The warning signal merely swayed in the breeze that carried soot and soot smells even here, where few sappers had penetrated.
Suilin had figured the commo gear would be at the TOC, whether Captain Ranson was there or not. In the event, the black-haired female officer sat on the back ramp of the vehicle, facing three male soldiers who squatted before her.
She stood, thumping out her closing orders, as Suilin pulled up; the men rose a moment later. None of the group paid the local reporter any attention.
Suilin didn't recognize the men. One of them was fat, at least fifty standard years old, and wore a grease-stained khaki jumpsuit.
"No problem,Junebug,"he called as he turned away from the meeting."We'll be ready to lift—if we're left alone to get ready, all right? Keep the rest a' your people and their maintenance problems off my back—" he was striding off toward a parked tank, shouting his words over his shoulder "—and we'll be at capacity when you need us."
Suilin got out of his truck. They called their commanding officer Junebug?
"Yeah,well,"said another soldier,about twenty-five and an average sort of man in every way.He lifted his helmet to rub his scalp, then settled the ceramic/plastic pot again. "What do you want for a call sign? Charlie Three-zero all right?"
Ranson shook her head. "Negative. You're Blue Three," she said flatly.
Blue Three rubbed his scalp again. "Right,"he said in a cheerless voice. "Only you hear 'Charlie Three-zero,' don't have kittens, okay? I got a lot to learn."
He turned morosely, adding, "And you know, this kinda on-the-job training ain't real survivable."
Suilin stood by, waiting for the third male mercenary to go before he tried to borrow the Slammers' communications system to call Kohang.
Instead of leaving, the soldier turned and looked at the reporter with a disconcertingly slack-jawed, vacant-eyed stare. The green-brown eyes didn't seem to focus at all.
Captain Ranson's eyes followed her subordinate's.She said angrily, "Who the bloody hell are you?"
It wasn't the same face that Suilin had been interviewing the night before.
There were dark circles around Ranson's eyes, and her left cheek was badly scratched. Her face, her hands, and her neck down to the scallop where she'd been wearing armor were dingy with fouling spewed from the breeches of her tribarrel when jets of nitrogen expelled the empty cases.
Ranson had been angry at being forced into an interview. She'd known the power was in the reporter's hands: the power to probe for answers she didn't want to give; the power to twist questions so that they were hooks in the fabric of her self-esteem; the power to make a fool out of her, by the words he tricked her into saying—or the form into which he edited those words before he aired them.
Now . . .
Now Suilin wondered what had happened to Fritzi Dole's body. He was almost certain that this small, fierce mercenary wouldn't shoot a reporter out of hand to add to the casualty count, no matter how angry and frustrated she was now . . . .
"I'm, ah," he said, "Dick Suilin. I'm, ah, we met yesterday when the—"
"The reporter,"Ranson said."Right, the bloody fool who didn't know t' hit the dirt for incoming. The interview's off."
She started to turn. "Beat it," she added.
"It's not—"Suilin said."Captain Ranson,I need to talk to somebody in Kohang, and your commo may be the—"
"Buddy," said Ranson with a venom and disgust that shocked the reporter more than the content of the words did, "you must be out of your mind. Get out of here."
The other soldier continued to watch without expression.
"Captain, you don't understand," Suilin called to Ranson's back. "I need to make sure my sister's all right."
The woman bent to reenter the immobile command blower.
"Curse it! She's the wife of the District Governor. Now will you—"
Ranson turned. The reporter thought he'd seen her angry before.
"The District Governor," she repeated softly. "The District Bleeding Governor."
She walked toward Suilin. He poised, uncertain as to what the female officer intended.
She tapped him on the chest as she said, "Your brother-in-law doesn't have any balls, buddy." The tip of her index finger was like a mallet.
"Captain—"
"He's got a brigade of armor," Ranson continued, "and maybe ten battalions of infantry and gendarmes, according to the order of battle in my data banks."
She tapped even harder. Suilin backed a step. "But no balls a'tall."
The reporter set his leg to lock him into place. "Captain, you can't—"
Ranson slapped him, forehand and then back across the other cheek. Her fingers were as hard as the popper of a bullwhip. "And he's got an ass, so we're going to get our ass shot off to save his!"
She spun on her heel. "Sparrow, get him out of my sight," she called over her shoulder as she entered her TOC.
Suilin viewed the world through a blur of tears. Sparrow put a hand on his shoulder and turned him with a detached gentleness that felt like compassion to the reporter at the moment.
"S'okay, turtle," the mercenary said as he walked Suilin toward the truck he'd borrowed. "We just got orders to relieve the District Governor ourself, and we got bugger-all t' do it with."
"What?" the reporter said. "In Kohang?"
His right cheek burned,and his left felt as if someone had flayed the skin from it. He wondered if Ranson had been wearing a ring. "Who's relieving Kohang?"
Sparrow waved an arm as deliberately as a stump speaker gesturing. "You're lookin'at it,turtle,"he said."Three tanks, five cars . . . and maybe crews for most of 'em."
The veneer of careless apathy dropped away. Sparrow shivered. He was tall and thin with an olive complexion several shades darker than Suilin's own.
"Via," the mercenary muttered. "Via!"
Sparrow turned and walked, then trotted in a loose-limbed way toward the tank across the enclosure from the TOC. He climbed the shallow steps up its skirts and battered hull, then popped into the turret with the haste of a man boarding under fire.
The hatch clanged loudly behind him.
Dick Suilin sat in his truck, blinking to clear his eyes and mind. He started the vehicle and turned it in a tight circle, heading back toward National Army Headquarters.
His own gear had been destroyed in the firefight, but he thought the barracks in which Fritzi Doyle was billeted had survived. The cameraman had worn fatigues. One of his spare sets would fit Suilin well enough.
Fritzi wouldn't mind.
The corpse of a National Army sergeant was sprawled at the doorway of a bombed-out building. He'd thrown on a uniform shirt, but he had no shoes or trousers. His left arm was outstretched while his right was folded under his face as though cushioning it from the ground.
He'd been carrying a grenade launcher and a satchel of reloads for it. They lay beside his body.