Aloud he said, “Daphne, I just got promoted to command of Fox Company. I’m trying to integrate new personnel and equipment as well as repair what we can.”
What remained of Captain Gillig’s Fantom Lady would stand, probably forever, on the crest where it’d been hit. The eight fan nacelles hadn’t been damaged, so Maintenance had stripped them off the hulk.
Relatives of the crew would be told their loved ones were buried on Plattner’s World. That was mostly true, except for the atoms that other 1st Squadron troopers had inhaled.
Huber laughed. “No rest for the wicked, you know.”
Daphne looked at him with unexpected sharpness. “Don’t say that,” she said. “You’re not wicked. You saved our planet. Saved us from ourselves, if you want to know the truth!”
Did you have friends working in the terminal building when I shot it up, honey? Did you have a cousin paying his vehicle taxes when we blasted the police post at Millhouse Crossing? Other people did!
“Ma’am,” said Huber, speaking very slowly and distinctly because this mattered to him. “I appreciate what you’re saying, but don’t kid yourself. If there’s such a thing as wicked, then some of what I do qualifies. Some of what I’ve done on Plattner’s World.”
“I don’t think you appreciate how true that is of other people too, Arne,” Daphne said. She looked at him steadily, then put a hand on his thigh and squeezed before returning her attention to the horizon and steering yoke.
Well, that answered a question which, despite Deseau’s certainty, had remained open in Huber’s mind. Frenchie didn’t have much to do with women like Daphne Priamedes.
He grinned. Neither did Arne Huber, if it came to that.
“The alliance of nations on Plattner’s World which hired your Regiment,” Daphne said, switching subjects with the grace of a mirror trick, “will continue to operate the port as a common facility rather than a part of Solace. We’ll be raising the price of Moss and of Thalderol base to pay for port renovations.”
She looked at Huber and grinned coldly.
“Which will be extensive, as you might imagine.”
“Yeah,” Huber said, “I can.”
Just clearing wrecked equipment would be a bitch of a job: the melted hull of a two-hundred-tonne tank wasn’t going to move easily, and thousands of plasma bolts had not only scarred the surface but also shattered the concrete deep into the pad’s interior.
The terminal building was gone, and the guidance pods which humped at regular intervals across the pad were scarred by shrapnel from the firecracker rounds if they hadn’t been blasted by stray powergun bolts.
“Your backers are agreeing to the price rise?” Huber said. “The planets who funded us the second time, I mean.”
“Their rates will go up ten percent,” Daphne said primly. “They’re quite comfortable with that. The rate to Nonesuch will go up thirty percent.”
She looked at Huber and added, “I suppose you’re surprised that we don’t refuse to sell Thalderol base to Nonesuch regardless of the price?”
“No ma’am,” Huber said, fighting to control his grin. What a question to ask a mercenary soldier! “I’m not surprised. I’d say it was a good plan to keep Nonesuch from getting so desperate that they’d try a rematch despite all.”
Daphne smiled wryly. “Yes,” she said, “I suppose it is at that, though I don’t believe anyone was thinking in those terms when we came to the decision. We just wanted to set the rate at the maximum we thought they’d pay. We need the money rather badly, you see.”
They both laughed; the tension of moments before was gone and nothing was hiding in the background so far as Huber could tell. Well, no conflict, anyway.
The aircar was five hundred meters above the ground, mushing along at about eighty kph. They’d flown beyond the wheatfields; below was pasture in which large roan cattle wandered in loose herds. Brush and small trees grew in swales, green against the rusty color of the grass at this season. Fencelines occasionally glinted from one horizon to the other, but there were kilometers between tracts.
Huber took off his commo helmet and set it in the compartment behind him. He probably wasn’t going to be back in the hour he’d told Tranter, and that was all right too.
“A nice day,” he said, stretching in his seat before he put an arm over Daphne’s shoulders.
“Yes,” she said, setting the aircar’s autopilot as she leaned toward Huber. “A nice day for normal things instead of with guns and destruction.”
They kissed, wriggling closer in their bucket seats.
In his mind, Port Plattner blazed with plasma bolts and the rich, red light of burning tents. But for me, Huber thought as he raised his hand to her breast, guns and destruction are what’s normal.
THE DARKNESS
“Hi, Lieutenant,” someone said as he walked into Ruthven’s room. “Good to see you up and around. I gotta do a few tests with you back in the bed, though.”
On the electronic window, a brisk wind was scudding snow over drifts and damaged armored vehicles. Ruthven turned from it; a jab of pain blasted the world into white, buzzing fragments. It centered on his left hip, but for a few heartbeats it involved every nerve in his body.
“Your leg’s still catching you?” said Drayer. He was the senior medic on this ward. “Well, it’ll do that for a while, sir. But they did a great job putting you back together. It’s just pain, you know? There’s nothing wrong really.”
Pain like this isn’t nothing, thought Ruthven. If he hadn’t been nauseous he might’ve tried to put Drayer’s head through the wall; but he had no strength, and anyway, there was no room for anger just now in the blurred gray confines of his mind.
He eased his weight back onto his left leg; it reacted normally, though the muscles trembled slightly. The agony of a few moments past was gone as thoroughly as if it’d happened when he was an infant, twenty-odd years earlier.
“Anyway, come lie down,” Drayer said. “This won’t take but
a …”
He noticed the window image for the first time. “Blood and Martyrs, sir!” he said. What d’ye want to look at that for? You can set these panels to show you anyplace, you know? I got the beaches on Sooner’s World up on all my walls. Let me tell you, walking to my quarters across that muck is plenty view of it for me!”
Ruthven glanced back at the window, catching himself in mid-motion; his hip ignored him, the way a hip ought to do. The snow was dirty, and what appeared to be patches of mud were probably lubricating oil. The Slammers’ hospital here on Pontefract shared a compound with the repair yard, a choice that probably reflected somebody’s sense of humor.
“That’s all right,” Ruthven said, walking to the bed; monitoring devices were embedded in the frame. “I chose it deliberately.”
He grinned faintly as he settled onto the mattress. The juxtaposition of wrecked personnel and wrecked equipment reflected his sense of humor too, it seemed.
Drayer knelt to fit his recorder into the footboard. “Well, if that’s what you want,” he said. “Me, I was hoping we’d be leaving as soon as the Colonel got transport lined up. The government found the money for another three months, though.”
Drayer looked up; a sharp-featured little man, efficient and willing to grab a bedpan when the ward was short-handed. But by the Lord and Martyrs, his talent for saying exactly the wrong thing amounted to sheer genius.
“Had you heard that, sir?” Drayer said, obviously hopeful that he’d given an officer the inside dope on something. “Though I swear, I don’t see where they found it. You wouldn’t think this pit could raise the money to hire the Regiment for nine months.”
“They’re probably mortgaging the amber concession for the next twenty years,” Ruthven said. He braced himself to move again.