“Yes!” Kilgor countered. “I can only do so much, be responsible for so many, and these lives were mine to protect.”

  Orders were shouted. Kilgor did a left face and stood alone.

  Wanto, Kelly, and Hurd faced him, backs ramrod straight, medals gleaming in the afternoon sun. Once again Kilgor saw sympathy in Kelly’s eyes and wondered what she was thinking.

  Major Dieter stepped up on Kilgor’s right. Once his X.O., now she commanded the battalion. She addressed Wanto.

  “All members of the Fourth Battalion, League Guards, present or accounted for, sir.”

  Kilgor smiled inside. He’d always enjoyed that phrase. “. . . accounted for.” It mean so many things: At various times it meant “drunk,” “in sick bay,” “wounded,” or “killed in action.”

  Yes, more than a thousand members of the Fourth Battalion had been “accounted for” on Ulona II. And now, within the next few minutes, one more. Still unhurt . . . but a casualty nonetheless.

  Wanto’s eyes were like stones. “Colonel Ras Kilgor, about face!”

  Kilgor obeyed. Now, by tradition, Kilgor faced the men and women of his command. They were professionals, lifers in a .crack outfit, a truly dying breed. Their faces were impassive.

  Admiral Wanto stepped forward to read the charges one last time. His words became a drone.

  A drum roll began.

  The sun came in hard and low.

  A bird soared upwards.

  Shame rolled over Kilgor in crushing waves. He wanted to cry, to run away and hide, to disappear and never be seen again. No matter what he told himself, no matter what he knew to be true, this was the ultimate dishonor and the lowest point of his entire life.

  The words finally came to an end, but the drum roll went on. All three of the senior officers approached and stood two paces in front of him. Wanto was at the center, and it was he who took the final step. The news cams swooped in for close-ups.

  There was satisfaction on the naval officer’s face as he ripped the tabs from Kilgor’s shoulders, jerked the bar of medals from his chest, and plucked each one of the gold embossed buttons from the front of his uniform. All went into a bag which would be ceremonially fed into a mass converter later that day.

  Then, on some invisible cue, a staff sergeant came forward with a cushion on her arms. The cushion was covered with red velvet and bore Kilgor’s dagger. The dagger given him the day he graduated from the academy. Handed to him by the same proud father who no longer acknowledged his existence.

  Light twinkled off polished metal as Wanto held the dagger aloft. The blade was more than a ceremonial toy, it had saved Kilgor’s life, and it hurt to see what they’d done.

  The durasteel blade had been cut nearly in two leaving only a small bridge of metal to hold both halves together. The cut had been filled with a silvery paste to make it seem undamaged.

  Wanto’s voice was amplified and carried over the speakers which ringed the parade ground.

  “Members of the Fourth Battalion, League Guards! This blade has been dishonored! But only this blade, and only the officer who abused it. All Arista knows of your loyalty, of your courage, of your battles against the alien Hothri. By age old tradition I call upon you to judge one of your own.” Wanto snapped the dagger in two.

  It was an age old tradition but rarely used in modern times. By allowing the troops to endorse the tribunal’s finding, Wan to hoped to maintain morale and score some more points with Arista’s non-human allies. The news cams pulled back for a wide shot.

  Kilgor waited for Dieter to give the traditional command. The battalion would perform an about face, and on her orders, march away. In doing so they would turn their backs on him and his dishonor as well.

  Major Dieter did a neat about-face. “Fourth battalion! Attenhut! Preseennt h’arms!”

  There was a double crash as 267 blast rifles came off the ground, hit hands, and snapped vertical.

  It was unheard of! The battalion was saluting him! Refusing to turn their backs on him, and in so doing, voluntarily accepting his dishonor as their own. To erase the stain from the unit’s record they would have to perform some act of future heroism.

  “Battalion! Right face! Right shoulder, h’arms! Forward, h’arch.”

  Stripped as he was of all rank Kilgor could not salute. So he stood there in silence, the tears rolling down his cheeks, and watched his battalion march away.

