"For now," Radescu added brusquely as hexose, "I have business that does not concern mercenaries. If you'll be so good—"
"Sir, the colonel has offered you troops," said Lieutenant Hawker as loudly as necessary to silence Radescu's voice without shrillness. "Us. All Profile means is you ought to use us, the best curst detection team in the Slammers. And he's right—you ought to use us, instead of throwing yourself away."
Radescu sat down again, heavily. The Slammers lieutenant was so much larger than the general that only by tricking his mind could Radescu keep from being cowed physically. "He didn't send you to me for that," he said, "for detection. You—you know that."
Bourne snorted and said, "Bloody cop we do."
At his side,with a hand now on the noncom's shoulder, Hawker replied, "The colonel doesn't talk to me, sir. But if you think he doesn't keep up with what's happening with the people who hired him, hired us, there you're curst well wrong. Don't ever figure a man like Colonel Hammer isn't one step ahead of you—though he may not be ready to commit openly."
"Not," Bourne completed grimly, "when he's ready to call in the Bonding Authority and void the contract for employer's nonperformance."
"My Lord," said Radescu. He looked at the pair of mercenaries without the personal emotion—hope or fear or even disgust—he had always felt before. The implications of what Hawker had just said stripped all emotional loadings from the general's immediate surroundings. Hawker and Bourne could have been a pair of trees, gnarled and gray-barked; hard-used and very, very hard themselves . . . .
"My Lord,"the Oltenian repeated, the words scarcely moving his lips. Then his gaze sharpened and he demanded,"You mean it was,was a game?You wouldn't have . . . ?"
"Try me, General," said Profile Bourne. He did not look at Radescu but at his open palm; and the dragon there bore an expression similar to that of the mercenary.
"It's not a game, killing people,"said the lieutenant."We got into the box where you found us by doing just what we told you we did.And believe me, sir, nobody ever complained about the support Profile and me gave when it came down to cases."The fingers of his right hands moothed the receiver of the submachinegun where the greenish wear on the plastic showed the owner's touch was familiar.
"It's just I guess we can figure one thing out, now," the sergeant remarked, looking up with the loose, friendly look of a man lifting himself out of a bath in drugs. "We'd heard our sentence four days ago, not that there was a whole lotta doubt. I mean, we'd done it. The colonel watched us."
He gave Radescu the grin of a little boy caught in a peccadillo, sure of a spanking but winkingly hopeful that it might still be avoided. "We don't stand much on ceremony in the Slammers," Bourne went on. "For sure not on something like a shot in the neck. So the Loot'n me couldn't figure what the colonel was waiting for."
"Iguess,"the sergeant concluded with a very different sort of smile again, "he was waiting for you."
Hawker pulled a chair well away from the table, lifting it off the floor so that it did not scrape. The mercenary handled the chair so lightly that Radescu could scarcely believe that it was made of the same dense, heavily carven wood as the one in which the Oltenian sat.
"You see, sir," the lieutenant said as he lowered himself carefully onto the seat, hunching forward a little to be able to do so,"we can't cover more than a platoon, the two of us—but a platoon's enough, for what you need."
"Any more'n that, they get screwed up," added Bourne. "Even if we get the range and bearing right, they don't. Just gives the Molts more targets to shoot at. That's not what we're here for."
"What are you here for?" Radescu asked,reaching out to touch Bourne's right palm to the other's great surprise. The skin was dry and calloused, not at all unlike the scaly head of a reptile. "What your colonel may want, I can see. But the danger to you personally—it isn't as though you'd be protected by, by your own, the tanks and the organization that strikes down Molts when they appear."
He withdrew his hand, looking at both the Slammers and marvelling at how stolid they appeared. Surely their like could have no emotion?"I'm an Oltenian," Radescu continued."This is my planet, my State. Even so, everybody in the room just now—"his fingers waggled toward the door through which his fellow generals had exited "—thinks I'm mad to put myself in such danger. You two aren't lumps like our own peasants. You made it clear that I couldn't even order you without your willingness to obey. Would Hammer punish you if you returned to him without having volunteered to accompany me?"
"Guess we're clear on that one, wouldn't you say, Loot?" remarked Sergeant Bourne as he glanced at Hawker.Though the noncom was physically even smaller than Radescu, he did not sink into the ambience of the big lieutenant the way the Oltenian felt he did himself. Profile Bourne was a knife, double-edged and wickedly sharp; size had nothing to do with the aura he projected.
For the first time, Radescu considered the faces of his divisional officers as they watched him in the light of the emotions he tried to hide when he looked at the pair of mercenaries. It could be that the Oltenians saw in him a core of something which he knew in his heart of hearts was not really there.
Hawker's body armor shrugged massively. "Look, sir," he said without fully meeting the Oltenian's eyes, "if we liked to lose, then we wouldn't be in the Slammers. I don't apologize for anything that happened before—" now he did focus his gaze, glacial in a bovine face, on Radescu"—but it wasn't what we were hired to do. Help win a war against the Molts."
Bourne tilted forward to grasp Radescu's hand briefly before the sergeant levered himself back to his feet."And you know, General,"the mercenary said as he rose, "until I met you, I didn't think the poofs had a prayer a' doin' that."
The encampment should in theory have been safe enough, with no chunk of crystalline rock weighing more than a kilogram located within a meter of the ground surface. Nobody really believed that a three-divisional area had been swept so perfectly, however, especially without the help which Hammer had refused to give this time.
The center of the encampment, the combined Army and the Second Division Headquarters, had been set up in a marsh and was probably quite secure. The nervousness of the troops mustered both for the operation and for immediate security was due less to intellectual fear of the Molts than to the formless concern which any activity raised in troops used to being sniped at from point-blank ambush with no time to respond.
Alexander Radescu felt sticky and uncomfortable in his new battledress, though its fabric and cut should have been less stiff than the formal uniforms he ordinarily wore. He could not bring himself to don body armor, knowing that it would cramp and distract him through the next hours when his best hope of survival lay in keeping flexible and totally alert.
Hawker and Bourne wore their own back-and-breast armor, heavier but far more resistant than the Oltenian version which Radescu had refused. They were used to the constriction, after all, and would probably have been more subconsciously hindered by its absence than by the weight.
Radescu would have been even more comfortable without the automatic shotgun he now cradled, a short-barreled weapon which sprayed tiny razor-edged airfoils that spread into a three-meter circle ten meters from the muzzle. The gun was perfectly effective within the ranges at which Molt warriors were likely to appear; but it was the general's dislike of personal involvement in something as ignoble as killing, rather than his doubts about how accurately he could shoot, which put him off the weapon.