Гордон Диксон - Soldier, Ask Not

“What’s going on …“I began, and tried to get to my feet. Dave moved to push me back; but I had already tried to put some of my weight on my left leg; and a tiger’s-tooth of pain drove through it, so that I slumped again, half-fainting, and soaked in my own sweat.

“Got to fall back,” one of the Groupmen was saying to the other, “Got to get out of here, Akke. Next time they’ll get us, or if we wait twenty minutes the armor’ll do it for them!”

“No,” croaked the Force-Leader beside me. I had thought him dead; but when I turned to look, I saw someone had set a pressure bandage against his wound, and released the trigger, so that its fibers would be inside the hole in him now, sealing apertures and clotting the blood flow. All the same he was dying. I could see it in his eyes. The Groupman ignored him.

“Listen to me, Akke,” said the Groupman who had just spoken. “You’re in command now. Got to move!”

“No.” The Force-Leader could barely whisper, but whisper he did. “Orders. Hold at all—costs—”

The Groupman evidently called Akke looked uncertain. His face was pale and he turned to look at the communications unit beside him in the foxhole. The other Groupman saw the direction of his glance and the spring-rifle across his knees went off, as if by accident. There was a smash and a tinkle inside the communications unit and I could see the ready light on its instrument panel go dark.

“I order you,” the Force-Leader was saying: but then the terrible jaws of pain closed upon my knee once more and my head swam. When my vision cleared again, I could see that Dave had ripped my left pant’s leg up above the knee and just finished setting a neat, white pressure bandage around the knee.

“It’s all right, Tam,” he was saying to me. “The spring-rifle sliver went all the way through. It’s all right.”

I looked around. The Force-Leader still sat beside me, now with his side-arm half drawn. There was another spring-rifle wound, this time in his forehead and he was quite dead. Of the two Groupmen, there was no sign.

“They’ve gone, Tam,” said Dave. “We’ve got to get out of here, too.” He pointed down the hill. “The Friendly troops decided we weren’t worth it. They pulled out. But their armor’s getting close—and you can’t move fast with that knee. Try to stand up, now.”

I tried. It was like standing with one knee resting on the needle-point of a stake and bearing half my weight on that. But I stood. Dave helped me out of the foxhole; and we began our limping retreat down the back way of the hill, away from the armor.

I had likened those woods earlier in my thoughts to a Robin Hood-like forest, in their openness, dimness and color finding them fancifully attractive. Now, as I struggled through them, with each step, or hop rather, feeling as if a red-hot nail was being driven into my knee, my image of the tree groves began to change. They became darkling, ominous, hateful and full of cruelty, in the fact that they held us trapped in their shadow where the Friendly armor would seek us out and destroy us either with heat beams or falling trees before we had a chance to explain who we were.

I had hoped desperately that we would catch sight of an open area. For the armored vehicles floating up behind us were hunting the woods, not the open spaces; and particularly out in the open knee-high grass, it would be hard for even an armored pilot to see and identify my cape before shooting at us.

But we had evidently moved into an area where there were much more trees than open spaces. Also, as I had noticed before, all directions among those tree trunks looked alike. Our only way of being sure we would not be traveling in circles, but of keeping in a straight line away from the pursuing tanks, was to follow back along the direction we had come. This direction we could follow because we could be guided back along it by my wrist director. But that direction, that line of march that had brought us here, had been deliberately through all the treed areas I could find.

Meanwhile, we were moving at so slow a pace because of my knee that even the relatively slow-moving armor must soon catch up with us. I had been badly shaken by the sonic explosion earlier. Now, the continual jab-jabbing of the brilliant pain through my knee goaded me into a sort of feverish frenzy. It was like some calculated torture—and it happens that I am not a stoic when it comes to pain.

Neither am I cowardly, though I do not think it would be fair to call me brave, either. It is simply that I am so constructed that my response to pain beyond a certain level is fury. And the greater the pain the greater my rage. Some ancient berserker blood, perhaps, filtering down through the Irish in my veins, if you want to be romantic about it. But there it is—the fact. And now, as we hobbled through the eternal twilight between those gold-and-silver, peeling tree trunks, I exploded inside.

In my rage, I had no fear of the Friendly armor. I was certain of the fact that they would see my white and scarlet cloak in time not to fire at me. I was positive that if they did fire, both their beam and any falling tree trunks or limbs would miss me. In short I was convinced of my own invulnerability—and the only thing that concerned me was that Dave was being slowed down by being with me and that if anything happened to him Eileen would never get over it.

I raved at him, I cursed him. I told him to go on and leave me, and save his own neck, that I was in no danger by myself.

His only answer was that I had not abandoned him when the sonic barrage caught us both; and he would not abandon me. I was Eileen’s brother and it was his duty to take care of me. It was just as she had said in her letter, he was loyal. He was too damn loyal, he was a loyal damn fool—and I told him so, obscenely and at length. I tried valiantly to pull away from him; but hopping on one leg, tottering on one leg rather, it was no use. I sank down on the ground and refused to go any farther; but he actually outwrestled me and got me up on his back, piggyback, and tried to carry me that way.

That was even worse. I had to promise to go along with him, if he would let me down. He was already tottering himself from weariness when he let me. By that time, half-insane with my pain and my fury, I was ready to do anything to save him from himself. I began to yell for help as loudly as I could in spite of his efforts to shut me up.

It worked. In less than five minutes after he got me quiet we found ourselves staring down the pinhole muzzles of the spring-rifles in the hands of two young Friendly skirmishers, attracted by my shouts.

I had expected them to appear in answer to my shouts even more quickly. The Friendly skirmishers were naturally all around us almost from the moment we left the hill to its dead, under the command of their dead Force-Leader. These two might have been among the same Friendlies who had discovered the patrol dug in on the hill in the first place. But, having found it, they had moved on.

For it was their job to discover important pockets of Cassidan resistance, so that they could call for strength to eliminate those points. They would be carrying listening devices as part of their equipment, but they would pay little attention if those devices picked up merely the sound of two men arguing. Two men were game too small for their orders to concern themselves with.

But one man deliberately calling for help—that was an occurrence unusual enough to be worth investigating. A Soldier of the Lord should not be weak enough to be so calling, whether he needed personal assistance or not. And why should a Cassidan be appealing for aid in this area where no fighting had been going on? And who other than Soldiers of the Lord or their weaponed enemies might be in this zone of battle?