The Regiment-A Trilogy Page 3

  And hot! Representative daily high and low temperatures on land were, at the equator, 120°F and 105°F respectively; at 25° north latitude, 125°F and 105°F; and at 52° north latitude, 110°F and 90°F. And those temperatures were ordinary! Varlik could imagine what a hot spell would be like. In addition, with so much ocean, the humidity would generally be high; the place was virtually unlivable.

  He scanned the summary on bioclimatic zones. The equatorial zone was defined by unbroken jungle, and extended north and south from the equator roughly fifteen degrees of latitude. "Jungle in the extreme," the summary called it, especially in the zone between 10° north and south. Rain was frequent and heavy all year.

  As on most free-water planets, planetary circulation made even Kettle's subtropical latitudes relatively dry. The semiarid zones extended roughly between latitudes 20 and 30 in both northern and southern hemispheres. Some semiarid land was desert grassland and some was scrub woodland, grading into forest toward both equator and middle latitudes. Its higher mountains and plateaus were forested.

  The middle latitudes lay above about forty degrees latitude, and much of it was jungle or other forest. Some, in the rainshadows of mountains, was savannah or prairie.

  According to the summary, the only cool climates on the whole planet occurred on mountains and plateaus above about 12,000 feet. These areas were described as generally extremely wet and misty, an "incredible tangle of smallish trees, standing up at every conceivable angle or lying down, overgrown with vines and lianas and slippery with mosses and saprophytes."

  That didn't sound very good either, he thought, then read on. "The exceptions are certain high mountains and plateaus in the arid zone, where the climate tends to be quite pleasant and the landscape ruggedly attractive."

  He knew automatically where the Romblit planetary headquarters had to be. And probably the army's.

  He skimmed down over material on the geology, flora, and fauna until he came to a summary of Orlantha's history. Very little was known of Orlantha until Y.P. 422, when a survey team found technite there. It wasn't even known from which Confederation world Kettle had been colonized, or at what remote date. The people had sunk into stone-age primitivism, and severe environmental selection, perhaps combined with genetic drift, had produced a very distinct species of Homo.

  Varlik thought he knew what had happened. Most gook worlds had been settled by one Confederation world or another using them for human dumping grounds—cost-free prisons—long ago. Even several trade worlds had gotten started that way, though in cases where they'd been colonized before the Amberian Erasure, there was only folklore or learned supposition to tell of it. Ordinarily the exiles had been sufficiently equipped to maintain some technology, but Kettle's breeding stock seemed to have been cast away with very little.

  Convict dumping had been outlawed when most of the habitable planets in the sector had been settled.

  The rest of the historical material on Kettle dealt briefly and summarily with the subjugation of tribes and with mining, and he only skimmed it. He decided to give it a more thorough read tomorrow. Right now he wanted to look into the T'swa mercenaries, and their homeland, Tyss. It was beginning to seem to Varlik more and more that the T'swa were the element to stress in his articles. It was they who would capture reader interest.

  5

  Excerpt from "The Confederation of Worlds," IN, The Encyclopedia. Lodge of Kootosh-Lan.

  Pertunis. With the collapse of the brief Thomsid Empire, the Generals' Junta surveyed the merchant houses of Iryala and subsequently appointed Pertunis of Ordunak as King of Iryala and Emperor of the Worlds. Pertunis's first official act was to dissolve the empire formally. While this was no more than official recognition of the existing situation, it made of Pertunis a sectorwide hero. Indeed, the Confederation numbers the years of its calendar from Pertunis's coronation.

  Within 34 years, Pertunis had reestablished the Confederation in much the same form as before the Charter of Halsterbors a millennium earlier. He based it, however, on a network of new trade agreements, the desire of certain rulers to safeguard or regain certain fiefs and other advantages, and, of course, on Iryala's shipbuilding monopoly and military fleet. He did this without any apparent desire for self-aggrandizement. And it served essentially to strengthen the unity, homogeneity, and central guidance—the "Standardness," if you will, of civilized humanity.

