by David Weber
She watched him leave, then turned back to face Gresham, and her mind raced while she tried to think of any explanation for Ahearn's bizarre behavior. None came to mind, and so she simply stood there, hands clasped behind her, expression politely attentive, and waited.
Gresham studied her with those odd eyes of his for what seemed like a very long time, although she knew it wasn't. She had the distinct impression that he was waiting for her to show some indication of curiosity or uncertainty. Which, of course, she wasn't about to do.
Finally, the civilian-garbed colonel smiled, like a man conceding some contest, and climbed out of the chair in which he'd been sitting. He crossed to stand behind Ahearn's desk, but he didn't seat himself in the captain's chair. Instead, he simply stood there, half-turned away from Alicia to gaze out the window at the parade ground baking under the afternoon heat of the Jepperson System's G-0 primary.
"Tell me, Staff Sergeant," he said after a moment, "how do you like being a Marine?"
"Excuse me, Sir?"
Gresham smiled again at Alicia's courteously blank tone.
"Actually, that wasn't a trick question," he told her. "I'm serious. How do you like being a Marine, now that you've had a couple of years experience?"
"I like it," she said after moment. "I like it a lot."
"Why?"
"Sir, that's a pretty sweeping question," she said slowly.
"I know." He turned back from the window to face her fully and folded his arms across his chest as he leaned back against the office wall. "It's meant to be a tough one, too," he added.
Well, it's certainly succeeded, then, she thought tartly. Just who is this yahoo, and why is he trying to screw with my head?
"Sir," she said finally, "a Marine is what I've always wanted to be. Partly, I suppose, because of my grandfather's example. Partly because of the challenge. But mostly? Mostly because standing up to defend the things you believe in is what adults do."
" 'The things you believe in,' " Gresham repeated softly. In the wrong tone of voice, he might have sounded as if he were mocking her, but instead, it came out musingly. Then he cocked his head.
"And just what do you believe in?" he asked.
Another of those deliberately "tough" questions of his, I suppose, she snorted mentally.
"If you want the simple form," she told him, allowing just a hint of testiness into her own voice, "I believe in what the Empire stands for. I believe in the individual rights imperial citizens are guaranteed, in the prosperity and standard of living the Empire offers its citizens—the educational opportunities, the medical support, all of it. And I believe in my responsibility to defend the society that gives me and all of my fellow citizens those things." She shrugged. "I guess that sounds pretty simplistic, but that's the bottom line for me."
"And killing other people to do that doesn't bother you?" Gresham's voice was completely neutral, as was his expression, but Alicia bridled inside anyway.
"I don't love combat for the adrenaline rush of blowing somebody else away, if that's what you mean, Sir," she said just a bit more coldly than she'd actually intend to.
"That wasn't what I asked," he replied. "I asked if killing other people to do your duty bothered you." He waved his right hand gently in the air in front of him. "I think it's a fair question, given the number of confirmed kills you racked up on Gyangtse alone."
Alicia's curiosity sharpened at the evidence of just how much this Gresham knew about her. She supposed it shouldn't really have been a surprise. The numbers were part of her official record, and it was only logical for him to have done his homework before he descended from Mount Olympus to interrogate her. Whyever he was doing that.
"All right, Sir," she said, deciding to answer his "fair question" as honestly as possible, "yes. It bothers me. I don't like it very much, in fact. But it comes with doing the job I chose, doesn't it? And I knew going in that it would. I guess I'm enough my father's daughter —" she allowed a hint of challenge into her green eyes, pushing to see just how much of her family background he'd studied up on as well "—to wish that no one ever had to do that. But I'm enough my grandfather's granddaughter to recognize that since it does have to be done, it's better for the doers to be people who volunteer for it. Who are . . . good at it, I suppose."
"But who don't enjoy doing it?"
