As he had feared, there was a draped shape that he couldn’t identify as any kind of military vehicle at all.
“No, sir!” Boland protested, as Daivid swept off the tarpaulin.
The lieutenant stared down at the machine revealed. It took his brain a moment to slot into place what he was seeing, and the last place he had seen it. His heart sank, and he sat down on the nearest packing crate.
“Oh, no. Not the captain’s flitter!”
“I can explain, sir,” the chief said hastily. “I mean, they were going to set us here for three days without any transportation except the dragons, sir, and we were going to have all this time to kill.… Civilians don’t want us driving tanks into town, sir. Remember, we’re supposed to keep a low profile?”
Daivid regarded him bleakly. “Which we can do with a stolen flitter? What did you plan to say when Harawe noticed it was missing?”
“Oh, he won’t be using it for a long time, sir! He’s on his way to the battle zone. By the time he’s ready to go on leave, we’ll be back on board. I can … break in the engine for him,” Boland added hopefully.
“I’m sure he wanted to break it in himself,” Daivid sighed. “I’ll try to explain it when we’re back aboard, once we’ve completed the mission and everything’s gone well, but it does not leave this hold. Do you understand?”
Boland echoed the sigh. “Aye, sir.”
“Let’s clear a space,” Daivid said, looking around at the others. “What are you all doing, eavesdropping on a private conversation? Come on, I’m hungry!”
O O O
“This is pretty good,” Lin said, around a mouthful of mixed noodles, proteinoids, and vegetables. “What did the label say?”
“Chop suey,” Meyers read off the label. “Very nice.”
“The fellow in Supply said it was the newest meal in the system,” Daivid said, slurping down pleasantly salty bean sprouts and bamboo shoots. Fluffy golden and white grains provided a bed that soaked up the brown sauce.
“Millet,” Borden identified the round grains. “Rice. Barley. High protein, high lysine, and low glycemic index.”
“It’s good. I could eat this again.”
“Me, too,” Streb said. “And I don’t even like vegetables.”
Military Entrees, Rapid Deployment, had a bad name among troopers on long assignments. Whereas the square black plastic packages took only ten minutes to reconstitute, heat, cool, and serve a complex and nutritious meal suitable for lunch or dinner, the menu choices were frequently less than edible. Somewhere along the line it had become more important to the manufacturers that the MERDs packed well and kept, often for years at a time, than to make sure the end user, a month or a decade after it was made, ate it or threw it away and subsisted on local vegetation instead. Students of ancient language often brought up the similarity of the acronym to an ancient Terran swear word, and commented that it couldn’t be coincidental. A great deal of political pressure by senators whose constituents sent them samples of MERDs had caused a shakeup in the last few years, resulting in food that was not only recognizable, but tasty. Daivid was fond of the vindaloo meal, a hot and spicy entree, and teriyaki, a sweet dish. They were also great combined, a tactic troopers frequently used in the field when the available varieties began to pall.
All of the protein-heavy entrees came with a healthy serving of a low-glycemic carbohydrate that would sustain a trooper through a long day’s fighting. To satisfy a military that comprised hundreds of cultures and many different dietary needs, the proteins were vegetable-based, but still fulfilled all the nutritional needs of carnivores. An adjustment before deployment pureed the contents for the use of such creatures as corlists, who subsisted on plankton in their home environment. Aaooorru signalled his approval of the meal with eight thumbs up. Hot and cold drinks were also provided. The hot containers, which could be set to dissolve one of a variety of tablets that reconstituted as one’s choice of teas, coffees, or grain beverages, drew water from the surrounding atmosphere, purifying it if necessary. The cold beverage container did the same thing with fruit juice. A side packet featured utensils, spices, condiments, sweetener, creamer, hot sauce, nicotine and theobromine pows, and an after-dinner mint, all of which, except for the utensils, could be combined in a pinch to produce a palatable soup. Breakfast entrees were in a smaller, green plastic container.