  The 26 other member worlds were not without differences and ambitions of their own. And their ruling classes could see themselves becoming vassals of the Iryalan throne through the commercial network. But each world had a strong taste for off-planet goods. And each had evolved an economy and developed a standard of living that depended on exports and imports. One by one, Pertunis made them certain guarantees in exchange for their joining the commercial network or for certain modest fees in currency and services. They were also to acknowledge the Iryalan crown as the Administrator General of the network.

  Each step into the net seemed the best alternative at the time, the decision to take it the most logical and favorable. And as one after another joined, the remainder began to see that, if they excluded themselves, they would end up in the "trade-world" category, along with the 14 old "junior autonomies," with minimal commercial rights and mostly unable to acquire ships or land like those they had on Confederation member worlds. As trade worlds, they would be outside the Confederation but dependent on it, in positions of considerable economic disadvantage. Only Splenn and Carjath chose ideology over logic, and in their newly reduced positions as trade worlds, neither was long able to maintain a centralized planetary government, nor generally to develop a peaceful and stable alternative. Which of course suited the Confederation, whose merchants then played the various states against their rivals.

  At this writing, life on Splenn and Carjath remains quite stimulating and interesting after nearly 500 Standard years. Their mostly aged, though well-captained ships, keep reasonably busy. Some provide a service important in the farflung Confederation: smuggling.

  All the 26 other ex-senior autonomies finally joined Iryala in the network, which in the Year of Pertunis 37 was reproclaimed the Confederation of Worlds.

  With the firm establishment of the new confederation, Pertunis was able to give more attention to a project he had worked on at intervals since he'd taken the throne: the development of a logical system of rules, guides, and procedures for the operation of organizations—any organizations—but with special reference to the Iryalan and Confederation bureaucracies. He worked on this, as opportunity allowed, into his final illness. It had begun as a means of rationalizing and lightening the labor of ruling as king and administrator general. In the later stages of the project he elaborated it in extreme detail, in a considerably successful effort to more fully circumvent the bureaucratic stupidities he observed around him. Despite certain weaknesses, it is a true masterwork, of major value to those who are polarized to any major degree. Even to those who are not polarized, it can be well worth contemplating.

  After Pertunis's death, this work was declared by the new king, Wilman IX, to constitute "Standard Management." It has markedly reduced operational variation within the Confederation and occupies a place in Confederation life second only to the Standard Technology of "prehistoric" origin.

  But while adding efficiency both to government and business, Standard Management further calcified the already rigid Confederation culture.

  6

  Like every army messhall, the officers' mess was a study in stainless steel. Varlik paused as he entered, looking around. Its round tables, more numerous than necessary for the ship's officers, were segregated into a section for senior officers and a larger one for junior officers. Just now they were sparingly occupied.

  The mate he'd talked with, Captain Mikal Brusin, looked up and beckoned, and Varlik walked over.

  "Might as well eat here with me, Varl. And meet another guest on board, Colonel Carlis Voker." Brusin indicated an officer next to him who wore
dress greens instead of the blue tanksuit of most of the working crew. "Colonel Voker's been on Kettle. Went back to Iryala to expedite getting some of the equipment they need, and now he's going back with it."

  The mate turned to Voker. "Varlik's the man I mentioned, with Central News, going out to Kettle to report on the war. Served a hitch in the army a few years back; you don't find many media people that have done that, I'll bet five on it."

  Without standing, Colonel Carlis Voker looked Varlik over as if inspecting a not very bright recruit. After a few seconds Voker stood and put out his hand. Varlik met it and they shook.

  "Served a hitch, eh? Well, at least we won't have to wipe your nose for you and explain the difference between a rocket launcher and a flare pistol. You might even be able to hike all day in a cool-suit without collapsing on your face. Possibly. If you decide to go into the bush."

