The Spectre General

III

It was exactly ten o’clock in the morning when Sergeant Dixon of the Imperial Space Marines snapped to attention before his commanding officer.

“Sergeant Dixon reporting as ordered, sir!” His voice cracked a bit in spite of his best efforts to control it.

The colonel looked at him coldly. “Nice of you to drop in, Dixon,” he said. “Shall we go ahead with our little chat?”

Kurt nodded nervously.

“I have here,” said the colonel, shuffling a sheaf of papers, “a report of an unauthorized expedition made by you into Off Limits territory.”

“Which one do you mean, sir?” asked Kurt without thinking.

“Then there has been more than one?” asked the colonel quietly.

Kurt started to stammer.

Colonel Harris silenced him with a gesture of his hand. “I’m talking about the country to the north, the tableland back of the Twin Peaks.”

“It’s a beautiful place!” burst out Kurt enthusiastically. “It’s… it’s like Imperial Headquarters must be. Dozens of little streams full of fish, trees heavy with fruit, small game so slow and stupid that they can be knocked over with a club. Why, the battalion could live there without hardly lifting a finger!”

“I’ve no doubt that they could,” said the colonel.

“Think of it, sir!” continued the sergeant. “No more plowing details, no more hunting details, no more nothing but taking it easy!”

“You might add to your list of ‘no mores,’ no more tech schools,” said Colonel Harris. “I’m quite aware that the place is all you say it is, sergeant. As a result I’m placing all information that pertains to it in a ‘Top Secret’ category. That applies to what is inside your head as well!”

“But, sir!” protested Kurt. “If you could only see the place—”

“I have,” broke in the colonel, “thirty years ago.”

Kurt looked at him in amazement. “Then why are we still on the plateau?”

“Because my commanding officer did just what I’ve just done, classified the information ‘Top Secret.’ Then he gave me thirty days’ extra detail on the plows. After he took my stripes away that is.” Colonel Harris rose slowly to his feet. “Dixon,” he said softly, “it’s not every man who can be a noncommissioned officer in the Space Marines. Sometimes we guess wrong. When we do we do something about it!” There was the hissing crackle of distant summer lightning in his voice and storm clouds seemed to gather about his head. “Wipe those chevrons off!” he roared.

Kurt looked at him in mute protest.

“You heard me!” the colonel thundered.

“Yes-s-s, sir,” stuttered Kurt, reluctantly drawing his forearm across his forehead and wiping off the three triangles of white grease paint that marked him a sergeant in the Imperial Space Marines. Quivering with shame, he took a tight grip on his temper and choked back the angry protests that were trying to force their way past his lips.

“Maybe,” suggested the colonel, “you’d like to make a complaint to the I.G. He’s due in a few days and he might reverse my decision. It has happened before, you know.”

“No, sir,” said Kurt woodenly.

“Why not?” demanded Harris.

“When I was sent out as a scout for the hunting parties I was given direct orders not to range farther than twenty kilometers to the north. I went sixty.” Suddenly his forced composure broke. “I couldn’t help it, sir,” he said. “There was something behind those peaks that kept pulling me and pulling me and”—he threw up his hands—“you know the rest.”

There was a sudden change in the colonel’s face as a warm human smile swept across it, and he broke into a peal of laughter. “It’s a hell of a feeling, isn’t it, son? You know you shouldn’t, but at the same time there’s something inside you that says you’ve got to know what’s behind those peaks or die. When you get a few more years under your belt you’ll find that it isn’t just mountains that make you feel like that. Here, boy, have a seat.” He gestured toward a woven wicker chair that stood by his desk.

Kurt shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, stunned by the colonel’s sudden change of attitude and embarrassed by his request. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but we aren’t out on work detail, and—”

The colonel laughed. “And enlisted men not on work detail don’t sit in the presence of officers. Doesn’t the way we do things ever strike you as odd, Dixon? On one hand you’d see nothing strange about being yoked to a plow with a major, and on the other, you’d never dream of sitting in his presence off duty.”

Kurt looked puzzled. “Work details are different,” he said. “We all have to work if we’re going to eat. But in the garrison, officers are officers and enlisted men are enlisted men and that’s the way it’s always been.”

Still smiling, the colonel reached into his desk drawer, fished out something, and tossed it to Kurt.

“Stick this in your scalp lock,” he said.

Kurt looked at it, stunned. It was a golden feather crossed with a single black bar, the insignia of rank of a second lieutenant of the Imperial Space Marines. The room swirled before his eyes.

“Now,” said the older officer, “sit down!”

Kurt slowly lowered himself into the chair and looked at the colonel through bemused eyes.

“Stop gawking!” said Colonel Harris. “You’re an officer now! When a man gets too big for his sandals, we give him a new pair—after we let him sweat a while!”

He suddenly grew serious. “Now that you’re one of the family, you have a right to know why I’m hushing up the matter of the tableland to the north. What I have to say won’t make much sense at first. Later I’m hoping it will. Tell me,” he said suddenly, “where did the battalion come from?”

“We’ve always been here, I guess,” said Kurt. “When I was a recruit, Granddad used to tell me stories about us being brought from some place else a long time ago by an iron bird, but it stands to reason that something that heavy can’t fly!”

A faraway look came into the colonel’s eyes. “Six generations,” he mused, “and history becomes legend. Another six and the legends themselves become tales for children. Yes, Kurt,” he said softly, “it stands to reason that something that heavy couldn’t fly so we’ll forget it for a while. We did come from some place else though. Once there was a great empire, so great that all the stars you see at night were only part of it. And then, as things do when age rests too heavily on them, it began to crumble. Commanders fell to fighting among themselves and the Emperor grew weak. The battalion was set down here to operate a forward maintenance station for his ships. We waited but no ships came. For five hundred years no ships have come,” said the colonel somberly. “Perhaps they tried to relieve us and couldn’t, perhaps the Empire fell with such a crash that we were lost in the wreckage. There are a thousand perhapses that a man can tick off in his mind when the nights are long and sleep comes hard! Lost… forgotten… who knows?”

Kurt stared at him with a blank expression on his face. Most of what the colonel had said made no sense at all. Wherever Imperial Headquarters was, it hadn’t forgotten them. The I.G. still made his inspection every year or so.

The colonel continued as if talking to himself. “But our operational orders said that we would stand by to give all necessary maintenance to Imperial warcraft until properly relieved, and stand by we have.”

The old officer’s voice seemed to be coming from a place far distant in time and space.

“I’m sorry, sir,” said Kurt, “but I don’t follow you. If all these things did happen, it was so long ago that they mean nothing to us now.”

“But they do!” said Colonel Harris vigorously. “It’s because of them that things like your rediscovery of the tableland to the north have to be suppressed for the good of the battalion! Here on the plateau the living is hard. Our work in the fields and the meat brought in by our hunting parties give us just enough to get by on. But here we have the garrison and the Tech Schools—and vague as it has become— a reason for remaining together as the battalion. Out there where the living is easy we’d lose that. We almost did once. A wise commander stopped it before it went too far. There are still a few signs of that time left—left deliberately as reminders of what can happen if commanding officers forget why we’re here!”

“What things?” asked Kurt curiously.

“Well, son,” said the colonel, picking up his great war bonnet from the desk and gazing at it quizzically, “I don’t think you’re quite ready for that information yet. Now take off and strut your feather. I’ve got work to do!”