The regiment's medics had administered synthblood, opiates, and antibiotics, had sutured wounds and splinted limbs—pretty much the limit of their skills. Instead of sending a surgeon, Carnfor had sent ambulances to take men in emergency need to his field hospital, and to the small district hospital in Burnt Woods. They also took the ranger with the badly damaged face, Gull Kro. Kro's wound wasn't life-threatening, but he was one of Carnfor's own officers. Covered trucks picked up the T'swa wounded who were fit for the ride to Rumaros.
Romlar had left those matters to his executive officer, Jorrie Renhaus, and gone to bed in his tent. He'd lost Fritek Kantros to a T'swa bullet. Eldren Esenrok had lost most of a leg and too much of his blood to a T'swa mortar round; his survival was uncertain.
With Fritek dead and Jorrie spending the night in the command tent, Artus was alone, which was how he preferred it just then. He'd declined to take anything for his pain. It wasn't that bad, and he preferred not to dull his mind if it wasn't necessary.
He allowed lassitude and depression to settle in though. How many men do you have now? he asked himself. The question was rhetorical. He knew how many: 733, including wounded whom he judged could return to combat effectiveness after proper treatment. Or 773, if he could salvage all of the men he'd sent into Komars as agitators. Depending on how you defined "waste," he'd gone a long way toward wasting his regiment.
That was the sort of thoughts he fell asleep to.
On Iryala, Lotta Alsnor sat in a lotus in the ghao at Lake Loreen, in deep meditation. She was preparing to monitor Tain Faronya, riding through hyperspace in the imperial flagship, accompanied by an invasion fleet. Before she reached, though, an image, a being, appeared to her. Eldren Esenrok: she knew him at once. Her immediate thought was that he'd died.
Nope, he told her. Maybe later tonight. Maybe tomorrow. Just now, the body's still hanging on, what's left of it. It's close enough to gone; I seem to be sort of in-between. I suppose that's why I could come here like this.
Is there something you want me to do?
For Artus. He's pulled in a bunch of shit; something the Ostrak Procedures didn't reach. It's gotten to him. We've had a couple of big bouts with the T'swa, and he's lost quite a lot of us. No fault of his; he's done a helluva job. You might want to help him out.
He was gone as abruptly as he'd arrived. Briefly Lotta adjusted her focus and perception, then projected. . . .
Romlar awoke as he would have if someone had come into the tent. And found that someone had: Lotta. When she'd come to him before in the spirit, she'd always seemed just that, a spirit. This evening she looked physical, except for the aura. Ordinarily he had to make a certain effort to see auras, but not hers this evening. She stood clad in a glow of auroral blue that sheathed her thinly below the chest, expanding upward, flaring around and above her head like the flame of a Bunsen burner. It seemed to him it would have been visible to anyone.
But it illuminated nothing. He could see no sign of it on the tent walls or ceiling.
Then it struck him. "I'm dreaming." He said it aloud.
"No, I'm here all right."
"I didn't know you could travel—like that. In a form that looks physical. I'll bet anyone could see you."
"I didn't know I could, either. Eldren told me you could use some help."
Eldren. Another gone; this one a close friend. Closer in his way than Fritek. "He's lost his body then," he said.
"No, it's still alive; it might still make it."
Tears threatened, growing out of some undefined emotion. Relief perhaps. He grinned through them. "You don't have any clothes on."
She laughed. He wondered if anyone but himself could hear it. "So I don't," she said. "But in this form there's only one way I can help. Regardless of appearances. Shall I?"
"Let's do it."
"Are you comfortable?"
"Not bad, considering I took two grenade fragments today."
"Warm enough? It's cold in here."
That surprised him. How could she tell? "Yep."
"Need to go to the bathroom?"
"The latrine, you mean. Nope. I was there just before I came to bed."
"Good. I've sat in on some of your dreams, so I've got a starting place. All right to begin?"
"Go ahead." He closed his eyes. For him, sometimes the Ostrak Procedures worked better that way.
"Okay, here goes. Is wasting a good subject to start with?"
He chuckled ruefully. "A very good subject."
His aura had verified it for her before he'd answered; it had thinned and darkened. "Good," she said, and her mind settled into a psychic posture from which she could monitor and support him. "So say the words 'to waste,' and keep saying them until something happens."
This was a procedure he hadn't done before, something new perhaps. "To waste. To waste . . ." He said it several times, then got an image of the open fen he'd used to break the T'swa pursuit, and the machine gun platoons fighting their bloody rear-guard action. She watched his recall with him, like a holograph, heard the gunfire, even felt the iron cold. "There was no other way," he said, as if he knew that she watched too. "It was that or take a lot more casualties. I had to sacrifice . . ."
He stopped. Cold waves of gooseflesh washed over him, intense, electrifying, and he abandoned "to waste." "To sacrifice," he murmured, "to sacrifice," repeating this until he got another image: Tain Faronya aboard an imperial warship, being questioned. A gate stood before her, the teleport the imperials had captured without knowing what they had. An officer—he felt like an intelligence officer—held an instrument in his hand. He pointed it at Tain, and though there was no sound with these images, Romlar saw her scream with pain, recoiling. Where did this come from? he wondered. How can I be seeing this? I wasn't there!
