Steel Walls and Dirt Drops (21 page)

"No, Third.
The next in line would be Golf Squad Trooper One Na'aranna. She is almost five years senior to me. I am next after her," he replied.

"Trooper Na'aranna?" Misha called out. The woman trotted over to her. "You are no
w the senior weapons tech for McPherson's Second. Get your group together and get back to work. I don't want to drop dirt on Altec and find out I have a H.E. launcher that jams up when it gets hot. Do you understand me? And Trooper, make sure you check with Second Jackson to find out who Donnellson’s backup is for his squad."

She turned to the rest of the watching
APES. "Since you don't have anything else to do, everybody who has an even trooper number is to report to Second Vark to help with armor repair. I don't care if you’re trained in it or not. Everyone who has an odd trooper number is to report to Trooper Jem Li Park for skid plate maintenance. Move it APES."

Britaine spoke in her ear, "Misha. I
’m sorry to do this, but I am going to restrict your unit to the confines of APES territory. I don’t want them mixing with my crew anymore than is absolutely required. Don't you agree?"

"Yes, Colonel, p
erhaps you are right. Maybe I made a mistake on insisting they mix their duties."

"Well, I
’m not the type of man who says I told you so, but maybe next time you’ll listen when wiser heads offer advice."

"Yes, Colonel, maybe
I will," Misha gritted her teeth, but smiled sweetly at the man.

"Oh, present company excepted, of course
. Please feel free to make yourself at home on my spacecraft." Britaine smiled brightly and left the training bay trailed by his crew.

Misha turned to face a pair of
security forces. One was a tall, gangly woman and the other was a short very muscular man. Both spacers looked nervous.

"Spacers, may I help you?"

"Sir, Third McPherson," the woman stuttered. "Bill and I, I mean Sergeant Williams and myself…I am Spacer First Class Molinna. Anyway, we…well; I guess we want to apologize."

"Exactly what are you apologizing for,
Spacer Molinna?" Misha asked.

"Well, I guess you are getting a raw deal. Bill and I were down below when that ass…I mean, Major Chang tried to run his number past you. And we both agree that
…um, in spite of your thing with Muffin, I mean Colonel Britaine, you are getting the short end of the stick here," The woman's voice trailed off.

Misha looked at the man
. She said, "Is that right, Sergeant Williams?"

"Yes, Third McPherson. I agree. You handled yourself very well. Both
Mo and I have been very impressed. I also have to admit I’m a little more than impressed with your Trooper Donnellson. He made dog meat out of Barret, Ortiz and Wang. That trio has been bullying people since they came aboard. I’m not sorry to see they finally met someone who wouldn't cave under their crap."

Misha smiled. "Thank you both. I don't see where you have reason to apologize, but I
’ll accept it none-the-less. I don't imagine I will get an apology from anyone else."

"We just wanted you to know that not everyone on the AMSF side of this bucket of bolts is against you
," Sergeant Williams said.

MISHA WAVED at Chief Brown as she stepped into the intel shack.

Brown
waved her over. "Morning. Evening. What time of the day is it anyway? Never mind, have a sit down or did you just drop by for a look-see before locking down for the upcoming jump?" The woman’s eyes were red rimmed, but they sparkled with intelligence and good humor.

Misha smiled at the older woman. "You've been running on coffee and
diesel fumes for a while, haven't you?"

"
I think it has been nothing more than coffee fumes. How can you tell? Don't be fooled by the bags under my eyes. They come naturally. Maybe, it's my wit and charm. I’m told that I am very pleasant when I've been working too long. Right, Buzz?" Brown said.

Buzz blew a razzberry in Brown's direction. "She hasn't been off duty since we called her back in to consult on your anomalous comm reading."

"Yeah, but I've been busy." Brown wiped her face with a mentholated wet nap. She wadded it up and tossed it at Buzz. "What am I going to do, leave all of this delicate intelligence analysis for you amateurs?"

"Watch it, Dead
-eye," a voice shouted from across the room. "Buzz is packing heat."

Misha saw a spacer
crouched down behind a desk in the back corner. The spacer was a small, blonde woman who spun quickly about and sprinted across the room, sliding headfirst to crouch behind the comms collector console. Misha saw a weapon in the spacer's hand.

