You know that! But we have to understand each other."
She dumped the bag and put both hands on his shoulders, as Rick let his own duffel fall. "I know you were unhappy here. But I know, too, that if the war rums out that way, I'll be listening to your voice, out there in the Danger Zone, and I won't be able to do a single thing about it but hope and pray."
She could barely keep the resentment out of her voice. "You and I are married; we're mates for life," she said, taking him into her embrace and feeling his arms close behind her, the strong fingers locking with a kind of determination.
Suddenly the resentment was gone; whether it would reappear or not, she didn't know. Lisa brushed back the thick black hair over his ear. "Husband and wife," she whispered. She could see a tear fall from his cheek to her uniform's breast. Her own were streaming, too.
"It's a rifle!" Karen Penn hollered, having had about enough.
"A goddamn projectile weapon, but it's not a rifle!" Jack Baker screamed back at her, blood vessels standing out in his neck. He was wrestling the huge Karbarran musket around, about to shake it at her if he could get it off the deck.
Karen was pleased to see that she had gotten a rise out of him. Being stuck down in what was apparently the lowermost hold of the Sentinels' ship, inspecting alien weapons and recording evaluations for the G-2 staff, would ordinarily have been fascinating, but she was down there with J. Baker, the World's Most Obnoxious Ensign.
Now he tried to hold up the Karbarran firearm, its ornate, jewel-set buttplate still planted on the deck. All hand-polished wood and burnished metal fittings, it looked like some primitive work of art.
Its wide leather sling was thick with embroidery, and its muzzle was decked with a rainbow of parrot-bright feathers.
Jack indicated the big, globular fixture just forward of the trigger guard. "Penn, we both agree that there's a lot of air in here, right? Under pressure, because the Karbarrans jack it in with this forestock lever, right? And it shoots bullets pneumatically, with the velocity of a primitive rifle, Right?"
She cringed involuntarily as he shrieked the last word. "So!" he concluded, "It…is…a…gun!"
Karen made a fist, her knuckles protruding, wishing she could punch him. She answered through clenched teeth, "Not by the G-2 guidelines, which specify propellant ignition or energy. Now, d'you want to turn in a faulty report, or are we gonna list these pump-up blunderbusses properly?"
Perhaps, she thought, there was some sort of berserk sadist in the assignments office, and that was how she had been thrown in with Baker yet again. That would explain everything, but easy explanations were so often suspect…
Jack grumbled something she took as acquiescence, and they went back to work. They inventoried the strange-looking weapons of those Praxians-weirdly-conformed naginata, which looked like long halberds with a curved blade at one end and a spike at the other, and short, one-handed crossbows with their grips protected by boiled, shaped leather, and the rest. Swords, shields-the peculiar crystalline-Spherian gadgets that looked like frozen lightning bolts-what were two ensigns to make of those, or of a Gerudan grapnel-shaped thing that didn't seem to come with instructions?
Jack made terse notes in the aud-vid recorder, wondering at the same time how a girl who was such a sweet armful at a dance could be such an awful pain in the neck on duty. He prided himself on keeping an open mind, but really, he was right and she was wrong, just about always, and some streak of perversion in Cadet Penn seemed to make it impossible for her to admit that.
Karen, for her part, was thinking of the Praxians and their maleless society. Dynamite! Where could she sign up?
Jack was inspecting a two-handed longsword that the Praxians used in fighting from chariots, a razor-sharp whip of steel. Suddenly, he lowered it and turned to her. "Look, Penn, I'm not trying to make life tough on you, y'know. It's just that I take my job very seriously."
She was weighing some kind of bulky slug pistol in one hand. "So do I, Baker."
Jack suddenly felt very confused. Her honey-blond hair smelled wonderful, and the strange, slightly sloe eyes that were fixed on him were exotically beautiful, as mysterious as any XT's. And now that he noticed it, her upper lip was longer and fuller than her lower, giving Karen a, well, kind of sexy look, really…
Except-why did she have to be so damn competitive? Why couldn't she just come right out and admire him, yield to his judgment, the way the girls back home used to do? "Okay," he answered her, wondering what in the world he meant. "Okay, then."
He held the aud-vid rig out toward her. "Let's do this right, agreed? You record, and I'll dictate notes and observations."
She put her fists on her hips. "Why don't you record, and I'll dictate notes and observations?"
He felt his lips pulling back to reveal his teeth. "For one thing, because I was the Academy First in military history, and I think I could bring a little extra insight to evaluation of XT weaponry."
"Oh, well, pardon me for consuming valuable oxygen! But it so happens I won a New Rhodes scholarship for a thesis in comparative military history, Mister!" Jack let go an exasperated growl and took a half step toward her; Karen raised a precisely folded fist, middle knuckle cocked forward. "And I have a first dan in Uichi-ryu karate. Want proof?"
He tried to calm down, then lost it. "You just offered the wrong thing to the wrong guy on the wrong day, meat-head!" He began tearing at the fastenings of his torso harness. "I'll mail your dog tags to your daddy!"
"That does it!" she shrilled at him, kicking things out of the way for some fighting room.
"Where d'you want your corpse shipped, moron?"
He couldn't think of a comeback, and so roared like Lron, fighting to get his tunic off. Karen was quartering the air with whistling hand cuts, taking practice snap kicks that reached higher than her head.
There was a sudden sound from the cargo hold's out-sized hatch, the deliberate, diplomatic clearing of a throat.
"Admiral Hunter." Jack tried to figure out whether he should button back up first, salute, or get busy thinking up the least preposterous alibi he could, even while Karen was bracing to attention and stuttering, "T-T-Tensh-hut!"
"As you were," Rick said, wandering in and gazing curiously at the racked Sentinels' weapons, to give the two cadets a moment to pull themselves together. He sort of regretted intervening; it might have been educational to sit at ringside for a few rounds.
Now, who do they remind me of? Rick Hunter asked himself. A young hot-dogger VT ace and a pale, intense SDF-1 first officer, maybe? He suddenly felt old, but it wasn't such a bad feeling, in view of what youth had yet to go through. "Pardon the interruption, Ensigns, but G-l just cut the orders, and as I was coming aboard anyway to settle in, I thought you'd want to know."
They were both a little rocky from the adrenaline of the would-be brawl, and from the surprise of his appearance. It took them several moments to realize that he had promotion orders in one hand and lieutenant jg bars in the other.
Rick took a secret pleasure in their shock. "Can't have ensigns assigned to the Sentinels; it muddles the chain of command. Congratulations, Lieutenant; congratulations, Lieutenant."
They shook his hand warily, as if afraid it were going to come off, and gazed down at the badges of rank he had put in their palms.
"Yes; well, carry on," Rick bade them when he saw that they were going to be flummoxed for a while. He returned their salutes crisply, and resolved not to listen at the hatch to find out what was going to happen next, even though he wanted to.
"Well? Let's do it," Jack Baker said. Tradition dictated a certain ceremony. Karen nodded.
They silently removed the ensign pips from each other's epaulets, and fastened the jg bars there. Then they braced at attention and saluted each other, and then shook hands slowly, all without a word.