The squads peeled off and double-timed down the Hot Gut. Man by man
they dipped into the Wet Gut for their swim outside. They'd been
drilled for speed in exiting. If the Regiment were needed outside,
the Syphon could become a literal bottle-neck. As the last squad
splashed into the antiseptic solution, Hartford turned to Colonel Nef.
"Sir, I have a question," he said.
"Hurry it up, Mister."
"Isn't this a bit extreme, sir? We're going out to take one man out
of a primitive village where we're not even sure he's in trouble. And
we're carrying enough firepower to blast into an armed city."
"I don't trust the Gooks," the colonel said. "Their bucolic way of
life may be a fraud, designed to lull us into complacency. Tonight
we may discover that they're plotting the overthrow of the Garrison,
using weapons and tactics they've kept secret. I hope such is the case,
Lieutenant. It would give us adequate cause to wipe the Stinkers off
Kansas and make this as clean a world as Titan."
"Sir...."
"Move, Mister," Nef said. "Piacentelli has been in Stinkerville for
fifty minutes. Let's get him out."
The four trucks roared down the plateau toward the Indigenous Hominid
hamlet at its foot. When the first Axenite Pioneers landed on the
planet, bacteria-free as all men in space had to be, they'd set up camp
near the spot where First Regiment Barracks now stood. They saw the
fields of sunflowers, grown for food and cloth, and heard the natives
call the nearest village Kansannamura. From that time on, this world
was Kansas.
There was no moonlight--Kansas has no moon--but the headlamps of the
four vehicles were wasted against the bright ribbon of road, lighted
as it was by the sheet of stars that melted together in a metallic
ceiling over the night. The men sat with their rifles between their
knees, the plastic sleeves stripped off. Each of these Dardick-rifles
could fire a solid stream of death. Each round of ammunition was
fitted with a matrix that served as chamber, cartridge and the first
fraction-of-an-inch of barrel. A magazine of forty such rounds could be
hosed through the rifle in half a second. The troopers sped downhill,
through sunflower fields black and silver in the light of the stars.
* * * * *
The personnel carriers and the jeeps scuffed to a halt by the village
gate, the men scattering like shrapnel, according to the book. Colonel
Nef spoke to Hartford on the command-band. "Move in, Lieutenant. Bring
out Piacentelli. Any Stinker resistance is to be treated as open
rebellion."
"Yes, sir." Hartford spoke to his men: "First squad, lead scout,
forward to the gate."
The scout, his plastic safety-suit and the glass of his helmet
glinting highlights, scuttled to the gate. He kicked the gate
open--Piacentelli had evidently left it ajar--and entered, rifle-first.
"First squad, follow me in column. Open to Line-of-Skirmishers in the
square. Second squad, follow in the same manner. Third squad; maintain
your interval and stand ready."
Hartford ran, pistol in hand, through the open gate. It was like
charging some Roman ruin unpeopled for three centuries, like a field
exercise with boulders marking obstacles to be won. There was no sign
of natives. Their shop-boards hung bearing the picture-script the
Kansans used, quiet as the marbles in a cemetery. Hartford directed
first squad in a sweep through the alleys, searching for Piacentelli.
Second squad clattered through the gate behind them, took up a skirmish
line, and moved in to cover the square as first squad disappeared into
the doorways and alleys of Stinkerville.
The village, except for its beasts, might have been deserted. These
animals, camelopards used for riding and to carry burdens, woke
and gazed serenely down at the interrupters of their vegetable
dreams, blinking their liquid half-shuttered eyes. Boots clattered
on cobblestones. The houses were unlighted. "Throw on your i-r,"
Hartford ordered. As they moved into the dark, narrow ways, the men
beamed infra-red light from the projectors on their safety-suits, the
bounced-back, invisible light being transduced to black-and-green
chiaroscuro by passage through the stereatronic goggles dropped inside
their helmets.
"Turn the Stinkers out, Mister," Nef command-banded.
"Into the houses," Hartford signaled. Ahead, a boot slammed wood, and
hinges burst. To the restless night sounds of the camelopards in their
stalls, the click of military boots on brick, and the rustle of rifles
against safety-suits was added the whispering of families rousing from
their beds. Hand in hand from father to mother to elder brother, down
the scale to the youngest, the Kansans stumbled out into their little
courtyards. "_Ano hito wa dare desu ka?" "Abunai yo!" "Shikata ga
nai...._"
* * * * *
"Any sign of Piacentelli yet?" Nef demanded.
"Not yet, sir," Hartford signalled.
"Feed a candle into every building, Lieutenant. We'll get these Gooks
in the open and interrogate till we find our man."
"Done and done, sir," Hartford said, stepping out of the way of a
little girl fleeing toward the village square with an even littler girl
strapped to a pack-board on her back. He passed on the order. "Fire
in ten seconds, nine, eight ... now!" Each man of first squad tossed
a Lake Erie Lightning Universal Gas Candle through the window nearest
him. A little over a second later a dozen grenades spit out a cloud
of smoke with a hiss like a bursting fire-hose, and the outer air was
filled with an eye-stinging gas. The Indigenous Hominids spilled out of
their homes in all directions now; coughing, choking, children rubbing
the smoke particles into their half-wakened eyes. Two camelopards,
blinded like their masters, blundered into the square, tears streaming
from their reproachful eyes, twelve feet above the pavement. Second
squad's men danced clear of the beasts and hallooed them out the gate.