When the MERD bowls had been scraped empty, two of the troopers hauled them outside into the recycling area. Thielind led the way with a field light. He had spotted an external access hatch that would enable them to use Wingle World’s system.
“He knows we’re here,” the ensign had reasoned. “Instead of making us pack it out, we can get rid of our trash here. Does it really matter if it’s recycled on board ship or down here?”
Daivid removed a deck of cards from his duffle and began shuffling it.
“So, who wants to try their luck?” he asked, invitingly.
“I’m on second patrol,” Ewanowski said. “I’ll watch a show. Anyone else?”
“I’m with you,” Boland said. His face still went red every time he glanced at Wolfe. “How about Creeptown: The Ravaging? I hear it’s got lots of blood and gore.”
“I’ll try Lady Luck,” Jones said.
“Me, too,” Lin said. “I don’t feel like sitting still, but I don’t want to go out in that snow. What’s it look like?”
Borden consulted her infopad, which was tied to the telemetry systems of the shuttle. “Over five centimeters already. The atmospheric pressure is dropping. It will probably snow all night.”
“Slag,” Vacarole spat. “My people live in a desert. I never slept in ice until I joined the service. I’m in.”
“Me, too,” Nuu Myi said, sitting down at the makeshift table. She held an amulet that hung on a string around her neck under her uniform. “Good luck to us all. Amen.”
O O O
“Do you know how much it suck being a clone?” Adri’Leta asked bitterly, as the cards went around again. She had lost her marker to Daivid in the eighth hand. With good grace, she didn’t wait to be prompted to pay it off. In fact, it seemed as though she had been dying to tell her story. “Everybody in de galaxy expect you to know everything your predecessors know. Bull. When Fifteen died, I wasn’t born yet.”
“Do you get anything for being next in line?” Lin asked. “An inheritance?”
The trooper tossed back her thick red hair and blew out her lips in disgust. “Hah! No. I’m more like a thing den a person. I’m a legacy. Dere’s a foundation to maintain the genetic pattern. It don’t matter what I look like, ‘cause I don’t look nothing like de ones who came before. Dere’s so many genes in de cells, de variations just happen, you know? When I die someone supposed to send a piece of me back to dem. Dat someone get a reward. Dey don’t care what I do, or what happen to me, so long as de genes of Adrian and Leta Krumbacher keep marching through de galaxy.” She appealed to the others at the table. “Do me a favor? Don’t do it. Just bury me or burn my body. I think it too stupid to go on. I always say I joined the service to die. Why didn’t dey just have children de old way?”
Daivid cleared his throat. He handed the cards over to Jones to shuffle. “Well, you know the regs, trooper. If your wishes are set down in your official records the service has to follow them. After all, the foundation’s not enlisted in the space service, you are. They will follow your instructions for the disposal of your remains, if it’s at all possible, along with any religious service you want performed. I’ll follow your instructions.”
The clone’s face brightened. “Really? No one ever told me dat. De brass just see de number after my name, and end of discussion. You’re de first one who say he’d do what I want. Thank you, sir. I follow you anywhere if you promise dat. Twenty bid.”
“Well,” Daivid said, with some embarrassment, “no one knows better than me, and Lin,” he included the senior chief in his nod, “about having to deal with being descended from a notable family
. But the law is on your side, I’m almost certain. See and raise thirty more.”
Borden cleared her throat as she arranged her cards precisely in her long fingers. “You are correct, sir. Except for ancephalic genetic simulacra who were engendered for organ replacement, and it still happens, in spite of the penalties, the wishes of the living being supersede those of a nonliving entity, such as a corporation. Raise sixty.”
Daivid threw a hand toward Borden. “There you have it. I wouldn’t argue with her.”
“Fifty more,” Lin said.
“And twenty,” Vacarole said, tossing in the cash. Nuu Myi dropped out.
The others waited. Daivid glanced at his cards. Three threes was a medium-good hand. The others were bidding pretty heavily. The odds were against all of them having hands superior to his. They couldn’t be so bored that they were risking all of their poker money on a single game when they had three weeks or more ahead of them to kill. They were setting him up to lose! They had obviously arranged among themselves to up the bidding until he had to drop out or risk a marker. We’ll show ’em, won’t we, Lady Luck? he thought.