  All prisons are brutal, but military prisons are the worst of all. Kilgor was well aware of this fact and understood the reasons behind it.

  First was the fact that civilian style prisons look pretty inviting when compared to the average battlefield. That means conditions inside military prisons are intentionally worse than a night drop onto a bug-held planet.

  Add to this the fact that unlike the population at large, some members of the military like to hurt others, and you’ve got the makings of an unmitigated hell.

  And that, Kilgor reflected, was a pretty good working definition of Receiving Station Four.

  RS-4 was located in the middle of a small desert. It consisted of eight large tents and an inflatable admin building.

  Like the rest of the prisoners, Kilgor hadn’t seen the inside of the air conditioned admin building and never would.

  He was however extremely familiar with the tents. Tent one was the mess hall, tent two was the medical facility, and the rest housed prisoners . . . 241 of them to be exact. One-hundred and sixty men, and eighty-one women. The sexes were segregated everywhere but in the mess tent.

  There was no wall, no razor wire, and no security system to keep them in. Only miles and miles of desert. They were, as Sergeant Major Giller liked to point out, “free to leave at any time.”

  However as long as the prisoners chose to stay, they would obey his rules, do things his way, and remember that it was his camp.

  Kilgor had arrived at RS-4 sixteen hours before. Shortly after his arrival he had been stripped, shaved, and professionally beaten. It was a light beating, scientifically administered, and delivered to each one of the prisoners on one pretext or another. It was a time tested process similar to army boot camp.

  First the prisoners were stripped of their previous identities. In Kilgor’s case, the officer-authority figure. This was accomplished by confiscating all of their personal possessions, shaving their heads, and forcing them to wear identical fatigues.

  Then the prisoners were introduced to a new set of rules, the consequences for breaking them, and a power structure in which they occupied the lowest rung.

  Only after this process was complete would the prisoners be allowed to enter the navy brig at High Bluff.

  RS-4 was similar to boot camp. In boot camp the goal is to break you down and build you up. But the purpose of RS-4 was to break you down and keep you down.

  Due to his status as an ex-army officer, Kilgor had been placed with navy and marine prisoners, and would eventually end up in a navy brig. This was for his own protection since an army prison might include men and women who’d served under him and bore some sort of grudge.

  It was a dubious protection however, since the marine guards had announced his previous rank immediately after arrival, thereby ensuring that most of the prisoners would dislike him. He was, after all, the only ex-officer in the entire group.

  Divide and conquer. It’s good military strategy regardless of circumstance.

  Interestingly enough, few if any prisoners knew about Kilgor’s offense, or if they did, didn’t choose to mention it. Maybe they’d been off-planet, were preoccupied by their own troubles, or just didn’t care.

  At the moment, Sergeant Major Giller had them standing at attention in the hot afternoon sun. The prisoners wore heavy winter fatigues, body armor, and assault packs filled with forty pounds of metal for the men, thirty for the women. Every moment was pure torture.

  Giller was a short man, with a heavily muscled torso, and bowed legs. As usual his puffy face was beet red, and he looked like he’d have a coronary at any moment. In spite of their fervent prayers, it never arrived. Making things worse was the fact that Giller enjoyed the sound of his own voice. Kilgor blinked sweat from his eyes and waited for this particular speech to end.

  “. . . And so,” Giller went on, “you will enter the med tent in single file, strip off your clothes, and step in front of the scanner. Depending on what the scanner finds, you will either leave through the other end of the tent, or remain behind for further examination. Do any of you worthless, low-life scum have questions?”

  Giller prided himself on the fact that he never swore. This didn’t keep him from heaping lots of abuse on everyone.

  Since any verbalization was worth forty push-ups, even when invited, no one asked any questions. Giller nodded approvingly. “Good. Take ’em away.”

  Giller’s cadre of interchangeable corporals divided them into groups of twenty or so and double-timed them around tent city until it was their turn in the med tent.