Misha jumped backwards
, spinning sideways, she looked for a weapon, but nothing was handy. Before she could launch herself into deeper cover, Brown stood up, snapped her wrist forward and as if by magic, a pistol appeared in her hand. It looked almost like a needler, but it was wrong somehow. Buzz stood and whipped his weapon up. Before he could get a bead on Brown, she put three rubber bands into the middle of his chest. Misha gawked as the woman rapidly shot two other male spacers as they popped up from behind Buzz's desk. Each man went down as if at a shooting gallery. Neither man got a shot off. A second later, a barrage of rubber bands shot through the air as the female spacer unloaded her weapon at the men.

Misha could see
Brown's gun still had a dozen rubber bands cocked and ready for fire. As she watched, Brown quickly pulled three rubber bands from a breast pocket and reset them on the gun.

Brown
smiled at Misha, "Tactical reload." She twirled the gun around her trigger finger and dropped it smartly into a holster at her hip. Turning to the female spacer, she said. "You were a day late and a credit or two short, little sister. I appreciate the warning, though."

Buzz said, "We'd have done better if Ricky hadn't been off duty. Clancy
, where did you come from?"

Brown
smiled. "You may have done better, but you'd still be dead. I figured you for an ambush today, so I put Clancy in the corner to watch you. She's been hiding there since you three went to lunch. Come on, Buzz. You don't think I would have figured something was up with you three whispering and having special meetings all day? Besides, you almost gave our guest a heart attack."

Buzz nodded, "I expected her. I figured she would be enough of a distraction to allow us to
score a win. I guess not."

Clancy
picked herself up off the deck where she had been hiding to ambush the men, brushed imaginary dust from her trousers, and tapped open her glass-pack clipped to her uniform blouse. She said, "Code Six-Shooter. Alpha team 3, B team 0; update, shuffle, reset and download."

Brown
turned to Misha. "It's a tension breaker, which is sometimes necessary on long ops with little downtime. We keep a running score." She pointed to her reader on the desk. A small clock had reset itself for 135 minutes. "We have a little over two hours standard before anyone can attack again. The glass-pack sets a random time lapse. That keeps the game from getting stale. Furthermore, you can see A and B team members have changed. Otherwise, Clancy and I would be unbeatable. She isn't much of a shot, but she is a nice distraction, especially when it has been a long op and these hairy legged swine get their hormones raging. Damn, I am rambling a bit, aren't I?"

Clancy laughed, "Yeah Chief, you sound a bit punch drunk."

Brown nodded, "In any event it is good to see you back, Misha. As the word going around says, you have been pretty busy with yourself."

Misha said, "I will agree. It has been anything other than uneventful. I hope you don't mind if I drop by. I wanted to spend the next jump with you."

Buzz spoke up first. "We will be glad to have you. Do you want to sit at the comm collector and run the analysis for us again? I had Cuffs assigned to it, but he really should be off duty now."

Cuffs spoke up, "No. I
really should be a civilian and back at my old job with the D-Tel Corporation on Veta Prime, but nooooooo, you convinced me to reenlist and then dragged me out here into the ass end of nowhere."

The other male spacer said, "Yeah, and I should be rich and incredibly handsome instead of just fantastically charming."

Clancy laughed, "And pigs in hell want ice water to wash their wings."

Brown said, "Enough,
children. Misha, do you want the job or not? You’re going to be working if you are spending the jump with us. No hiding out here just to dodge work somewhere else."

"Yes
, Chief. It beats being locked down behind the blast shutter in my bunk," Misha replied.

Cuffs said, "Bunks sound like heaven to me. I am
oh-fficially, out of here."

"Chief Brown,
may I ask you a question?" Misha asked.

"You just did. Do you mean you want to ask another one already?"

"Yes, that is what I meant in the first place. Anyway, Buzz seems to let you run a pretty loose intel shack," Misha said.

"Sorry, but that is a statement
," Brown said. "Where is the question?"

Misha sighed. “Okay. Why such a loose shop? It doesn’t seem to match with the rest of Colonel Britaine’s command style. I haven’t seen any camaraderie between officers and enlisted like you share with Buzz.”

