“How are you?” She asked, sitting down beside me on the bunk. I caught a whiff of her scent, something slightly flowery, and felt a tingle passing through me. “How did you cope with today?”
I didn’t want to discuss it, but how could I push her away? “It was…strange,” I admitted. I didn’t want to discuss it at all. “It was beautiful and terrible and frightening and exciting…”
Suddenly, I was overwhelmingly aware of just how female she was. I wasn’t a virgin — I’d paid one of my classmates for sex back in Albuquerque, when I’d been fourteen and intensely curious about sex — but I’d never had a real partner. Everyone said, back home, that the guy had to be very firm with the girl, but it struck me as a recipe for having my head kicked in. I felt uncomfortable and hoped — prayed — that she couldn’t sense it. She probably could.
“Yeah,” Kitty said. Her voice softened. “It was that for me too, John, and it doesn’t get much better. But you survived and you’re alive…”
She kissed me, hard. After a moment, I kissed her back.
It was the first time we made love.
Chapter Sixteen
UN Regulations on sexual relations between officers in the Peace Force can be summed up simply. They are only permitted between officers of an equal rank, above Ensign, or crewmen in different chains of command. An Ensign is not expected to have sexual relationships while onboard ship, nor is a Captain permitted to sleep with anyone on his vessel. Naturally, the rules are often flouted and ignored. Provided the affair does not hamper the performance of the starship, most commanding officers will ignore any relationships between his crew.
It was three weeks before I was allowed to go down to the surface.
I wasn’t too unhappy about it. Officially, the war was proceeding well, with only a handful of casualties and dozens of towns and cities occupied by the infantry. Unofficially, it was far worse. There were hundreds of engagements every day, with dozens of infantry killed in brief brutal encounters… and the natives were ingenious. The Admiral had allowed some air transport to operate after the invasion — mainly first aid and food supplies — and one of the aircraft had been armed with a shipkiller missile, which it fired at Devastator, high overhead. It came within metres of destroying the entire ship and, after that, there were no more aircraft permitted to fly.
The reporters, at first, had demanded to go down to the ground at once, but as rumours filtered through their grapevine — the Admiral’s pet reporters had been allowed down at once — they started to become much less enthusiastic, choosing instead to write and file stories that drew heavily on the official broadcasts from the Admiral’s office. I’d read some of them while taking them to Ellen for the first check and discovered that they bore little relationship to reality. The reporters knew which side their bread was buttered on, all right.
And my relationship with Kitty continued to grow. I don’t know if the Captain knew about it — he certainly never said anything to us — but Anna knew and never lost an off-duty moment to tease us. On-duty, we were strictly professional and pretended we didn’t know each other. I doubt we fooled the Captain, but from what I gathered, he wouldn’t have said anything unless we acted the fool while on duty. I just hoped the reporters didn’t know. I’d heard that two of them had paid female crewmen for the pleasure of their company for a few nights and I didn’t want to remain Frank Wong about Ensign Gomez. They’d probably try to use it as blackmail information.
Devastator remained in continuous operation and it was a rare day when we fired less than a hundred KEW pellets into the planet, targeting areas identified by the infantry on the ground. We were stationed directly over Lazarus, which left part of the planet free of our interference, although the other starships continued to patrol and bombard the other side of the planet if necessary. I began to see why the Captain had been so determined to load all of our holds with KEW pallets. We had barely been in orbit for a week before we had to reload the first set of launchers. It wouldn’t be long before we would have to resupply from the transports, or even leave for the nearest UNPF base. I just hoped that the planet would be more peaceful then, although I rather doubted it. The death toll just continued to rise.
Eventually, it was decided that our reporters would be permitted to set foot on the surface of the planet, along with myself. Anna had spent part of the time in orbit drilling me on calling in strikes from the surface — the Captain firmly believed that the infantry were calling in strikes they didn’t really need, wasting KEWs that couldn’t be replaced quickly — and insisted that I took the equipment with me. She kept calling it shore leave, but I had the feeling that it wouldn’t be anything like shore leave on Earth, and that had been dangerous enough.
I had my first inkling of danger when the shuttle pilot briefed us on safety precautions. “Remain firmly strapped in at all times,” he ordered, tightly. He’d been a confident young man back when I’d boarded Devastator, but he looked to have aged fifty years overnight. Three weeks of flying to and from a hostile planet seemed to have done that to him. The infantry claimed to have seized vast quantities of weapons, but there were still attacks on our shuttles and aircraft with handheld SAMs “If I sound the alert, prepare for heavy manoeuvring.”
It wasn’t something designed to reassure the reporters, who were already half-scared to death, but they complied. The first part of the flight down to the surface was uneventful and I rather missed not having a viewport, but that changed when alarm tones rang through the shuttle and we began to lurch from side to side. I heard the reporters screaming at each other, trying to understand what was going on, and for once I was as ignorant as they were. We might have been under attack, or the pilot might have been extracting revenge for their comments about his ‘poky little shuttle.’ There was no way to know, but as the lurching grew stronger, it was all I could do not to vomit. The reporters weren’t so lucky.
“What a mess,” the pilot commented, after we landed. The compartment was in a thoroughly disgusting state. “There are showers in the buildings out there, so you can take them to shower and change while the ground crew mops out the shuttle. It won’t be the first time.”
“Thank you,” I said, sourly. An Ensign who threw up in a shuttle would be expected to clean up the mess, but the reporters didn’t even offer to help. They staggered off the shuttle and practically kissed the ground below their feet. “I’ll make a note of your services and commend you to the Captain.”
Heinlein’s main spaceport looked like hell. The smell hit me as soon as I stepped out of the shuttle, a faint mixture of burning and decaying bodies. The landing field was as packed as the field on Terra Nova, but here there was a tense air that seemed to defy understanding, at first. I heard a distant popping sound and, a moment later, explosions echoed out along the fence. A trio of massive guns positioned at one corner of the airfield swung around automatically and returned fire. A moment later, a flight of attack helicopters followed the gunfire, hunting for targets on the ground.
The buildings around the landing field looked devastated. I remembered with a tinge of guilt how we had blasted them from orbit, clearing the way for the infantry to seize the spaceport; down on the ground, it must have been a nightmare. We stumbled past a line of burned out vehicles, being moved back to the spaceport in accordance with various UN regulations, trying not to breathe in the smell. I doubted that Heinlein had always stunk of rotting bodies. Hadn’t the infantry bothered to dig mass graves and bury them?