The War for Profit Series Omnibus (58 page)

The crowd moved in as Bun was carried off on a stretcher, his lawyer walking along beside him.

Karen came to Galen’s side. “Please, don’t ever do that again.”

Galen said, “It’s my job. And as much as I love you, this was for the unit, not for you. What kind of commander lets little weasels come in here and extort money to keep secrets? That’s just bad business. By the way, are there any more people from your past I need to shoot?”

Karen bared her teeth. “In the future I’ll fight my own duels, thank you very much.” She executed an about face and stomped off at a quick time march.

Galen pushed away his breakfast plate and tilted his head all the way up to get the last drop of coffee out of his cup. Karen grabbed the dishes from the breakfast bar and set them in the washer. She said, “It’ll be fun.”

Galen shrugged. “If you say so. Tad and Spike both told me to take the day off, and you’ve been bugging me about going to your lake house all week. I guess that makes today the day.”

“I’ll be ready in a few minutes.”

Galen sat on the couch and picked up his eBook reader. Based on past experience, he thought he’d have enough time to read a novel before she’d actually be ready to go. He’d read half a page when she said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

“All right.” Galen stood and walked out of the apartment with her. They took the elevator to the ground floor and went out the side door into the privately-owned vehicle lot and got in Karen’s civilian skimmer, a small two-seater red convertible with a black top. She got in and powered up the systems and began retracting the top. Galen waited until the top was all the way down and then got in. Even with the passenger seat all the way back, his knees rubbed the dashboard.

Karen left the Brigade garrison compound’s side gate and took the paved tank trail that led past some of the small-arms training ranges. Just before the paved tank trail ended and became a soft pack of fine powdered dust, she turned left at a new-equipment de-processing station and took a street down hill for a hundred meters. After passing garrison troop housing, she came to the drive-through gate. Sensors recognized her skimmer and the barricade swung up. The guard on duty, facing the incoming lane of the gate, looked over his shoulder and then turned and saluted as Galen and Karen went by. Three kilometers past the gate, Karen turned left onto a narrow gravel driveway that led to the back porch of an A-frame house fifteen meters high at its peak, and fifteen meters wide at its base. Galen looked at his wrist chronometer. The trip had taken seven and a half minutes.

Karen set the vehicle down and stepped out. “Here we are.”

She and Galen stepped up onto the back porch. The metal construction was sturdy and would last for a thousand years at least, but it had a hand-made feel to it. Karen held her right hand to the identity pad. Then she wiped it with her left forearm sleeve, breathed fog on it from her breath, wiped and tried again. Nothing.

“I know. I have to turn the power back on.” She stepped off the porch and waded through waist-high grass to a row of mulberry trees, the branches drooping to the ground, burdened with ripe berries. Galen picked and ate a berry as he followed her past the trees and saw the single-floor tin pole barn on the other side. Karen reached above the door frame and found a ceramic key and held it against the lock. It opened. Inside the building stood a half meter wide fusion bottle on a brick pedestal and a row of converters and inverters, thick wires coming out of the ground into junction boxes. Beyond that was some machinery.

“What’s all this?” said Galen.

“My father called it his forge. It’s for extrusion and smelting and things like that. He’d crush rocks and heat them and make metal, and gravel, and dirt. For the garden. All the metal to make the house was extruded here, cast in sand molds made from the rocks he crushed. I don’t understand all of it. He was a very hard working man.”

Karen opened the front cover of the power distribution box and pushed up on a red lever. She then closed the cover, stepped out of the shed, and after Galen stepped out she closed the door and put the key back up along the door frame.

“You know your way around here pretty well,” said Galen.

“I grew up here. It was my home until I was fourteen, that’s when…when I moved into the city.”

They went back to the A-frame house. She placed her hand on the identity pad and an audible click came from the lock of the back door. She stepped inside and opened the alarm panel and punched a code. “Place your hand on the identity pad outside.” Galen did. “Now you can get in too.”

Inside was a door to the left. Galen opened it and looked.

