The medic finished with me and left, and I lay back, listening to the small ship-noises that murmured through the walls. It had been about an hour now since the last faint shocks that meant contact with one of the chunks of debris that was all that was left of forty-two fighting ships—twenty-two UN, the rest Bloc. At least Tarleton had gone through the motions of picking up what few survivors there might have been from the slaughter—perhaps a few hundred dazed and bloody men, the accidental leftovers of the power plays of Grand Strategy.
I had come through in better shape than most of them, I guessed. With the exception of a few minor cuts and bruises and a mild concussion, aggravated by twenty-eight hours without food or sleep, I was in as good shape as I had been before the fight. My arms and legs still worked; my heart was pumping away as usual; my lungs were doing their job. The brain was still numb, true, but it was working—working for its life.
Tarleton may or may not have meant it when he turned down Braze's suggestion—but he had told me far too much for any man to hear who was arrayed on the opposite side of the fence from the Commodore. I didn't need to break out of my cell to look for trouble: it would come to me. Braze was a man who always took the simple direct course. It had won him a commodore's star; he'd stay with the technique. He'd make his move at the last minute before the ground party boarded the boats for the trip down, to minimize the chance of word getting to Tarleton; he'd have an account of an attempted escape ready for later, if Tarleton got curious—an unlikely eventuality. The Admiral would have his hands full digesting his conquests, with no time left over for pondering the fates of obscure former acquaintances.
They'd be going down tonight, Tarleton had said. He'd have a good-sized shore party with him; all of his top advisors—or whatever ratfaced little men like Walters called themselves—and a nice showing of armed sailors, tricked out in dress blues and sidearms, as a gentle reminder of the planet-wrecking power orbiting ten thousand miles out.
The flagship carried a complement of two thousand eleven men, all long since screened for reliability, no doubt. If I knew Banny Tarleton, he'd have half of them along on his triumphal march. That would call for twenty heavy scout boats. He'd use bays one through ten on the upper boat deck for reasons of ease of loading and orbital dynamics. . . .
I was building an elaborate structure of fancy on a feeble foundation of guesses, but I had to carry the extrapolation as far as I could. I wouldn't get a second chance to make my try; maybe not even the first one—and my quota of mistakes was already used up.
I got up and took a couple of turns up and down the room. I still felt lightheaded, but the meal and the bath and the dressings and the shots and the pills had helped a lot. The plain set of ducks Purdy had provided were comfortable enough, but I missed the contents of a couple of small special pockets that had been built into my own clothes—the ones that had been taken away and burned. The hardware was gone—but with a little luck I might be able to improvise suitable substitutes.
A quick inspection of the room turned up an empty closet, a chest with four empty drawers, a wall mirror, a molded polyfoam chair that weighed two pounds soaking wet, a framed tridograph of the Kennedy monument complete with shrapnel scars, and the built-in bunk to which the medics had lowered me, groaning, ten minutes earlier. Not much there from which to assemble a blaster—
I felt the tremor then—the teacup-rattling nudge of a scout boat kicking free. Quite suddenly my mouth had that dry feeling. Boat number two pushed off, then a third. Tarleton wasn't wasting any time. At least there wouldn't be any long tedious wait to see whether my guesses had been right. The time for action was here. I set my heart rate up two notches and metered a trickle of adrenalin into my system, then went over to the door, flattened myself against the wall to the left of it, and waited.
Seven boats were away now. A couple of minutes ticked past like ice ages. Then there was a soft stealthy noise outside the door. With my ear against the wall, I could imagine I heard voices. I set myself—
The door slid smoothly back and a man came through it fast—a big thick-shouldered DP with pinkish hair on an acneed neck, a use-worn Mark XX gripped in a freckled fist the size of a catcher's mitt. I half-turned to the left, drove my right into his side just behind the holster hard enough to jar the monogram off the hanky in my hip pocket—not fancy, but effective. He made an ugly noise and went down clawing at himself like a cat, and I was over him, diving for the gun that skidded to the wall and bounced back into my hand, and I was rolling, bringing it up, seeing the lightning-flicker and feeling the hard tight snarl of the weapon in my hand as I slashed it across the open doorway. The man there fell into the room, hit like a horse falling in harness, and the air was full of the nauseating stench of burned flesh and abdominal wounds.
