Strong Arm Tactics (6 page)

Daivid didn’t really need to use the finder to locate Jones. He found the Cymraeg standing knee deep in waders, fishing in the rocky brook that flowed parallel to the landing pad about a kilometer out and singing light opera in his big voice. Ewanowski and Aaooorru sat slung in a pair of insulation rings sipping out of cocktail glasses festooned with paper umbrellas which they lifted in toast to Daivid as he frowned at them. Funny, corlists and semicats were not species that usually got along well. But he still hadn’t found the right person. He strode on, stalking his prey with all the intense concentration of his namesake animal.

Meyers looked up with concern and gathered up the arrangement of Tarot cards she had spread out on a cloth across the bottom of an unused shipping container and snuffed out the candles burning at the corners.

“Sorry, sorry,” Daivid kept saying, getting more and more angry in his embarrassment.

Finally, he located one of his two quarries, at the bottom of a gully bounded on three sides by an ox-bow of the ancient river that bounded the spaceport.

“There you are!”

A naked Chief Boland scrambled up and out of the double-recliner chair at the sound of Daivid’s furious voice. The big man reached for his discarded breeches and started to tug them on. Lin, similarly unclad, merely shrugged and shifted her eyeshades up onto the top of her head. Her slight but taut body was a criss-crossed network of healing scars and decorated here and there with tattoos. On her knee was a raised area resembling Ambering’s do-it-yourself Cockroach.

“So, you went to Supply,” she said, her eyes crinkling up at Daivid with amusement. “How far’d you get?”

“What unauthorized modifications?” Daivid exploded. “You set me up.”

“Nah,” Lin waved a protest. She found a bottle of sunprotectant on the ground and handed it to Boland. Obediently, he opened it and began to rub it on her back and shoulders. “It was worth a try. I thought your background might get the request past him. You’re going to have to go through Mason to get replacements after all. Sorry. I was hoping you wouldn’t have to.”

“You knew he was going to refuse?” Daivid asked, feeling his blood pressure rising.

“Well … maybe 80%.” She took the bottle and began to anoint her small breasts with the white lotion.

Daivid lost his patience. He threw his hands in the air. “What unauthorized modifications? What did you do to the CBS,Ps that I am going to have to take the request to the commander instead of just requisitioning them like any other unit?”

“Everybody does it,” Boland interjected. Daivid just glared at him. The big chief looked momentarily sheepish. Daivid transferred the glare to Lin.

She looked a little embarrassed, too. “All right, maybe they don’t. But they could.”

“Do what?” Daivid pressed.

“Well, you know what the CBS,P does,” Lin began. “It monitors circulation, and responds to drops or increases in ambient pressure. It keeps up a wave of compression going all over the body.”

“Yes, so where does.…?”

“Let me explain,” Lin pleaded. “So … you know, sometimes transport to the arenas takes so long, and people were getting bored … we adapted it so that maybe it compresses a little harder in some places.…”

“… And a little faster,” Boland added. “Okay, a lot faster. Not all the time, just after a while. Then it stops.”

Daivid eyed them. “And where does it start this faster, har—oh, tell me you’re kidding!”

The two chiefs had the grace to look ashamed of themselves. “Uh, no.”

“So you’ve turned the space service’s main survival garment into an all-over
masturbation
machine? No wonder Supply is furious with you!”

“He’s quick on the uptake,” Lin told Boland. “Most of ’em don’t get it right away.”

“Would you like us to adjust yours?” Boland offered. “If you’re not interested in the sex thing, it also gives a hell of a good backrub.”

“And a footrub,” put in Lin. “
Totally
sensual.”

“No!” Daivid exclaimed, horrified. “So … you say you turned in the used garments for new ones, and they refurbished the material, and then some poor unsuspecting bastard in another unit puts it on and activates the mechanism, and …” The image in his mind of a body stocking putting intimate moves on its wearer started to form in his mind. The guy had to be squirming in his armor, unable to explain what was happening to him. Daivid tried to remain upset about it, but the more he thought about it, the harder it was not to laugh. The situation struck him as irresistibly funny. “And he’s got to explain to his commanding officer that he can’t … because he’s got … and then he …” He gestured feebly as words failed him. He started laughing. His knees folded under him and he slid down until he was sitting on Lin’s deck chair. Tears leaked out of his eyes. He wiped them away with the edge of his hand. In a while he gasped for breath. “Oh, my God! I love it.”

