by David Drake
“Like this?” Vicki said softly. “Just squeeze it and… ?”
Jolober put his hand over the Doll's and lifted the knife away between thumb and forefinger. When she loosed the hilt, the knife collapsed again into a short baton.
He squeezed—extended the blade—released it again— and slipped the knife back into its concealed sheath.
“You see, darling,” Jolober said, “the plastic's been keyed to my body. Nobody else should be able to get the blade to form.”
“I'd never use it against you,” Vicki said. Her face was calm, and there was no defensiveness in her simple response.
Jolober smiled. “Of course, dearest; but there was a manufacturing flaw or you wouldn't be able to do that.”
Vicki leaned over and kissed the port commandant's lips, then bent liquidly and kissed him again. “I told you,” she said as she straightened with a grin, “I'm a part of you.”
“And believe me,” said Jolober, rolling onto his back to cinch up his short-legged trousers. “You're not a part of me I intend to lose.”
He rocked upright and gripped the handles of his chair.
Vicki slipped off the bed and braced the little vehicle with a hand on the saddle and the edge of one foot on the skirt. The help wasn't necessary—the chair's weight anchored it satisfactorily, so long as Jolober mounted swiftly and smoothly. But it was helpful, and it was the sort of personal attention that was as important as sex in convincing Horace Jolober that someone really cared’—could care—for him.
“You'll do your duty, though,” Vicki said. “And I wouldn't want you not to.”
Jolober laughed as he settled himself and switched on his fans. He felt enormous relief now that he had proved beyond doubt—he was sure of that—how much he loved Vicki. He'd calmed her down, and that meant he was calm again, too.
“Sure I'll do my job,” he said as he smiled at the Doll. “That doesn't mean you and me‘ll have a problem. Wait and see.”
Vicki smiled also, but she shook her head in what Jolober thought was amused resignation. Her hairless body was too perfect to be flesh, and the skin's red pigment gave the Doll the look of a statue in blushing marble.
“Via, but you're lovely,” Jolober murmured as the realization struck him anew.
“Come back soon,” she said easily.
“Soon as I can,” the commandant agreed as he lifted his chair and turned toward the door. “But like you say, I've got a job to do.”
If the government of Placida wouldn't give him the support he needed, by the Lord! he'd work through the mercenaries themselves.
Though his belly went cold and his stumps tingled as he realized he would again be approaching the tanks which had crippled him.
The street had the sharp edge which invariably marked it immediately after a unit rotated to Paradise Port out of combat. The troops weren't looking for sex or intoxicants— though most of them would have claimed they were.
They were looking for life. Paradise Port offered them things they thought equaled life, and the contrast between reality and hope led to anger and black despair. Only after a few days of stunning themselves with the offered pleasures did the soldiers on leave recognize another contrast: Paradise Port might not be all they'd hoped, but it was a lot better than the muck and ravening hell of combat.
Jolober slid down the street at a walking pace. Some of the soldiers on the pavement with him offered ragged salutes to the commandant's glittering uniform. He returned them sharply, a habit he had ingrained in himself after he took charge here.
Mercenary units didn't put much emphasis on saluting and similar rear-echelon forms of discipline. An officer with the reputation of being a tight-assed martinet in bivouac was likely to get hit from behind the next time he led his troops into combat.
There were regular armies on most planets—Colonel Wayne was an example—to whom actual fighting was an aberration. Economics or a simple desire for action led many planetary soldiers into mercenary units… where the old habits of saluting and snapping to attention surfaced when the men were drunk and depressed.
Hampton's Legion hadn't been any more interested in saluting than the Slammers were. Jolober had sharpened his technique here because it helped a few of the men he served feel more at home—when they were very far from home.
A patrol jeep passed, idling slowly through the pedestrians. Sergeant Stecher waved, somewhat uncertainly.