Brown nodded. "That’s all too true. I like a loose shop. It took us a while to unpucker Buzz's ass, but he's learned to like it too. This is a very smart bunch of people. As for Britaine, he sees what he wants to see. And all he sees from us are the pre-mission briefings in the flight room and training briefs at the education center. I don't think he has set foot in the intel shack since he’s been in command. This style of management may not work for every AMSF department. I’m sure it would never work in the APES, but it works for intel. It keeps us fresh and open to new ideas like your anomaly. You are planning on looking for it again?"

"Yes
, Chief. That would be my plan, if you don't mind?"

"Mind? No, I insist. If you don't look, I will. I want your eyes glued to the comm collector array blips. Watch for any patterns in real time. Don't worry about the squadron chatter. The collector will put that in the can for us, but you might spot something
that a machine would miss."

"Roger that, Chief
," Misha said. "What do we know about the system we’re jumping into?"

"It
’s just like the one we are in. It’s uninhabited and uninhabitable; a complete waste of vacuum, if you ask me. That’s what intrigues me about your anomaly. There is something there that shouldn't be. We have a jump coming in fifteen, so get situated and comfortable. Strap into your chair tight. General Gurand has ordered the squadron to do another combat insertion, so it should be another rough jump."

Misha sat at the comm collector console. The chair she was in was the same Mark 19D Crash Couch she remembered from her
AMSF tour of duty earlier. Each buckle and strap felt familiar, as did the console's arrays and displays.

She thought about the anomaly off and on throughout the day. She play
ed with the data in her head and then put it away, only to pull it out again later. She was sure there was a matching pattern there, but they were stuck somewhere in the back of her head. The sounds were not meshing comfortably with some stuck memory key. In truth, Misha would have preferred to endure a jump strapped into her own bunk. There she could stretch out and close her eyes. With the crash couch, she was tossed about and her movements restricted, plus there was still a nagging cramp in her left calf muscle that had bothered her for years that she blamed on this very style seat.

The jump itself was spectacularly dull. It was like riding the same roller coaster a dozen times in a row. It was the jinking and twisting the Kiirkegaard went through during the combat reentry that kept things lively at the communications collector. All
the spacecraft in the squadron began blasting automated and manual data in an almost continuous stream immediately upon system entry.

The automated signals would
emit status of their own spacecraft, position and disposition of any other squadron spacecraft in its general area, and any unidentified or enemy spacecraft detected. If the automated systems did not detect any enemy spacecraft, it would say so; repeatedly and loudly.

The manual systems
emissions were the crew. Bridge operation personnel would send data streams containing information on status of their own spacecraft, position and disposition of any other squadron spacecraft in its general area, and any unidentified or enemy spacecraft detected. If the crew did not detect any enemy spacecraft, they would say so; repeatedly and loudly.

The main difference between the automated and the manual systems w
as that every so often a manual signal would be lost when the spaceship jinked. It would dart off in a random direction causing the crew member to lose her breath, his train of thought, or their lunch; depending upon the constitution of the individual involved. Jinking was a deliberate attempt to confuse any enemy targeting systems. The inertial dampers could completely eliminate any feeling of movement, but humans rely on a certain amount of movement to keep their internal bearings from going completely haywire, causing some very strange psychotic episodes.

Misha found the jinks more of an inconvenience
than discomforting. Her heavy-worlder heritage included a strong inner-ear alignment and an elevated tolerance for sudden high gravity movements. She watched the collector arrays between jinks, searching for the anomaly. She fed the data perimeters into the system and set it for an automated search. She knew there was little chance of spotting it before the collector’s automated systems alerted her to its presence. She was right.

A small beep cut through the air and the collector array switched to a visual pattern approximating the sounds from the anomaly. Something tickled her brain just at the edge of discovery. The Kiirkegaard jinked. Its gyrations caused even the automated systems to lose the anomaly. The spacecraft settled back into squadron formation, but the signal was gone.

Misha saw the pattern clearly in her mind's eye. She knew what she was seeing was of Binder origin. The sound's visual pattern from the collector array was a perfect match to what Misha had seen on Guinjundst. It was an exact fit to the green vegetation markings along the sides of Binder energy weapons. Although she couldn't fathom their purpose, to her it was positive proof of Binders in Allied Systems space.

"I got it
," she shouted. Any response was lost as the spacecraft jinked again and was covered by the sound of someone retching into a waste can.