"Sir, with all due respect, I've never much cared to trust the judgment of someone who likes to kill other people." She shook her head. "I know they exist. I've even met some, here in the Corps. But there's a difference between recognizing that you're good at something and deciding that doing it when you don't have to is a good idea. It isn't. I saw both sides of that on Gyangtse, in my first tour. So, yes, I know there are people who subscribe to the 'kill them all; let God sort them out' philosophy. But I'm not one of them, and they aren't the ones I want making the decisions, or acting in the Empire's name."
"I can't argue with that." The colonel's brief smile showed what looked like a flash of amusement mixed with what sounded like genuine agreement. Then he looked back out the window again, facing away from her.
"So killing people does bother you, but you're still willing to do the job. I believe you said that part of it was the challenge. From your record, you look like someone who enjoys doing hard things simply because they're hard." He swung back around towards her, silvery eyes narrowed. "Would you agree with that assessment?"
"Simply because they're hard?" Alicia shook her head. "Colonel, I'm not a masochist. I enjoy challenges, enjoy . . . stretching myself, I suppose. In fact," she looked him in the eye, "I guess if I'm going to be completely honest, the reason I put in for Recon straight out of McKenzie was because I wanted to prove I could tackle the hardest job out there. And, no, it wasn't to impress anyone else. It was because I wanted to prove it to me."
"I see."
Gresham pursed his lips, studying her thoughtfully for several seconds. She felt uncomfortable under those odd, featureless silver eyes. Eyes, she abruptly realized, which were cybernetic replacements for his original organic eyes. But she returned his regard levelly, respectfully but with more than a slight edge of challenge.
"There's a reason for my questions, Staff Sergeant DeVries," he said finally. "I'm sure you're aware that your performance as a Wasp has been well above the norm. You may not be aware of just how far above the norm it's been, but your current rank at your age is pretty clear evidence of how the Corps sees you. And, while I'm aware that you don't know this yet, the Corps has already designated you for a Raider tour, to be followed by OCS."
Alicia's eyes widened slightly. She'd picked up the Raider qualification on her own time, although she hadn't yet officially tested for it, and she'd hoped for a Raider tour sometime soon. There weren't that many Marines—and practically none of them were as young as she was—who had both Recon and Raider in their résumés. But despite that, and despite the increasingly unsubtle hints from her superiors that she ought to be considering officer's rank, she hadn't considered the possibility that the Corps was keeping as close an eye on her professional development as Gresham seemed to be suggesting.
"The reason I'm telling you this," the colonel continued, "is that I don't want you to take it."
"Sir?" This time she failed to keep the surprise out of her voice, and he smiled.
"I have a somewhat different offer for you to consider, Staff Sergeant DeVries," he said calmly. "One that doesn't come the way of very many people."
Alicia eyed him warily, and he chuckled softly.
"No, it's not quite that bad," he told her. "You see, I came directly out here from Old Earth specifically to see you, and I'm here on behalf of my own immediate superior, Brigadier Sir Arthur Keita."
He watched her closely, and she frowned. The name rang a distant sort of bell, but she couldn't quite remember exactly why. Gresham waited a moment, then snorted softly.
"Sir Arthur," he said, "is the second in command of the Imperial Cadre, Staff Sergeant." Alicia's eyes
popped wide, and he nodded. "That's right," he said. "Sir Arthur believes you're Cadre material, Staff Sergeant DeVries. So if you can stand to tear yourself away from the Marines, the Emperor needs your services."
Alicia DeVries sat in the NCO club, nursing a stein of beer, and stared blankly at the HD above the bar. A bunch of burly men in brightly colored jerseys were doing something complicated with a ball in a spherical micro-gravity court. She wasn't certain exactly what they were doing, or even what the game was called—it was a purely local variant practiced here in Jepperson—but that was fine. She wasn't paying any attention, anyway.
Colonel Gresham had finally managed to get her attention, she thought wryly.
