"You mean you've been expecting this - expecting deCastries to make speeches like that?" demanded Eachan.
"Yes," answered Cletus. He dismissed the subject. "Never mind that. I'm back here to go through the motions of transporting an imaginary extra division of troops to Breatha Colony. I'll need at least two deep-space transports. Maybe we can arrange to lease some empty cargo spaceships for a diversionary trip - "
"You'd better listen to something else first," Eachan interrupted him. "Did you know you're losing Swahili?"
Cletus raised his eyebrows. "No," he murmured. "But it's not surprising."
Eachan opened a drawer of Cletus' library desk and took out a resignation form, which he dropped on the table on top of the news clippings. Cletus looked down at it. Sure enough, it was made out and signed by Swahili, now a one-star general field commander. Promotions had come thick and fast among those men who had been with Cletus from the beginning. Only Arvid, now in the field, was still a commandant - the equivalent of his old grade of captain, and Eachan, who had refused the one promotion offered him. By contrast, the once ineffective Bill Athyer was now a rank above Arvid as commandant senior grade, less than two ranks away from field commander, with command of a regiment.
"I suppose I'd better talk to him," said Cletus.
"Not that it'll do you any good," replied Eachan.
Cletus invited Swahili up from his post at the main new-training center, now on the far side of Foralie. The next day they met briefly in that same office-study where Eachan had confronted Cletus with the news clippings shortly after his arrival home.
"Of course, I'm sorry to lose you," said Cletus, as the two faced each other. Swahili, a single star gleaming gold on each of his shoulder tabs, bulked larger than ever in his blue dress uniform. "But I imagine you've completely made up your mind."
"Yes," said Swahili. "You understand, don't you?"
"I think so," said Cletus.
"I think you do," echoed Swahili softly, "even if it is just the opposite of the way you like to do things. You've taken all the life out of war - you know that, don't you?"
"It's the way I like it," said Cletus.
Swahili's eyes flashed a little in the soft light of the peaceful library-office. "It's not the way I like it," he said. "What I like is what nearly everyone else hates - hates or is scared sick of. And it's that you've taken out of the business for everybody who serves under you."
"You mean the combat, itself," said Cletus.
"That's right," said Swahili, softly. "I don't like being hurt and all those weeks in the hospital any more than the next man. I don't want to die. But I put up with all the rest of it - all the training, all the hurry-up-and-waiting, all the marking tune between engagements - I put up with all that, just for the few hours when everything turns real."
"You're a killer. Or don't you admit that to yourself?" asked Cletus.
"No," said Swahili. "I'm a special fighter, that's all. I like to fight. Just the killing itself wouldn't do anything for me. I told you I didn't want to get hurt, or killed, any more than the next man. I feel just as hollow inside when the energy weapons start burning the air over my head. At the same time, I wouldn't miss it for anything. It's a dirty, damn universe, and every once in a while I get a chance to hit back at it. That's all. If I knew in the morning when I started out that I was going to be killed that day, I'd still go - because I couldn't die happier than to go down hitting back."
He stopped talking, abruptly. For a moment he simply looked at Cletus in the silence of the room.
"And it's that you've taken out of mercenary work," he said. "So I'm going someplace else where they still have it."
Cletus held out his hand. "Good luck," he said.
They shook hands.
"Luck to you," said Swahili. "You'll need it. In the end the man with gloves on always loses to the bare-knuckle fighter."
"You'll have your chance to test that belief, at least," said Cletus.
23
A week later Cletus returned to New Earth with two leased cargo vessels, the crew and officers of which had agreed to being held in a locked room during the embarking and disembarking of the troops they were supposed to carry. They could testify afterward only to hearing the sounds of boots entering the ship for two and a half hours, on the Dorsai, and to some four hours of similar sounds as they hung in orbit above New Earth, while landing craft shuttled from their ships to some unannounced spot on the planet below. Agents for the Central Combine of city-states, however, observed these landing craft making their sit-downs in a wooded area just inside Breatha Colony's border with Spainville. On attempting to investigate further, the agents found themselves stopped and warned back by a cordon of armed Dorsais, but their estimate of the troops landed, taken from the number of trips from the spaceships in orbit, was of at least five thousand men.
General Lu May, commander of the city-states combined forces, grunted when this information was brought to him.
"That's the sort of thing this Grahame likes to pull," said Lu May. The general was in his mid-seventies, and had been retired from active soldiering until the new ambitions and war-like fervor of the city-states had summoned him back to take over-all command of their new army. "He'd like to shake us up with the idea that we've got to watch two separate invading commands. But I'll lay you odds he pulls them together at the first opportunity, as soon as he thinks he's got us out in the open where he can pull all sorts of fancy maneuvers. But we aren't going to fall for it. We'll stay dug in here in Spainville, and make him come to us."
He chuckled. He was fat as well as old, and the thought of being able to frustrate this unorthodox young upstart while remaining comfortably seated in his own home in Stanleyville tickled him. He ordered heavy energy weapons dug in all around the perimeter of the city and all approaches heavily mined. It would take more than the light-weaponed and light-armored Dorsai mercenaries to break through defenses such as these, even if they were equal in number to the men he had under arms inside the city.
Meanwhile, Cletus' forces were already in motion. A motley horde of civilian trucks and other heavy-duty, air-cushioned sliders had earlier converged on the area where the shuttleboats had landed from the spaceships. These now moved out like a transport and supply convoy, with an armed Dorsai driving each of them. This force crossed the border into Armoy, and swung inland toward Armoy City and its new spaceport, thereby raising flutters of alarm within the community's citizens.
"Sit tight!" grunted Lu May to the frantic messages that reached him from Armoy City for an expeditionary force to defend them against the oncoming Dorsais. He did not send the force, but instead followed his own advice, sitting tight and watching Cletus' other command, which was also in movement now, across the Spainville border, heading apparently through Spainville toward one of the other adjoining city-states. Still Lu May made no move, and sure enough, once it had passed the city of Spainville, Cletus' first command of Dorsais swung about and came up on the city's rear. At the same time, the command that had been threatening Armoy City swung away and cut in to come up before the city of Spainville , so that within a few days the city was ringed by the Dorsai troops.
Lu May chortled and slapped his fat knees. Curiously enough, in Cletus' headquarters outside the city, there was hardly less satisfaction to be found in the person of Chancellor Ad Reyes, representative of the government of Breatha Colony, who was accompanying Cletus, ostensibly as an "observer."
"Excellent, Marshal. Excellent!" Reyes, who was a thin, eager, scholarly-looking man with a high forehead, dressed in the long, black, official gown of his chancellorhood, rubbed his thin hands with pleasure. "You've managed to trap their army here. And there're no other forces who can come to their rescue. Excellently done!"