The image dissolved. "Keep saying it," Lotta told him.
"To sacrifice. To sacrifice . . ." It returned. This time he heard Tain scream, and heard the officer speak to her. The words, in Standard, seemed not to come from his lips but from a computer vocator. They exchanged words, while seven years later in his tent on Maragor, Romlar watched and listened. Then some uniformed men tried to push her into the teleport gate. Abruptly she wrenched loose from them, lunged forward into it—and went berserk, bounding from the platform with a wild and guttural howl, crashed blindly into one of the uniformed men, knocking him sprawling, then charged into a table with men sitting behind it, rebounded, still howling, staggered, lunged, and fell over a chair onto the deck, where she lay thrashing and kicking.
The image snapped out of existence, leaving Romlar staring at nothing, his hair on end. After a long moment he spoke: "Where did that come from?" he breathed.
"You're doing fine," Lotta answered. "Keep saying it."
"To sacrifice. To sacrifice." He paused. "You know what?"
"Tell me."
"She did sacrifice herself. For us. For all of us: the regiment, the worlds as she knew them. . . . She assumed it would kill her to enter the gate, or at least leave her mindless. And if she was dead or mindless, she couldn't tell them what it was."
His aura had cleared, but it hadn't flared. "Right," Lotta said. "Keep saying it."
"Sacrifice. Huh!" He saw himself talking with Lotta, not a three-dimensional image of her, here in his tent in Smolen, but the flesh-and-blood Lotta in his command tent in the Terfreyan jungle. And repeated the words he'd spoken then: "I wouldn't bring in more gunships; I don't want air superiority that way. I want to drive them off with inferior numbers and inferior weapons. That will stamp us with the mystique we want them to remember the Confederation by."
He shook his head. Lotta had watched the images with him, he knew, images colored by the events that grew out of that decision. The events and the casualties. Half of all the casualties he'd had on Terfreya.
But it didn't affect him now; he looked at it as if it was just what it was: a decision intended to produce the best result with the least cost over the long run.
"Keep saying it," Lotta ordered.
"To sacrifice. To sacrifice. To sac—un-n-nh!" He saw people, men and women, on the bridge of a spaceship. And shuddered. Lotta saw his aura flare, then collapse, and the image dissolved. He continued without prompting: "To sacrifice. To sacrifice . . ." Gradually, as he repeated, the image formed again, unmoving, like a still photo or a freeze-frame. It was a large bridge, ringed with instrument and monitor stations, while above them screens showed space, ships, a world—Home World!
"To sacrifice. To sacrifice." The image took life, became a sequence. There was no sound. One of the people on the bridge, tall, aristocratic-looking, was clearly the commander, and it seemed to Romlar that he'd been that man. It also seemed to him he'd seen these people, this bridge, in a dream. Perhaps only in a dream? Was that all it was? Another sat facing him, sat on an AG chair, wrapped archaically in a blanket, looking as if in the final stage of some degenerative disease. The man's gaze was powerful though, powerful, gentle—and compelling. He was pointing at the monitor that showed Home World, and his lips parted. Though Romlar didn't hear the words, he knew them. "Destroy it!"
He saw himself, the figure that seemed to be him, step to a console and touch a series of keys. In the present, in his winterized tent near Burnt Woods, his eyes were squinched tight. His aura had contracted almost to nothing, as if it were his skin that glowed murky yellow. Then the picture he watched flew apart in a blinding flash, and chills rushed through him more intense than any orgasm. His aura flared and contracted in a sort of irregular pulsing, as the chills continued. He writhed on his cot as if trying to escape.
This went on for nearly twenty seconds, then faded. His aura swelled, clear gold again with flecks and sparkles of red. His eyes opened and he laughed. "Speaking of sacrifice," he said, "I had a crew of nearly seven thousand on Retributor, and blew them all up. With the emperor and myself. He'd ordered me to destroy our Home World." He shook his head ruefully. "No wonder the ancients developed the Sacrament. There were weapons in those days."
"Okay. How do you feel about sacrifice?"
He shook his head again, but the grin was still there. "We'll come up with something better before we're done. Better than sacrifice, better than sacraments. We'll call it sanity."
"Okay," she said. "You're looking good. Are we done?"
There was no hesitancy in his answer. "Yep." His aura glowed pure and steady.
"Good. We're done then."
"And you're leaving now?"
"I need to. This isn't easy for me."
"I love you. I haven't told you that for a long time."
"I'll remember. I love you too."
She faded then and disappeared, to find herself back in the ghao with moonlight shining through the window. We didn't get it all, she told herself. We may have taken care of "wasting" and "sacrifice," but there's something still there that we haven't touched. He's not ready yet, and I'm not either.
When she'd rested—moved around and swung her arms a bit—she tranced, then reached to Eldren Esenrok. The ravaged body had stabilized; Eldren had returned to it, and slept. It seemed to her he'd live, but she stayed with him awhile, helping him communicate with his stump, with its nerves and mood vessels. They could look into other matters later.