In fact, Van Dassel did not make any move. His division surrounding Watershed sat quietly while his deadline for surrender passed, and the relieving forces from the Advanced Associated Communities began to be airlifted in. During the following night, he quietly withdrew his forces. By the following sunrise, as the newly landed AAC soldiery began to clear an area of the forest outside the town and construct a semipermanent camp for themselves, there was not a Brozan soldier to be found within two hundred miles.
"Very well done indeed!" said Walco, enthusiastically, when he arrived at Watershed with the last of his own troops and was ushered in to the office Cletus had taken over in the police headquarters building. "You and your Dorsais have done a marvelous job. You can move out any time now."
"As soon as we're paid," said Cletus.
Walco smiled, thinly. "I thought you might be eager to get your pay," he said. "So I brought it along with me."
He lifted a narrow briefcase onto the desk between them, took out a release form, which he passed to Cletus, and then began to remove gold certificates, which he stacked on the desk in front of Cletus.
Cletus ignored the form and watched coolly as the pile of certificates grew. When Walco stopped at last, and looked up at him with another broad smile, Cletus did not smile back. He shook his head.
"That's less than half of what our agreement called for," Cletus said.
Walco preserved his smile. "True," Walco said. "But in the original agreement we envisioned hiring you for a three-month term. As it happens, you've been lucky enough to achieve your objective in less than a week and with only a quarter of your expeditionary force. We figured full combat pay for the whole week, however, for the five hundred men you used, and in addition we're paying you garrison scale not only for the rest of your men for that week but for your whole force for the rest of this month as well - as a sort of bonus."
Cletus looked at him. Walco's smile faded.
"I'm sure you remember as well as I do," said Cletus, coldly, "that the agreement was for two thousand men for three months, full combat pay for everybody during that period - and no pay at all if we weren't able to deliver the stibnite mines to you. How many men I used to make that recovery, and how long I took, was my concern. I expect full combat pay for three months for my entire command, immediately."
"That's out of the question, of course," said Walco, a little shortly.
"I don't think so," said Cletus. "Maybe I should remind you that I told General Van Dassel, the Brozan commander who had us encircled here, that I was holding the civilian population of Watershed hostage for his good behavior. Perhaps I should remind you that I and the men I brought here with me are still holding these people hostage - this time for your good behavior."
Walco's face became strangely set. "You wouldn't harm civilians!" he said, after a moment.
"General Van Dassel believes I would," replied Cletus. "Now I, personally, give you my word as a Dorsai - and that's a word that's going to become something better than a signed contract, in time - that no single civilian will be hurt. But have you got the courage to believe me? If I'm lying, and your takeover of the mines includes a blood bath of the resident townspeople, your chances of coming to some eventual agreement with Broza about these mines will go up in smoke. Instead of being able to negotiate on the basis of having a bird in the hand, you'll have to face a colony interested only in vengeance - vengeance for an action for which all civilized communities will indict you."
Walco stood, staring at him. "I don't have any more certificates with me," he said at last, hoarsely.
"We'll wait," answered Cletus. "You should be able to fly back and get them and return here by noon at the latest."
Shoulders slumped, Walco went. As he mounted the steps of the aircraft that had brought him to Watershed, however, he stopped and turned for a parting shot at Cletus.
"You think you're going to cut a swath through the new worlds," he said, viciously, "and maybe you will for a while. But one of these days everything you've built is going to come tumbling down around your ears."
"We'll see," said Cletus.
He watched the door shut behind Walco and the aircraft lift away into the sky of Newton. Then he turned to Arvid, who was standing beside him.
"By the way, Arv," he said, "Bill Athyer wants to have the chance to study my methods of tactics and strategy at close hand, so he'll be taking over as my aide as soon as we're back on the Dorsai. We'll find a command for you, out in the field somewhere. It's about time you were brushing up on your combat experience anyway."
Without waiting for Arvid's response, he turned his back on the younger man and walked off, his mind already on other problems.
22
"Your prices," said James Arm-of-the-Lord, Eldest of the First Militant Church, on both the neighboring worlds of Harmony and Association - those two worlds called the Friendlies, "are outrageous."
James Arm-of-the-Lord was a small, frail, middle-aged man with sparse gray hair - looking even smaller and more frail than he might otherwise in the tight black jumper and trousers that were the common dress of those belonging to the fanatical sects that had colonized, and later divided and multiplied, on the surfaces of Harmony and Association. At first sight, he seemed a harmless little man, but a glance from his dark eyes or even a few words spoken aloud by him were enough to destroy that illusion. Plainly he was one of those rare people who burn with an inner fire - but the inner fire that never failed in James Arm-of-the-Lord was a brand of woe and a torch of terror to the Unrighteous. Nor was it lessened by the fact that the ranks of the Unrighteous, in James' estimation, included all those whose opinions in any way differed from his own. He sat now in his office at Government Center on Harmony, gazing across the desk's bare, unpolished surface at Cletus, who sat opposite.
"I know we're priced beyond your means," said Cletus. "I didn't come by to suggest that you hire some of our Dorsais. I was going to suggest that possibly we might want to hire some of your young men."
"Hire out our church members to spend their blood and lives in the sinful wars of the Churchless and the Unbelievers?" said James. "Unthinkable!"
"None of your colonies on Harmony or Association have anything to speak of in the way of technology," said Cletus. "Your Militant Church may contain the largest population of any of the churches on these two worlds, but you're still starving for real credit - of the kind you can use in interworld trading to set up the production machinery your people need. You could earn that credit from us, as I say, by hiring out some of your young men to us."
James' eyes glittered like the eyes of a coiled snake in reflective light. "How much?" he snapped.
"The standard wages for conventional mercenary soldiers," replied Cletus.
"Why, that's barely a third of what you asked for each of your Dorsais!" James' voice rose. "You'd sell to us at one price, and buy from us at another?"
"It's a matter of selling and buying two different products," answered Cletus, unmoved. "The Dorsais are worth what I ask for them because of their training and because by now they've established a reputation for earning their money. Your men have no such training, and no reputation. They're worth only what I'm willing to pay for them. On the other hand, not a great deal would be demanded of them. They'd be used mainly as diversionary forces like our jump troops in our recent capture of Margaretha, on Freiland."
The taking over of Margaretha on Freiland had been the latest of a series of successful engagements fought by the new-trained Dorsai mercenaries under Cletus' command. Over a year had gone by since the capture of the stibnite mines on Newton, and in that time they had conducted campaigns leading to clear-cut and almost bloodless victories on the worlds of Newton's sister planet of Cassida, St. Marie, a smaller world under the Procyon sun with Mara and Kultis, and most recently on Freiland, which, with New Earth, were the inhabited planets under the star of Sirius.