The offer he'd extended ran through her brain again and again. As he'd said, it wasn't one that came the way of many people. She knew about the Cadre, of course. Everyone did, especially in the military, because the Cadre was, quite simply, the best. They were the standard to which every special forces unit in the imperial armed forces aspired . . . and which none of the others ever attained.
The few, the proud, the Cadre, she thought, and somehow the well-worn phrase didn't seem quite as clichéd now.
The Cadre wasn't part of the regular armed forces, at all. All though they still came under the overall control of the Ministry of War, the Cadre answered directly to the Emperor, in his own person. They were sometimes called "the Emperor's Own," because they served the Emperor as their own direct liege lord, but they were closely regulated and watchdogged, under the Constitution, by a special Senate oversight committee. And they were hedged about with other restrictions, as well, including the biggest one of all—numbers. The Cadre was the only imperial military organization whose total roster strength was forever restricted by constitutional amendment to a maximum of forty thousand. That was it. The total legally permissible active-duty strength of the Cadre . . . for an empire with almost two thousand inhabited worlds.
She'd told Gresham that she enjoyed "stretching herself." Well, here was the ultimate opportunity for that! Of course, there were a few little points about joining the Cadre which bore thinking on. For one thing, the least outre rumors she'd heard about the sort of augmentation cadremen underwent were bizarre, to say the least. Then there was the fact that membership in the Cadre was for life. You didn't retire from the Cadre; you simply went onto inactive reserve status, and the Cadre could call you back anytime it chose. And the Cadre's casualty rate, despite its superlative training and matchless equipment, was substantially higher than that of any other branch of service. Not surprisingly, since the Cadre got only the hardest jobs.
But if you were up for the challenge, it offered you the chance to prove that you were the best. And what she'd said to Gresham about an adult's responsibility to defend a society in which she believed came back to her now, because that was what the Cadre was. The Emperor's sword, wielded in the pure service of the Empire he ruled.
Gresham had insisted that she go away and think about it before she gave him her answer, and she was glad he had. This wasn't a decision to rush into, and the colonel's awareness of that—his refusal to pressure her, or rush her—only emphasized its importance. But as she sat there, with her chilled beer gradually warming to something Greta Haroldson would have preferred, she knew it didn't really matter how much time he wanted her to take.
"Gresham," the voice on the other end of the com said.
"Colonel, it's Staff Sergeant DeVries. I've thought about it."
"And?" Gresham said after a few seconds of silence.
"Show me where to sign," she said simply.
"Meet me in Admin Three, Room 1017, tomorrow morning. Zero-nine-hundred hours."
"Yes, Sir."
"Good. Oh, and DeVries?"
"Yes, Sir?"
"Welcome aboard."
Chapter Fourteen
The wind howl was barely audible as Alicia stepped out of the elevator. It was still there, though. Not so much heard, as sensed. And although the air inside Camp Cochrane's main administration building was kept at a toasty 23°, and despite the fact that her uniform's smart fabric would have maintained a comfortable body temperature even if it hadn't been, she shivered. She'd grown too accustomed to the bone-deep warmth of Jepperson's summer for the abrupt transition to the middle of winter in Old Earth's Argentina Province's high Andes Mountains.
She walked briskly down the well lit hallway, following the map of the building which Admin had uploaded to her through her neural receptor. The map showed only a very limited portion of the administration building, of course. She didn't need all of it, and she wasn't a bit surprised by the fact that the Cadre insisted on a strict interpretation of the need-to-know rule, especially here. Camp Cochrane was to the Imperial Cadre what Camp Mackenzie was to the Imperial Marines.
It was also very large.
Alicia had arrived in the middle of the night, and also in the middle of a snowstorm. Or, at least, she'd thought it was a storm until a real storm blew in the following morning. The darkness and flying snow had kept her from forming more than a very vague impression of Cochrane on her arrival, but she'd seen enough to be a bit disappointed. Somehow, she'd assumed that the central headquarters facility of the famed Cadre would consist of more than a handful of nondescript weather domes, none of them more than three or four stories tall.
