He drank again; too much. He’d supposed he’d made his opinion of the Solace Militia clearer than he should’ve to an officer’s daughter. The whiskey was good but it was strong as well, even cut with water; the big slug made his throat spasm and he had to cough.
Covering his embarrassment, Huber went on, “Ma’am, I can give you policy reasons why my commanding officer didn’t want to blow away your father’s men when they made a break for it. The truth is, though, neither I nor Captain Sangrela really likes to kill people. I’m a soldier, not a sociopath.”
“I see that,” she said, smiling faintly. “And I still prefer Daphne, Lieutenant.”
“It’s the booze talking,” Huber said, smiling back. It was warm in his stomach, though and it felt good. “Look, Daphne, I appreciate the drink, but I really need to get to a bunk.”
“Very well,” she said, tossing off the rest of the fizzy, light green concoction she was drinking over ice. “If I can’t offer you dinner …?”
“No ma—no Daphne,” Huber said, rising more easily than he’d sat down. “I’ll eat some rations, but right now I need sleep more than company—even company as nice as you.”
“Then I’ll just thank you again for sparing my father,” she said, standing also. “And I hope we’ll see one another again in the future when you’re better rested—Arne?”
“Arne,” Huber agreed. “And I hope that too.”
“I’ll expect your report in three hours, then, General Rubens,” Huber said and broke the connection. He adjusted the little fan playing on him from the console as he thought about the next call he had to make. The day’d started out cool, but now by midmorning it was unseasonably hot for Plattner’s World.
Parts of Base Alpha were climate controlled, but mostly the Regiment’s machines and personnel were expected to operate under whatever conditions nature offered. You weren’t going to win many battles from inside a sealed room, and the Colonel tried to discourage people from thinking you could.
As a break from talking to people he didn’t like and didn’t trust—he knew they probably felt the same way—Huber called up the Solace Order of Battle. He wasn’t sure he was really supposed to have the information, but he’d found that his retina pattern was on Central’s validation list. A benefit of being assigned to Operations …
As he viewed the latest information, his gut told him that he’d have been better off staying ignorant. Sure, things could’ve gotten worse—things can always get worse—but he hadn’t really expected them to go this bad. Daphne’d said Solace was mortgaging its next ten years to hire mercenaries. Huber knew now that she’d been understating the real costs.
He looked out through the fence, trying to settle his mind. An aircar with Log Section markings had landed in the street under the guns of the combat car on guard. The driver, one of the locals the Regiment had hired for non-combat work, waited in the cab. A tall civilian in an expensive-looking pearl-gray outfit got out, stalked to the gate, and said, “I am Sigmund Lindeyar. Take me to Colonel Hammer at once!”
Instead of snapping to attention obediently, Captain Dillard turned his back to the furious man on the other side of the fence. He was frowning as he called Central on his commo helmet.
The fellow ought to be more thankful than he seemed. Dillard was treating him a lot better than some troopers would’ve done to a civilian who raised his voice to them.
Dillard grimaced minusculely as he signed off. When he focused again on his present surroundings, he caught Huber’s eye. “Lieutenant Huber?” he called. “Will you join us, please?”
Huber cut the power to his console manually instead of trusting it to turn itself off when he rose from the attached seat. He didn’t want anybody else to see what he’d just learned. Blood and Martyrs, a brigade of armored cavalry in addition to what Solace was already fielding!
“Sir?” said Huber crisply to Captain Dillard. He stood at parade rest, trying to look like what a civilian expected a professional soldier to be. He’d picked up from Dillard’s expression that Central had confirmed the civilian’s high self-opinion, so a little theater was called for.
Huber’s rumpled fatigues weren’t what a rear-echelon soldier would’ve called “professional appearance,” but Huber wasn’t a rear-echelon soldier.
Huber’d thought Lindeyar was an old man; viewing him closely, he wasn’t sure. The hair beneath the fellow’s natty beret was pale blond, not white, and his face was unlined; despite that, his blue eyes had age in them as well as a present snapping fury.
“Lieutenant,” Dillard said, turning to include both Huber and the civilian, “Mr. Lindeyar is the Nonesuch trade representative. His driver brought him here rather than to the Tactical Operations Center at Base Alpha, where he’s to meet Colonel Hammer. I’d like you to escort Mr. Lindeyar to the correct location.”
“Yessir!” Huber said, his back straight. He thought about saluting, but that’d come through as obvious caricature if Lindeyar knew anything about the way the Slammers operated. Besides, Huber was lousy at it.
“Mr. Lindeyar,” Dillard said, shifting his eyes slightly, “Lieutenant Huber is my second in command. He’ll see to it that there isn’t a repetition of the error that brought you here in the first place.”
“He’d better,” said the civilian, his eyes flicking over Huber with the sort of attention one gives to a zoo animal. “Your colonel is expecting me. Expecting me before now!”
“We’ll get you there, sir,” Huber said as Dillard opened the gate. He was the only officer in the annex besides Dillard himself, but “second in command” was more theater. If one of the warrant officers or enlisted men had caught Dillard’s eye at the moment he needed a warm body to cover somebody else’s screwup, that trooper would have become “my most trusted subordinate” as sure as day dawns.
And screwup it’d been. The driver had a navigational pod, but he or it had chosen the coordinates for the operations annex instead of the TOC. A soldier wouldn’t have made that mistake, but to the contract driver it was simply a destination. That probably wasn’t the fault of anybody in the Regiment—and it certainly wasn’t Captain Dillard’s fault—but Lindeyar didn’t seem like the sort of man who worried about justice when he was angry.
They walked toward the street together. The path was gravel and Huber’s left knee didn’t want to bend. He tensed his abdomen to keep from gasping in pain as he kept up with the long-legged civilian.
“I want you to drive,” Lindeyar said as they reached the aircar—a ten-seat utility vehicle that’d seen a lot of use. “I don’t trust this fool not to get lost again.”
“Negative!” said the scruffy driver—who turned out to be female, though Huber couldn’t imagine anyone to whom the difference would matter. “I own this truck and I’m not letting any soldier-boy play games with it!”
“No sir,” said Huber, letting himself breathe now that he didn’t have to match strides with Lindeyar, “I can’t drive an aircar. We won’t get lost.”
He got into the cab, motioning the driver aside. She opened her mouth for another protest. “Shut up,” Huber said, not loudly but not making any attempt to hide how he felt.
He was pissed at quite a number of things and people right at the moment, and the driver was somebody he could unload on safely if she pushed him just a hair farther. Huber didn’t know how to drive an aircar, that was true; but he was in a mood to give himself some on-the-job training with this civilian prick along for the ride.
The driver shut her mouth. Huber switched on the dashboard navigational pod, synched it with his helmet AI, and downloaded the new destination. Lindeyar climbed into the back, looking tautly angry but keeping silent for now.
“All right,” Huber said to the driver, more mildly than before. “I’ll check as we go, but you shouldn’t have any trouble now. Let’s get going.”