It was little short of dawn when the evac floater landed at the base hospital at Aromanis. Because he'd eaten native food and drunk untreated water, Varlik too was entered, to be checked for parasites. The first thing he did was get a letter cube off to Mauen telling her that he was safe.
As usual, the T'swa wards were well occupied, mostly with young troopers of the Ice Tiger Regiment. From the veteran regiments there'd been fewer than thirty until the seventeen arrived, and the word was that only some forty had been evacuated unwounded, or too slightly wounded to remain hospitalized. Along with a couple of hundred disabled or undergoing rehabilitation from earlier actions, they were all that remained alive of more than eighteen hundred who'd landed on Kettle scant deks ago—they and a handful still among the Birds, too badly injured to be moved.
The forty able-bodied, informed of the exchange, had been at the hospital to greet them. The greeting had been neither exuberant nor somber. There were wide grins, handshakes, soft laughter, and an incredible sense of spiritual togetherness that left Varlik feeling left out. Not that he was ignored or slighted; he simply could not share in the feeling that was part of it, and that depressed him. He kept busy through it with his camera.
The new media people had not been informed of their pending arrival, and none of them were there.
There'd been a letter cube waiting for him from Mauen—long and warm and carefully devoid of worries or problems. He hoped she wouldn't hear of his brief "missing" status before she got his letter.
His nights in the hospital weren't as bad as some in the jungle, but the days were worse; around him were bandaged reminders of the regiment and what had happened to it. After two days of tests, shots, and observation, he was discharged from the hospital. He went straight to army headquarters, where he was accosted by a newly arrived young man from Central News and a team from Iryala Video. They seemed ridiculously impressed with him—the "white T'swa," they said he was called back home.
Somehow they angered him, though he knew the feeling was unreasonable—a matter of his own condition, not theirs. He shook loose from them as quickly as he decently could and went hopefully to Voker's office. Voker was the only one at Aromanis that he wanted to see. But the colonel was at Beregesh, expected back that day. Finally, Varlik arranged to leave Kettle on the next ship to Iryala, the Quaranth again, two days hence.
Then he arranged with Trevelos for a place of his own to work; he wanted privacy from the new media people. Trevelos was friendlier than ever, eager to help; the brief barrier between them had left no scars. Varlik spent most of the day editing his material and preparing his report. He didn't show Ramolu, though, only talked about him, as if the man had refused to be recorded. His recordings of Ramolu weren't news; they were evidence.
When he was done, he found Voker in and played it for him—the battle in the jungle and what he'd been able to record of the Birds. Voker, in turn, told him of fierce firefights between Birds and T'swa around Beregesh. The Birds had also mounted more concentrated hunt-and-kill sweeps to cut down T'swa trail harassment, resulting in increased casualties on both sides. But meanwhile, progress on rebuilding the refinery had improved markedly.
It had been necessary, Voker said, to keep revising upward the estimated size of insurgent forces. The figure now was thirty to fifty thousand, with no confidence that further upward revisions wouldn't be necessary.
Over Voker's good Crodelan whiskey, they speculated on why the Birds had blindfolded him and the T'swa while taking them out for evacuation—what was it they didn't want them to see?—and came up with nothing compelling. Perhaps nothing was the answer. Again Varlik didn't mention the arsenal on Tyss, and withheld his belief in T'swa complicity. He agreed to play his report again for Lamons at the next day's staff meeting.
After supper Varlik went to the T'swa camp. The men of the two veteran regiments shared a single company area, with only a few men to a tent. The Ice Tiger Regiment had moved into the rest of the camp, but most of them were south now, fighting.
Varlik didn't feel right with the T'swa anymore. He felt an urgency, a compulsion, to get home to Iryala. There, he told himself, was the answer to the Kettle mystery. Not its roots, perhaps, but on Iryala he would learn what those roots were.
The general's staff meeting wasn't particularly interesting, what Varlik saw and heard of it. After a little, he was asked courteously to leave; what would follow was confidential. He seriously doubted that the confidential session would be very interesting either. You people think you have secrets! he said to himself as he left. Afterward, he talked to the other media people. The new man from Central News talked a good job, but that he was still at Aromanis instead of Beregesh suggested otherwise to Varlik.
Most of the rest of the day, Varlik hung around the T'swa wards where the wounded from the Red Scorpion and Night Adder Regiments were. He got their views on what the future held for them: Some would marry, have families. For a few there would be lodge-related jobs—scouting children who seemed to have the warrior purpose, or training recruits, or administrative jobs, or maintenance or other duties. Others would take outside jobs. Several would join a monastery and become masters of wisdom; some of the best-known masters had earlier been warriors.
For him there was Central News. It hit him then for the first time that he didn't want to work for Central News anymore. He told himself that maybe he'd feel different about it by the time he got back. Fendel would give him an interesting assignment and he'd be ready to go again. But he didn't really believe it.
That evening he bought a bottle of decent whiskey and got drunk by himself. The next day, hung over, he boarded his old friend, the IWS Quaranth, for the trip home.