Читать книгу Squadron of the Damned - David Wright O’Brien - Страница 5

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The Recruiting Officer of the Outer Space Patrol Legion faced Ricky the following morning. He sat behind a small, clean, unpretentious desk in a white, bare, severe office. He wore the deep blue tunic of the Legion. On his chest were miniatures of many campaign medals, and on his left arm were six gold seniority stripes. He was a short man, dark haired and wide shouldered, and a rugged, granite like expression chisled on his rocky features.

His eyes fixed Ricky's unsmilingly.

"We never accept a man who isn't absolutely aware of what he's getting in for," the Recruiting Officer declared. His voice was deep and somewhat harsh.

"I know that," Ricky answered.

The officer's eyes traveled over Ricky's expensive attire.

"There is no story book glory connected with the men of our patrols. Not of the sort that legend leads people to believe, at any rate. The pay amounts almost to nothing. Promotion can only be attained by the hard way. It's long in coming, if you live to deserve it."

"I understand that also," Ricky said.

"Most of the men who enter this office," the officer went on, ignoring Ricky's last remark, "are running away from something or someone in their past. We don't delude ourselves that they're coming to us because of any appeal service in our ranks might have. We are not interested in what they are escaping from, nor what they might have been before they joined us. Most of them are misfits, for any of a hundred reasons, from society. We don't care about that, either. If they are cowards, we find that out shortly enough and before their cowardice can cost us the lives of any others in our ranks."

Ricky looked at the hard, gnarled hands of the officer as he drummed his fingers on the desk while he spoke.

"Your enlistment in our ranks is for seven years," the officer went on. "Quite frankly, four out of every ten men who join our ranks never live to be mustered out of service at the end of that time. I'd like you to consider this very carefully. Take a day to do it, if you like. It's obvious from the words you use, from the clothes you wear, from your very manner of standing here before my desk, that the life you've left behind you is a lot softer than the life you wish to enter. Think that part over very carefully. If you're running away from something back in that life—and I repeat we don't care if you are—I just want you to realize you're running away straight into the arms of a buzz saw when you come to us. Do I make myself clear?"

Ricky nodded slowly. "I understand perfectly. I shan't need any additional time to consider this. I've thought it out carefully long ago."

The officer considered Ricky's expression for a moment. Then he shrugged, smiled, and reached for a sheaf of papers beside his elbow. He placed them before Ricky.

"The enlistment is seven years. The penalty for desertion is, at all times, death. Sign these," he instructed.

Ricky leafed casually through the papers, seeming to examine them carefully yet swiftly. Then he bent over them and affixed his signature to the bottom of each paper. When he straightened up he seemed to have relaxed.

The officer pressed a microtube button on his desk and spoke into a tiny box. "A recruit, Richard Werts. My office. Supplies."

He flicked off the button and turned back to Ricky.

"My luggage," Ricky began, indicating the expensive baggage behind him. "Will I be permitted to—"

The officer anticipated his question, shook his head. "It will be returned to you seven years from now—when you're mustered out. Don't worry about it."

Ricky smiled for the first time. "I wasn't worrying. I was just wondering."

At the corner of the little office a door opened. The officer stood up behind his desk, clearing his throat. He held out a gnarled right hand.

"Goodbye, Legionaire Richard Werts," he said, "and good luck!"

Ricky took his hand, felt the hard, strong, reassuring grasp and was grateful for it. He grinned once, and the officer returned the grin. Then he turned on his heel, after executing a somewhat makeshift salute. An orderly stood waiting for him, his expression noncommittal.

"Follow me, Legionaire," he said....

If Ricky had felt that he would soon be beside his brother Clark, and that the arrival of that long awaited moment would be but a matter of days, he was doomed to disappointment. Exactly one month after he had left the small recruiting office in Barkay, he was still on that god forsaken little asteroid, undergoing the rigid training service at the military barracks there.

It was hard going. The thick shouldered recruiting officer hadn't been guilty of understatement when he'd warned Ricky of that. There was drill, endless and fatiguing. There was instruction in military maneuver that seemed endlessly wearisome.

