Lieutenant, page 20
part #2 of Dirigent Mercenary Corps Series
Lon got his men, the ones who were still fit for duty, settled, then went to check on the wounded. He talked to the ones who were conscious and asked the orderlies about each of the others—when he could find a medic willing to take a few seconds to answer a question.
When Lon got back to his platoons, he almost fell, his muscles and joints going limp as he started to sit—a reaction, part exhaustion, part delayed fear … and disgust. He took a moment to steady himself, then pulled his helmet off and dropped it at his side. He leaned forward, arms on his thighs, head hanging as far as it would go. Now, his mind was almost blank. There was simply too much to think about, too much to regret.
“There’s only one constant about our business,” Lieutenant Arlan Taiters, the officer who had mentored Lon through his cadet stage in the DMC, had told him. “Men die in battle. You’ve got to be able to deal with that, or you don’t have any place in the Corps, not as an officer, not as an enlisted man.” Taiters himself had died not long after that. It was his two platoons that Lon had inherited when he received his commission. Lon thought about him, when his mind started to function again. Taiters had died in a confrontation not all that different from the one that Lon and his men had just experienced.
“You okay, Lieutenant?” Tebba Girana asked.
Lon looked up. Tebba was just then squatting in front of him. The corporal had his faceplate up.
“Tired,” Lon said. “And thinking about the men we lost.” He shook his head. “And remembering Arlan Taiters.”
“Sometimes I have nightmares,” Tebba said, very softly.
“I see all of the men I’ve known who got killed. Been a lot of them in the fifteen years I’ve been in the Corps. But that’s always at home, back on Dirigent. It’s not good to dwell on them on contract. Can’t help them, and don’t help the men I’m supposed to take care of now.”
“I know, Tebba. I know.” Lon let out a breath. “I’ll be okay in a minute or two. Just gotta clean out the cobwebs, and the memories are tangled up in them.”
“Sergeant Dendrow’s gonna have to go in a tube, but he’s waiting for the more seriously wounded guys first. Looks like it might be mid-morning before he’s ready for duty.”
Lon nodded. “I talked to him a few minutes ago. He tried to tell me a half dozen things that I needed to do before I could shut him up and tell him that we’re coping, to just rest and take care of himself.”
“Yeah, he gave me a hard time too,” Tebba said. “I finally had to just walk away from him so’s he would shut up.”
“We need to find a good water supply,” Lon said after a moment. “Get the canteens filled, try to get a little extra so men can douse themselves, get a little of the stench off.”
“Weil and I are already working at it, Lieutenant. Phip and Janno found some pails in one of the buildings. And the water’s on in most of them. I’ll bring a bucket around for you, soon as it all gets here.”
Lon shook his head. “Not till everyone else is taken care of, Tebba.”
“Don’t worry about that sort of nonsense now, Lieutenant,” Tebba said. “We’ll get everybody taken care of, more or less at once. It’s only ‘women and children first,’ that I recall, and we don’t have any of those here.”
Lon had a call from Captain Orlis. The rest of the company was still in action. “I know you took a beating, Nolan, but I hear that you did a great job,” Orlis said. “You and your men stay put. Try to get some sleep. We’ll worry about getting you back in the morning.”
Lon got his men moved into a building. Shelter, running water, and toilets. The building housed professional offices, a half dozen separate units. Many of the windows had been blown or shot out, but that scarcely mattered. None of Lon’s men were in any hurry to carp about details, even though it meant that they could hear the distant sounds of fighting—gunfire and grenade explosions. It was infinitely better than sleeping outside. There were no complaints, no bad jokes.
Not a good sign, Lon thought, but he shared the same apathy. “A griping soldier is, basically, a happy soldier,” one of Lon’s instructors at the North American Military Academy had been fond of saying. “It’s when he stops griping that you have to be most concerned about his morale.” Morale isn’t supposed to be a problem in the Corps, Lon thought. We’re professionals, career soldiers. This is what we chose to do. He sighed. They had good reason to be quiet. Too many men had died. If the men did not snap back from it after a night’s sleep, then there might be something for Lon to worry about.
