Inside the building, in the old half-underground library on the lowest level of the school, three long scarred wooden tables have been rearranged into a U. At the center of the table, a sober-faced woman in a heavy uniform coat sits with three small piles of paper in front of her, sorting through the handwritten and typed pages with the aid of a younger officer. To her left, another gray-haired officer waits in self-important isolation, his fingers laced primly in front of him, tired-looking eyes gazing across the empty space in the hollow of the U at another figure.
The object of his gaze is David Valentine, wearing the closest thing to a uniform the Wolf officer posesses: creased blue trousers, boots, and a pressed white shirt. He has bound his shining black hair close to his scalp out of respect for the occasion. Valentine has none of Foxtrot's complement in Montgomery, but were any of them to look at him, they would know fie was angry. His chin is down, jaw set, and he wears the fixed expression of a wounded bull about to try a final charge at the matador. A brother Guard officer leans toward him, speaking calmly and softly into his ear.
Col. Elizabeth Chalmers, who rumor said had written the book on Southern Command's military jurisprudence, cleared her throat. After the days' proceedings, Valentine learned that the sound was her version of a judge bringing the court to order with his gavel.
"This investigation is drawing to a close. Captain Wilton," she said, addressing the older man who sat facing Valentine, "you've had the unhappy duty of attempting to substantiate the charges brought by Captain Beck against Lieutenant Valentine. Namely that on the date in question Lieutenant Valentine willfully and without cause disobeyed orders and withdrew from Little Timber Hill, turning Foxtrot Company's hard-won victory into a defeat."
Two weeks ago, when Valentine first heard that Beck, from his hospital bed, had ordered charges brought against him, he had been shocked. During the course of investigation to determine if a court-martial should be convened, Valentine came to the slow realization that Beck was using the investigation of his subordinate as a smoke screen to obscure the debacle at Little Timber Hill. Foxtrot Company, so laboriously built up and trained over the last year, was again well below half-strength and rendered useless to Southern Command for the rest of the year at least. Judicial proceedings against a disobedient subordinate would befuddle the issue.
Who knows, Valentine thought, a touch of gallows humor appearing, Beck might even get another promotion out of it.
Captain McKendrick of the Advocate General's office, the tiny legal team that handled most of the military and civilian justice in the Free Territory, had been assigned to Valentine as his official "friend and spokesman." His counsel consisted of, "Keep your mouth shut," and "Colonel Chalmers prefers to be addressed as sir, not ma'am."
He did not inspire much confidence in Valentine. Especially after he heard that if brought to court-martial and convicted, he could be shot by firing squad.
The colonel's voice broke him out of his dark musings. "Captain Wilton, your summation, please."
The prosecuting officer stood up, a slightly bent figure with the slow voice of grandfatherly wisdom. "Yes, sir. I think we should concentrate on two essential facts. The first being that on March sixteenth, the day in question, Foxtrot Company was victorious on Little Timber Hill. In no small part due to the courage of Lieutenant Valentine here, the Grogs were thrown back each time they tried to take the hill. Their attacks grew less and less frequent as the day progressed, until finally they were reduced to sniping and the occasional mortar shell. Lieutenant Valentine's own report, read out at this hearing, states that plainly. They were beat, and they knew it."
"Colonel, please," Valentine's adviser interrupted. "There's no evidence to support that last statement."
"Don't let rhetoric carry you away, gentlemen," Colonel Chalmers said. "Let's stick to facts, please. The statement about the Grogs being beaten will be removed from the record."
"My apologies, Colonel. But that would have been my judgment, having served in the field most of my career. Within minutes of Captain Beck being wounded, Lieutenant Valentine assembled what subordinates he could and began planning a withdrawal. Despite the fact that Captain Beck, before relinquishing command temporarily owing to wounds, ordered that hill be held."
"Colonel, sir . . . ," McKendrick said, holding up his hand.
