Learoyd was getting to his feet. Steuben grabbed the collar of Deseau’s clamshell armor and jerked the sergeant upright; the major must have muscles like steel cables under his trim exterior. The muzzle of the powergun in his other hand was a white-hot circle.
He turned toward Huber, looking out of the adjacent window, and shouted, “Come along, Lieutenant. We’ve taken care of our little problem and it’s time to leave now.”
Huber met them in the sitting room. Steuben waved him toward the stairwell. Sergeant Deseau still walked like a drunk, so Huber grabbed his arm in a fireman’s carry and half-lifted, half-dragged the man to the trucks. Every floor of the building was burning. The major was the last man out.
In all the cacophony—the screams and the blasts and the weeping desperation—that Arne Huber had heard in the past few minutes, there was only one sound that would haunt his future nightmares. That was Joachim Steuben’s laughter as he blew a girl’s head off.
If I buy the farm here on Plattner’s World, Huber thought as he walked toward the open door of Major Steuben’s office, they’re going to have to name this the Lieutenant Arne C. Huber Memorial Hallway.
There’s never a bad time for humor in a war zone. This was a better time than most.
“Come in and close the door, Lieutenant,” Steuben said as Huber raised his hand to knock on the jamb. “And don’t, if you please, attempt to salute me ever again. You’re not very good at it.”
Huber obeyed meekly. The major was working behind a live display, entering data on the touchpad lying on his wooden desk. It wasn’t a game this time: Steuben was finishing a task before he got on to the business who’d just walked in his door.
He shut down the display and met Huber’s eyes. He smiled; Huber didn’t try to smile back.
“This will be brief, Lieutenant,” Steuben said. “The United Cities are in a state of war with Solace, or will be when the Senate meets in a few hours. There’s been a second attack within UC territory by mercenaries in Solace pay. This one was directed against Senator Patroklos Graciano here in Benjamin.”
Steuben quirked a smile. “It was quite a horrific scene, according to reports of the event,” he went on. “Graciano and his whole household were killed.”
Huber looked at the man across the desk, remembering the same smile lighted by the flash of a powergun. “If I may ask, sir?” he said. “Why did the, ah, mercenaries attack that particular senator?”
“It’s believed that the Solace authorities had made an attempt to turn the poor fellow against his own people,” the major said blandly. “Graciano had gathered a great deal of information about Solace plans and was about to make a full report to the Senate. The attack forestalled him, but as a result of such blatant aggression even the former peace party in the Senate is unanimous in supporting military action against Solace.”
I wonder how many of the senators believe the official story, Huber thought, and how many are afraid they’ll go the same way as Patroklos Graciano if they continue to get in the way of the Regiment’s contract?
Well, it didn’t really matter. Like he’d told Major Steuben last night, he wasn’t a politician. Aloud he said, “I see, sir.”
“None of that matters to you, of course,” Steuben continued. “I called you here to say that a review of your actions at Rhodesville the day you landed has determined that you behaved properly and in accordance with the best traditions of the Regiment.”
He giggled. “You may even get a medal out of it, Lieutenant.”
Huber’s mouth was dry; for a moment he didn’t trust himself to speak. Then he said, “Ah, sir? Does this mean that I’m being returned to my platoon?”
Steuben looked up at Huber. He smiled. “Well, Lieutenant,” he said, “that’s the reason I called you here in person instead of just informing you of the investigation outcome through channels. How would you like a transfer to A Company? You’d stay at the same rank, but you probably know already that the pay in A Company is better than the same grade levels in line units.”
“A Company?” Huber repeated. He couldn’t have heard right. “The White Mice, you mean?”
“Yes, Lieutenant,” Steuben said. His face didn’t change in a definable way, but his smile was suddenly very hard. “The White Mice. The company under my personal command.”
“I don’t …” Huber said, then realized that among the things he didn’t know was how to end the sentence he’d begun. He let his voice trail off.
“Recent events have demonstrated that you’re smart and that you’re willing to use your initiative,” the major said. His fingers were tented before him, but his wrists didn’t quite rest on the touchpad beneath them.
The smile became amused again. He added, “Also, you can handle a gun. You’ll have ample opportunity to exercise all these abilities in A Company, I assure you.”
“Sir …” said Huber’s lips. He was watching from outside himself again. “I don’t think I have enough …”
This time he stopped, not because he didn’t know how to finish the sentence but because he thought of Steuben’s hell-lit smile the night before. The words choked in his throat.
“Ruthlessness, you were perhaps going to say, Lieutenant?” the major said with his cat’s-tongue lilt. “Oh, I think you’ll do. I’m a good judge of that sort of thing, you know.”
He giggled again. “You’re dismissed for now,” Steuben said. “Go back to Logistics—you’ll have to break in your replacement no matter what you decide. But rest assured, you’ll be hearing from me again.”
Arne Huber’s soul watched his body walking back down the hallway. Even his mind was numb, and despite the closed door behind him he continued to hear laughter.
The Political Process
The air above Fencing Master sizzled just beyond the visual range; some of the farm’s defenders were using lasers that operated in the low-ultraviolet. Lieutenant Arne Huber sighted his tribarrel through his visor’s thirty percent mask of the battlefield terrain and the units engaged. He swung the muzzles forward to aim past Sergeant Deseau’s left elbow and gunshield.
If Huber fired at the present angle, the powerful 2-cm bolts would singe Deseau’s sleeve and his neck below the flare of his commo helmet. He wouldn’t do that unless the risk to his sergeant was worth it—though worse things had happened to Deseau during his fifteen years in Hammer’s Slammers.
“Fox Three-one,” Huber said; his helmet’s artificial intelligence cued Foghorn, another of the four combat cars in platoon F-3. “Ready to go? Fox Six over.”
A rocket gun from somewhere in the Solace defenses fired three times, its coughing ignition followed an instant later by the snap-p-p! of the multiple projectiles going supersonic. At least one of the heavy-metal slugs punched more than a hole in the air: the clang against armor would have been audible kilometers away. No way to tell who’d been hit or how badly; and no time to worry about it now anyway.
“Roger, Six, we’re ready!” cried Sergeant Nagano, Foghorn’s commander. He didn’t sound scared, but his voice was an octave higher than usual with excitement. “Three-one out!”
Huber figured Nagano had a right to be excited. Via, he had a right to be scared.
“Costunna, pull forward,” Huber ordered his own driver, a newbie who’d replaced the man whom a buzzbomb had decapitated. “Three-one, rush ’em!”
The Northern Star Farm was a network of cornfields crisscrossed by concrete-lined irrigation canals. In the center were more than twenty single-story buildings: barns, equipment sheds, and barracks for the work force. The layout was typical of the large agricultural complexes with which the nation of Solace produced food not only for her own citizens but for all the residents of Plattner’s World— when Solace wasn’t at war with the Outer States, at any rate.