The room Lon selected for himself was on the second floor, in a corner. There was a sofa covered with what might have been real leather, soft and almost long enough for him to stretch out fully. Tebba and part of his squad were in the other two rooms of the office suite, with the rest of third platoon distributed around the second floor; fourth platoon was below, on the ground floor.
Lon stripped off his helmet, pack, harness, and web belt, which made him more than forty pounds lighter. I could almost float away, if I wasn’t so dead tired, he thought. He sat on the sofa and let his shoulders slump forward. Sleep held great attraction, but Lon could not simply collapse. He tried to think coherently, tried to make certain that he was not forgetting anything essential. Third Battalion headquarters and the technicians at the aid station knew where Lon and his men were. They would not be “lost,” and the men who were released by the medics would be able to find them. Lon had not set up any schedule of sentries; that might be a mistake, but he thought not. They were away from the fighting, with enough active soldiers around to give warning of any trouble.
“I need sleep,” Lon muttered. But he got to his feet and shuffled across to the private restroom that the office boasted—the other reason (aside from the sofa) that he had selected it. He could take a couple of minutes to wash some of the grime away.
When he finished his toilet, Lon returned to the sofa. For several minutes he just sat on it. Then, finally, he took off his boots and lay down. His feet hurt. They were moderately swollen. Lon was too tired to appreciate the softness of his bed. Almost immediately, he was asleep.
Lon came awake with a start. He lay absolutely motionless, trying to determine what had brought him out of sleep so abruptly. He needed time to realize that what was “wrong” was silence. The guns had stopped firing. There were no explosions. He did not even hear men talking below his window.
It was still dark. That window was just a rectangular space that was not quite as dark as the wall that framed it. Lon was cautious getting up, trying to be as silent as the world around him. He got his helmet and put it on, giving himself its night-vision capability. Then he went to the window to look out. Several large tents had been erected where the medical orderlies and technicians had been treating the wounded earlier. Lon saw four men standing guard at the perimeter of the square. Standing, Lon thought. The men were not behind cover looking out over their rifle barrels.
The fighting must be over, Lon decided. The enemy must have surrendered. Otherwise, the guards would have been more cautious. They would not be standing the way they were, as if they were in front of Corps Headquarters on Dirigent.
Lon looked at the time on his helmet display. It was a few minutes past five-thirty in the morning, local time. It would be light soon.
I wonder if anyone’s been trying to contact me, he thought. With his helmet on the floor next to the sofa, there was a good chance that he would not have heard a radio call. Then he realized that if anyone had tried to contact him and he had not answered the radio, someone would have been sent to wake him. Enough people know where I am. He toyed with the idea of calling Captain Orlis, but decided against it. Orlis might be sleeping, needing his own rest after a long day and night of fighting.
“It can wait,” Lon said softly, keeping his voice down as though he were afraid of waking someone—even though there was a closed door between him and anyone else. He continued to stand by the window, observing the minimal activity below. Two men came out of one of the tents, went over to one of the guards, and apparently conversed with him briefly before going on out of sight, in the direction the guard had just pointed—wounded men looking to rejoin their unit after completing their treatment.
“I wonder if our wounded are back yet.” Lon went back to the sofa, sat, and pulled on his boots. He did not consider lying down and trying to go back to sleep. Even though he had had little more than an hour, he was no longer sleepy. His mind was alert, and until he knew for certain what was going on, he would be unable to shut off his thoughts enough for slumber.
Lon was uncertain what to do next. His impulse was to put on the rest of his gear and go prowling through the building, maybe go out to the medical tents to find someone who might be able to tell him what had happened. But he did not want to wake any of his men unless it became necessary. They needed to get as much sleep as they could, while they could. I don’t know that it’s over, Lon reminded himself. There might still be units of Belletiener troops in The Cliffs or elsewhere.