I got up, stepped to the redhead, kicked him hard above the cheekbone; he gave up the attempt to loop the loop on the rug. At the door I gave a quick glance both ways: nobody in sight. There was another gentle shock. Number eight? Or had I missed one. . . . ?
It was a hot two minutes' work to get the unbloodied uniform off its owner. It wasn't a good fit, but I buckled everything up tight, strapped on the gun in a way that I hoped would conceal the fold I'd taken in the waist band, tried the boots: too big. I didn't like touching the other fellow, but I had to. My feet complained a little, but they went in, shrinking from the warmth of the dead man's shoes. The redhead was still breathing; I thought seriously about putting a burst into his head, then settled for strapping his ankles and wrists and wadding a shirt sleeve in his mouth. It cost me an extra minute and a half. So much for the price of a human life.
Out in the corridor things were still quiet: Braze's work again. He wouldn't have wanted witnesses. I locked the door and headed for the boat.
Four more boats were away by the time I reached the steel double doors that sealed U deck off from the main transverse. I pushed against them, swore, kicked the panel. It gave off a dull clang. I kicked it again, then yanked out the power gun, set it for a needle beam, heard sounds on the other side, slammed the weapon back into its holster in time to see the door jump back and a square-jawed DP plant himself flatfooted in the opening, gun out and aimed.
"Thanks, brother—" I started past him. He backed, but kept me covered. A confused scowl was getting ready to settle onto his face.
"Hold your water, paisan—"
"Knock it off," I rapped. "Jeezus—can't you see I'm missing formation? My boat—"
"What you doing on U deck?"
"Look—I had a sidekick, see? I wanted to see the guy. Okay, satisfied? You want me shot for desertion?"
"Go on," he waved the gun at me, looking disgusted. "But you'll never make it."
"Thanks, buddy—" I struck off at a dead run. . . .
I had lost count, not sure whether it was eighteen or nineteen—or maybe twenty, too late. . . .
I rounded the last corner, came into the low-ceilinged boat deck, felt a throb of some kind of emotion—fear or relief or a mixture—at the sight of thirty or forty blue-uniformed men formed up in a ragged column, filing toward the black rectangle of Number Two loading port. I dropped back to a walk, came up to the column, moved along with them. One man looked over his shoulder at me with a blank expression; the rest ignored me. A middle-aged Warrant with a long leathery face saw me, snarled silently, came back.
"You're Gronski, huh? Nice to see you in formation, Gronski. You see me after breakaway; you and me got to have a little talk about things—okay, Gronski?"
I looked sullen; it wasn't hard. It's a lot like looking scared. "Okay, Chief," I muttered.
"By God, that's 'Aye, aye, Mr. Funderburk' to you, swabbie!"
"Aye, aye, Mr. Funderburk," I growled out. He spun with a squeak of shoe leather and walked away. The man in front of me turned and looked me up and down.
"You ain't Gronski," he said.
"What else is new?" I snarled. "So I'm helping out a pal—okay?"
"You and Funnybutt are gonna get along," he predicted and showed me his back again. I kept my eyes on it until it was safely tucked away in the gloom of the troop hold. Wedged in between two silent men on the narrow shock seat, I held my breath, waiting for the yell that would mean somebody hadn't been fooled. I wondered what lucky accident had made Gronski late, what other lucky accident had assigned him to a detail with a Warrant who didn't know his face. . . .
But calculating the odds on what was already accomplished was just sorting over dry bones. The odds ahead were what counted. They didn't look good, but they were all I had. I'd take them—and play the angles as they fell like Rubinstein cutting the original soundtrack of the "Flight of the Bumblebee."