“Fox Three-six to Fox Three,” Huber said in a voice that caught at every syllable. “Good work, troopers. Nobody ever commanded a better unit than I did tonight.”
He swallowed and added the words that almost hadn’t gotten past his swollen throat. “Three-six out.”
Then, because his head throbbed and any constriction was an agony he couldn’t bear for the moment, Huber took off his helmet. He regretted the decision immediately with the first breath he took of the unfiltered atmosphere.
He turned and vomited over the side of the fighting compartment. No matter how often he encountered it, the smell of burned human flesh always turned Arne Huber’s stomach.
“Hey El-Tee!” said Deseau, standing with Padova on the plenum chamber to brace the replacement plate while Learoyd applied the cold weld. “That black-haired piece you met the first time the wogs threw in the towel? She’s coming to see you.”
“He’s not an el-tee anymore, Frenchie,” Learoyd said, laying his bead along the seam as evenly as the fully-mechanized factory operation which put Fencing Master together to begin with. “He’s a captain now.”
Huber looked over his shoulder in the direction of Frenchie’s gaze. He wasn’t sure how Daphne Priamedes would take to being called a “black-haired piece,” but it was accurate given Deseau’s frame of reference. The other part, though …
Huber got up from the empty ten-liter coolant drum he was using as a seat while he worked at the Command and Control box. He wiped his hands on his utility blouse—newly issued three days before and still clean enough—and said quietly, “I met her in Benjamin, Frenchie, back when I was in Operations.”
“Captain Huber?” Daphne called from the ground. “I hope you don’t mind my coming to offer you lunch. The orderly said that you have an office but that you usually worked in your combat car.”
Huber shut down the display. “Glad to see you, Daphne,” he said as he swung himself, left leg first, over the side of the fighting compartment. “I could use a break, but I don’t know about lunch.
Maybe …”
He paused as he slid to the ground, careful to take the shock on his right boot. He’d been going to say, “ …the canteen,” but the facilities here at Base Beta consisted of a plastic prefab with extruded furniture and dispensers for a basic range of products. Bezant was only twelve klicks away, so there was no need for the Regiment itself to provide off-duty troops with anything impressive.
Daphne flashed a smile of cool triumph. “I thought you might say that,” she said, “so I’ve brought a cooler in the car. I thought we’d fly to a grove where we could find some quiet.”
Huber looked down at his uniform. He hadn’t been doing much manual labor—well, much—but he’d have wanted to change before an interview with Hammer; or with Joachim Steuben, now that he thought about it.
Daphne repeated the cool smile. “Come along, Arne,” she said. “The trees won’t care any more than I do. I left my aircar by the TOC.”
She crooked her elbow for him to take and started off. Base Beta was an expansion of Firebase One, no prettier than it’d been before Engineer Section trebled its area to hold all three squadrons. As he passed Fancy Pants, Huber saw Tranter looking out of an access port and said, “Hold the fort for an hour, Sarge. If anybody really needs me, I’ve got my commo helmet.”
“Roger that, sir,” Tranter said cheerfully. He was holding a multitool and a pair of pliers, doing technician’s work and pleased at the chance.
“Hey El-Tee?” Deseau shouted from Fencing Master, loudly enough that half the camp could hear him. “If there’s any left that you don’t need, remember me’n Learoyd.”
Daphne appeared not to notice the comment, unless the faint smile was her response.
Huber cleared his throat, taking stock of the situation. Daphne was wearing a pants suit, simply cut and of sturdy—but probably expensive—material. It would’ve been proper garb if Huber’d decided to put on his dress uniform and take her to one of the top restaurants in Bezant, but it wasn’t out of place in a firebase either.
Well, he’d never doubted that she was smart.
A starship lifted, its corona shiveringly bright even in broad daylight. The rumble of shoving such a mass skyward trembled through Huber’s bootsoles, though the airborne sound was distance-muted and slow to arrive.
Huber nodded toward the rising vessel and said, “This time they’re repatriating the other mercenary units before they terminate our contract. It’ll probably take a while to find so much shipping.”
“Yes, but the amount of trade Port Plattner carried before the war is simplifying the problem,” Daphne said. They’d reached her car, parked on the concertina-wired pad under the guns of an A Company combat car. The Colonel and the staff he’d brought with him on the run north were sharing space in the trailers with the squadron commanders. That must’ve been tight, though Huber had his own problems. Tents beside the buried trailers provided overflow for activities that nobody would care about if the shooting started again.
“As for continuing to pay your hire until all the other forces are off-planet …” Daphne continued in a wry, possibly amused, tone. “That was a condition Colonel Hammer set on agreeing to allow us to employ the Slammers. Though I think that after seeing the mistake Nonesuch made, we would have decided to find the money whether or not it was a contract term.”
The sergeant in charge of the White Mice at the aircar pad spoke to one of her troopers, who swung open the bar wrapped in razor ribbon. Huber noticed the sergeant’s arm was in a surface cast, then recognized her as the commander of the resupply aircars. He nodded and said, “I’m glad you came through all right, Sergeant.”
“Same to you, Captain,” she said, surprised and obviously pleased at his notice. “And congratulations on your promotion.”
They stepped into the fenced area. Daphne’s limousine was as much of a contrast to the battered utility vehicles as she herself was to the several contract drivers resting in what shade they could find.
“I haven’t congratulated you on your promotion, Arne,” she said. She opened the door, then bent to touch the switch which slid the hardtop in three sections down into the seatback. “I’m very glad things worked out for you.”
Does she know what she’s saying? Huber wondered; but maybe she did. Various things Daphne’d said showed that she was far enough up in the government of Solace that she could probably learn anything she wanted to.
“Yeah,” he said, getting into the front passenger seat. “The Colonel offered me an infantry company before we headed north, but I wouldn’t have known what I was doing. I’m glad I waited.”
Waited for a 25-cm bolt to turn Captain Gillig, a good officer and a first-rate bridge player, into a cloud of dissociated atoms. A bolt that could just as easily have hit fifty meters south and done the same thing to Lieutenant Arne Huber and his crew. There were religious people—some of them troopers—who believed everything happened by plan, and maybe they were right. Huber himself, though, couldn’t imagine a plan that balanced details so minute and decided that tonight a particular lieutenant would be promoted instead of being ionized….
Daphne ran her fans up to speed, then adjusted blade angle to lift the car off the ground in a jackrabbit start. Huber remembered that on pavement she’d been more sedate; she was outrunning the cloud of dust her fans raised from the scraped, sun-burned, clay.
“To be honest,” she said, her attention apparently focused on her instruments and the eastern horizon, “I thought you might already have looked me up now that the war’s over.”
Huber didn’t speak for a moment. He had thought about it. He’d decided that she wouldn’t be interested; that she wouldn’t have time; and that anyway, he flat didn’t have the energy to get involved in anything more than a business transaction which cost about three Frisian thalers at the going rate of exchange.