Huber didn’t speak. He regretted getting into the car with this woman, but he regretted a lot of things in life. This wasn’t his worst mistake by any means.
Northern Star was a collective farm that’d been turned into a firebase under Colonel Priamedes. He commanded an infantry battalion and an artillery battery from the Solace Militia, with a company of mercenaries whose high-power lasers were supposed to be the anti-armor component of the force.
Huber’d led the combat cars in the company-sized Slammers task force that had punctured the defenses like a bullet into a balloon. The Militia were brave enough and even well trained, but they weren’t veterans. The cars’ concentrated firepower had literally stunned them, and the mercenary lasers were too clumsy to stand a chance against 20-cm tank guns which had virtually unlimited range across flat cornfields.
In retrospect it hadn’t been much of a battle, though it’d seemed real enough to Arne Huber as he watched scores of Militiamen rise from a trench and aim at his oncoming combat cars. And all it takes is one bullet in the wrong place and you’re dead as dirt, no matter how great your side’s victory looks to whoever writes the history books.
Priamedes shook her head in inward directed anger, then turned a genuinely warm smile toward Huber. “I’m sorry,” she said. “The situation frustrates me, but that isn’t your fault and it’s not what I came to see you about. Will this place do for our drink? I like it myself.”
She banked the car slightly and gestured through her window. On Plattner’s World, there was forest even in the cities. She was pointing toward a three-story structure shaded by trees on all sides. On the roof were open-air tables, half empty at this hour, and a service kiosk in one corner with an outside elevator rising beside it. Above, a holographic sign, visible from any angle, read GUSTAV’S. The letters changed from dark to light green and back in slow waves.
“That’s fine,” Huber said. “Anywhere’s fine. I don’t know much about Benjamin.”
He’d been on seven planets besides Nieuw Friesland where he was born, and he didn’t know much about any of them. He remembered the way powergun bolts glinted among the ice walls on Humboldt and the way the whores on Dar es-Sharia dyed their breasts and genitalia blue; those things and scores of similar things, little anecdotes of existence with nothing connecting them but the fact they were fragments from the life of Lieutenant Arne Huber.
Priamedes brought them around in a tight reverse instead of angling the fans forward to slow them. The car dropped between the treetops to level out just above the gravel roadway. The elevator was descending with a pair of well-dressed men in the glass cage.
Dust puffed as Priamedes landed smoothly in a line of similar cars. City streets in the Outer States were for parking and delivery vehicles. They were almost never paved, because that would speed storm-water runoff and decrease the amount of water that penetrated the soil to nourish vegetation.
Huber reached for his door release; parts of his body decided to protest, cramping when they were directed to move. He gasped with pain, then tried to cover his weakness with a blistering curse.
“Wait, I’ll—” Priamedes said.
Snarling under his breath, Huber shoved the door open before his hostess could get around the vehicle to help him. He hopped out, forcing his left leg to work even though it felt as if somebody had turned a blowtorch on the hip joint.
She paused, turning her head away politely, and waited for Huber to join her so that they could walk to the waiting elevator together. “My father was injured in the fighting before he was captured,” she said in a neutral tone. “He got off crutches a few days ago and should make a full recovery.”
Huber laughed as the cage rose. “So will I,” he said, more cheerfully than he felt. “Look, mostly I’m just stiff from sitting at a console all day. I’m not used to desk duty, that’s all.”
That was part of why he was stumbling around, all right; and he was tense from frustration at the people he had to deal with, which was another part of the problem. But at the back of Huber’s mind was the awareness that the fragments he’d caught when the shot struck might have done damage that even time and the best medical treatment couldn’t quite repair. That he might never again be fit for a field command….
“Lieutenant?” the black-haired woman said in concern.
Via, what had his expression been like? “Sorry,” Huber said, forcing a smile. “I was klicks away, just thinking of the work I’ve got to do in the morning.”
He must have sounded convincing, because Priamedes’ features softened with relief. To keep away from the subject of his health, Huber made his way to a table near the wickerwork railing and pulled out a chair for the woman. It was with considerable relief that he settled across from her, though.
A waitress approached with an expectant look. The dozen other customers were glancing covertly at them as well, their eyes probably drawn by Huber’s uniform and possibly his limp. There were a lot of mercenaries in Benjamin now, but the Slammers’ khaki and rampant lion patch were the trappings of nobility to those who were knowledgeable. On a planet as wealthy and interconnected as Plattner’s World, that meant most people.
Because of that perfectly accurate perception and because of the perfectly normal human resentment it engendered in other mercenaries, the United Cities were going to lose the war. A single armored regiment couldn’t defeat several divisions worth of enemies, many of whom were themselves highly sophisticated; and the other UC mercenaries weren’t cooperating with the Slammers the way they’d need to do to win.
“Lieutenant?” said Daphne Priamedes, loudly enough to penetrate Huber’s brown study. They were waiting for his order, of course….
He swore in embarrassment. “Ah, there’s corn whiskey? I don’t remember the name for it here, but my sergeant when I was in Log Section …?”
Priamedes nodded understanding and said to the waitress, “Zapotec—and water, I believe, unless …?”
“That’s fine,” Huber said in reply to her raised eyebrow. “Anything’s fine, really.”
He didn’t know whether Zapotec was generic or a brand name; if the latter, it was probably the best available unless he’d misjudged Daphne Priamedes. Huber suddenly realized that he knew very little about anything beyond what he needed to do his job well. He and his fellow troopers wouldn’t have been nearly as effective if they hadn’t focused so completely on their jobs, but when he thought about it he felt lonely.
The waitress trotted away. Priamedes glanced around the covered patio, slapping the eyes of the others back to their own proper concerns. When she and Huber were as private as one ever is in open air, she said, “My father told me what happened at Northern Star, Lieutenant. At the end, I mean. He said it would’ve been much easier for you to kill him and his men than to capture them, but you took a considerable risk to spare their lives.”
The waitress came back with the drinks. Priamedes entered her credit chip in the reader before Huber even thought to take his out of its pouch. Via! Maybe it was a good thing he wasn’t in the field right now, because he was dropping too bloody many stitches.
Though …in the field he knew what he was doing reflexively. This was civilian life, and that was another matter. Arne Huber hadn’t been a civilian for a long time.
He took a swig of the liquor; it cleaned the gumminess from his mouth and tongue and focused his mind like a leap into cold water. “Ma’am,” he said, “I guess I’ve done worse things than shooting civilians who didn’t have sense enough to give up, but only by mistake or when I had to.”