“The den, or office,” said Karen. Farther along on the left was another door, the bathroom. On the right was the kitchen, open to the rest of the first floor. Except for the den and the bathroom, the entire first floor was all one room. The three meter high ceiling above the kitchen and den area ended and the great room ahead was open all the way to the inside peak of the A-frame. The front wall was framed glass, floor to ceiling. Great curtains blocked the view until Karen pressed a button by the kitchen counter. The curtains drew back and the view showed a wide yard, overgrown waist high, trees on the left and a barn off to the right, and off center to the right a boat house and a dock built on the edge of the lake. Across the lake, the shore half a kilometer distant and a series of low wooded hills beyond.

Three large couches faced the window, a coffee table in front of each, a large rug covering all but half a meter of the polished concrete floor all the way around the great room. A spiral staircase led up to the loft. They climbed up. The railed walkway was open to the great room on one side, a wall with three doors on the other, a door for each bedroom. There was also a ladder, leading to a balcony and door above, centered on the roof’s peak. The bedroom in the center was the master suite, with an oversized bed and a bathroom of its own.

Galen smile. “Nice.”

Karen gave him a hug. “I want to live here.”

“Who’s stopping you?”

“I mean, after our wedding. We’ll come here for our honeymoon, and live here together. I want to raise my kids here.”

Galen looked out at the lake. “How big is it?”

“Two hundred and seventy square meters.”

Galen said, “I meant the property.”

“Thirty eight hectares. Will your dream fit here?”

Galen stepped back. He smiled and said, “It’s not really a dream any more, now is it?”

Karen said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“My dream has come true; it’s no longer a dream. That’s what I meant.”

Karen smiled, “Come check this out.” She hurried down the stairs and out through the front sliding glass doors into the front yard and ran past the barn and stopped under a corrugated metal roof supported at each corner above a concrete slab by metal poles. A solid storage locker was rooted to the slab. Karen spun its combination knob three times and opened its door. Inside were two pistols and a child-size rifle. “Our own shooting range. A hundred meters out is a slab, a bullet stop ten meters high and twenty meters wide. Beyond that, a finger of the lake.”

“Hard to see with all the brush grown up.”

Karen laughed, “You have a lot of work to do around here, mister.”

“It’ll give me something to do while you take care of all that dust in the house.”

They drew the pistols from the locker and took a few shots down range.

Karen put the guns away and grabbed Galen’s hand and led him off to the side through some more waist-high grass. She showed him a five meter square building with a garage door on the front. She raised the door. “We just walked across the garden and in front of you are all the gardening tools you will ever need.”

There was a garden tractor taking up most of the right side of the floor, a small hay-baler implement parked to its left. Tools and implements hung along the walls and on the far wall a set of cabinets which Galen recognized as a seed bank. And a grow light, and a shelf below it for germinating seeds indoors.

Galen stepped back and said, “It’s beautiful. Plenty of work for me indeed.”

Karen showed him the barn, a hay loft above with stalls for four animals, suitable for horses. Built on to the side of the barn was a workshop that had never been used. Galen stepped back into the barn and looked around and realized it had not been used either. Karen was still in the workshop; her hands pressed against the wall, her forehead leaned against the wall too.

Galen stood next to her. “Karen?”

“He…”

Galen left the barn and waited out side. After a few minutes Karen came out, her eyes red and puffy, her cheeks moist. Galen hugged her, patted her back slowly.

Karen took him by the hand and led him away, back toward the house, beyond it, past the building with the generator, just the other side of it. Karen held back some drooping mimosa tree branches and pulled Galen inside the area enclosed by them. At the base of the mimosa tree’s trunk there was a granite grave stone inscribed, “Harry Mitchell. Centurion, Sixth Legion of Langston. A man of honor.”

Karen said, “He always talked about getting me a pony.”

Galen said nothing. He patted her shoulder then went to wait for her by the skimmer.

She came out after a half hour. “So what do you think?”

“We can clean this place up and have it ready to live in before the wedding. It’s another five weeks yet.”

Karen said, “Hire some people?”

Galen said, “No, not for my work. It’s mostly work I want to do. You can hire people if you want, but I’m doing the outside work.”

“No, you’re right. We’ll do it ourselves, together. But we need time to plan the wedding.”

Galen shrugged. “It’s standard data, a military wedding. There’s a field manual for it and everything. The Brigade Chaplain has it all worked out. All we have to do is follow a few simple instructions.”

