to her gun deck and organized a response from the survivors.”

“A lot of people died,” Andie reiterated.

“But more didn’t,” Kurt told her.  “That’s the name of the game.”

Linda Walsh, who rarely spoke at meetings like this, did so then.  “I called Helen Boyle after the fight.  She’s organized a research party of three zoologists and a paleontologist.  They’ll be here in the morning.  I remember what Andie said about the dralka that attacked Arvala -- the dralka with chains.”

She reached down to her lap and rolled a piece of gold out onto the table.  “One of the Israeli techs saw this around the neck of a dralka, and wanted to know what would happen to him if he tried to take a souvenir home.  I hope no one minds, because I told him that we’d applaud.”

Everyone looked at the golden collar.

“That looks more decorative than anything else,” Andie told the others.

“I’d assume that too,” Kris added.

Andie closed her eyes and spoke bitterly, “A two hundred dralka attack on Arvala, right after we reached the city.  A five hundred plus dralka attack on Siran-ista shortly after Charles Evans and his classmates arrived.  Now, upwards of a thousand dralka attack when the B’Lugi arrive.

“Either we have to believe in gremlins or we have at least one set of spies and more likely two.  And the worst thing of all -- they have some way to coordinate with the dralka on when and where to attack.”

Melek had been silent up until then and now he spoke simply.  “We have men all along the road, all of the time.  I can’t see how a hundred dralka could go past without someone seeing them, much less a thousand.  Yet it has happened twice now.

“In Arvala we could probably withstand an attack by a thousand now -- we have half the army camped nearby, nearly twenty thousand men.  Had it been a thousand dralka that first time instead of a hundred -- I’m sure we’d have fared far worse than we did.

“It seems unbelievable that someone could be an ally of the dralka.  First, you have to believe that the dralka are as intelligent, or nearly so, as we are.  Then you would have to believe someone could be a traitor to their people, to their entire species and then you have to believe that the dralka simply wouldn’t eat the traitor.  I have already reported back to Collum and he’s contemplating bringing in some of the former Dralka officers for more extensive questioning.”

“It’s a start,” Kurt said, nodding.  “But this has put a different complexion on things here.  We are going to need more men as guards.  We need to be able to do something to shelter from the dralka.”

Andie was brisk.  “We’ll bring over some workers and more soldiers from Earth.  We’ll start putting up some stone fortifications every few miles, going north along the railroad and probably along the wagon road as well.  We can put heavy wooden roofs on them, something the dralka can’t get through.

“It’s going to take a lot of time and effort,” she finished.

“Aye,” Melek replied.  “But it is something we can do.  The King was already considering building a series of bases near the sites of former towns, along the eastern shores here.  We are going to have to do extensive patrolling to keep the dralka from reestablishing themselves here, so we will need those bases, whether or not the Tengri come.

“For a long time there were very few attempts by the dralka to push south of the wall; they had to know that there was nothing to eat south of the wall.  Now they’ve found a lot of food.”  He sighed.  “Before long we’ll have problems along the other two Fingers as well.  I don’t know how long we can keep trading each other gold and silver for copper, but this is going to cost a lot of money.  We need a much larger army.”

Andie nodded.  “Kurt, will it be much trouble to get more guards?”

He grimaced.  “It’s going to be iffy unless you are willing to spend buckets of money.  Has anyone inquired how the Arvalans manage property rights?”

“Individuals own property, but the King has rules about how much one family can own.  There are nothing like estates or latifundia here.  You can own about a hundred and sixty acres of cropland, and an acre or so in a city,” Andie told him.  “Why?”

“One thing that has been traditional in the past on Earth in many armies is grants of land to the soldiers.”  Kurt chuckled and added, “Although the thought of one size of plot fits all will cause conniptions among the officers and senior NCOs.”

“Melek, has any king done anything like that?”

Melek shrugged.  “You have to understand that there is still a lot more land available than people.  A father may decide which of his sons gets the family land, but the other sons need only to ask the King and they will be able to go to one of several nice places and pick and choose what they want.  I am sure that if any of your people wish to settle here, they would be welcome, and subject to the same land rules as one of our people.”