Jolober waved back, smiling toward his subordinate but angry at himself. He keyed his implant and said “Central, I'm back in business now, but I'm headed for the Refit Area to see Captain van Zuyle. Let anything wait that can till I'm back.”
He should have cleared with his switchboard as soon as he'd… calmed Vicki down. Here there'd been a crisis, and as soon as it was over he'd disappeared. Must've made his patrolmen very cursed nervous, and it was sheer sloppiness that he'd let the situation go on beyond what it had to. It was his job to make things simple for the people in Paradise Port, both his staff and the port's clientele.
Maybe even for the owners of the brothel: but it was going to have to be simple on Horace Jolober's terms.
At the gate, a tank was helping the crew repairing damage. The men wore khaki coveralls—Slammers rushed from the Refit Area as soon as van Zuyle, the officer in charge there, heard what had happened. The faster you hid the evidence of a problem, the easier it was to claim the problem had never existed.
And it was to everybody's advantage that problems never exist.
Paradise Port was surrounded with a high barrier of woven plastic to keep soldiers who were drunk out of their minds from crawling into the volcanic wasteland and hurting themselves. The fence was tougher than it looked—it looked as insubstantial as moonbeams—but it had never been intended to stop vehicles.
The gate to the bivouac areas outside Paradise Port had a sturdy framework and hung between posts of solid steel. The lead tank had been wide enough to snap both gateposts off at the ground. The gate, framework and webbing, was strewn in fragments for a hundred meters along the course it had been dragged between the pavement and the tank's skirt.
As Jolober approached, he felt his self-image shrink by comparison to surroundings which included a hundred-and-seventy-ton fighting vehicle. The tank was backed against one edge of the gateway.
With a huge clang! the vehicle set another steel post, blasting it home with the apparatus used in combat to punch explosive charges into deep bunkers. The ram vaporized osmium wire with a jolt of high voltage, transmitting the shock waves to the piston head through a column of fluid. It banged home the replacement post without difficulty, even though the “ground” was a sheet of volcanic rock.
The pavement rippled beneath Jolober, and the un-damped harmonics of the quivering post were a scream that could be heard for kilometers. Jolober pretended it didn't affect him as he moved past the tank. He was praying that the driver was watching his side screens—or listening to the ground guide—as the tank trembled away from the task it had completed.
One of the Slammers’ noncoms gestured reassuringly toward Jolober. His lips moved as he talked into his commo helmet. The port commandant could hear nothing over the howl of the drive fans and prolonged grace notes from the vibrating post, but the tank halted where it was until he had moved past it.
A glance over his shoulder showed Jolober the tank backing into position to set the other post. It looked like a great tortoise, ancient and implacable, maneuvering to lay a clutch of eggs.
Paradise Port was for pleasure only. The barracks housing the soldiers and the sheds to store and repair their equipment were located outside the fenced perimeter. The buildings were prefabs extruded from a dun plastic less colorful than the ruddy lava fields on which they were set.
The bivouac site occupied by Hammer's line companies in rotation was unusual in that the large leveled area contained only four barracks buildings and a pair of broad repair sheds. Parked vehicles filled the remainder of the space.
&nb
sp; At the entrance to the bivouac area-waited a guard shack. The soldier who stepped from it wore body armor over her khakis. Her submachine gun was slung, but her tone was businesslike as she said, “Commandant Jolober? Captain van Zuyle's on his way to meet you right now.”
Hold right here till you ‘re invited in, Jolober translated mentally with a frown.
But he couldn't blame the Slammers’ officer for wanting to assert his authority here over that of Horace Jolober, whose writ ran only to the perimeter of Paradise Port. Van Zuyle just wanted to prove that his troopers would be punished only with his assent—or by agreement reached with authorities higher than the port commandant.
There was a flagpole attached to a gable of one of the barracks. A tall officer strode from the door at that end and hopped into the driver's seat of the jeep parked there. Another khaki-clad soldier stuck her head out the door and called something, but the officer pretended not to hear. He spun his vehicle in an angry circle, rubbing its lowside skirts, and gunned it toward the entrance.