  Arrogant bastard, Varlik thought, sitting down with the two officers. Still, it had been a favorable evaluation, even put in rather derisive terms. A messman came over and took Varlik's order while Brusin and Voker continued their conversation, a discussion of stations they both knew. They finished their meal before Varlik was well started, and Voker got up.

  "Colonel Voker?" said Varlik.

  The officer paused, looking at him, his expression for some reason verging on a scowl. "Yes?"

  "May I meet you after supper and ask you some questions? I know very little about the war on Kettle, or about its antecedents."

  "Antecedents? You won't learn much about those from me. Or from anyone I know of. But the war I can tell you about. Meet me in the officer's dayroom in"—he looked at his watch—"fifty minutes."

  Voker turned on his heel and walked away. Varlik watched him leave, then looked at his own watch.

  Mike Brusin grinned at him. "He likes you."

  "You could have fooled me."

  "He's exasperated from dealing with civilian bureaucrats and army data shufflers for the past ten days—people who use Standard Management to slow things down instead of make them go smoothly. No, he likes you, about as much as he's apt to like any male civilian. He comes from one of those army families you run into—army for generations back.

  "The colonel feels that most journalists are too ignorant to report on a military operation. They don't know what they're looking at, so they sort of dub in their own misconceptions. And he's got a low tolerance of anything he considers stupidity."

  Brusin paused, grinning. "I confess, I set you up for this. I told Voker about you going to cover the war, and then I watched for you, to call you over. He's basically a combat man, though he's on General Lamons's staff now; I figured he could be valuable to you.

  "But after he finished telling me what he thought of journalists in war areas, I decided not to mention them." Brusin indicated the video team seated with the junior officers. "They're too ignorant to know the difference between the two sides of the room, and the differences in service that go with them."

  Brusin swigged down the last of his joma, wiped his mouth with the cloth napkin at his place, then stood up. "I figured he'd talk to you, though. Anyway, I've got to hit the rack now, Varl. I go on duty again at midnight. See you around."

  * * *

  Carlis Voker sat in the dayroom reading, and looked up. "You're right on time," he said. "What do you know about Kettle?"

  "Not much. Too humid-hot for a real human, and a lot of it too overgrown for decent surface mobility. Even the gooks didn't live south of the middle latitudes."

  Voker nodded, a jerky nod. " 'Didn't' is the word. They do now. There's got to be thousands of them in the equatorial jungle and the subequatorial scrub. Lots of thousands."

  He looked at Varlik, who sat waiting. Voker went on. "When technetium was discovered there, the initial intention was to mine and refine the ore ourselves. It would give Iryala added leverage, because no one could make steel without getting their technetium from us.

  "But about then there was a big upset among member worlds over Iryalan domination. And the worked-out technite mines were on a planet in the Rombil sector; Rombil had been responsible for technite mining throughout recorded history. So Consar XV assigned Kettle to Rombil in fief, with the condition that a royal embassy and a royal military garrison would be kept at a place of the royal choosing and at Romblit expense.

  "The Rombili run the place, though—mines, refineries, the whole works. Or they did. There were two technite operations, both in semiarid scrub country—one in the northern hemisphere, a place called Beregesh, and one in the southern.

  "For more than two hundred and fifty years, occasional slaves and their women escaped from the compounds. Never any big breakouts, just three or four gooks at a time; no problem. They could easily be replaced and they weren't a danger. The country around the mines was unlivable—scrub woodland with almost no water. That was the key: water was scarce. And when a heat wave moves through, it can be 140° for three or four days at a time. The best thing fugitives could hope to do was work their way up-latitude and try to last twelve or fourteen hundred miles to where the climate eases up. Which of course they could never do. A hundred miles north of Beregesh the hills turned into desert grassland—no shade and no water—while in the southern hemisphere, the continent doesn't extend far enough.

  "So went the theory."

  Voker's lean face had been intense as he'd talked; now he paused for a moment, his eyes like drill bits, as if to evaluate what his listener was making of it all.

