Jerry Pournelle - Sword & Sceptre 1

VIP免费

2024-12-19 0 0 542.5KB 22 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Despite its miserable climate, Tan-ith was an important world. It was first a convenient dumping

ground for Earth's disinherited: the rebels, criminals, malcontents, victims of administrative mistakes, and

the balance of the wretched refuse of a civilization that could no longer af-ford misfits; and it was the main

source of borloi, which the World Pharmaceutical Society called "the perfect intoxicating drug."

Few men knew that Tanith was also important because many of the borloi plantations were owned

by the CoDominium Space Navy, and profits from the drug trade were important in keeping the Fleet in

being after the Grand Senate began wholesale cuts in the Navy's bud-get.

Heat beat down on sodden fields. Two hours before the noon of Tanith's fifteen-plus hours of

sunshine the day was already hot; but all Tanith's days are hot. Even in midwinter the jungle steams in late

afternoon. In the swamps be-low the regimental camp Weem's Beasts snorted as they burrowed deeper

into protective mud. In the camp itself the air hung hot and wet, heavy, with a smell of yeast and decay.

The Regiment's camp was an is-land of geometrical precision in the random tumble of jungles and

hill-tops. Each yellow rammed-earth barrack was set in an exact rela-tionship to every other, each

com-pany set in line from its centurion's hut at one end to the senior pla-toon sergeant's at the other. A

wide street separated Centurions' Row from the Company Officers' Line, and beyond that was the

shorter Field Officers' Line, the pyramid narrowing inevitably until at its apex stood a single building

where the colonel lived. Other officers lived with their ladies, and married enlisted men's quarters formed

one side of the compound; but the colonel lived alone.

The visitor stood with the colonel to watch a mustering ceremony evolved in the days of Queen

Anne's England when regimental commanders were paid according to the strengths of their regiments,

and the Queen's mustermasters had to determine that each man draw-ing pay could indeed pass

muster—or even existed.

The visitor was an amateur histo-rian and viewed the parade with wry humor. War had changed and

men no longer marched in rigid lines to deliver volleys at word of command—but colonels were again

paid by the forces they could bring into battle.

"Report!" The adjutant's com-mand carried easily across the open parade field to the rigidly immobile

blue and gold squares.

"First Battalion present or ac-counted for, sir!"

"Second Battalion present or ac-counted for, sir."

"Third Battalion present or ac-counted for, sir!"

"Fourth Battalion four men ab-sent without leave, sir."

"How embarrassing," the visitor said sotto voce. The colonel tried to smile but made a bad job of it.

"Artillery present or accounted for, sir!"

"Scout Troop all present, sir!"

"Sappers all present, sir!"

"Weapons Battalion, Aviation troop on patrol. Battalion present or accounted for, sir!"

"Headquarters Company present or on guard, sir!"

The adjutant returned each sa-lute, then wheeled crisply to salute the colonel. "Regiment four men

absent without leave, sir."

Colonel Falkenberg returned the salute. "Take your post."

Captain Fast pivoted and marched to his place. "Pass in re-view!"

"Sound off!"

The band played a military march that must have been old in the Twentieth Century as the Regi-ment

formed column to march around the field. As each company reached the reviewing stand the men

snapped their heads in unison, guidons and banners lowered in sa-lute, and officers and centurions

whirled sabers with flourishes.

The visitor nodded to himself. No longer very appropriate. In the Eighteenth Century demonstrations

of the men's ability to march in ranks, and of the noncoms and of-ficers to use a sword with skill, were

relevant to battle capabilities. Not now. Still, it made an impres-sive ceremony.

"Attention to orders!" The ser-geant major read from his clipboard. Promotions, duty schedules, the

daily activities of the Regiment, while the visitor sweated.

"Very impressive, Colonel," he said. "Our Washingtonians couldn't look that sharp on their best day."

John Christian Falkenberg, III nodded coldly. "Implying that they mightn't be as good in the field, Mr.

Secretary? Would you like an-other kind of demonstration?"

Howard Bannister shrugged. "What would it prove, Colonel? You need employment before your

regiment goes to hell. I can't imag-ine chasing escapees on the CoDo-minium prison planet has much

at-traction for good soldiers."

"It doesn't. When we first came things weren't that simple."