Somewhere back in an alley a first-squad trooper tapped his trigger,
jetting steel against overhanging roof-tiles. "Nail that shot, Mister!"
Nef demanded.
Hartford heard the squad leader: "It's Lieutenant Piacentelli, sir.
He's here."
"Bring him out, man; bring him out!" Nef's excited voice triggered a
new string of rifle bursts.
Hartford tongued his bitcher full-volume: "Cease fire, you idiots!
Piacentelli, head for the square."
"Stop it, for God's sake, stop it!" Piacentelli shouted, his
unamplified voice coming from a smoke-filled alley. Hartford plunged
into the dark smoke--a tear-gas grenade had set afire some of the
sun-flower-paper room dividers, and kindled with them a row of wooden
houses--and shouted for Piacentelli. A blabrigar, as blind in the smoke
as the men, blundered against Hartford's helmet. "_Yuke! Yuke!_" the
bird screamed, grabbing hold of the transceiver-antenna that horned up
from the helmet. Hartford grabbed the blabrigar and tossed it up above
the melee. He heard it flying in circles, searching for its Stinker
owners, chanting the last words they'd said to it: "_Yuke! Yuke!
Yuke!_"--"Go!"
* * * * *
Everything was burning. Even through the safety-suit Hartford suffered
from the heat. He retracted his i-r goggles, useless in all this smoke.
Nef called. "I'm coming in, Mister." Hartford acknowledged. Great. One
more blind man wandering in the smoke was what he needed.
He tongued his bitcher loud and shouted; "Gabe! Come this way. Gabe!
Gabe!" The heat was intolerable. He positive-pressured his suit,
ballooning the fabric away from his skin. How hot, he wondered, would
the rounds packed into the butt of his Dardick-pistol have to get
before they exploded?
As though in answer, a snap of gunfire sounded from the fog ahead.
Some meat-head had spooked. There were more shots as other troopers
fired at their fantasies. "Cease fire, damn it!" Nef shouted over the
command-circuit. "If anyone was hurt by you idiots, I'll court-martial
every man with smoke in his gun barrel." Hartford hurried on. Ahead of
him in the alley he heard Colonel Nef's voice, uncharacteristically
soft. "Hartford, join me. I've found Piacentelli." Ahead in the smoke
was a pinkness: the scarlet-suited commander kneeling above a body on
the bricks.
Here in the open of planetary air, available to all the microscopic
beasts of Kansas, Piacentelli was wearing only Class B's; his sneakers,
shorts and tee-shirt. The center of the shirt sopped blood from the
bullet-hole that funneled into Axenite Lieutenant Piacentelli's chest.
Nef stood. "The Decontamination Vehicle should be standing by," he
said. "Get Piacentelli outside. We may be able to save him." He sounded
unhopeful.
Hartford draped his friend's body across his shoulder. The smoke was
bad, but he'd memorized his course through it. The air sucked in
through his filter was clean, but hot. His helmet steamed opaque. As he
stumbled out, blind, but guided by the colonel's voice, two men came
forward to take Piacentelli over to the Decontamination Vehicle parked
by the village gate. In the cooler air Hartford's helmet cleared. A
girl gnotobiotician from the Decontamination Squad pressed the pickup
of her helmet's "ears" against Piacentelli's bloody chest.
She looked up. "He's dead, sir," she said.
Nef's voice boomed from his bitcher. "Burn the Stinker village!" he
shouted. "These Gooks will pay for Piacentelli's death with their
homes."
Hartford felt imminent danger of vomiting, bad business in a
safety-suit. He fought it as he looked around. The column of smoke
rising from the buildings already fired was sweeping around, carried
by the morning wind that poured off the plateau. Everything within the
walls of the rammed-earth houses would be incinerated. Kansannamura was
destroyed. "Regroup by the vehicles," Hartford spoke to his troopers.
He walked back to his jeep, the village flaming behind him.
The Decontamination Squad checked Hartford's safety-suit, and found it
sound despite its roasting. Piacentelli they cocooned in plastic: he
was contaminated and dangerous. As the five trucks rolled back toward
the Barracks, they met families of Indigenous Hominids, smoke-stained,
who retreated back into the sunflower-fields as the troopers drew near
them. The Stinkers seemed to have salvaged little from the flames
beyond an occasional blabrigar, perched on an old man's shoulder,
or now and then a camelopard, fitted with a saddle and carrying a
blanket-wrapped bundle of clothing and cooking-pots.
V
Hartford had to see Piacentelli's body placed in the Barracks morgue,
where a necropsy would be performed by a safety-suited gnotobiotician.
It was seldom that an Axenite was contaminated. Rarer yet was the death
of a trooper who'd been exposed to bacteria. Information held in Pia's
body might someday save lives.
Hartford, directing the sealing-off of the morgue from the rest of the
Barracks, was not comforted by these reflections. He unsuited, shaved
and showered, and put on fresh Class B's to finish what remained of
this O.G. tour. On his way back up to the Board Room he had to pass the
morgue again. Colonel Nef, in the midst of a cluster of lesser ranks,
was there. On a wheeled cart, covered by a sheet, was a second body.