Karen sat on the back porch said, “Perfect.”

Galen entered the corporate board room of the Jasmine Panzer Brigade wearing his garrison duty uniform, stood at attention, saluted the chairman of the board and said, “Sir, Colonel Raper reports.”

The table had been moved, so that its length ran side to side, and all the board members were on the other side of the table from Galen. Also, the chair provided for him was two meters away from the table, directly in front of the Chairman. The Chairman nodded and said, “Take a seat and relax, Colonel.”

Galen glanced over his left shoulder to locate the chair, took a half step back and sat. After a moment he relaxed his posture a little, letting his left hand slip to the outside of his left thigh. This setup of the board room was better; Galen could more easily address individual board members, and see their reactions all at once.

The Chairman said, “It looks like you’ve had a very successful quarter, Colonel. Your bold, adventurous risk-taking has paid off.”

Galen said, “Yes sir it has. But I want to slow things down for the next year.”

“Not planning to shoot any more of Karen’s ex-boyfriends, I hope.”

The board members chuckled and laughed.

Galen said, “Only if they bring themselves to my attention, but I don’t expect that to be much of a problem from here on out. I think I sent a strong message.”

The chairman smiled. “So you’d like to slow things down. Any particular reason?”

“We lost a lot of good people on Grinder, and some good equipment too. Financially, we could take the entire next year off and still be in excellent financial shape, but I do want to take some smaller contracts. To keep our people experienced, to develop leadership and combat skills at lower levels.”

“I agree,” said the chairman. “How do you plan to go about this?”

“I’ll look at smaller contracts, for units of a hundred up to eight hundred troops. I’ll hire out task forces of company size up to battalion size, commanded by a Captain or Major or Lieutenant Colonel, accompanied by their enlisted equivalents to serve as XO. But I’ll be selective, and send out no more than one unit at a time, based on which unit most needs the experience.”

“It doesn’t seem like that would generate much revenue,” said the board member to the left of the chairman.

“That is not my goal for the next year. My primary concern is to cover operating costs and get contract experience for relatively new troops.”

The board member on the far left said, “On Grinder, you dealt a serious blow to the Mosh ability to produce combat units. There has already been a ten percent decrease in Mosh activity this month. With Tuha operating in the Mosh back yard, I don’t think there will be many opportunities for lucrative contracts for an extended period of time.”

Galen smiled. “Thank you for pointing that out. I’m sure my strategy of scaling down our combat operations for the foreseeable future meshes nicely with the reduced demand for mercenary services, for the time being.”

The president said, “Aw hell, relax, Galen. You talk like you’re trying to graduate from business school.”

The board members leaned back in their chairs. The one on the far right took off his jacket and tie, another stood and stretched and sat back down and drank some water. Galen leaned back, crossed his legs.

“Gentlemen, I’ve come to the conclusion I don’t care if I ever go on another contract.”

“You’re quitting?”

“I didn’t say that. I can stay right here and take contract bids and send units out. There’s no real need for me to go.”

The chairman said, “So you’d like to sit back here and make money off the troops you send out on contracts.”

“I wouldn’t be the only person in this room doing that.”

The board members nodded, not insulted one bit.

“Like so many of you, I’ve done my time. Until it becomes a problem for unit morale, I’d prefer to stay here and do the job of managing this Brigade the way it should be done. That last contract, it was pure luck. I came within a millimeter of being nothing but a statue in the museum.”

The chairman said, “Don’t flatter your self. You’d have been a picture with a name under it, that’s all.”

Galen laughed along with the board members. “So it’s okay with you all. I’ll hold a cash reserve for the next year to make quarterly dividend payments, not take any contracts until my personnel and equipment strengths are back up to a hundred per cent, and then starting next quarter I’ll look at taking company and battalion sized contracts.”

The chairman said, “That’s good with me. Everyone else?”

The other board members nodded. Galen stood.

The chairman asked, “Before you go, is there anything else you’d like to add?”

Galen said, “You’re all invited to my wedding tomorrow, at seventeen hundred hours in the Brigade chapel.”

“We’ll be there, Colonel, that’s a promise. Dismissed.”

Galen saluted, took a step to the left, executed an about face and marched out of the board room.