Jolober had met van Zuyle only once. The most memorable thing about the Slammers’ officer was his anger— caused by fate, but directed at whatever was nearest to hand. He'd been heading a company of combat cars when the blower ahead of his took a direct hit.
Van Zuyle didn't have his face shield down because the shield made him and most troopers feel as though they'd stuck their heads in a bucket. And that dissociation which is mental rather than sensory, could get you killed in combat.
The shield would have darkened instantly to block the sleet of actinics from the exploding combat car. Without its protection… well, the surgeons could rebuild his face, with only a slight stiffness to betray the injuries. Van Zuyle could even see—by daylight or under strong illumination.
There just wasn't any way he'd ever be fit to lead a line unit again—and he was very angry about it.
Commandant Horace Jolober could understand how van Zuyle felt—better, perhaps, than anyone else on the planet could. It didn't make his own job easier, though.
“A pleasure to see you again, Commandant,” van Zuyle lied brusquely as he skidded the jeep to a halt, passenger seat beside Jolober. “If you—”
Jolober smiled grimly as the Slammers’ officer saw— and remembered—that the port commandant was legless and couldn't seat himself in a jeep on his air-cushion chair.
“No problem,” said Jolober, gripping the jeep's side and the seat back. He lifted himself aboard the larger vehicle with an athletic twist that settled him facing front.
Of course, the maneuver was easier than it would have been if his legs were there to get in the way.
“Ah, your—” van Zuyle said, pointing toward the chair. Close up, Jolober could see a line of demarcation in his scalp. The implanted hair at the front had aged less than the gray-speckled portion which hadn't been replaced.
“No problem, Captain,” Jolober repeated. He anchored his left arm around the driver's seat, gripped one of his chair's handles with the right hand, and jerked the chair into the bench seat in the rear of the open vehicle.
The jeep lurched: the air-cushion chair weighed almost as much as Jolober did without it, and he was a big man. “You learn tricks when you have to,” he said evenly as he met the eyes of the Slammers’ officer.
And your arms get very strong when they do a lot of the work your legs used to—but he didn't say that.
“My office?” van Zuyle asked sharply.
“Is that as busy as it looks?” Jolober replied, nodding toward the door where a soldier still waited impatiently for van Zuyle to return.
“Commandant, I've had a tank company come in shot to hell” van Zuyle said in a voice that built toward fury. “Three vehicles are combat lossed and have to be stripped— and the other vehicles need more than routine maintenance—and half the personnel are on medic's release. Or dead. I'm trying to run a refit area with what's left, my staff of twenty-three, and the trainee replacements Central sent over who haven't ridden in a panzer, much less pulled maintenance on one. And you ask if I've got time to waste on you?”
“No, Captain, I didn't ask that,” Jolober said with the threatening lack of emotion which came naturally to a man who had all his life been bigger and stronger than most of those around him. “Find a spot where we won't be disturbed, and we'll park there.”
When the Slammers’ officer frowned, Jolober added, “I'm not here about Captain Hoffritz, Captain.”
“Yeah,” sighed van Zuyle as he lifted the jeep and steered it sedately toward a niche formed between the iridium carcasses of a pair of tanks. “We're repairing things right now—” he thumbed in the direction of the gate “—and any other costs'll go on the damage chit; but I guess I owe you an apology besides.”
“Life's a dangerous place,” Jolober said easily. Van Zuyle wasn't stupid. He'd modified his behavior as soon as he was reminded of the incident an hour before—and the leverage it gave the port commandant if he wanted to push it.
Van Zuyle halted them in the gray shade that brought sweat to Jolober's forehead. The tanks smelled of hot metal because some of their vaporized armor had settled back onto the hulls as fine dust. Slight breezes shifted it to the nostrils of the men nearby, a memory of the blasts in which it had formed.