“After a while you get used to the effect,” Boland explained. “I mean, once I had to do an insertion dive before I … er … finished. It was kind of cool, getting turned on in mid-air. It doesn’t interfere with your effectiveness, I swear. We don’t run it during the missions themselves. It just keeps us from being bored during the long stretches in the suits.”

“So what are the limericks and the other time-fillers for, then?”

“Hey, you can’t jerk off all the time!”

“Are you sure you don’t want to have the programming installed yourself?” Lin asked.

“
Hell
, no,” Daivid said, passionately, getting himself under control. “And if anyone does that to my suit without my permission I’ll space them.”

Boland made a face. “You gonna make us undo ours?”

“It would help if you deprogrammed the old ones before we turn them in for replacements,” Daivid pointed out, reasonably. He stood up. “
If
I can get that tightass in Supply to give us replacements.”

Lin waved a hand. “They’ve got to give them to us anyhow. Just get Mason to sign off on it. She’ll do it, no problem. She’s done it a bunch of times.”

“Fine,” Daivid said. He’d had enough, and he had his answer. “I’ll leave you alone now. Enjoy the rest of your day. See you at 0600 for PT tomorrow.” He boosted himself up the bank.

“Hey, lieutenant?” Lin called. “You passed the test. You were a good sport. Captain Cohen, the CO we had before Scoley, went into a complete snit the first time he found out about the CBS,Ps, and we ended up doing survival evolutions every day for a month. But then he asked Boland to reprogram his, and he never again gave us shit about it.”

Daivid smiled down at them, the sun behind him casting his long shadow over their faces. “How do you know I won’t?”

Lin gave him a half-smile, soldier to soldier, Family to Family, woman to man. “I just know.”

“Don’t think you’ve pegged me as a softy, chief,” Wolfe warned her. He waved and walked away.

O O O

The soft blue glow of the chronometer on the front of the mess hall read 0200. Two of Treadmill’s three moons, tiny gleaming white bubbles, sailed high overhead through a clear, black, star-spangled night. That night, Daivid moved on soft-footed tiptoe to the door of the enlisted barracks. In the red glow of the emergency lighting, he could see humped shapes on each of the bunks and floating in the corlist’s tank. He knew they had been over the big room with electronic detectors and other means of investigating whether he had planted some form of discipline upon them. Sometimes, he mused, low-tech was best. Standing at attention in the doorway, he removed a finger-long silver cylinder from his breast pocket, raised it to his lips, and blew.

The whistle’s blast tore the air like a descending tornado. Snatched from sleep, the Cockroaches sprang out of bed. Or tried to. As each of the occupants of the bunk attempted to draw his or her feet out of the covers, the Vortex, a complicated but nearly undetectable folding together of top and bottom bedsheets, twisted together around their lower limbs, immobilizing or significantly hobbling them. As Daivid punched on the overhead lights, he was treated to the morally satisfying sight of nineteen of his twenty enlisted personnel flailing about as they thrashed, fell out of bed, or staggered upright with their sheets clinging to their legs. The corlist swam to the side of his tank and hung there by his upper limbs, watching with bemusement. With a final grin at his troopers, Wolfe pocketed his whistle, spun on his heel, and marched out of the barracks into the night, leaving the confusion behind him.

A touch on the arm nearly made him jump out of his shoes.

“It’s me, sir,” Borden’s voice whispered. She drew forward into the light. Thielind stood at her elbow, his large eyes gleaming. Both of them wore grins that nearly reached their ears. “Very nice, sir. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. The Vortex is … very effective.”

Daivid couldn’t help sharing their grin. “A shock for a shock,” he said succinctly. “Let the punishment fit the crime. Good night, lieutenant, ensign.”

“Good night, sir,” they chorused. Daivid marched off to his own quarters, cognizant of a job well done. This might be the start of a battle of practical jokes, but he was ready for it. On the way back from the main base he had had plenty of time to review all those long-dormant tricks he had learned at camp. What with modern technology and the experience of the intervening years, he was pretty sure he could hold his own. If he woke up the next morning with his clothes soaked and tied into knots, he would cope.