But Lady Luck must have wanted him to lose a marker that night. Lin won the hand, but only by a squeak, three fours against his threes. The hands that followed were little better, and sometimes much worse. Even when he shuffled or dealt the cards himself, he got hands that were mediocre at best. And when the others noticed he was bidding a hot hand, they dropped out. They supported the bidding on one another’s hands, forcing him to drop out or pay too much to call poor hands. With a sigh, he resigned himself to fate.
Vacarole clutched his cards, spitting out a spent nicotine pow onto the floor. “Two hundred,” he said, with a gleam in his eye. The others seemed to hold their breath as Daivid looked over his bank. With a blank expression, he tossed in a marker. The bidding got more hot and heavy. Daivid’s hand was good, but Vacarole held onto his hand with tight fingers. He might win one of the lieutenant’s secrets, and he was going to go to the bitter end. Daivid was afraid his hand, good but not great, wouldn’t beat it. He felt fortune deserting him away. He tried to believe in it, but he had a vision of the shining lady in green lace patting him on the head.
Not every hand’s a winner, she whispered to him, before settling down on Vacarole’s lap with an arm around his head, playing with the dark hair that curled over his ears. When the bidding returned to Wolfe, he threw in his hand. “Fold,” he said.
The big man clapped his hands together in pleasure. He pulled the chips toward him, and held up the marker. The others applauded.
“I didn’t think it would be you, my friend,” the Cymraeg chuckled. “What’ll you ask him?”
“Ask him, why did you join the army?” Adri’Leta suggested.
“Where’d you get that pistol?” Jones asked.
“No, I want to know how rich his family is,” Streb said.
“Have you ever killed anyone yourself?” Nuu Myi asked, her straight black brows pulled intently down over her eyes. “I mean, not in the line of duty?”
“Does your family really knock off rivals like targets on a wall?” Meyers asked, only half kidding.
Vacarole nodded his head firmly, a question finally taken shape in his mind. He opened his mouth to speak. Quick as lightning, Lin leaned over the table, threw three hundred credits onto his stake, and grabbed the plastic marker.
“Hey, chief!” Vacarole exclaimed.
Lin paid no attention. She held out the marker to Wolfe and stared him straight in the eye.
“What’s the card stuck to your chest?”
“What?” Daivid asked, feeling as though he’d been shot. His hands trembled suddenly, and he pressed them hard into the tabletop.
Lin kept the intent stare drilling through him. “We all saw it when we suited up during the pirate raid. I’ve never seen it before. You know we’ve been through everything else you own, so you have been pretty careful about keeping it where we can’t find it. It’s got to be something special, and my curiosity is killing me. What is it?”
Daivid’s mouth was dry as salt. He’d forgotten all about the database in the heat of battle, and since no one had mentioned seeing it at the time when he had stripped off to put on his websuit, he had assumed no one had noticed it. He took a swig of liquor, which burned his throat. “Is that … what you’re asking me? It’s really Vacarole’s chip. My debt is to him.”
Lin shifted the stare to the trooper, who shrugged. “What she said, lieutenant. I think I’d like to know, too. I mean, it’s kind of strange. You know, people usually just keep valuable stuff in a safe.”
Daivid flattened his hands out on the table and pushed himself upright. “Well, I won’t tell you what that card is. It’s personal. And if anyone tries to meddle with it, I’ll show you some of what I showed today. You leave it the hell alone.”
“You can’t say that,” Lin argued, her eyes alight. “You swore on your honor that if we won one of your markers you would tell the truth. That was the grounds you gave us for trusting you with our own histories, and you can tell how painful it’s been for some of us to talk about those. We have told you the truth. I demand that same truth from you.”
“All right,” Daivid said, knowing he’d just been strangled with his own tongue. He slumped into his seat. With unsteady fingers he undid the front of his tunic and peeled the card loose. His hand was extremely reluctant to let go of it, but he set it down on the table. “There it is. My father gave it to me before I left home. He wouldn’t let me leave unless I took it. It’s a database of … some favors that people owe my family.”