"You'll have your chance to speak, Captain McKendrick," Chalmers shot back. "Please continue, Captain."
"Lieutenant Valentine's reasoning for disobeying his Captain's orders is given in his report. This Cat out of Oklahoma somewhere believed that some kind of 'paramilitary Reaper unit,'" Wilton read, referring to a copy of Valentine's report, "would be there by midnight, having already destroyed Lieutenant Caltagirone's short platoon of Foxtrot Company. Unfortunately, this Cat disappeared as quickly and mysteriously as she came."
Captain Wilton let that hang in the air for a moment.
"We know she is no figment of the imagination, but wild stories about Reapers behaving contrary to everything we know about them might seem more frightening on the battlefield with Grogs prowling the woods than here. Lieutenant Valentine acted on this intelligence, for whatever reason"-Valentine gritted his teeth and dug his fingers into his thighs to keep from speaking-"and left a strong defensive position with a long column on night march through territory of unknown enemy strength and disposition. I think we should count ourselves fortunate that any of them returned at all.
"Of course, I must leave it to the colonel to decide whether the withdrawal from Little Timber Hill constitutes a court-martial offense."
Colonel Chalmers turned to Valentine's side of the table. "Captain, are you ready to give your final statement, or shall we break so you can reread the record before your response?"
McKendrick stood. "Colonel, I believe there is no basis for a court-martial; in fact this hearing should never have been called. Charging Lieutenant Valentine with disobeying orders makes no sense, for as soon as he assumed command when Captain Beck was wounded, no one of superior rank was present. The only orders he could disobey were his own.
"Lieutenant Valentine holds a commission in the Wolves, an honor that says we trust him to make decisions about the lives of those under him. As a commander, he made a decision to abandon the position under the same authority that Captain Beck had to order its defense. Wolves in the field usually operate outside the formal command structure; he had no one to refer to, so he used his own judgment. He made the right decision, in my opinion, but even that is a moot point for the purposes of this investigation. Even a handful of Wolves are worth more to us than the entire Grog force assaulting the hill is to the Kurians. A Grog force that was being reinforced as the day progressed as evidenced by the artillery fire that started that afternoon.
"As to the issue that Captain Beck's final orders should have been obeyed, I agree that it is traditional to follow the orders of a wounded commander being carried from the field. But we are talking about a court-martial here, and a sentence that could include this officer facing a firing squad. So we must be very careful about how we apply the law, as opposed to applying tradition.
"As soon as Lieutenant Valentine assumed command, any action he took that did not violate the Stated Rules and Regulations or Emergency Articles was by definition legal. We have had Guard colonels withdraw their forces despite orders to the contrary from immediate command authority, and at each instance, we have deferred to the judgment of the officer in the field. This proceeding should go no further. The fact that it has gone this far speaks more eloquently of the nature of the officer who brought these charges than I-"
"Colonel Chalmers! This-," Wilton protested, but Chalmers cut him off.
"Captain, Lieutenant Valentine is being discussed here, not Captain Beck. I believe this is the second time I've had to warn you about this. I want those remarks removed from the record," she said to the young officer typing on the recorder. "Another statement like that, and I'll put my own censure of you on record, Captain McKendrick. Please continue."
Valentine would infinitely rather have been back at the breastworks on Little Timber Hill than be subject to this cross-court sniping. He shifted in his seat, a bitter taste at the back of his tongue.
"Thank you, Colonel," his defender continued. "I just want to ask the colonel to keep the good of the service in mind. If we hamstring our officers by court-martialing them for decisions made under fire, we are going to get a very timid group of Wolves. Lieutenant Valentine was at Little Timber Hill; we were not. What's more, he was in command. For us to punish him for exercising that command would be the height of folly."
McKendrick sat in his wooden chair and pulled it forward with an authoritative scrape.
Colonel Chalmers looked at the piles of paper before her. "Lieutenant Valentine, do you have anything to say before I make my decision?"