Robert Asprin: For King and Country

Hospital, Stirling realized fuzzily. They got me to hospital through that mess, that priest and whoever was with him. Gratitude prickled behind his eyelids and thickened his throat, making him long mightily for the strength to blow his nose. Instead he lay quietly, trying to recover the use of more of his senses.Vision cleared at last, revealing a stark white ceiling, equally stark walls, and the steel railings of a hospital bed. He lay in a casualty ward, with gurneys stacked in the spaces between the regular beds, all filled with badly injured civilians. In the corridor just beyond, Stirling could see harried doctors and nurses performing miracles of triage, routing the worst cases into surgery. He wondered how long he'd been here. Whether any of his command had survived that car bomb. If his commanding officer knew where he was.

He tried not to wonder how badly injured he might be.

Time stretched out in that endless way it does when the body is too traumatized to move, but the mind is too alert to sleep. Stirling was left with no activity to distract him, save listening to the unfolding chaos out in the corridor. More wounded were arriving every minute, giving him all too grim a notion of how badly the riot had spread through West Belfast. Eventually, footsteps entering the ward roused him to greater attention. Stirling focused on three figures approaching his bed, one dressed in hospital whites, one in the unrelieved black of the Catholic priesthood, and the third in badly stained battle gear. Surprise registered when he recognized Colonel Ogilvie. The look crackling through the colonel's eyes told Stirling the most important news of all. None of his section had made it out of that street alive. God, a hundred and twenty good soldiers, snuffed out in an instant. And who knew how many innocent civilians with them...

"... captain is very lucky that Father McCree, here, pulled him out of the rubble," the doctor was saying.

"I'm afraid we weren't able to reach the others," the priest said in response, an exhausted note of horror wavering through his voice. "The whole block of flats came down, buried the whole of Divis Street in burning rubble. The entire SAS unit was under it, along with at least a dozen constables and a whole crowd of boys, most of them no older than sixteen."

Ogilvie nodded sharply. "I'm grateful to you, Father, for rescuing at least one of my lads." Ogilvie's radio crackled and he listened, then spat orders. The next moment, he'd reached the bedside. "Stirling, it's good to see you. Doctors tell me you're bloody lucky, son."

"Sorry, sir," he croaked out, horrified by the rasping, watery whisper of his voice. "Orange bastard drove a panel van past us, cram full of explosives. Didn't twig to it, not until it was too bloody late..."

"Easy, son." Ogilvie pressed his shoulder with one calloused, grime-streaked hand. "It's no use blaming yourself for a suicidal maniac. They've set off half a dozen other car bombs of the same type, set to blow on timers. Run 'em into a big crowd of Catholics with a margin of a few seconds for the drivers to get clear. There's no way anyone could've stopped it. Believe me, we've tried. Shooting the drivers doesn't stop the bloody bombs ticking and they're on too short a timer to defuse 'em."

Stirling wanted to be comforted by the news, but all he could see was Murdoch slamming into that parked car, buildings toppling down across his men, crushing anyone who might've survived the initial blast. Maybe Balfour had been right, after all. Scouring this place to bedrock seemed a sane solution, in light of the Orange terror machine's latest atrocities. Stirling had never expected to understand the IRA's hatred of the Orangemen as thoroughly as he did now. Not that the IRA was any better, for all that they didn't torch Protestant neighborhoods the way the Orange paramilitaries torched Catholic ones. They preferred blowing up crowded shops and pubs, instead, and SAS facilities, vehicle checkpoints and RUC stations, or executing prominent Protestant politicians, government officials, and members of the British Royal family. The worst of it was, he couldn't see any way to end it. Not with both sides demanding total capitulation to mutually exclusive goals. The hollow feeling in his chest terrified him.

Ogilvie squeezed his shoulder again. "Rest for now, Stirling. We'll talk again when you've recovered a bit more. The doctors will take proper care of you."

"Yes, sir," he whispered, utterly empty inside.

He faded into sleep while the doctor was still telling him about his injuries.

The sway of the train and the steady clacking of wheels across joints in the track might have lulled Stirling to sleep, if the dull throb of pain from wrist and knee hadn't kept up a steady counterpoint to the rhythm of the rails. He'd sat stiffly upright and correct in his seat for the first quarter of an hour out of the station, before giving up all pretense of appearances and simply eased himself into the least uncomfortable position he could manage. The newspaper he'd picked up in London lay in untidy folds on the seat, unable to hold his interest despite articles on Northern Ireland's continuing Troubles and some archaeologist's claim that a major volcanic eruption on Krakatoa in the middle of the sixth century a.d. had disrupted worldwide weather patterns for more than a decade, triggering the worldwide failure of agriculture, the mass migration of various peoples and a spread of plague throughout Britain, all across Europe, even creating population upheavals in Ireland. The bloke quoted in the article even blamed the eruption for the Dark Age's collapse of European civilization—including the defeat of King Arthur's Britons by Saxon invaders.

Somehow, he couldn't work up much enthusiasm about events from the year 538 a.d. when his body ached from still-mending injuries sustained in a firefight he should never have been involved in, in the first bloody place. He had, at least, come a long way since his initial discharge from hospital. Belfast to Blackpool by military airlift, down through Manchester and Derbyshire by rail to London and a battery of surgical specialists to repair his knee, then from London to York and points north by rail, on his way to a new posting he didn't particularly want. In fact, the only good thing he could find in the assignment Ogilvie had handed him, his first day out of rehab in London hospital, was the location.

Trevor Stirling hadn't been home in four years.

He'd forgotten how much he loved the dour Scottish hills until the train plunged over the edge of the Southern Uplands, revealing Edinburgh spread out in the late afternoon, golden light spilling across the Lothians and the Pentland Hills which swept down to the very edge of town. A storm front was moving in, scudding low over Arthur's Seat, an achingly familiar mountain that lifted its brooding black profile well above the prominence of Calton Hill. The Palace of Holyroodhouse and Edinburgh Castle dominated the skyline along the rocky spine known as Royal Mile, which ran slap through the heart of Old Town. The train roared its way across the high spans of the Forth rail bridge, far above the glimmering waters of the Firth of Forth, while the leading edge of the storm obscured all but a smudge of the Highland ranges in the distance.

Stirling leaned back against the seat, abruptly exhausted by the hours-long train ride up from London. His wrist, broken in several places beneath the cast, ached and his newly repaired knee had swollen up and gone stiff inside its brace. It had needed surgery to repair damaged cartilage and torn ligaments. He wouldn't be seeing combat for a good, long while yet, a prospect that both dismayed and relieved him. Lying about in hospital with far too much time on his hands had eaten ragged holes in his self-confidence. When finally released, he'd left the hospital with a cane, a bad limp, and a gnawing fear that he'd be useless to the regiment.