"I know that too. The Forty-sec-ond was one of the best outfits of the CD Marine Corps. I've never

understood why, it was disbanded instead of one of the others. I'm speaking of your present situation

with your troops stuck here without transport—surely you're not intending to make Tanith your life-time

headquarters?"

Sergeant Major Calvin finished the orders of the day and waited patiently for instructions. Colonel

Falkenberg studied his bright-uni-formed men as they stood rigidly in the blazing noon of Tanith. A faint

smile might have played across his face for a moment. There were few of the four thou-sand whose

names and histories he didn't know.

Lieutenant Farquahar, a party hack forced on him when the Forty-second was hired to police

Hadley, but who'd become a good officer and elected to ship out after the action . . . Private Alcazar, a

brooding giant with a raging thirst, the slowest man in K company but he could lift five times his own

mass and hide in any terrain ... dozens, thousands, each with his own strengths and weaknesses, add-ing

up to—a regiment of mercenary soldiers with no chance of going home and an unpleasant future if they

didn't get off Tanith.

"Sergeant Major."

"Sir!"

"You will stay with me and time the men. Trumpeter, sound Boots and Saddles, Full Equipment, and

Ready to Board Ship."

"Sir!" The trumpeter was a griz-zled veteran with corporal's stripes. He lifted the gleaming instrument

with its blue and gold tassels, and martial notes poured across the pa-rade ground. Before they died

away the orderly lines dissolved into masses of running men.

There was less confusion than Howard Bannister had expected. It seemed an incredibly short time

before the first men fell back in. They came from their barracks in small groups, some in each company,

then more, a rush, and fi-nally knots of stragglers. Now in place of bright colors there was the dull drab

of synthetic leather bulg-ing over Nemourlon body armor. The bright polish was gone from the weapons.

Dress caps were re-placed by bulging combat helmets, shining boots by softer leathers. As the Regiment

formed Bannister turned to the colonel.

"Why trumpets? I'd think that rather out of date."

Falkenberg shrugged. "Would you prefer shouted orders? You must remember, Mr. Secretary,

mercenaries live in garrison as well as in combat. Trumpets remind them they're soldiers."

"I suppose."

"Time, Sergeant Major," the ad-jutant demanded.

"Eleven minutes, eighteen sec-onds, sir."

"Are you trying to tell me the men are ready to ship out now?" Bannister asked. His expression

showed polite disbelief.

"It would take longer to get the weapons and artillery battalion equipment together, but the in-fantry

could board ship now."

"I find that hard to believe—of course the men know this was only a drill."

"How would they know that?"

Bannister laughed. He was a stout man, dressed in inexpensive business clothes with cigar ashes

down the front. Some of the ash floated free when he laughed. "Well, you and the sergeant major are still

in parade uniform."

"Look behind you," Falkenberg said.

Bannister turned. Falkenberg's guards and trumpeter were still in their places, their blue and gold

dress contrasting wildly with the grim synthileathers of the others who had formed up with them. "The

headquarters squad has our gear," Falkenberg explained. "Sergeant Major."

"Sir!"

"Mr. Bannister and I will inspect the troops."

"Sir!" As Falkenberg and his vis-itor left the reviewing stand Calvin fell in with the duty squad behind

him."Pick a couple at random," Fal-kenberg advised. "It's hot out here. Forty degrees anyway."

Bannister was thinking the same thing. "Yes. No point in being too hard on the men, It must be

un-bearable in their armor."

"I wasn't thinking of the men," Falkenberg said.

The Secretary of War chose L Company of Third Battalion. The men looked all alike except for size.

He looked for something to stand out, straps not buckled, any-thing to indicate an individual difference,

but he found none. Veteran or recruit? Veteran. Bannister approached a scarred private who looked

forty years old. With regen-eration therapy he might have been half that again. "This one."

"Fall out, Wiszorik!" Calvin or-dered. "Lay out your kit."

"Sir!" Private Wiszorik might have smiled thinly, but if he did Bannister missed it. He swung the

packframe easily off his shoulders and stood it on the ground. The headquarters squad helped him lay out

his nylon shelter cloth and Wiszorik emptied the pack, placing each item just so.

Rifle: a New Aberdeen seven-millimeter semiautomatic, with ten-shot clip and fifty-round box

maga-zine, both full and spotlessly clean like the rifle. A bandolier of car-tridges. Five grenades. Nylon

belt with bayonet, canteen, spoon, and stainless cup that served as a pri-vate's entire mess kit.