The barracks were cold and prison like in their atmosphere. The other recruits with whom Ricky trained, some fifty of them, were for the most part cynical riff-raff from the interplanetary gutters. But they were tough, and apparently fearless. Only a few of them were stupid. And in the attitudes of all of them there was complete and almost happy acceptance of their new lives. They seemed, all of them, like men glad to have left the rest of the world behind them, happy in the awareness that their past was buried completely for the next seven years.

The days were long, and even the constant attention to drill and detail, drill and detail, didn't lessen their aching endlessness to Ricky. But with the passing of each of these days, Ricky was confident in the knowledge that he was getting harder, swifter, keener—tapering down into the vicious human fighting machine that symbolized the Legionaire of the Outer Space Patrol.

At the end of a month there was strength and steel and sinew in his very bearing. His muscles were flat and hard, his eyes alive and restless. He was beginning to wear the swashbuckling blue tunic of the Legionaire as if it were a part of him, and he eagerly awaited the day that would send him off to his first patrol station.

And finally there was that day when the Instructing Officer stood before the fifty monthlings on the parade ground and read the order that tingled every last man of them to his heels.

"Forty out of fifty of you," the Instructing Officer had announced, "have been judged as ready for preliminary patrol training. The rest of you will remain here at the barracks for two more weeks extensive training in fundamentals. Those forty of you who have been judged fit for further work will be sent to the Outer Space Patrol Legion Base at Tromar.[2] The other ten, if they don't show considerable improvement within the next two weeks, will receive unimportant detail assignments at the home bases."

Standing there at attention, Ricky felt the tingling surge of excitement and suspense that comes only to a soldier at such moments. The Instructing Officer began to read the names of the favored forty—

"Yjaka, Carroll, Masters, Revwa, Nougak, Werts, Sommers" and his voice went on naming the other thirty-three, while Ricky stood there elatedly, hearing only his own name ringing in his ears. He'd made it. He was closer, now, to Clark!

When, finally, the Instructing Officer had dismissed the monthlings, Ricky was joined by a tall, hard, sleek earth-man named Carroll. He had bunked in the same dormitory as Ricky, and although they had spent occasional leisure moments together, Ricky had always felt a subconscious distrust of the chap.

"Congratulations, Werts," Carroll said, in his soft, too cultured voice. "I see we'll both be heading toward inevitable glory now, eh?" There was, as always, the slightest amused contempt in his voice. Barrack rumor had it that Carroll was a jewel thief hiding from the interplanetary police. Ricky neither believed nor doubted this, for he had already taken the Legion attitude of accepting a man on present value rather than past renown or notoriety.

But there was something in Carroll's attitude that Ricky instinctively resented; a camaraderie that intimated common bonds, not only of having lived well and fully in their respective past lives, but equally uncleanly.

Carroll didn't seem to notice the fact that Ricky didn't answer him, however, for he continued to stride along beside him as they made their way across the parade ground to the canteen.

"There's a rumor around that we're going to be trained damned fast," Carroll went on. "Seems there's been more than an average ratio of trouble running along the outer space borders. The grapevine has it that a small asteroid garrison of the Outer Space Patrol Legion was completely wiped out a few days back. There was nothing but their charred corpses left lying around when the checking Patrol arrived on the scene."

Ricky felt a sudden chill. Perhaps Clark had been one of that annihilated garrison!

He forced himself to reply casually. "Is that so? What post?"

Carroll shook his head. "Don't know. One of the bad spots. They think the Malyas did it, however. Little doubt of that angle."

Ricky shuddered mentally. The Malyas were a vicious, weird tribe of Outer Space brigands. Creatures from another universe, their periodic raids and constant guerilla warfare along the interplanetary borderlands, had been the greatest problem faced since the formation of the Interplanetary Federation. Cruel, cunning, inhuman, the threat of these creatures was a constant danger to the civilized sections of space.

"Was the garrison comprised of new men or veterans?" Ricky asked.

Carroll shrugged. "Veterans, or so I understand."

