The priest bowed again and turned toward the door. He was not the same man in demeanor as the one who had entered the meeting, emphasizing his importance by blatantly displaying his bodyguards.
"Praise the Lord,"Tyl muttered,more to himself than to Major Borodin."I've been a lotta places I liked better 'n this one—and some of them, people were shooting at me."
Nodding to take his leave of the UDB officer, Tyl started for the door that was already being opened from the outside.
"Lieutenant Desoix of United Defense Batteries," the greeter announced.
"You there," Eunice Delcorio called in a throaty contralto—much less shrill than her previous words had led Tyl to imagine her ordinary voice would be. "Captain Koopman. Wait a moment."
Father Laughlin was already out of the room. Borodin was bearing down on his subordinate with obvious wrath that Desoix prepared to meet with a wry smile.
Everybody else looked at Tyl Koopman.
She'd gotten his name and rank right, he thought as his skin flashed hot and his mind stumbled over itself wondering what to say, what she wanted, and why in blazes Colonel Hammer had put him in this bucket. He was a line officer and this was a job for the bloody staff.
"Yes, ma'am," he said aloud, turning toward his questioner. His eyes weren't focusing right because of the unfamiliar strain, so he was seeing the President's wife as a fiery blur beneath an imperious expression.
"How many men are there under your command, Captain?"Eunice continued. There was no hostility in her voice, only appraisal. It was the situation that was freezing Tyl's heart having to answer questions on this level, rather than the way in which the questions were being asked.
"Ma'am, ah?" he said. What had Scratchard told him as they walked along the levee? "Ma'am, there's about a hundred men here. That's twenty or so in the base establishment, and the rest the transit unit that, you know, I'll be taking to Two in a few days."
"No," the woman said, coolly but in a voice that didn't even consider the possibility of opposition. "We certainly aren't sending any troops away, now."
"Yes, that's right," Delcorio agreed.
A tic brushed the left side of the President's face. The calm with which he had concluded the meeting was based on everything going precisely as he had choreographed it in his mind. Eunice was adding something to the equation, and even something as minor as that was dangerous to his state of mind if he hadn't foreseen it.
"Ah . . ." said Tyl. "I'll need to check with Cen—"
"Well, do it, then!"Delcorio blazed."Do I need to be bothered with details that a corporal ought to be able to deal with?"
"Yes sir!" said the Slammers officer.
He threw the President a salute because it felt right.
And because that was a good opening to spinning on his heel and striding rapidly toward the door, on his way out of this room.
Chapter Eight
Headquarters and billets for the enlisted men of Battery D were in a basement room of the Palace of Government, converted to the purpose from a disused workers' cafeteria. Desoix sighed to see it again, knowing that here his superior would let out the anger he had bottled up while the two of them stalked through hallways roamed by folk from outside the unit.
Control, the artificial intelligence/communications center, sat beside a wall that had been pierced for conduits to antennas on the roof. It was about a cubic meter of electronics packed into thirty-two resin-black modules, some of them redundant.
Control directed the battery in combat because no human reactions were fast enough to deal with hypersonic missiles—though the calliopes, pulsing with light-swift violence, could rip even those from the sky if their tubes were slewed in the right direction.
The disused fixtures were piled at one end of the room. Control's waste heat made the room a little warmer, a little drier; but the place still reminded Desoix of basements in too many bombed-out cities.
Major Borodin pulled shut the flap of the curtain which separated his office from the bunks on which the off-duty shift was relaxing or trying to sleep. In theory, the curtain's microprocessors formed adaptive ripples in the fabric and canceled sounds. In practice—
Well, it didn't work that badly. And if you're running an eighty-man unit in what now had to be considered combat conditions, you'd better figure your troops were going to learn what was going on no matter how you tried to conceal it.
"You should have called in at once!"the battery commander said,half furious, half disappointed, like a parent whose daughter has come home three hours later than expected.
"I needed you at that meeting," he added, the anger replaced by desperate memory. "I . . . you know, Charles, I never know what to say to them up there. We're supposed to be defending the air space here, not mixed up in riots."
"I got a good look at that this morning, Sergei," Desoix said quietly. He seated himself carefully on the collapsible desk and, by his example, urged Borodin into the only chair in the curtained-off corner. "I think we need to reposition Gun Three. It's too close to where—things are going on. Some of our people are going to get hurt."
Borodin shook his craggy head abruptly."We can't do that,"he said."Coverage."
"Now that Five's back on-planet—" Desoix began.
"You were with that woman, weren't you?" Borodin said, anger hardening his face as if it were concrete setting."That's really why you didn't come to me when I needed you. I saw her slip in just before you did."
Yes, Daddy, Desoix thought. But Borodin was a good man to work for—good enough to humor.
"Sergei,"he said calmly,"now that we've got a full battery again,I can readjust coverage areas. We can handle the seafront from the suburbs east and west, I'm pretty—"
"Charles, you're going to get into really terrible trouble," Borodin continued, his voice now sepulchral. "Get us all into trouble."
He looked up at his subordinate and added,"Now, I was younger too, I understand . . . But believe me, boy, there's plenty of it going around on a businesslike basis. And that's a curst sight safer."
Desoix found himself getting angry—and that made him even angrier, at himself, because it meant that Anne mattered to him.
Who you screwed wasn't nearly as dangerous as caring about her.
"Look,"he said,hiding the edge in his voice but unable to eliminate the tremble. "I just shook a calliope loose on Merrinet, and it cost the unit less than three grand plus my transportation. I solve pro—"
"You paid a fine?"
"Via, no! I didn't pay a fine," Desoix snapped.
Shifting into a frustrated and disappointed tone of his own—a good tactic in this conversation, but exactly the way Desoix was really feeling at the moment also—he continued, "Look, Sergei, I bribed the Customs inspectors to switch manifests. The gun was still being held in the transit warehouse, there wasn't a police locker big enough for a calliope crated for shipment. If I'd pleaded it through the courts, the gun would be on Merrinet when we were old and gray. I—"