Greatcloak and poncho, string net underwear, layers of clothing

"You'll note he's equipped for any climate," Falkenberg commented. "He'd expect to be issued

special gear for a non-Terran envi-ronment, but he can live on any in-habitable world with his gear."

"Yes." Bannister watched inter-estedly. The pack hadn't seemed heavy, but Wiszorik kept

withdraw-ing gear from it. First-aid kit, chemical warfare protection drugs and equipment, concentrated

field rations, soup and beverage pow-ders, a tiny gasoline-burning field stove . . . "What's that?"

Bannister asked. "Do all the men carry them?"

"One to each maniple, sir," Wis-zorik answered.

"His share of five men's commu-nity equipment," Falkenberg explained. "A monitor, three privates,

and a recruit make up the basic combat unit of this outfit, and we try to keep the maniples

self-suf-ficient."

More gear came from the pack. Much of it was light alloys or plas-tic, but Bannister wondered about

the total weight. Trowel, tent pegs, nylon cordage, a miniature cutting torch—more group equipment for

field repairs to both machinery and the woven Nemourlon armor. Night sights for the rifle, a small plastic

tube half a meter long and eight centimeters in diameter ... "And that?" Bannister asked.

"Antiaircraft rocket," Falkenberg told him. "Not effective against fast jets but it'll knock out a chopper

ninety-five percent of the time. Has some capability against tanks, too. We don't like the men too

depen-dent on heavy weapons units."

"I see. Your men seem well-equipped, Colonel," Bannister commented. "It must weigh them down

badly."

"Twenty-one kilograms in a stan-dard G field," Falkenberg answered. "More here, less by a lot on

Washington. Every man carries a week's rations, ammunition for a short engagement, and enough

equipment to live in the field."

"What's the little pouch on his belt?" Bannister asked interestedly.

Falkenberg shrugged. "Personal possessions. Probably everything he owns. You'll have to ask

Wiszorik's permission if you want to examine that."

"Never mind. Thank you, Private Wiszorik." Howard Bannister pro-duced a brightly colored

bandanna from an inner pocket and mopped his brow. "All right, Colonel. You're convincing—or your

men are. Let's go to your office and talk about money."

As they left, Wiszorik and Ser-geant Major Calvin exchanged knowing winks, while Monitor

Hartzinger breathed a sigh of relief. Just suppose that visiting pan-jandrum had picked Recruit Lat-terby!

Hell, the kid couldn't find his rear without looking for ten minutes.

Falkenberg's office was hot. It was a large room, and a ceiling fan tried without success to stir up a

breeze. Everything was damp from Tanith's wet jungle air. Bannister thought he saw fungus growing in the

narrow space between a file cabinet and the wall.

In contrast to the room itself, the furniture was elaborate. It had been hand carved and was the

product of hundreds of hours' labor by soldiers who had little else but time to give their commanding

of-ficer. They'd taken Sergeant Major Calvin into a conspiracy, getting him to induce Falkenberg to go

on an inspection tour while they scrapped his functional old field gear and replaced it with equip-ment as

light and useful, but hand carved with battle scenes.

The desk was quite large, and entirely bare. To one side a table in easy reach was covered with

pa-pers. On the other side a two-meter star cube portrayed the ninety stars with inhabited planets.

Communi-cation equipment was built into a spindly-legged sideboard which also held whiskey.

Falkenberg offered his visitor a drink.

"Could we have something with ice?"

"Certainly." Falkenberg turned toward his sideboard and raised his voice, speaking with a distinct

change in tone. “Orderly, two gin and tonics, much ice, if you please. Will that be satisfactory, Mr.

Secre-tary?"

"Yes, thank you." Bannister wasn't accustomed to electronics being so common. "Look, we needn't

spar about. I need soldiers and you need off this planet. It's as simple as that."

"Hardly. You've yet to mention money."

Howard shrugged. "I haven't much. Washington has damned few exports. Franklin's dried those up

with the blockade. Paying for your transport and salaries will use up what we've got. You know this, I

suppose—I'm told you have access to Fleet intelligence sources."

Falkenberg shrugged. "I have my ways. You're prepared to put our return fare on deposit with

Dayan, of course."