As much to fill time as to assuage hunger, Lon opened a meal pack and ate. He started to remember the night before, the fighting, the deaths. He would have to write up an after-action report, and the sooner he fixed the details in his mind, the less likely he would be to omit anything when it was time for the formal report. The dead. The seriously wounded. Names. He recalled the faces that went with the names, and he remembered more. Especially about the dead. His dead.
I hope we don’t have to spend the whole six months here, Lon thought at about the time that he finished his breakfast. We’ve had our share of Calypso. Let Second Regiment fill out the time when they get here, if the locals still want help around to prevent another attack. Let us go home and lick our wounds. On the trip out, some of the men had talked about the joys of spending six months in a “tropical paradise” with nothing to do but wait around in case there was an invasion, maybe spend time training more Calypsan soldiers. But paradise had turned sour.
He went back to the window, and was surprised to see that it had started to rain—a gentle shower, fit for a storybook spring day. The sky was a little lighter with approaching daylight, but the overcast seemed determined to retard the dawn. At least it’ll give the men something safe to bitch about when they get up, Lon thought. He shook his head. It was time to do something more constructive than standing around and staring.
After putting on his gear, Lon picked up his rifle and left the room. He moved quietly through the outer room of the suite, hoping to avoid waking anyone, but Tebba either woke or was already awake. He got up and followed Lon out into the corridor.
“I’m going to go see if I can find out what the situation is,” Lon said, lifting his visor and speaking softly. Tebba was carrying his helmet. “The shooting has stopped.”
Girana nodded. “Yeah, I noticed. More’n an hour ago it was.” He shrugged. “At least, that’s when I woke and noticed it was quiet.”
“That’s what woke me too,” Lon said. “Sleep through all the racket, then wake when it gets quiet.”
“You figure that Belletiene surrendered?” Tebba asked.
“Something like that. The troops here, anyway. Hard telling if there’s any contact with their government.”
“I didn’t even think about that. All I had in mind was the bunch here fighting us. That is all we gotta worry about, isn’t it, Lieutenant?”
“I don’t know, Tebba,” Lon said. “For the moment anyway. But if their government isn’t ready to come to terms that Calypso will accept, maybe not. We could still have to wait out the full six months of our tour, maybe face more of them somewhere down the road. It’s all guesswork. I might know more after I get a chance to talk to Captain Orlis. Whenever that is. Right now, I’m going to drift over to the aid station, or maybe 3rd Battalion headquarters, and see if I can find out what’s what.”
“You want me to tag along?”
“No need. Stick around here. Is Ivar back yet?”
“No. He would have looked you up right away, and tripped over me in the process. Shouldn’t be long, though, I think. By now they must have most of the wounded cycled through the tubes.”
If anyone else woke while Lon was working his way through to one of the building’s exits, they did not bother to get up or say anything. Lon stood in the doorway for a couple of minutes, feeling the soft, damp breeze coming from the east, getting a little drizzle on his faceplate. He lifted that and let the air and the water hit him in the face. There was a fishy smell to the air, to the rain.
It’s only dead fish smell like that, he thought, remembering one summer when all of the fish had died in one of the nearby streams—back in eastern North America on Earth. After a couple of days the stench downwind had been intense, much worse than the hint of fishiness here. He did not recall what had caused that die-off. At eleven years of age, such things had not concerned him for long.
Lon pulled his visor back down before he stepped out of the covered doorway and walked to 3rd Battalion’s headquarters. That was in another building, for now. If the fighting was over, Colonel McGregor and his staff would almost certainly be displaced by the building’s regular occupants. Lon was surprised that the battalion’s medical section had bothered to erect tents rather than make use of one or more of the vacant structures.
There was little activity at the headquarters. Two enlisted men were busy on complinks. Major Kai was sitting at a desk at the rear of the room, leaning back, his eyes closed. But he apparently heard Lon enter. He sat up, then stood and walked over toward Lon, who had lifted his faceplate.
