Strong Arm Tactics (14 page)

“How’s the leg?” Bruno asked, spinning around suddenly, as Wolfe stood before his desk.

“Fine, thank you,” Wolfe answered politely, determined to keep the interview civil. After all, he wanted a favor.

“Your own medic take care of it, or did you go to the infirmary?”

“Just some analgesics and a little hydrotherapy,” Wolfe admitted. “A couple of days, and it went away.”

“Ah. I got over the same injury in a day because I’ve been practicing yoga for ten years,” Bruno said offhandedly. “Although I strained my thigh during a boarding maneuver against the Lizards. My suit was punctured, too.”

Wolfe smiled even more politely. To attempt to win this oneupsmanship contest was to lose the objective for which he had come. “I see. That was some attack, by the way. If the swords had been unpadded you might have gotten me with that second thrust.”

“With the first,” Bruno corrected him. “The neck injury would have been fatal. The monofoil on the edge of my blade is new. I always replace it before a battle.” Seeing that he had quashed his opponent thoroughly on at least three counts, he came around to business. “May I ask why you’ve requested this meeting?”

“X-Ray Platoon has been on ground duty for over three months,” Wolfe explained. “Many of my people are overdue to recertify for zero-gee combat. My senior chief said that the first time you can get us into the chamber is several days from now, and at fairly long intervals after that until the ship reaches the front. I’d like to request an accelerated program.”

Bruno eyed him. “Your platoon, and I say this regardless of its reputation, some of which I experienced the other night, is only a very small unit, and its priority is going to be correspondingly low. You do realize that we are carrying almost ten thousand spacers and troopers.”

“Yes, I do. I’ve made inquiries among the other officers, and most of them come from space stations or have been transferred from active duty to join the push, so they’re fresh. I’d say 90% of them have their status current. I would appreciate it very much if you would increase our access to the training module to, say, every three days, or every other day, until we certify, then you can increase the interval to whatever you want. The other ten percent of the complement would probably appreciate a speeded-up process, too,” Daivid added, trying to make it sound like a win-win arrangement. “That way you would have 100% compliance by the time we get to Benarli. You’d probably have thought of it yourself. I’m only trying to bring it to your attention for your convenience.” Bruno frowned thoughtfully. Daivid had him there. It would make him look good, but a born bureaucrat had to resist somehow. “We’ve got a 1300 hour training time in four days. Could you schedule us, say tomorrow for the same time as we have for our first scheduled workout? 1300 hours?”

“I’ll see what I can do.” Bruno nodded meaningfully toward the door. The interview was at an end. Daivid retreated.

O O O

Ignoring the insults Bruno had managed to work into the conversation, Daivid was pleased with the outcome. Instead of passing it along by way of an infopad link, or asking Thielind to relay it, he decided to take a few moments and drop down to the sanitation department to tell Lin in person. Besides, Borden’s quietly competent assertion that she always studied the venues where the platoon was stationed made him feel guilty. He should have known that—should have been doing that. There was a lot to learn about being the CO. It was like piloting a spacecraft. You didn’t pay so much attention to how it was done when you were a passenger as when you finally got dumped into the front seat.

Whistling, he swung down to Deck 6 and made his way forward toward the Sanitation Department. Funny how much smaller the corridor looked, now that he could see it in the light. Creeping down it with only his scopes and infrared vision to go on, the transit seemed to have taken forever. The ceramic walls and blue directional signs looked like any other section of the ship. Wolfe knew he had arrived when the air took him by the throat, making him cough. His eyes watered. He tried to clear them, but rubbing only seemed to make the situation worse. He sniffed heavily, trying to drive the tears back. That brought in a fresh lungful of stench, and he hacked it out again.

Streb waved to him from the top of a tank along the huge main array that ran through the pumping room. He swung down, landing nimbly on his feet at its base.

“Hi, sir! Great day, isn’t it?”

“How do you stand it in here?” Wolfe coughed. “It stinks in here—I mean, stinks! How do you breathe? You would have to burn my clothes. Even the box couldn’t get the reek out of them.”