  "Of course, a few gooks might find their way onto the plateau south of Beregesh, where it's cooler, and the Rombili considered that a potential problem. So every now and then they'd send floaters over the plateau for any signs of cook smoke or huts or garden patches. Whenever they'd see anything, they'd put down a couple of platoons to clean them out. Then they'd bring in any gook bodies and hang them on the fence of the slave compound as object lessons—just let them hang there and rot.

  "But now it looks as if most of them headed for the equatorial jungles, the last thing anyone expected. On the face of it, it made no sense. And the ones that survived must have raised families there. Big families. Gradually they ended up with a whole equatorial population developing under cover of the jungle.

  "Then, last year, a force of them attacked the Beregesh Compound, wiped out the garrison, took their weapons, and released the slaves. Not that they didn't already have weapons. They did: rifles, hoses, lobbers, shoulder-fired rockets . . . And no one knows where they got them. Now they've got more."

  Voker sat quietly for a long moment, scowling at his thoughts. Varlik didn't speak; he sensed there was more to come.

  "They had more than weapons," Voker went on. "They'd learned tactics and coordination somewhere, because about five minutes after the attack started at Beregesh, another force attacked the planetary headquarters on Wexafel Mountain, thirty miles southwest.

  "The Rombili had a regular resort at Wexafel Mountain, well guarded but not fortified: a tall wire fence and sentries walking around inside it. Our own token 'garrison' was stationed there at the Royal Embassy—two platoons—and the Rombili had two ornamental marine companies. By Kettle standards it's up in the cool, at 10,800 feet. It's still fairly hot by Iryalan or Romblit standards, but decent—a compromise between heat and an atmospheric pressure acceptable to lard-ass executive types. Sea level pressure on Kettle is a little higher than on Iryala, but only about 85 percent of what they're used to on Rombil.

  "Anyway, the gooks wiped them out, too—planetary director and all. I suppose the staff there was running around in circles yammering about what they'd just gotten on the radio from Beregesh and didn't even look out the frigging windows until the shooting started. Probably never even warned their sentries that there might be trouble. And you can guess what sentry discipline would have been like after 280 years without an alarm, unless they had a real ass-kicker C.O., which obviously they didn't."

  He shook his head, gaze indrawn beneath a scowl.


  "The stupidity didn't end there, though. Three days later another gook force attacked the guard detail at the southern hemisphere site, Kelikut. And the Rombili bungled there, too. They'd begun to build log and dirt fortifications and to patrol a perimeter around the site, but they hadn't sent in reinforcements. They said afterwards they hadn't thought they were needed. They hadn't even set out mine fields! They could enfilade the fields surrounding the compounds with automatic weapons fire, but only from the compound's watch towers, which were nothing more than little air-conditioned tin boxes on legs. They stood up there just inviting someone to hit them with rocket fire.

  "Anyway, the patrols were pulled in when it got dark, if you can believe that. So about midnight the gooks hit the guard compound, a couple of hundred yards from the slave compound, and they hit the guard posts at the slave compound at the same time. Total surprise. The Rombili did get one of their patrol floaters up, but it didn't do any good. Another wipeout."

  Voker's brooding eyes rested on Varlik's.

  "The floater hung around a while, and they claim it attacked the guerrillas effectively. I don't know what they mean by effectively; they lost the place and all personnel, and all the slaves took off. And it was dark, with no one around to make a body count. The floater was lucky to make it up north on the charge it carried."

  "Up north?" Varlik said.

  "Yeah. The Rombili have a big agricultural operation at Aromanis, 52° north latitude—several thousand acres of grassland country converted to irrigated farmland—and a lumbering operation a couple hundred miles northwest of there in the foothills, all using cheap native labor. This being in native territory, with free natives running around loose, the Rombili had a lot stronger military force there. Why they hadn't flown some of them south to the Kelikut site when they lost Beregesh, I'll never know. Maybe they were too used to getting their instructions from the big brass at Wexafel Mountain, and no one at Aromanis was willing to make a decision like that."