Her initial disappointment had become something quite different when the air car transporting her from Valparaiso Spaceport to her new temporary home had passed through a portal in one of those "nondescript weather domes" and she'd discovered just how large they actually were. They might not go up very far, but they went down a long way, indeed. Her own temporary quarters were fourteen stories below ground level, and she'd been astounded by the number of people who seemed to spend most of their time termite-swarming around the interiors of Cochrane's vast, buried structures.
She still didn't understand where they'd all come from, not given the Cadre's constitutionally mandated numerical limitations. Either there was something seriously wrong with her math, or else the Cadre had a simply enormous logistical tail and very, very few shooters, which seemed a contradiction of everything she'd ever heard about its operations.
At least seventy-five percent of the people she'd seen so far were in civilian clothing, like Colonel Gresham, too. After spending the last two-plus standard years of her life surrounded by uniforms, Alicia found that a little disconcerting. But she was once again the newest kid on the block, and she'd made up her mind to possess her soul in patience until someone got around to explaining things to her.
Which, she thought as she turned a final corner and saw the numbered door of the office which was her destination, is about to begin now, hopefully.
She slowed as she approached the door, but before she could knock, it slid silently open in front of her. She quirked an eyebrow and stepped through the opening.
There was an anteroom on the other side, with pleasant pastel-colored walls and a viewscreen set to window mode. The view of almost horizontal, wind-driven snow was scarcely homey, but the illusion that she was looking out an actual window was almost perfect. There were several comfortable chairs, but no sign of any other living human.
"Please be seated, Staff Sergeant DeVries," a voice said. It was obviously a computer's voice, and Alicia wondered whether it was a full cyber-synth AI. "Major Androniko will be with you shortly."
"Thank you," Alicia replied. She managed to keep her tone conversational, although the truth was that cyber-synths made her more than a little nervous. She didn't have the sort of phobia where they were concerned which the neo-Luddites treasured, and her own ability to sustain a synth-link made her quite comfortable about claiming a computer without an AI as an extension of her own merely human capabilities. But she also knew that a cyber-synth personality was exactly what it was called: an artificial intelligence. And one that wasn't all that tightly wrapped, by human standards.
She'd met several aliens in her life—more than most peo
ple her age, probably, given her father's position in the Foreign Ministry—and none of them had ever bothered her the way AIs did. She didn't know why. Perhaps it was just that the intelligence behind those alien eyes had at least evolved the same way hers had, rather than being whipped up to order from scratch in a cybernetics lab somewhere. Or perhaps it was the . . . eccentricities and well-known instability the cybernetics types still hadn't been able to remove from the cyber-synth equation.
She pushed that thought aside, selected a chair, and leaned back comfortably, watching the blizzard.
The delay, as promised, was brief.
"Major Androniko will see you now, Staff Sergeant," the same computer voice said, and another door opened, this one in the inner wall of the anteroom.
"Thank you," Alicia said once more, and stepped through the door.
The office on the other side was large and efficiently laid out. At first glance, it seemed like an awful lot of space for the single, tallish, dark-haired woman sitting behind the outsized desk which faced the door. But a second glance made it clear that the office's occupant actually had very little available free space. Alicia had seldom seen so many chip files in one place. The hard data storage stacks in the Emperor's New College main library had been bigger and more extensive, but she couldn't remember any place else of which that had been true. And arranged among the chip file cabinets and the standard data terminals were even bigger, clunkier storage cabinets—the sort that actual hardcopy documents might be tucked away inside of.
Unlike many of the people Alicia had seen here at Camp Cochrane, Major Androniko was in uniform. Not in the black tunic and green trousers of Alicia's Marine uniform, but in the green-on-green of the Imperial Cadre, with the starship and harp insignia of the House of Murphy on her collar.
"Staff Sergeant DeVries, reporting as instructed, Ma'am," Alicia said, coming to attention, and Androniko cocked her head to one side as if to see her better.