"Lead my troops," he said.
I stopped. Standing there, I watched him walk away from me. A hand tugged at my elbow", and I turned around to see that Pel and Moro had caught up to me. It was Moro who had his hand on my arm.
"Tom," said Moro, "What do we do, now?"
"See Padma," I said. "If he can't do something, I don't know anybody who can."
Charley was not flying directly back to Blauvain.
He was already in a staff meeting with his fellow officers, who were barred from the voting of the enlisted men by the Covenant. We three civilians had to borrow a land car from the encampment motor pool.
It was a silent ride, most of the way back into town. Once again I was at the controls, with Pel beside me. Sitting behind us, just before we reached the west area of the city, Moro leaned forward to put his head between us.
"Tom," he said. "You'll have to put your police on special duty. Pel, you've got to mobilize the militia - right now."
"Moro," I answered - and I suddenly felt dog-tired, weary to the point of exhaustion. "I've got less than three hundred men, ninety-nine per cent of them without anything more exciting in the way of experience than filling out reports or taking charge at a fire, an accident or a family quarrel. They wouldn't face those mercenaries even if I ordered them to."
"Pel," he said, turning away from me, "your men are soldiers. They've been in the field with these mercenaries - "
Pel laughed at him.
"Over a hundred years ago, a battalion of Dorsais took a fortified city - Rochmont - with nothing heavier than light field pieces. This is a brigade - six battalions - armed with the best weapons the Exotics can buy them - facing a city with no natural or artificial defenses at all. And you want my two thousand militiamen to try to stop them? There's no force on St. Marie that could stop those professional soldiers."
"At Rochmont they were all Dorsai - " Moro began.
"For God's sake!" cried Pel. "These are Dorsai-officered, the best mercenaries you can find. Elite troops - the Exotics don't hire anything else for fear they might have to touch a weapon themselves and damage their, enlightenment - or whatever the hell it is! Face it, Moro! If Kensie's troops want to chew us up, they will. And there's nothing you or I can do about it!"
Moro said nothing for a long moment. Pel's last words had hit a near-hysterical note. When the Mayor of Blauvain did speak again, it was softly.
"I just wish to God I knew why you want just that to happen, so badly," he said.
"Go to hell!" said Pel. "Just go-"
I slammed the car into retro and we skidded to a halt, thumping down on the grass as the air-cushion quit I looked at Pel.
"That's something I'd like to know, too," I said. "All right, you liked Kensie. So did I. But what we're facing is anything from the leveling of a city to a possible massacre of a couple of hundred thousand people. All that for the death of just one man?"
Pel's face looked bitter and sick
"We're no good, we St. Marians," he said, thickly. "We're a fat little farm world that's never done anything since it was first settled but yell for help to the Exotics every time we got into trouble. And the Exotics have bailed us out every time, only because we're in the same solar system with them. What're we worth? Nothing! At least the Dorsai and the Exotics have got some value - some use!"
He turned away from Moro and myself; and we could not get another word out of him.
We drove on into the city, where, to my great relief, I finally got rid of Pel and Moro both; and was able to get to Police Headquarters and take charge of things.
As I had expected, things badly needed taking care of there. As I should also have expected, I had very much underestimated how badly they needed it. I had planned to spend two or three hours getting the situation under control, and then be free to seek out Padma. But, as it ended up, it took me nearly seven straight hours to damp down the panic, straighten out the confusion, and put some purpose and order back into the operations of all my people, off-duty and otherwise, who had reported for emergency service. Actually, it was little enough we were required to do - merely patrol the streets and see that the town's citizens stayed off the streets and out of the way of the mercenaries. Still, that took seven hours to put into smooth operation; and at the end of that time I was still not free to go hunting for Padma, but had to respond to a series of calls for my presence by the detective crew assigned to work with the mercenaries in tracking down the assassins.
I drove through the empty nighttime streets slowly, with my emergency lights on and the official emblem on my police car clearly illuminated. Three times, however, I was stopped and checked by teams of three to five mercenaries, in battle dress and fully weaponed, that appeared unexpectedly. The third time, the Groupman - a non-commissioned officer-in command of the team stopping me, joined me in the car. When twice after that we encountered military teams, he leaned out the right window to show himself; and we were waved through.
We came at last to a block of warehouses on the north side of the city; and to one warehouse in particular. Within, the large, echoing structure was empty except for a few hundred square feet of crated harvesting machinery on the first of its three floors. I found my men on the second floor in the transparent cubicles that were the building's offices, apparently doing nothing.
"What's the matter?" I said, when I saw them. They were not only idle, but they looked unhappy.
"There's nothing we can do, Superintendent," said the senior detective lieutenant present - Lee Hall, a man I'd known for sixteen years. "We can't keep up with them, even if they'd let us."
"Keep up?" I asked.
"Yes sir," Lee said. "Come on, I'll show you. They let us watch, anyway."
He led me out of the offices up to the top floor of the warehouse, a great, bare space with a few empty crates scattered between piles of unused packing materials. At one end, portable floodlights were illuminating an area with a merciless blue-white light that made the shadows cast by men and things look solid enough to stub your toe on. He led me toward the light until a Groupman stepped forward to bar our way.
"Close enough, Lieutenant," he said to Lee. He looked at me.
"This is Tomas Velt, Blauvain superintendent of police."
"Honored to meet you, sir," said the Groupman to me. "But you and the Lieutenant will have to stand back here if you want to see what's going on."
"What is going on?" I asked.
"Reconstruction," said the Groupman. "That's one of our Hunter Teams."
I turned to watch. In the white glare of the light were four of the mercenaries. At first glance they seemed engaged in some odd ballet or mime acting. They were at little distances from one another; and first one, then another of them would move a short distance - perhaps as if he had gotten up from a nonexistent chair and walked across to an equally nonexistent table, then turned to face the others. Following which another man would move in and apparently do something at the same invisible table with him.
"The men of our Hunter Teams are essentially trackers, Superintendent," said the Groupman quietly in my ear. "But some teams are better in certain surroundings than others. These are men of a team that works well in interiors."
"But what are they doing?" I said.
"Reconstructing what the assassins did when they were here," said the Groupman. "Each of three men on the team takes the track of one of the assassins, and the fourth man -watches them all as coordinator."
I looked at him. He wore the sleeve emblem of a Dorsai, but he was as ordinary-looking as myself or one of my detectives. Plainly, a first-generation immigrant to that world; which explained why he was wearing the patches of a non-commissioned, rather than a commissioned officer along with that emblem.