“You have been an officer, haven’t you?” Cort asked. “Yes, you’ll be officer of the watch. Thank you deeply, Dirk.”
“My pleasure. Who do I wake up to take second watch, and when?”
“The master sergeant, at midnight.” Cort hesitated. “He might…”
“Resent me a bit, because I’ve been hired in as a sergeant and stayed pretty close to you? Don’t worry, lieutenant, I’ll reason with him.”
“Just make sure your reasoning doesn’t leave any bruises,” Cort cautioned.
Dirk grinned, shaking his head. “I wouldn’t dream of assaulting a senior noncom, lieutenant. Sleep tight.”
“That’s what sent me into this misery,” Cort groaned. “If you don’t mind, I’ll sleep sober.” True to his word, Dirk wandered through the camp while the men were bedding down, and even found a chance to exchange a few words with Sergeant Otto.
“Glad you joined up,” the older man told him. “Young officers need watchdogs now and then, and I’m just as glad to have someone share the job.”
Dirk grinned. “So you knew why I really signed up.”
“Took a liking to him right away, didn’t you? And you had nothing else going, at the moment. Well, it’s good for young men to make friends. You’ve been an officer, too, though, haven’t you?”
“An officer, and a sergeant major before that,” Dirk confirmed, “but I started as a private.”
Sergeant Otto nodded. “Then I’m glad to have someone else to help keep this crew of thugs in order. Just don’t let on when we rejoin the company.”
“I’ll revert to the lowliest infantry sergeant,” Dirk promised.
“I doubt that.” Otto grinned. “But I’ll settle for your taking orders.”
Then Dirk went out to pace the unseen picket line, visible only as-line-of-sight between sentries. They were easy enough to see, because they were on a flat meadow. He stopped by the first and said, “What of the night?”
“Quiet, sergeant.” The trooper tried to hide his disdain of this disguised civilian.
Dirk decided he needed a lesson. He pointed. “See that bush?”
“Of course, sergeant,” the soldier replied, with a trace of scorn.
“How far away is it?”
The soldier thought a moment, then said, “Twenty yards.”
Dirk nodded. “Keep an eye on it. When I come back, tell me if it’s even five yards nearer.”
“Closer?”The soldier stared at him as though he were crazy. “How could a bush move?”
“By somebody cutting it off at the roots and using it to hide behind as he crept closer to you,” Dirk explained.
The sentry’s gaze snapped back to the bush, staring.
“Keep the watch,” Dirk said, turning away. “Yes, sergeant!” The young man’s voice held a note of respect now.
Dirk made the rounds, chatting with each soldier and winning a little trust from each, if not yet respect. Then he stepped out past the picket line, strolling around it twenty yards out, ostensibly checking the ground. It wasn’t the best military tactic, but it did provide some privacy. He took the medallion out of his shirt front and managed to fake a rather believable sneeze. He waited a few minutes, then sneezed again.
The medallion spoke in Gar’s voice. “Receiving.”
CHAPTER 9
Are you someplace where you can talk without being overheard?” Dirk asked. “I’ve just signed off as a caravan guard, and I’m out on my own, camping in a cave for the night,” Gar answered. “Where are you?”
“Patrolling the perimeter as officer of the watch for a mercenary company,” Dirk answered. “I bummed around for a bit, learning the language, until I found the town they were visiting for R and R. Stayed overnight in a peasant hovel, took a short courier job for a boss, that kind of thing. How about you?”
“We fought off some mercenaries moonlighting as bandits,” Gar told him, “and I pumped the caravan merchant for every bit of information I could get about trade and the political setup, or lack of it. Then we outwitted a translator who was trying to make a profit out of swindling both his boss and us, and he sicced some off-duty boots on us—that’s…”
“Boss’s soldiers, I know,” Dirk said. “Just offhand, I’d say that between the two of us we’ve seen a pretty good cross section of the population.”
“I’ve picked up enough legends to work out the history of the planet after Terra cut them off,” Gar told him.
“Me, too,” Dirk said. “The folktales make it pretty clear the people remember their ancestors being anarchists.”
“From what I’ve heard, they really thought they could live with no government, imitating the virtue of their sages,” Gar agreed. “The first generation managed to live by their ideals, but some of their children didn’t feel obligated. A few of them liked to throw their weight around, and decided to steal as much as they could by brute force. They bullied other tough guys into taking orders, gathered gangs, and started beating up their neighbors, enslaving them, and taking all their food except the bare minimum to keep them alive and reproducing.”
Dirk nodded, forgetting that Gar couldn’t see him. “Then one bully started conquering another, two allied against one, the one allied with two more, and the situation turned into perpetual warfare. Finally one bully managed to conquer three or four others and declared himself boss. Word got out, the idea caught on, and other bullies started fighting it out to see who could become boss.”
“Which worked fine to make a boss over several bullies,” Gar agreed, “but by the time one boss started trying to conquer another one, some enterprising soul had already invented mercenary companies, and with each side hiring mercenaries to help out, the battles only ended in futility and bloodshed.”
Dirk added, “And nobody noticed that it wasn’t exactly ethical.”
“They seem to have the idea that morality is only for weaklings,” Gar said, “and there’s no religion to make them rethink the point.”
“Yes, you noticed that, too?” Dirk frowned. “No religion at all. I gather the original colonists were trying very hard to be good philosophers and better atheists.”
“Well, they succeeded,” Gar said grimly, “and the bosses finished the job. They did their best to kill off all the philosophers.”
“Yeah, I picked up traces of that, too,” Dirk agreed. “The sages told their people not to try to defend them, but the people tried to fight for them anyway, and were slaughtered. So ended all the philosophers.”
“Except for the ones who were willing to come up with logical excuses for bosses to exist, and be used as mouthpieces,” Gar said, “and willing to concoct a philosophy that said bosses were right to be bosses, and the common people should stay in their places.”
“I get the impression that a very few sages survived by going so far out into the wilderness that the bosses didn’t care about them,” Dirk said. “Anyway, each district seems to have at least one sage, and he’s keeping the basic ideas of Taoism alive, to comfort the people when they’re on the verge of despair.”
“So philosophy becomes the opiate of the masses,” Gar said, with irony. “I also found out that after Terra cut the colony off and manufactured goods became scarce, the second generation reinvented capitalism. Since there was no government to force it to stop, it caught on.”
“Interesting that you’ve found a merchant,” Dirk commented. “All I’ve seen are mercenaries.”
“That does seem to be the most widespread form of capitalism,” Gar agreed. “Most of the bosses’ money goes into hiring free companies. The wars between bosses quickly became a matter of seeing who could hire the most and the best mercenaries, and the ordinary people were ground down to pay for them.”