  Though careful to keep a straight face, Kilgor found the whole thing a bit amusing. Giller would abuse them, the medics would fix them up, and Giller would abuse them some more. It didn’t make sense. Why bother? Wouldn’t it be easier to let them die?

  The answer was of course that death would be inhumane, and compared to life with Giller, relatively pleasant. Theirs was truly “a fate worse than death.”

  Kilgor laughed, caught a nasty look from the hulk known as Corporal Kostaza, and turned it into a cough. The trick didn’t work. Kostaza’s swagger stick hurt like hell.

  By the time Kilgor fell into his rack at the end of the second day, the prisoners had divided themselves into subgroups, and a power structure was starting to emerge.

  Kilgor watched this process rather carefully. Like anyone who’d managed to survive five years in the military academy, he knew a lot about life in a structured environment. There were two choices. Join a group, or go it alone.

  Membership in a group had advantages and disadvantages. Members had people to watch their backs, but unless they fought for leadership, were forced to follow group rules. The first rule was to “hate all the other groups.” Otherwise, why have groups?

  In the case of RS-4 the groups were forming along service lines. The “grunts” and the “swabbies” had already divided Kilgor’s tent into two halves and were exhibiting various kinds of territorial behavior.

  Meanwhile, there were two kinds of loners. Voluntary loners and involuntary loners. The voluntary loners chose to stay apart. One was a black man named Struck.

  Struck was big slab of a man, and that, plus a sort of glacial cool, allowed him some independence. No one knew much about him, except that he was a marine and an expert in unarmed combat.

  Kilgor suspected Struck of leaking that piece of information on purpose. If so, Struck would be someone to watch. Tough and smart. Officer material.

  Thanks to his status as an ex-officer, Kilgor fell into the other category of loners. The kind which had no choice. These were the geeks, the screw-ups, and the crazies. Men and women who didn’t or wouldn’t fit in. And, given the kind of people who end up in military prisons, there were plenty of them.

  The loners didn’t have to follow group rules, but due to their isolation, made perfect victims. Kilgor studied them carefully because he had a plan, and it hinged on them.

  Some were in his tent, and some weren’t, but he had a mental profile: First there was Red, a jittery young man with wild eyes and a talent for blowing things up. According to the scuttlebut, Red had taken a real dislike to his C. O. and wired an A-6 demo pack into her command car.

  For weeks she’d driven it around while Red watched, played with the remote detonator in his pocket, and enjoyed his invisible power. Then one day she made the mistake of chewing Red out, and whammo! No more C.O.

  Next was a skinny little woman called “Wires.” Once a com tech on a battleship, she’d used her considerable technical expertise to set up a fleet-wide gambling network, and had been court martialed when a senior officer lost ten-thousand credits.

  Then there was “Freese,” a sometimes raving lunatic with three now-suspended decorations for bravery. He had slightly bulging eyes, a nose somewhat too small for his face, and a nervous tic in his left cheek. No one knew exactly what Freese had done and he wouldn’t say.

  And there was “Bugs,” a monosyllabic maniac with cold wet hands and dead eyes. Word had it that Bugs had a pathological hatred for the Hothri, and while fighting them on a world called Isamba II, had assembled a huge collection of right index fingers . . . some belonging to prisoners-of-war. This explained his presence at RS-4. Bugs loved guns and was one of the few marines to score “expert” with every hand-weapon currently in use.

  Finally, there was the woman called “Doc.” She was pretty in a haunted sort of way and seemed to float through her days, as if only partially there. The rumor was that she’d machine-gunned a squad of marines trapped in a burning assault vehicle and been convicted of murder. Though always willing to treat members from either group, Doc had refused to align herself with either the grunts or the swabbies.

  There were more, but these would do for a start. With time and work Kilgor would mold them into a third group. A group which would eventually dominate the other two.

  “Sure,” Kilgor thought to himself, “it’ll work. But why bother?”

  “Because I haven’t got anything else to do,” the answer came back. “And because it’s the only way to hit back.”