O O O

The geese woke him two hours later, at false dawn. Wolfe stared at the ceiling for a moment, then rolled over, carefully feeling the bedclothes with his feet. No strings had been tied to his toes, no return Vortex played on him while he was sleeping, but he still had the feeling that someone had been in his quarters. He had no specific reason, no clue to which he could easily point, except for a faint, foreign scent in the air that couldn’t be put down to his perambulation of the base nor his personal toiletries. He stretched out a hand to palm the control for the overhead lights. He could see nothing unusual. He eased himself out of bed.

Very gingerly, he stood to one side and activated the doors to the closet and the bathroom. Nothing. No bucket of water tumbled to the floor, no tripwires sprang up from the smooth, synthetic flooring to grab his ankles, no sudden blast of marching band music shocked him into jumping backwards. The contents of his bureau and desk had been left alone. None of the drawers were booby-trapped. His infopad seemed to function correctly, and all his uniforms were dry and properly pressed.

With a sudden attack of panic he felt for the card on his chest. It was intact, with no sign that any attempt had been made to tamper with it. The miniature screen sprang into life when he held the retinal scanner up to his eye. None of the access alarms showed.

A half-hour’s search turned up no signs of intrusion. Still feeling a little uneasy, he stepped into the shower and turned on the tap.

The outrushing torrent from the showerhead knocked him against the back wall. Wolfe flailed for the grab bars and hauled himself upright. He slammed the lever downward and stood panting, water streaming down his body.

A cursory flick of the lever produced another waterfall-power cataract. Wolfe turned it on and off a few times just to make certain that it was ordinary water coming out of the rose, not perfume, paint or a few other less savory liquids that he knew could be loaded into a tank. He laughed until the enamel-walled room rang with the sound. Either the faulty plumbing had healed itself overnight, or the Cockroaches were responsible for the puppy-piddle stream he had bathed with for the first few days of his tenure. They were waiting for a sign that he was worthy of their respect. How many commanding officers had come and gone through here, never knowing that the shower could work properly?

“I wonder which one it was,” he said, aloud, as he adjusted the spray to a comfortable spray, halfway between drowning standing up and a fine mist, before stepping in, “facing the supply chief, or the Vortex?”

An hour later he jogged in place on the exercise yard as the chronometer turned over from 0459 to 0500. The door of the barracks zipped open, and every member of the Cockroaches swarmed out, attired in workout gear.

“Morning, lieutenant,” Boland greeted him, with a snappy salute. “So, what do you want us to do first?”

O O O

“As you can see, we have already returned twenty-two units,” Wolfe said, as Commander Mason read through the supply request he had placed on her desk. “They’re ready for refurbishment.”

“They are?” Mason asked, glancing up from the infopad. On the tip of her tongue was an unasked question. Wolfe picked up the cue as neatly as he could. He put on a stern expression.

“Yes, ma’am. I think you’ll find them to be in as good a condition as CBS,Ps can be, when they’re so overdue for replacement. I believe they should have been swapped out over 150 days ago. Even standard programming can’t stabilize an elastic fabric that gets that much wear in the course of a military task. My troopers might have to rely upon those units to save their lives. Not that I am criticizing a senior officer, ma’am. Just quoting regulations.”

“Standard programming, eh?” Mason murmured to herself. “Miraculous. I mean, good.” As Lin had predicted, the senior officer read the notation on the infopad, and affixed her signature code. She pushed it toward him.

“Thank you, ma’am,” Wolfe said, saluting. “I’ll take this directly to Supply. We have only three days until we lift.”

“Lieutenant,” the commander began tentatively. Wolfe stopped. “I … I have to say how remarkably well you’re doing with your new unit. I was very impressed by the results of the inspection the other day. I wouldn’t say such strides are unprecedented, but admittedly, they are rare.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Daivid said, pleased. But Mason wasn’t finished.

“I, uh, you didn’t have to put any
unusual pressure
on your company in order to get those results? There’s nothing you need to discuss with me?”

Wolfe groaned inwardly. He knew exactly what she meant. Was he threatening the Cockroaches, Family style, to get them to shape up the way they had? He almost opened his mouth to admit to her he had made most of the beds himself.