Strong Arm Tactics (25 page)

“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 evening’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.”

“Cold enough for you?” Wolfe asked the ensign, who was wearing his usual string vest and a pair of shorts. Daivid was freezing, even in the sensor blanket, whose fibers read the body temperature underneath and thickened or thinned accordingly.

“A bit chilly. Not as cold as my homeworld.” The slender ensign smiled brilliantly up at Wolfe, who had settled himself to listen intently. “I think what you’re doing with the others is smart. I have no problem telling you about my life, so ask any time. We live right on the tundra. That kind of wilderness you can’t keep flesh-and-blood pets, so I got to like machines. They like me, too. I have parents and one sister. We’re happy.”

“I’ve got three sisters,” Wolfe said. He glanced out into the darkened street beyond the yellow square of the recycling center. “It’s so quiet here. You would never think that we’re in the middle of a resort town. In season there would be a million people or more having a good time.”

Too quiet, he realized, standing up. At least half a dozen of the troopers snored, as he knew from sessions in the day room. Troopers who weren’t playing cards or watching vids or pursuing other hobbies usually slept, and a few of them rocked the room with their somnolent vocalizations. He tiptoed over to one of the tents, peered in through the flap. The tent was empty.

Well, Daivid reasoned, the trooper had probably gone to use the disposer in the shuttle, or just couldn’t sleep and wanted to watch a video. He checked another tent. Then another. They were
all
empty. It was then he observed the footprints in the gradually accumulating snow around the dark gray shelters. The prints didn’t lead toward the ship; they led away, towards town.

Suddenly, he remembered earlier in the day that Jones had mentioned a bar a few blocks away. Damn them, he gave an order to stay by the shuttle! Or, he mused, stalking back towards his own tent, whipping his blanket around him more tightly against the wind, he didn’t give an order, he had just made a statement without giving it the force of an official order. With the Cockroaches that omission gave them all the leeway they wanted to bend a rule. They’d waited until he fell asleep, then went off to the bar. It was clear the tender speech Boland had made had been meant to soften him up. Well, it didn’t work. Wait until he got his hands on them! He
knew
he was letting them get too familiar with him. The instructors at OTS had been absolutely right. That was going to stop at once.

Loud humming approached from over a building. A brilliant light glared down at him, spotlighting him like a lounge headliner. Heedless of the snow, Daivid dropped and rolled out of the beam, belly crawling toward his tent. He was just reaching for his sidearm when the craft dropped, and a peeved male voice called out to him.

“Are these yours?”

Daivid stood up, skin, underwear and boots crusted in snow, his blanket hanging over one shoulder. The craft touched down beside him, and a large man in a dark blue uniform jumped out, holding Streb by the elbow. “You Sergeant Wolfe?”

“Lieutenant Wolfe. Lt. Daivid Wolfe, X-Ray Platoon.”

“Yes, that’s what this boy said,” the large man said, shoving the trooper towards him. The newcomer had thick black eyebrows turning gray, hooding deepset dark eyes, a large nose, and fleshy red lips. “Sorry to disturb you, Lieutenant. I’m Sergeant Perkin Rivera of the Welcome PD. I got called out to the riot. Come on out, all of you.”

Looking abashed, the remainder of the missing Cockroaches emerged from the hovercraft. None of them could look Daivid straight in the eye. Their fatigues were wet, torn or both.

“They were busting up the bar on Bizarro Street. Kind of unexpected to see anybody from the Space Service, since this is off-season. A little surprised no one notified us you were on leave here.”

Daivid shook his head. “We didn’t mean to cause a disturbance, Sergeant. We were supposed to be in and out on a three-day mission, but it looks as though we’ve got a delay. My troopers,” he glared at them, “were anticipating the long wait by scoping out the local entertainment.”

“A
long
delay?” Rivera asked pointedly.

“Well … it could be three weeks, or possibly longer,” Daivid admitted. “Our ship is on … an irregular schedule.”

“I see. Well, I was a trooper once. I’d like to help you out, but it looks as though some of your people don’t play well with others. The bar owner was plenty pissed when this boy here put one of his best customers through the mirror on the back wall. The guy was only bruised, luckily.”

Daivid sighed. “We’ll pay for damages, of course, Sergeant. How much?”

“Not too much. Tennie will only ask you for the wholesale value, seeing as you’re service personnel. The tourists have to pay retail. May I ask the nature of your mission?”