“This is nothing,” Streb assured him, flipping the wrench in his hand up in the air. It turned end over end before he caught it slap in his palm. “Sometimes the fumes are so thick you can’t see through them.…” He clutched Wolfe’s arm when the lieutenant looked stricken. “I’m just kidding, sir! This is about as bad as it gets. The valves had to be opened while we replaced some gaskets. The air cleaners only kicked on a minute ago. Pretty soon it’ll smell like roses in here. Comparatively, that is.”

“Thank God,” Wolfe said. “I’m looking for Lin.”

“She and her squad are on the firing range, sir. Boland’s here … uh, maybe he’s not,” Streb hesitated.

Wolfe raised an eyebrow. Hesitancy in a Cockroach meant trouble. “
Where
is he?”

“Uh,” Streb gulped, realizing he had given something away. He bent his head to study his wrench. “Compartment 64D, sir.”

Eyes stinging, Wolfe went in search of whatever trouble his platoon had gotten themselves into. He realized he was not going to find 64D without help, and called up a chart of the deck on his infopad. The 64’s were a cluster of small, square chambers that housed cooling pipes adjacent to the main plant. No hatch from the big room gave onto them in case of a breach in the pumping system, so he had to wind his way through the labyrinth of linked rooms behind the long wall until he came to doors marked 64B, 64D, and 64F. He palmed the lock on the center hatch.

The door slid aside, and a huge, clear, bulging pseudopod lunged toward him from the open door. Wolfe jumped back.

“Dammit, halfway! Only open it halfway!” Boland’s voice came. Wolfe heard sloshing noises, and found himself face to face with his noncom.

“Chief Boland,” Wolfe asked with some gravity. “Why is it every time I come looking for you I find you naked?”

“Uh, sir, I can explain,” Boland said, reaching behind him. A dark-skinned hand stretched forward and handed Boland a soggy towel. The noncom wrapped it around his waist, but the towel insisted on floating on the surface of the water which occupied the room from that level downward. Wolfe recognized Ambering, who grinned at him sheepishly. She was naked, too, as were all eight of the Cockroaches in the water with them. Waves of warm air washed out into the corridor.

“I can’t wait,” Wolfe said, folding his arms. “Explain.”

“Uh,” Boland glanced over his shoulder at the others as though looking for inspiration. “Did we tell you there were perks in working even the worst jobs?”

“I don’t really see you working,” Wolfe pointed out. “I ought to report this, you know.”

“Not really, sir?” Boland pleaded.

“Give me one reason I shouldn’t!”

“Well, we did all our assignments for the time being. We even asked Master Chief Winston if he had any more tasks. He said not at the moment.”

“Okay, so within the letter of the law you’re not skiving off,” Wolfe said. “Though you know if your chief hasn’t got anything for you to do you ought to look at the job board on the ship system. But what about the waste of energy?”

“There’s no waste, sir,” Ambering spoke up. “This water’s heated in the process of the purification system. In fact, it has to cool down from vapor to liquid before we can use it. This is about halfway down the cycle.”

“What about when it has to be
re
purified after you bathe in it?”

“It uses about one erg more of energy to raise the temperature back to steam, sir.” Boland added temptingly, “And I bet that pulled muscle of yours would really respond to moist heat.”

“Well …” Wolfe thought about it for a moment. He did miss the water-showers on Treadmill. The sonic cleansers did not really provide a satisfactory substitute. “But what the hell’s this?” He poked the bulging balloon that held the water.

“Emergency shelter, sir,” Boland said. “Practically indestructible, and absolutely weightless.”

“Those things only get to be two meters on a side!”

Boland looked proud. “Not if you fill them with water. They can get to be a heck of a lot bigger than this.”

Wolfe was agog. “You’ve done this
before
?”

“This happens all the time, sir. I learned the trick from a CPO I served with when I was a grunt the first time. You get stuck down in plumbing as often as we do, you look for the little creature comforts. Besides, who’s going to look? You
have
to check on us, and
you
don’t like it.”

“You can’t really hide something like this in inspection. What about your section chief?”

The chief laughed. “Oh, we showed him how we did it. He’s going to keep this in place when we leave. Private facility, you might say. After all, there’s no security eyes in here, and the ambient heat of the section keeps the hot water from being readily detected. It’s okay with him, sir. How about it?” Boland offered him an ingratiating grin. “You’re not really going to make us empty it. After all, they always dump us down here. Nobody cares.”