Ricky sighed in relief. Clark was probably not among them. Carroll noted this sudden change in expression, and his brown eyes narrowed. They entered the canteen, and Carroll bought a bottle of Venusian wine.

"Share it, won't you, old boy?" Carroll invited, indicating a small table.

Ricky shrugged ungraciously. "Very well."

They were seated, and Carroll filled the glasses, when he said casually, "You're a funny duck, Werts. Can't seem to dope you out. You aren't like the rest." His tone indicated that Ricky was like himself, and that the comparison was meant as a compliment.

Ricky shrugged, sipping the cheap, bitter wine. He fished into his tunic pocket and found a cigarette. They were a harsh Junovian brand, the best he could afford on his meager pay allowances.

Carroll's tone was cloying, confidential. "Myself, for an example," he said, dropping his voice, "I'm not like the rest of our comrades, either. We're both used to better things. Neither of us were thugs. I, well, I don't mind admitting, had a rather slick thing before I came here." He laughed apologetically. "I was able to do quite nicely for myself with it, until it suddenly became a matter of immediate urgency that I remove my handsome hide to a quick hideout. This seemed to be my best move."

Ricky took a deep draught on his cigarette and raised his eyebrows noncommittally. He said nothing.

Carroll pushed his uniform cap back on his slick blonde hair and refilled his glass. He was driving at something, that much was obvious. And it was also certain that he didn't quite know how to go after what he sought. Ricky wasn't being helpful. Suddenly Carroll leaned forward and his tone became sickeningly friendly.

"What was your racket?" he asked.

Ricky's gray eyes clouded with frost.

Carroll had the grace to turn crimson. "I mean," he said swiftly, "I wasn't trying to pry into your background, old boy."

"What were you doing, then?" Ricky asked frigidly.

"I, ah, I was just comparing notes, so to speak. I didn't think you'd be touchy. We could save ourselves a lot of grief in this present set-up if we got together. One for all, all for one, that sort of thing, you know." Carroll said in an explanatory torrent.

"I see," Ricky said noncommittally. "And what's your background, Carroll?"

Carroll became suddenly more at ease. He grinned and bent forward once more. "Ice," he said. "Valuable jewelry. Flick!" He waved one long fingered, gracefully tapered hand to show the theft of an object from thin air. He sat back and grinned.

"Society background, pinch the pearls stuff, eh?" asked Ricky.

Carroll nodded. "Right. It was a cinch. Society chap myself, you know. Made it easy. Had lots of friends. No one suspected."

"Then why are you here?" Ricky asked in the same toneless voice.

Carroll frowned, then laughed. "I see what you mean. If no one was wise, why am I here. Good question. They got wise, eventually, under rather messy circumstances. There was a person murdered. Ghastly thing, ruined my trade. I had to scoot."

"So you joined the Outer Space Patrol Legion until things died down and you could come back in seven years or so, eh?" Ricky said.

Carroll smirked. "Seven years is a long time. Too long for one of my, ah, impatient traits."

"The penalty for desertion is death," Ricky reminded him flatly.

"So is the penalty for murder," Carroll smiled.

"Then you have an angle," Ricky said. "I see."

Carroll smiled smugly. "You might say I have many angles, old man. All of them right angles." He snickered at his play on words.

"And I take it that these angles need two men to properly develop them, eh?" Ricky asked.

Carroll nodded. "That's it exactly," he admitted. "I knew from the minute I set eyes on you that you were the man to take in on my plans. You have brains, old boy, and background."

Ricky nodded sarcastically. "How flattering of you," he murmured.

The look Carroll gave him was suddenly sharp. "I'm not trying to be flattering," he said, the purr leaving his voice and his eyes growing hard. "I'm trying to let you in on some angles—smart angles—that can make this forced concealment in these uniforms," he indicated his plain blue tunic distastefully, "a little bit more pleasant and a little less permanent. What do you say?"

Ricky met his cold stare evenly. He held out his empty glass, and Carroll filled it.

"I say," Ricky declared with measured distaste, "that your wine is much better than your ideas. And I can't say that I enjoyed the wine too much!"