“You’re welcome to fall on anyone you please, sir. But if you have unofficial ways of receiving information, it follows you must have unofficial ways of sending it, too. And after all, you’ve only my word for what happened.” Miles hefted his useless single boot and heaved it back into the bog.
Thoughtfully, Bonn watched it arc and splash down in a pool of brown meltwater. “A Vor lord’s word?”
“Means nothing, in these degenerate days.” Miles bared his teeth in a smile of sorts. “Ask anyone.”
“Huh.” Bonn shook his head, and started back toward the hovercab.
Next morning, Miles reported to the maintenance shed for the second half of the scat-cat retrieval job, cleaning all the mud-caked equipment. The sun was bright today, and had been up for hours, but Miles’s body knew it was only 0500. An hour into his task he’d begun to warm up, feel better, and get into the rhythm of the thing.
At 0630, the deadpan Lieutenant Bonn arrived and delivered two helpers unto Miles.
“Why, Corporal Olney. Tech Pattas. We meet again.” Miles smiled with acid cheer. The pair exchanged an uneasy look. Miles kept his demeanor absolutely even.
He then kept everyone, starting with himself, moving briskly. The conversation seemed to automatically limit itself to brief, wary technicalities. By the time Miles had to knock off and go report to Lieutenant Ahn, the scat-cat and most of the gear had been restored to better condition than Miles had received it.
He wished his two helpers, now driven to near-twitchiness by uncertainty, an earnest good-day. Well, if they hadn’t figured it out by now, they were hopeless. Miles wondered bitterly why he seemed to have so much better luck establishing rapport with bright men like Bonn. Cecil had been right; if Miles couldn’t figure out how to command the dull as well, he’d never make it as a Service officer. Not at Camp Permafrost, anyway.
The following morning, the third of his official punishment seven, Miles presented himself to Sergeant Neuve. The sergeant in turn presented Miles with a scat-cat full of equipment, a disk of the related equipment manuals, and the schedule for drain and culvert maintenance for Lazkowski Base. Clearly, it was to be another learning experience. Miles wondered if General Metzov had selected this task personally. He rather thought so.
On the bright side, he had his two helpers back again. This particular civil engineering task had apparently never fallen on Olney or Pattas before either, so they had no edge of superior knowledge with which to trip Miles. They had to stop and read the manuals first, too. Miles swotted procedures and directed operations with a good cheer that edged toward manic as his helpers became glummer.
There was, after all, a certain fascination to the clever drain-cleaning devices. And excitement. Flushing pipes with high pressure could produce some surprising effects. There were chemical compounds that had some quite military properties, such as the ability to dissolve anything instantly, including human flesh. In the following three days Miles learned more about the infrastructure of Lazkowski Base than he’d ever imagined wanting to know. He’d even calculated the point where one well-placed charge could bring the entire system down, if he ever decided he wanted to destroy the place.
On the sixth day, Miles and his team were sent to clear a blocked culvert out by the grubs’ practice fields. It was easy to spot. A silver sheet of water lapped the raised roadway on one side; on the other only a feeble trickle emerged to creep away down the bottom of a deep ditch.
Miles took a long telescoping pole from the back of their scat-cat, and probed down into the water’s opaque surface. Nothing seemed to be blocking the flooded end of the culvert. Whatever it was must be jammed farther in. Joy. He handed the pole back to Pattas and wandered over to the other side of the road, staring down into the ditch. The culvert, he noted, was something over half a meter in diameter. “Give me a light,” he said to Olney.
He shucked his parka and tossed it into the scat-cat, and scrambled down into the ditch. He aimed his light into the aperture. The culvert evidently curved slightly; he couldn’t see a damned thing. He sighed, considering the relative width of Olney’s shoulders, Pattas’s, and his own.
Could there be anything further from ship duty than this? The closest he’d come to anything of the sort was spelunking in the Dendarii Mountains. Earth and water, versus fire and air. He seemed to be building up a helluva supply of yin; the balancing yang to come had better be stupendous.
He gripped the light tighter, dropped to hands and knees, and shinnied into the drain.
The icy water soaked the trouser knees of his black fatigues. The effect was numbing. Water leaked around the top of one of his gloves, feeling like a knife blade on his wrist.
Miles meditated briefly on Olney and Pattas. They had developed a cool, reasonably efficient working relationship over the last few days, based, Miles had no illusions, on a fear of God instilled in the two men by Miles’s good angel Lieutenant Bonn. How did Bonn accomplish that quiet authority, anyway? He had to figure that one out. Bonn was good at his job, for starters, but what else?
Miles scraped around the curve, shone his light on the clot, and recoiled, swearing. He paused a moment to regain control of his breath, examined the blockage more closely, and backed out.
He stood up in the bottom of the ditch, straightening his spine vertebra by creaking vertebra. Corporal Olney stuck his head over the road’s railing, above. “What’s in there, Ensign?”
Miles grinned up at him, still catching his breath. “Pair of boots.”
“That’s all?” said Olney.
“Their owner is still wearing ’em.”
Miles called the base surgeon on the scat-cat’s comlink, urgently requesting his presence with forensic kit, body bag, and medical transport. Miles and his crew then blocked the upper end of the drain with a plastic signboard forcibly borrowed from the empty practice field beyond. Now so thoroughly wet and cold that it made no difference, Miles crawled back into the culvert to attach a rope to the anonymous booted ankles. When he emerged, the surgeon and his corpsman had arrived.
The surgeon, a big, balding man, peered dubiously into the drainpipe. “What could you see in there, Ensign? What happened?”
“I can’t see anything from this end but legs, sir,” Miles reported. “He’s got himself wedged in there but good. Drain crud up above him, I’d guess. We’ll have to see what spills out with him.”
“What the hell was he doing in there?” The surgeon scratched his freckled scalp.
Miles spread his hands. “Seems a peculiar way to commit suicide. Slow and chancy, as far as drowning yourself goes.”
The surgeon raised his eyebrows in agreement. Miles and the surgeon had to lend their weight on the rope to Olney, Pattas, and the corpsman before the stiff form wedged in the culvert began to scrape free.
“He’s stuck,” observed the corpsman, grunting. The body jerked out at last with a gush of dirty water. Pattas and Olney stared from a distance; Miles glued himself to the surgeon’s shoulder. The corpse, dressed in sodden black fatigues, was waxy and blue. His collar tabs and the contents of his pockets identified him as a private from Supply. His body bore no obvious wounds, but for bruised shoulders and scraped hands.
The surgeon spoke clipped, negative preliminaries into his recorder. No broken bones, no nerve disruptor blisters. Preliminary hypothesis, death from drowning or hypothermia or both, within the last twelve hours. He flipped off his recorder and added over his shoulder, “I’ll be able to tell for sure when we get him laid out back at the infirmary.”