Miles waited expectantly.
“You’re wondering why I wanted to talk to you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I need your help, or think I do. You’ve probably guessed that already.”
“I’ll be happy to help you any way I can, sir.”
“I know. I feel sure of that, but I’m going to have to ask you some personal questions. It wouldn’t be fair for me to do that without briefing you, without giving you some idea of why I’m prying into your private life. You went down into the hold with Sergeant Kent-Jermyn to fight the hijackers.”
“Yes, sir. It was a damned fool thing to do. I know that now.”
“It was a very brave thing to do. I admire you for it. Everybody admires you.” Skip paused, collecting his thoughts. “Some of you were killed. Others were captured. When you were, Mastergunner Chelle Blue led a party down there to rescue you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Mastergunner Blue and I are contracted. Did you know that?”
“Yes, sir. Lieutenant Brice told me. He’s one of the ship’s officers, sir.”
“He is, Captain Kain has mentioned him. There’s a Captain Johnson on board, too. A captain in the Army, I mean. Do you know him?”
“No, sir.”
“He was in that meeting room when you came in. I should have introduced you to everyone, but I was so anxious to talk to you that it was all I could think of. Do you know Virginia Healy?”
“No, sir. Wait a minute—wasn’t that the woman who volunteered to go down as a prisoner? The first woman who raised her hand?”
“Correct. She’s Mastergunner Blue’s mother.” Skip sighed. “She’s Chelle’s mother, and someone’s trying to kill her. That’s one reason I’m poking and prying—a peripheral reason, or I think it is. Sometime peripheral reasons turn out to be not so peripheral later.”
Miles nodded. “Yes, sir.”
There was a diffident knock.
Skip opened the door, and signed the bill when the waiter had deposited his tray on a small table. “Did you fight?” Skip asked the waiter.
“No, sir. Not really. They put the older people in the second-class dining room, sir, and assigned four of us to guard them. I was one of those.”
“Did you have a gun?”
“Not at first, sir. A kitchen knife. We got guns after, sir.”
“Can you shoot?”
“No, sir.”
“Neither can I.” Skip added a tip to the check, and the waiter went out.
As the door closed, Miles said, “I heard you killed quite a few of them, sir.” He had not opened his beer.
“Yes, but I burned a lot of ammunition, and they were so tightly packed that when I missed one I hit another. I’ll try to do better next time, if there’s a next time.”
Skip sat, and twisted the top from his bottle. “You know Chelle, I know. Do you like her?”
“I’m not trying to move in on you, sir.”
“I didn’t think you were. I just wondered what you thought of her.”
“Everybody likes her, sir.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, sir.” Miles paused. “She’s good-looking, and sharp as hell. She’s got that air of command, too. You know what I mean? She’s a leader. She knows it, and you know it as soon as she shows up. I don’t know how many decorations she’s got, but Private Bonham called around, he said, and he says the eagle and maple leaf, silver. If she stays in, they’ll pin bars on her. You bet your ass, sir.”
“She’s not staying in,” Skip said. “Or I don’t think she is.”
“I don’t blame her, sir.”
“I ought to add that I don’t want her to. She has a problem, a serious one, and I’m trying to help her with it. I’m a great deal older than she is, as I feel certain you realize.”
“A little older, sir. Just a little bit. I guess you two contracted before she went up.”
“Correct. I can’t be a young man for her again. I can help her, though, and that’s what I’m trying to do. Are you contracted?”
“No, sir.” Miles’s face went blank.
“Have you ever been?”
“No, sir. We— Can I explain, sir? You won’t believe me, but it’s the truth.”
“If it’s true, I’ll believe you.”
“There was this girl in high school. We … You know.”
“You fell in love.”
“Yes, sir. That’s it exactly. We said we were going to contract. I believed it, and I think she did, too.”
“Continue, please, Corporal. Let’s have the whole story.” Skip sounded as sympathetic as he ever had to a defense witness during a murder trial, and that was very sympathetic indeed.
“Only she went off to college, sir. We said we’d call and e-mail and all that. You know?”
Skip nodded. “I certainly do.”
“Only I didn’t have the money to call very often, and I’m not very good about writing anything. After a while, well, I enlisted and she stopped calling. It—it didn’t bother me back then. It wasn’t a big thing. This next is the part you won’t believe, sir.”
“Try me,” Skip said.
“She was on the planet, on the world they sent me to. She was an officer, sir.”
“Really?”
“Yes, sir. She’d studied physics in college, and gotten really high up. There was a weapon we had there. She couldn’t say what it was, but it was something one of her teachers had come up with. He was old and hadn’t wanted to go, but he told the Army they ought to take Jane. He said they ought to make her an officer and all that so she could take care of his weapon, and they did it. After I’d been at that base about a week, we—well, we saw each other. I can’t tell you how that was, sir. I haven’t got the words.”
“I think I understand.”
“We said we wanted to get together to talk about old times, and that was all it was. Only we knew better, both of us. We’d go to the officers’ club. I was an enlisted man, but nobody said anything. They could see how it was, and they just smiled and went back to their card game or whatever. We said we were going to contract, and we meant it. We were going to do everything right. You could get model contracts on one of the computers she worked on. Then…”
“Something happened,” Skip said.
“She got killed.” Miles cleared his throat. “I was out on the periphery then, sir. There were outposts, and that was where I was when the missile hit. It was just a little one, not one of the big ones like you fire into space, but it … It killed Janie—killed her, and a hell of a lot of other people.”
“One question, please.” Skip paused. “I know this must be painful.”
“Go ahead, sir. It’s not going to get any worse.”
“Was Janie’s last name Sims?”
“Yes, sir. It was. How’d you know, sir?”
“Chelle told me. You were on Johanna.”
“Yes, sir. I’m not supposed to tell anybody that, but you know already.”
“So was Chelle. She was hurt pretty badly there, perhaps by the same missile, although I don’t know that.” Skip returned his glass to the tray and rose to pace the floor. “Before we knew about Sergeant Kent-Jermyn’s group, Chelle gave Captain Kain her word that she wouldn’t go down into the hold. Her word’s usually good. Better than mine, I think. Achille—do you know Achille?”
Miles nodded. “The little guy with no hands? Yes, sir.”
“He’ll have hands again when we get back home. I’m going to get him replacements. I owe him, and I like to pay my debts.”
For a few moments Skip paced, swinging along with the pronounced roll of the ship and collecting his thoughts. “You know that Chelle assembled a force of her own and went down to rescue you. They were defeated, just as the group you were in were. A good many of them were killed and the rest were captured, including Chelle.”
Miles nodded again. “It’s called defeat in detail, sir. It’s what happens when you break up and let the enemy fight you piece by piece.”