“Lieutenant Nolan,” Kai said, nodding to him. “I figured you’d still be sleeping.”
“The silence woke me, Major,” Lon said with a self-conscious grin. “I came over to see what’s going on.”
“Not a whole lot, as you can see,” Kai said.
“Is the fighting over?”
“The general commanding the invasion force surrendered his command less than two hours ago,” Kai said. “The Calypsans and our people are still collecting prisoners and seeing to the wounded on both sides. For the rest of us, we’ve been given the word to stand down—provisionally. Colonel Gaffney has scheduled a regimental officers’ call for noon. No word yet on where it will be.”
“What about my platoons? Do we stay here or pack up and rejoin our company?”
“No hurry, Lieutenant. You might as well let them sleep for a couple more hours before you worry about trekking off to find the rest of your lads. No one’s yelling for you, so as long as you don’t make noise, you should have plenty of time. You might even try getting a little more sleep yourself.”
Lon shrugged. “I need to check on my wounded, see how long it’ll be before the last are released by the medics, and make certain none of them are going to be shipped up to Long Snake for rehab or extended treatment.”
“Come over to my desk. I can give you some of that information here.” Kai led the way. When he sat down, he pulled his portable complink closer and keyed in a request.
“Here’s what I have, Lieutenant,” he said then, turning the unit so that Lon could see the screen. “Two of your boys are going to be returned to ship for regeneration or rehabilitation. Your platoon sergeant, Dendrow, nearly lost an arm. He’s going to be off the duty list for a month for tissue regeneration and therapy. I talked with him for a couple of minutes. I didn’t get to talk to the other one.”
The other man being sent back up to the ship was Loe Gavish from fourth platoon’s first squad. “When will they be shipped out, Major?” Lon asked.
“Any minute now, I suspect,” Kai said. “All of the wounded who need further treatment were collected nearly an hour ago, taken over toward the beach. A shuttle should be coming in for the pickup right about now.”
“No chance for me to talk to my two men before they go, is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m afraid that’s the way it is, Lieutenant. Sorry. I didn’t think to have you notified. Perhaps I should have.”
“I guess it doesn’t matter, Major. I should have taken the time to see them on my own, earlier. I was afraid the medics would chase me out, though.”
Major Kai chuckled. “Very likely. One of the technicians even gave Colonel McGregor an earful. But if you go over there now, you’ll probably be able to speak to the rest of your wounded. Things have quieted down considerably, especially since there are no new wounded coming in.”
20
Intermittent light showers, rarely more than a drizzle, persisted through the morning. There were few complaints. Most of the comments that Lon heard were of the “I hope it stays like this and keeps the temperature down” variety. That was unlikely. The reports Lon got from CIC aboard Star Dragon suggested that the rain would end around midday and that the clouds would move out to sea shortly after that.
At eight o’clock Lon received a call from Matt Orlis. The captain asked for more details on how Lon’s platoons had fared, then suggested that they move north to rendezvous with the other half of Alpha Company before the regimental officers’ call. “That should give you time to collect the rest of your men from the medics,” Orlis said, and Lon confirmed that it would be. The last were scheduled to be returned to duty by 1000 hours—except for those who had been evacuated to the ship.
During the next two hours, Lon talked with each of his remaining noncoms, getting more detailed information on the activities of each squad during the final fight of the previous night … and how many casualties had been suffered. Everything was recorded, both for his personal record and as part of the official archives for the regiment.
Tebba Girana was told that he would continue as interim platoon sergeant until Ivar Dendrow returned to duty. Lance Corporal Dav Grott would take over second squad temporarily. In third platoon’s first squad, Lance Corporal Jez Aivish succeeded Heyes Wurd as squad leader. There were also a couple of temporary changes in fourth platoon that Lon had to confirm with Captain Orlis—who accepted all of Lon’s recommendations.