  Kilgor smiled and fell into an exhausted sleep. Sometime during the night he stirred briefly as something went pop, pop, pop, but he went right back to sleep.

  The next day got off to a brutal start. The prisoners arrived in the mess tent to find three bullet riddled bodies sprawled across the tables.

  During the night two men and a woman had tried to cut their way into the admin building. No one knew what the plan was. Maybe they hoped to steal a vehicle, find some booze, or who knows. It really didn’t matter.

  The prisoners grumbled as they fell in. No one liked to miss breakfast, not when meals were their sole source of entertainment, and portions were so small. That’s when they noticed that piles of sand that had sprung up overnight courtesy of Corporal Kostaza and the dozer he stood on.

  Giller arrived a few minutes later. He had just stepped out of the air conditioned administration building. His uniform was freshly starched and had just enough wear to show he was a pro. Kilgor could practically smell the cool air still trapped in its weave.

  Ignoring the women Giller headed for the men. Once in front of them, he wrinkled his nose as if confronting a garbage dump, and started his speech.

  “Good morning, scum. I hope each and everyone you low-life scuz-buckets had the worst night of your life. But, just in case some of you worthless hunks of putrescent meat had pleasant dreams, I will make your day a living hell.” Giller paused to point his swagger stick at the mountains of sand.

  “Men can move mountains, or so I’ve been told. You of course are not men, but pus-sucking vermin, sent here to try my patience. You shall have a chance nonetheless. Before you, stand two proud mountains. The mountain on the left is Mount Giller. It is my mountain, and I want you to move it. “.

  Now Giller strutted over in front of the women. “Good morning maggots. You are, as always, some of the most repulsive slime balls I’ve ever seen.” He pointed at their mountain.

  “That’s Mount Kostaza. It belongs to Corporal Kostaza. He looks up to me, and when the scuz balls move my mountain, he’ll want you to move his mountain as well. And Kostaza will be very disappointed if his mountain arrives after mine does. Do you maggots understand?”

  It was a no-win trap, and the women knew it, but they yelled “yes, sir!” anyway, sensing it was the less of two evils. They were right. The push-ups were hard, but easier than the laps Giller would’ve given out had they refused to speak.

  The moment the push-ups were over, the real torture began. Line up in front of the mountains, wait while another prisoner loaded your pack with sand, then double-time to the other end of the camp where you dumped it out, double-time back, then start all over.

  Hour after hour they ran, glugging the canteens of water the medics pushed their way, and swallowing an endless procession of salt tablets.

  As time passed it became obvious that the men would finish first. This was not due to any weakness on the women’s part, but because of the fact that Corporal Kostaza had intentionally over estimated the amount of sand in their pile, making it impossible for them to move their mountain in the same amount of time as the men.

  Had there been some sort of central leadership among the prisoners, it would’ve instructed the men to slow down so that the women could tie.

  But that wasn’t the case, and seeing an opportunity to come out on top, the men sped up. Kilgor saw, and understood, but couldn’t intervene. He had no power, and thanks to the circumstances, no opportunity to communicate his observations to those who did.

  As the men hurried to move the last loads of sand Giller stood next to his mountain and grinned. And Kilgor knew why. This was the point where the analogy between boot camp and a military prison came to an end.

  In boot camp almost all the activities forced recruits to work as a team. Here it was just the opposite. A single team would be harder to control, so Giller was busy sub-dividing them into smaller groups. Not only for his benefit, but for the benefit of subsequent guards as well-guards who depended on RS-4 to break prisoners in.

  The men won a few minutes later, just as Giller had intended, and Corporal Kostaza flew into a calculated rage. The women were ordered to move their mountain back to its original position while the men went to dinner.

  The women labored long after the sun had set, and by the time they ate their cold field rations and racked out, they hated the men with a living passion.

  In the meantime Kilgor planned his next move. He was angry, and without knowing it, had substituted Giller for the “enemy.” All his life Kilgor had been trained to defeat the enemy, and this was no different. Tomorrow, or the next day at the latest, he would implement the first step of his plan.