Everybody was looking at Ruthven. Well, everybody but Purchas. They expected him to say something.
Ruthven’s lips were sticking together. “I …” he said. “Ah, I see.”
“Well, I’ll leave you to it, then,” Lyauty said. “This is as good a platoon as there is in the Slammers, Ruthven. You’re a lucky man.”
He turned toward the curtained entrance. “Ah, excuse me, sir,” Ruthven said. How do I address the man? Oh Lord, oh Lord! “Ah, my sleeping bag is with my other gear. Ah, in the jeep.”
“No sweat, Lieutenant,” said Trooper Rennie, pointing to the bag roughly folded on a wall niche. The outside was of resistant fabric; beneath were layers of microinsulation and a soft lining. This cover was torn, and from what Ruthven could see, the lining was as muddy as the floor. “There’s an extra in each of the squad bunkers. You and me won’t both be sleeping at the same time.”
Lyauty cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “keep your heads down, troopers. I’ll be thinking about you, believe me.”
He muttered something else as he stepped back into the rain. Ruthven thought he heard, “I’ve got half a mind …” but it might not have been that.
The bunker was cold and it stank. Sweat and rain water were cooling between Ruthven’s skin and his body armor, and he was sure he’d chafed blisters over his hipbones. Another rocket screamed through the sky; this time it hit close enough to shake dirt from the bunker ceiling.
Ruthven looked at his new subordinates. Their expressions were watchful, hostile, and in the case of Purchas completely dismissive.
He wished he were back on Nieuw Friesland. He wished he were anyplace else but here.
Lieutenant Henry Ruthven wished he were dead.
There was a knock on a door down the corridor. “El-Tee, is that you?” somebody called. Ruthven, his face blanking, stepped quickly around the bed to get to the door.
Muffled words answered unintelligibly. “Sorry,” said the familiar voice. “I’m looking for Lieutenant Ruthven and …”
“Axbird, is that you?” Ruthven said, stepping into the corridor. “Via, Sergeant, I thought you’d already shipped out! Come on in …I’ve got a bottle of something you’ll like.”
“Don’t mind if I do, El-Tee,” Axbird said. “Tell the truth, there isn’t a hell of a lot I don’t like, so long as it comes out of a bottle. Or a can …I’m democratic that way.”
E/1’s former platoon sergeant had gained weight …a lot of weight …since her injury, though that hadn’t been but …well, it’d been four months. Longer than Ruthven would’ve guessed without thinking about it. But still, a lot of weight.
The skin of her face was as smooth as burnished metal. Her eyes had the milky look of a molting snake’s, and she had an egg-shaped device clipped above each ear.
Ruthven backed into his room and rotated the chair for Axbird, primarily to call it to her attention. A buzzbomb had hit the side of the command car while she was inside with her faceshield raised. The jet from the warhead’s shaped charge had missed her …had missed everything, in fact; patched, the car was still in service with E/1 …but it’d vaporized iridium from the opposite bulkhead. That glowing cloud had bathed her face.
Axbird entered with the careful deliberation of a robot. She wasn’t using a cane, but she held her hands out at waist height as though preparing to catch herself. When she reached the chair, she put one hand on the back and tapped the device above her right ear. “How do you like them, El-Tee?” she said with a plastic smile. “I always wanted to have black eyes. Didn’t say they shouldn’t be lidar transceivers, though. That’s what you get for not specifying, hey?”
“You’re getting around very well, Axbird,” Ruthven lied. He squatted to rummage in the cabinet under his side table. There was only one glass, and the brandy was too good to pour into the plastic tumbler by the water pitcher.
“I’m still getting used to them,” Axbird said. “Dialing ‘em in, you know? They say I’ll get so I can tell the numbers, but right now I’m counting doorways.”
“There’s a linen closet in the middle of the corridor,” Ruthven said apologetically. He offered her the glass, wondering if she could see his expression. Probably not; probably never again.
Axbird drank the brandy without lowering the glass from her lips. “Via, I needed that,” she muttered, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She forced another grin and said, “How are you doing, sir? I heard you guys really got it in the neck.”
“It was bad enough,” Ruthven agreed carefully. He’d hesitated a moment, but he took the glass and refilled it for her. “Thank the Lord for Fire Central.”
“You can’t trust wogs,” Axbird said. Her voice rose. “We might as well kill’em all. Every fucking one of ’em!”
“There’s better local forces and worse ones, Sergeant,” Ruthven said with deliberate formality. “I’d say the Royalists here were pretty middling. They’d do well enough if they got any support from their own government.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” Axbird said. She was trembling; she held the glass in both hands to keep from spilling. “You trust your buddies and screw the rest, every one of ’em.”
A rebel sapper had gotten close enough to nail the command car with a buzzbomb because the Royalists holding that section of the perimeter had all been asleep. The car’s Automatic Defense System hadn’t been live within the compound; it wouldn’t have been safe with so many friendlies running around.
“Sorry, El-Tee,” Axbird said. She seemed to have gotten control of herself again. “Yeah, remember on Diderot where our so-called allies were trying to earn the bounties the Chartists were offering on a Slammer’s head?”
“Umm, that was before my time, Axbird,” Ruthven said, sitting on his bed. He held the brandy bottle but he didn’t think a drink would help him right now. “I joined on Atchafalaya, remember.”
“Oh, right,” said Axbird. She drank, guiding the glass to her lips with both hands. “Right, Diderot was back when I was a trooper.”
For a moment she was silent, her cloudy eyes staring into space. Ruthven wondered if he should say something …and wondered what he could say …but Axbird resumed: “They got a great spot lined up for me, El-Tee. The Colonel did, I mean: a condo right on the beach on San Carlos. It’s on Mainland because, well …until I get these dialed in better, you know.”
Her right hand gestured toward the lidar earpiece, then quickly closed again on her empty glass.
“And for maintenance at first, I don’t want to be out on my own island,” she continued in a tone of birdlike perkiness. “But I can be. I can buy my own bloody island, El-Tee, I’m on full pay for the rest of my life! That’ll run to a lotta brandy, don’t you know?”
“Here, I’ll fill that,” Ruthven said, leaning forward with the bottle. He took the glass in his own hand before he started to pour. “Are you from San Carlos originally, then?”
“Naw,” Axbird said. “I’m from Camside, sir. Haven’t been back since I enlisted, though, twelve years.”
She stared off into space. Her eyes moved normally; Ruthven wondered how much sight remained to them. Probably no more than being able to tell light from dark, though that’d be some help when she was on her own.
“I thought of going back, you know?” she said. “My pension’d make me a big deal on Camside, leastways unless things’ve changed a bloody great lot since I shipped out. But I thought, who do I know there? There’s nobody, nobody ever who’d understand what it means to be a Slammer. What do I care about them?”
Axbird drank convulsively, dribbling brandy from the corners of her mouth. She started to lower the glass and instead dropped it. It bounced once, then shattered.
“Oh Lord, sir!” she said, her voice rising into a wail. She lurched to her feet. Tears were streaming from beneath the lids of her ruined eyes. “What do I care about wogs, on Camside or any bloody place?”