Plastics had burned also, leaving varied pungencies which could not conceal the odor of cooked human flesh.
The other smells of destruction were unpleasant. That last brought Jolober memories of his legs exploding in brilliant coruscance. His body tingled and sweated, and his mouth said to the Slammers’ officer, “Your men are being cheated and misused every time they come to Paradise Port, Captain. For political reasons, my supervisors won't let me make the necessary changes. If the mercenary units serviced by Paradise Port unite and demand the changes, the government will be forced into the proper decision.”
“Seems to me,” said van Zuyle with his perfectly curved eyebrows narrowing, “that somebody could claim you were acting against your employers just now.”
“Placida hired me to run a liberty port,” said Jolober evenly. He was being accused of the worst crime a mercenary could commit: conduct that would allow his employers to forfeit his unit's bond and brand them forever as unemployable contract-breakers.
Jolober no longer was a mercenary in that sense; but he understood van Zuyle's idiom, and it was in that idiom that he continued, “Placida wants and needs the troops she hires to be sent back into action in the best shape possible. Her survival depends on it. If I let Red Ike run this place to his benefit and not to Placida's, then I'm not doing my job.”
“All right,” said van Zuyle. “What's Ike got on?”
A truck, swaying with its load of cheering troopers, pulled past on its way to the gate of Paradise Port. The man in the passenger's seat of the cab was Tad Hoffritz, his face a knife-edge of expectation.
“Sure, they need refit as bad as the hardware does,” muttered van Zuyle as he watched the soldiers on leave with longing eyes. “Three days straight leave, half days after that when they've pulled their duty. But Via! I could use ‘em here, especially with the tanks that're such a bitch if you're not used to crawling around in ‘em.”
His face hardened again. “Go on,” he said, angry that Jolober knew how much he wanted to be one of the men on that truck instead of having to run a rear-echelon installation.
“Red Ike owns the Dolls like so many shots of liquor,” Jolober said. He never wanted a combat job again—the thought terrified him, the noise and flash and the smell of his body burning. “He's using them to strip your men, everybody's men, in the shortest possible time,” he continued in a voice out of a universe distant from his mind. “The games are honest—that's my job—but the men play when they're stoned, and they play with a Doll on their arm begging them to go on until they've got nothing left. How many of those boys—” he gestured to where the truck, now long past, had been “—are going to last three days?”
“We give ‘em advances when
they're tapped out,” said van Zuyle with a different kind of frown. “Enough to last their half days—if they're getting their jobs done here. Works out pretty good.”
“As a matter of fact,” he went on, “the whole business works out pretty good. I never saw a soldier's dive without shills and B-girls. Don't guess you ever did either, Commandant. Maybe they're better at it, the Dolls, but all that means is that I get my labor force back quicker—and Hammer gets his tanks back in line with that much fewer problems.”
“The Dolls—” Jolober began.
“The Dolls are clean,” shouted van Zuyle in a voice like edged steel. “They give full value for what you pay ‘em. And I've never had a Doll knife one of my guys—which is a cursed sight better'n any place I been staffed with human whores!”
“No,” said Jolober, his strength a bulwark against the Slammer's anger. “But you've had your men knife or strangle Dolls, haven't you? All the units here've had incidents of that sort. Do you think it's chance?”
Van Zuyle blinked. “I think it's a cost of doing business,” he said, speaking mildly because the question had surprised him.
“No,” Jolober retorted. “It's a major profit center for Red Ike. The Dolls don't just drop soldiers when they've stripped them. They humiliate the men, taunt them… and when one of these kids breaks and chokes the life out of the bitch who's goading him, Red Ike pockets the damage assessment. And it comes out of money Placida would otherwise have paid Hammer's Slammers.”
The Slammers’ officer began to laugh. It was Jolober's turn to blink in surprise.
“Sure,” van Zuyle said, “androids like that cost a lot more'n gateposts or a few meters of fencing, you bet.”