"My universe?" Houghton shook his head. "You're telling me I'm in an entirely different universe?"
"Obviously," Wencit replied. Another wave of his hand indicated Houghton's uniform and equipment harness and Tough Mama, sitting on the grass behind him and Mashita-who'd climbed up onto the decking through his hatch-looming up on the far side of the turret. Then the same hand indicated Wencit's own clothing, the campfire, and the magnificent horse grazing nearby. "I may not recognize your vehicle, Kenneth Houghton," he said, "but wouldn't you say it seems just a bit out of place here?"
"I guess you could put it that way," Houghton admitted, and glanced over his shoulder at Mashita.
The corporal had obviously been listening to the early stages of at least Houghton's side of the conversation over his helmet commo link. Now the short, wiry Nisei shrugged and settled himself casually on top of the turret beside the M240 machine gun at the commander's station. It put him close enough to listen to Houghton's conversation with their . . . host, and despite this Wencit's apparent sincerity, it didn't bother Houghton a bit to have the machine gun manned, just in case.
"So, we're in another universe," he said, turning back to Wencit. "What is it? One of those 'parallel universes' the science fiction writers are so fond of?"
"I'm not familiar with 'science fiction writers,' Kenneth Houghton," Wencit replied. "But to call our universes 'parallel,' might actually be a good way to describe it. Or, at least, as good a way as I've ever heard anyone else suggest."
"You can call me Ken, not Kenneth," Houghton said. His voice was harsher than he'd intended as a familiar stab of remembered loss went through him. He'd always disliked his first name. In fact, Gwynn was the only one who had ever been able to call him "Kenneth" without making him feel like some sort of dweeb.
"Ken?" Wencit repeated, then made a sound suspiciously like a chuckle.
"Well,Ken," he said after a moment, "as I was saying, our universes may not precisely be 'parallel,' but time is proceeding at the same rate and in the same direction in both of them. I suppose the best way to describe the differences between them is to say that each of our universes was formed out of the many differing possible outcomes of an inconceivable number of separate events. Judging from your appearance, your equipment, and the fact that sorcery is obviously as strange to you as your equipment appears to me, our universes must have diverged long, long ago.
"Which," he continued in a more serious tone, "leaves me even more puzzled about how my spell could have reached so far afield from its intended destination. And how you could have arrived in the flesh, as it were. Usually, when you try to move people between universes, all you actually manage to summon is a shadowman, a sort of . . . doppelganger, I suppose you'd call it, rather than the actual individual. I'm almost beginning to wonder if someone else didn't have a finger in this particular pie."
"You know . . . Wencit," Houghton said, "the thing that worries me most right this minute is that I'm starting to feel like you're actually making sense."
Wencit chuckled at Houghton's desert-dry tone. Then he shook his head again.
"You said you were a 'gunnery sergeant,'" he said. "That's a military rank, yes?"
"Yeah. A gunnery sergeant is the senior noncom in a platoon of Marines," Houghton said.
"Ah. I thought it must be something like that. And this." The wild wizard gestured at the peculiar, bulky, massive vehicle again. "This entire wagon, or whatever. It's a weapon, isn't it?"
"It's armed," Houghton conceded warily, one eyebrow quirked. He folded his arms across his chest and cocked his head. "It's not exactly a main battle tank, but I'd guess it could hold its own against anything we're likely to encounter here."
"I see."
Wencit rubbed his neatly trimmed white beard for a moment, then grimaced.
"Gunnery Sergeant," he said earnestly, "as I say, you aren't at all what I expected. But if you and your friend-" a nod of his head indicated Mashita, still sitting atop the eight-wheeled vehicle "-are both soldiers, perhaps the spell that brought you here did better than I first thought."
"Just a minute, now, Wencit!" Houghton said. He recognized that tone. It was the kind of tone officers-or, still worse, civilian intelligence pukes or even Air Force officers-used when they needed someone to volunteer for some perfectly stupid frigging op.
The wizard stopped speaking and regarded him steadily. Or, at least, Houghton thought it was steadily. It was amazing how hard it was to read someone's expression when you couldn't actually see his eyes.
"I'm sure you wouldn't have 'summoned' us-or the gryphon you were trying to get, anyway-unless the shit had really hit the fan. And for all I know, you're a perfectly nice guy, with a perfectly legitimate reason for looking for any help you can get. But like you say, this isn't our universe, and Jack and I have responsibilities of our own back home."
"I realize that," Wencit said earnestly. "But at the same time, don't good men have the same responsibilities, wherever they may find themselves?"
"Don't go there," Houghton cautioned, shaking his head firmly. "Every time I've gotten into trouble in my life, it's been because someone convinced me it was the 'right thing to do.' It's not going to work this time."
"So you're not even curious about why you wound up here?"
"I didn't say that. I just said that what Jack and I need to do is to get back to where our own people are waiting on us for the operation we were about to mount. Trust me, Wencit, we've got more than enough shit of our own to deal with back home."
"Really?" Wencit crossed his own arms and settled back on his heels. "You're at war, then?"
"Yeah, we are," Houghton agreed bleakly. "Took us a while to figure it out. And we screwed up along the way, more than once. But that's what we are."
"What kind of war?"
"Ha! It's gonna take more than a few hours to answer that one! Let's just say we're up against a bunch of certified looney-tunes who're more than willing to murder as many civilians as it takes to make their point. And," he conceded grudgingly, "a lot of them are perfectly willing to die themselves along the way."
The tall red-haired "gunnery sergeant's" voice had gone flat and hard, Wencit noticed. He rather doubted Houghton realized just how true that was, but it confirmed several things Wencit had already suspected about him.
"You sound like a man who's seen too much bloodshed, Ken Houghton," he said quietly. "Too many innocent dead."
Houghton's jaw muscles clenched hard for a moment. Then he inhaled deeply.
"Damned straight I have." His voice was as quiet as Wencit's own, but burred with anger and the ashes and clinkers of old hatred. "Not all of them from the other side's efforts, either," he continued. "I don't know about wars here, but the one we're fighting back home is a copperplated bitch. We do our best to minimize civilian casualties, but how the hell do you do that when the other side fades into the rest of the civilian population? When you're doing your goddamned fighting right in the middle of a frigging city?"
He shook his head hard, and Wencit nodded.
"It's the children, isn't it?" he asked gently. "It's the children that make it hurt so badly."
Kenneth Houghton's nostrils flared as he heard the sympathy-the understanding-in Wencit's voice. Somehow, he knew, the old man, the wizard, truly did understand. And because he knew that, the gunnery sergeant found himself admitting the truth.