“I care, dammit! I don’t want us to be the unit everyone points to as the bad example.” No. Wolfe shook his head. What point was there in protesting? If he ordered it taken down, it’d almost certainly go back up the moment he left. And the responsibility for this section really lay with the department chief. He could almost rationalize it, thinking of the seductive roll of hot water running over his sore muscles. “Forget it. You’re right. I’ll be back with my trunks after shift.”

O O O

“Hey, we just heard,” Lt. Ti-Ya said eagerly, when Daivid appeared in the wardroom for a late meal.

He eyed her uneasily. Had word spread about the hot tub? “Heard what?”

“The other day, you kicked Bruno’s ass.”

Daivid looked around. The Supply lieutenant was sitting with his posse at the table at the wall farthest from the door where he could watch everyone. Daivid nodded to him. Bruno returned the nod curtly.

“He’s the one who kicked my ass,” Daivid said, loud enough to be heard. “I got killed. That was stupid. My senior chief shredded what was left of my posterior afterwards.”

“No, really, we heard you slagged them,” Ti-Ya grinned. “Literally.” Wilbury came in studying his infopad and glanced up. His face lit up when he saw Daivid.

“Hey, I heard you busted up the home team,” the lanky man crowed. “It must have been …!” He noticed Bruno and the others glaring at him from the back of the room, and hurried to flop down beside Carmen. “Sorry,” he whispered. “I didn’t see him back there. Now I’m going to get all my assignments screwed over. I better eat some crow.” He picked himself up again and strode to greet the fuming assembly. “Bruno! Big guy!”

“I want to hear all the details,” Carmen said, keeping her voice down. “It happened, when, four days ago, and all we knew was the new guys reached the objective within the time frame. That was it! And then today one of the guys on the squad broke silence. We were doing water survival rotations, and she mentioned your … nonstandard technique. Tell me all.”

Daivid rolled an eye towards Wilbury, who was giving a grandstand-quality clown act for Bruno and his friends. The severe lieutenant still hadn’t changed his expression, so Daivid doubted that Wilbury had managed to appease him. “The loss must really have pissed Bruno off.”

“He
never
loses,” Carmen insisted. “If everyone else on his squad gets killed, he goes and creams the rest of the enemy by himself. This was the first time his hand-picked company ended up in second place.”

“Cleaning the battlefield,” Daivid recalled, unable to keep a big grin off his face.

“Yeah. Since no one is really killed or hurt in these exercises, Captain Harawe figured that there ought to be some penalty for losing, and he came up with making the unsuccessful squad mop up, or reseal the enamel on the walls, or whatever. That stinky pipe is one of their favorite hiding places. Cleitis likes to sic Bruno’s group on newcomers, to see what they’re made of.”

“I guess we’re made of slag,” Daivid pointed out, not at all ashamed of himself. “At least, that’s what we left all over them.” In an undertone, he began to recount the event, including the uneven odds, the convenient AI that forced X-Ray to take all its losses but seemed to let even mortally wounded spacers keep fighting, and the conclusion, which he had had to watch from the floor. As he spoke, others dining or reading in the wardroom began to drift over, sitting close so they could hear his low voice. The chortles and outright laughter that erupted from the group as he got to the part about Jones yanking open the sump lid couldn’t be ignored, and they weren’t. Bruno cut Wilbury off with a curt gesture, rose to his feet, and stalked out of the room with Varos and Rindel on his heels.

“You’re going to pay for that,” Wilbury said ruefully, coming back to join them. “He’s a real son of a bitch when he’s embarrassed.”

“My fault,” Carmen said, with a tilt of the head for apology. “I should have IM’ed you for the details, but voice is a lot more satisfying than text.”

Daivid looked after the retreating Bruno with contempt. “I can live with it.”

O O O

The mayor of a small town seized Daivid’s hand and pumped it gratefully. The people behind him, all statuesque women in scanty clothing, looked as though they were close to tears with joy. “Lieutenant, we’re all so thankful. Your army saved us from the blobs, and all you had was a crate of bubble gum! Thank you so beep. Beep. Beep! Beep!”

Daivid rolled over as the town faded into the blackness of his cabin. He stared at nothing, until the noise came again. It was the door signal. With a groan he noticed the chrono: 0314. He swung his legs out of the bunk and yanked his robe on over his skivvies. “Come in!” he called.