"Yes." Bannister was startled. "Dayan? You do have sources. I thought our negotiations with New

Jerusalem were secret. All right, we have arrangements with Dayan to furnish transportation. It took all

our cash, so everything else is con-tingency money. We can offer you something you need, though. Land,

good land, and a permanent base that's a lot more pleasant than Tanith. We also offer—well, the chance

to be part of a free and in-dependent nation, though I'm not expecting that to mean much to you."

Falkenberg nodded. "That's why you—excuse me." He paused as the orderly brought in a tray with

tin-kling glasses. The trooper wore battle dress and his rifle was slung across his shoulder.

"Will you be wanting the men to perform again?" Falkenberg asked.

Bannister hesitated. "I think not."

"Orderly, ask Sergeant Major to sound recall. Dismissed." He turned back to Bannister. "Now. You

chose us because you've noth-ing to offer. The New Democrats on Friedland are happy enough with

their base, as are the Scots on Covenant. Xanadu wants hard cash before they throw troops into ac-tion.

You could find some scrapings on Earth, but we're the only firstclass outfit down on its luck at the

moment. What makes you think we're that hard up, Mr. Secretary? Your cause on Washington is lost,

isn't it?"

"Not for us." Howard Bannister sighed. Despite his bulk he seemed deflated. "All right. Franklin's

mer-cenaries have defeated the last or-ganized field army we had. The re-sistance is all guerrilla

operations and we both know that won't win. We need an organized force to rally around, and we

haven't got one." Dear God, we haven't got one. Bannister remembered rugged hills and forests,

weathered mountains with snow on their tops, and in the valleys were ranches where the air was crisp

and cool. He remembered plains golden with mutated wheat and the swaying tassels of Washington's

native corn-like plant rippling in the wind. The Patriot army marched again to the final battle.

They'd marched with songs in their hearts. The cause was just and they faced only mercenaries after

defeating Franklin's regular army. Free men against hirelings in one last campaign.

The Patriots entered the plains outside the capital city, confident that the mercenaries could never

stand against them—and the enemy didn't run. The humorless Cov-enant Scots regiments chewed

through their infantry, while Fried-land armored squadrons cut across the flank and far into the rear,

de-stroying their supply lines and cap-turing the headquarters. Washing-ton's army had not so much been

defeated as dissolved, turned into isolated groups of men whose en-thusiasm was no match for the iron

discipline of the mercenaries. In three weeks they'd lost everything gained in two years of war.

But yet—the planet was only thinly settled. The Franklin Confederacy had few soldiers and couldn't

afford to keep large groups of mercenaries on occupation duty. Out in the mountains and across the

plains the settlements were ready to revolt again, and it would only take a spark to arouse them ...

"We've a chance, Colonel. I wouldn't waste our money and risk my people's lives if I didn't think so.

Let me show you—I've a map in my gear."

"Show me on this one." Falken-berg opened a desk drawer to reveal a small input panel. He touched

keys and the translucent gray of his desk top dissolved into colors. A polar projection of Wash-ington

formed.

There was only one continent, an irregular mass squatting at the top of the planet. From twenty-five

de-grees North to the South Pole there was nothing but water. The land above that was cut by huge bays

and nearly landlocked seas. Towns showed as a network of red dots across a narrow band of land

jut-ting down to the thirty-to fifty-de-gree level.

"You sure don't have much to live on," Falkenberg observed. "A strip a thousand kilometers wide by

four thousand long—why Washing-ton, anyway?"

"Original settlers had ancestors in Washington State. The climate's similar too. Franklin's the

compan-ion planet. It's got more industry than we do, but less agricultural land. Settled mostly by

Southern United States people—they call themselves the Confederacy. Wash-ington's a secondary

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

I Despiteitsmiserableclimate,Tanithwasanimportantworld.ItwasfirstaconvenientdumpinggroundforEarth'sdisinherited:therebels,criminals,malcontents,victimsofadministrativemistakes,andthebalanceofthewretchedrefuseofacivilizationthatcouldnolongeraffordmisfits;anditwasthemainsourceofborloi,whichtheWorld...

展开>> 收起<<

Jerry Pournelle - Sword & Sceptre 1.pdf

共22页,预览5页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Jerry Pournelle - Sword & Sceptre 1

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: