For obvious reasons, no weapons were allowed in the living quarters. The way these people were trained, even a fistfight could be a duel to the death, and tempers were short. A hundred merely normal people would probably have been at each other’s throats after a week in our caves, but these soldiers had been hand-picked for their ability to get along in close confinement.
Still there were fights. Graubard had almost killed his ex-lover Schon when that worthy made a face at him in the chow line. He had a week of solitary detention (so did Schon, for having precipitated it) and then psychiatric counseling and punitive details. Then I transferred him to the fourth platoon, so he wouldn’t be seeing Schon every day.
The first time they passed in the halls, Graubard greeted Schon with a karate kick to the throat. Diana had to build him a new trachea. Graubard got a more intensive round of detention, counseling and details — hell, I couldn’t transfer him to another company — and then he was a good boy for two weeks. I fiddled their work and chow schedules so the two would never be in the same room together. But they met in a corridor again, and this time it came out more even: Schon got two broken ribs, but Graubard got a ruptured testicle and lost four teeth.
If it kept up, I was going to have at least one less mouth to feed.
By the Universal Code of Military Justice I could have ordered Graubard executed, since we were technically in a state of combat. Perhaps I should have, then and there. But Charlie suggested a more humanitarian solution, and I accepted it.
We didn’t have enough room to keep Graubard in solitary detention forever, which seemed to be the only humane yet practical thing to do, but they had plenty of room aboard the Masaryk II, hovering overhead in a stationary orbit. I called Antopol and she agreed to take care of him. I gave her permission to space the bastard if he gave her any trouble.
We called a general assembly to explain things, so that the lesson of Graubard wouldn’t be lost on anybody. I was just starting to talk, standing on the rock dais with the company sitting in front of me, and the officers and Graubard behind me — when the crazy fool decided to kill me.
Like everybody else, Graubard was assigned five hours per week of training inside the stasis field. Under close supervision, the soldiers would practice using their swords and spears and what-not on dummy Taurans. Somehow Graubard had managed to smuggle out a weapon, an Indian chakra, which is a circle of metal with a razor keen outer edge. It’s a tricky weapon, but once you know how to use it, it can be much more effective than a regular throwing knife. Graubard was an expert.
All in a fraction of a second, Graubard disabled the people on either side of him — hitting Charlie in the temple with an elbow while he broke Hilleboe’s kneecap with a kick — and slid the chakra out of his tunic and spun it toward me in one smooth action. It had covered half the distance to my throat before I reacted.
Instinctively I slapped out to deflect it and came within a centimeter of losing four fingers. The razor edge slashed open the top of my palm, but I succeeded in knocking the thing off course. And Graubard was rushing me, teeth bared in an expression I hope I never see again.
Maybe he didn’t realize that the old queer was really only five years older than he; that the old queer had combat reflexes and three weeks of negative feedback kinesthesia training. At any rate, it was so easy I almost felt sorry for him.
His right toe was turning in; I knew he would take one more step and go into a savate leap. I adjusted the distance between us with a short ballestra and, just as both his feet left the ground, gave him an ungentle side-kick to the solar plexus. He was unconscious before he hit the ground. But not dead.
If I’d merely killed him in self-defense, my troubles would have been over instead of suddenly being multiplied.
A simple psychotic troublemaker a commander can lock up and forget about. But not a failed assassin. And I didn’t have to take a poll to know that executing him was not going to improve my relationship with the troops.
I realized that Diana was on her knees beside me, trying to pry open my fingers. “Check Hilleboe and Moore,” I mumbled, and to the troops: “Dismissed.”
5
“Don’t be an ass,” Charlie said. He was holding a damp rag to the bruise on the side of his head.
“You don’t think I have to execute him?”
“Stop twitching!” Diana was trying to get the lips of my wound to line up together so she could paint them shut. From the wrist down, the hand felt like a lump of ice.
“Not by your own hand, you don’t. You can detail someone. At random.”
“Charlie’s right,” Diana said. “Have everybody draw a slip of paper out of a bowl.”
I was glad Hilleboe was sound asleep on the other cot. I didn’t need her opinion. “And if the person so chosen refuses?”
“Punish him and get another,” Charlie said. “Didn’t you learn anything in the can? You can’t abrogate your authority by publicly doing a job … that obviously should be detailed.”
“Any other job, sure. But for this … nobody in the company has ever killed. It would look like I was getting somebody else to do my moral dirty work.”
“If it’s so damned complicated,” Diana said, “why not just get up in front of the troops and tell them how complicated it is. Then have them draw straws. They aren’t children.”
There had been an army in which that sort of thing was done, a strong quasi-memory told me. The Marxist POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War, early twentieth. You obeyed an order only after it had been explained in detail; you could refuse if it didn’t make sense. Officers and men got drunk together and never saluted or used titles. They lost the war. But the other side didn’t have any fun.
“Finished.” Diana set the limp hand in my lap. “Don’t try to use it for a half-hour. When it starts to hurt, you can use it.”
I inspected the wound closely. “The lines don’t match up. Not that I’m complaining.”
“You shouldn’t. By all rights, you ought to have just a stump. And no regeneration facilities this side of Stargate.”
“Stump ought to be at the top of your neck,” Charlie said. “I don’t see why you have any qualms. You should have killed the bastard outright.”
“I know that, goddammit!” Both Charlie and Diana jumped at my outburst. “Sorry, shit. Look, just let me do the worrying.”
“Why don’t you both talk about something else for a while.” Diana got up and checked the contents of her medical bag. “I’ve got another patient to check. Try to keep from exciting each other.”
“Graubard?” Charlie asked.
“That’s right. To make sure he can mount the scaffold without assistance.”
“What if Hilleboe—”
“She’ll be out for another half-hour. I’ll send Jarvil down, just in cage.” She hurried out the door.
“The scaffold…” I hadn’t given that any thought. “How the hell are we going to execute him? We can’t do it indoors: morale. Firing squad would be pretty grisly.”
“Chuck him out the airlock. You don’t owe him any ceremony.”
“You’re probably right. I wasn’t thinking about him.” I wondered whether Charlie had ever seen the body of a person who’d died that way. “Maybe we ought to just stuff him into the recycler. He’d wind up there eventually.”
Charlie laughed. “That’s the spirit.”
“We’d have to trim him up a little bit. Door’s not very wide.” Charlie had a few suggestions as to how to get around that. Jarvil came in and more-or-less ignored us.