“Holy crap,” Boland breathed, staring at the little card. “That’s … power. Big power. You can get people to do anything you want. I mean, anything! How’s it work?”
“I don’t use it,” Daivid said. “I’ve been in the service for three years, and I have never called in a single favor. I don’t want to use it.”
“You’re kidding!” Streb said, his fingers arching as he gazed at the database. “I wouldn’t be able to resist it. Do you know how easy you can make life with that?”
“It’s not easy,” Daivid retorted, regarding Streb with horror. “You don’t know what those favors cost. Sometimes just a person’s pride, but sometimes the lives of some very good people are lost.”
“We won’t mess with it,” Lin hurried to assure him. “But you’ve got to realize that you’ve already lived with us a month and we thought we’d scoped out all we could discover about you. You’re a surprise, sir. That’s a compliment.”
“Holy crap,” Boland repeated, his voice gravelly. “You better put that away, sir. You don’t want that falling into the hands of unscrupulous people.”
Daivid gave him a wry grin. “There are those who would lump all of you into that category, chief.”
“Back at you, sir. You’re not with us just because they want you to reform us. But we do have scruples. They just might not align perfectly with the rigid mores of the jerks who’ve messed up our lives. They’re a whole more like yours. You believe in debts of honor. So do we. Ask those politicians if they’ve ever let anyone down who really needs them.”
O O O
Daivid lay on the temperature-control mattress in his tent staring at the inflated fabric shell listening to the hissing of heavy snowflakes hitting the roof and the crunch-crunch-crunch of the feet of the troopers on perimeter watch. Borden warned him winter was going to be very intense, since it was so short, and the axial tilt of the planet was as extreme as it was. They were going to be up to their bellies in snow.
He shifted and crossed his arms behind his head. Boland’s little speech had touched him. He hoped he was getting through to the Cockroaches. He wanted them to believe he supported them, that if he ever had to lead them into a dangerous situation they should know they could count on him to get them out again. This unwanted unit, which had proved over and over again that appearances could be deceiving, was not unwanted by him. He hoped that the ev
ening’s revelations had proved they were opening up to him. He had never felt so vulnerable in his life.
A twanging sound and a muttered curse interrupted his meditations. He wrapped a blanket around himself, stuck his feet into his boots, and pushed open the self-sealing tent flap. The sentry, a wavering outline against the acid yellow street light, shifted slightly as if turning to look at him.
“It’s the streetcleaning ’bots,” the ghostly figure said. Daivid recognized the voice as Meyers’s. “We’re on their assigned route, so they keep running into our protective perimeter, sir.”
Daivid came closer to see a low rectangular mechanical with its front scoop stubbornly pressed against the invisible energy barrier. Meyers pointed around the plascrete square at three other ’bots also determined to push their way through the unseen obstruction. A six-limbed shadow that had to be Haalten regarded one of them. Daivid couldn’t see the third sentry, who was probably behind the shuttle.
“Well, regulations say we have to leave that in place,” Daivid shrugged. “If we open it up every time a cleaner comes through, what good is it?”
“If we don’t do something it’ll go on all night, sir. It sets off the alarm in my helmet, and on board the shuttle. Can’t we set up a signal or a beacon or something that tells them to ignore this zone until we leave?”
Daivid snapped his fingers. “Good idea, Meyers. I’ll get Thielind.”
The ensign’s tent was on the right side of Daivid’s, opposite Borden’s shelter. He popped out into the winter night to see the problem.
“Poor little things!” the ensign exclaimed. “Sure, sir! Piece of pastry. They look like the bigger version of the ones in our barracks. If they respond to the same set of signals as the ’bots the service buys, no problem. The encoding’s password protected,” he explained as Meyers opened the perimeter. “Come here, little one.” He popped open the back hatch and started to work the controls “… But you can program it by using the factory specs, which no one ever resets.”
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