Theirs Not to Reason Why 4: Hardship (14 page)

“Sir? Restaurant? . . . Food?” Reversing course as soon as she noticed, Sunrise followed her toward the crosswalk zone. Shrugging, she gave up on the subject of food. “Sir . . . before we get into trouble—not that I’m going to start any, but I’m always prepared for it—I just wanted to say thank you. For pulling me out of that holding brig on the Moon. What I did to wind up in there wasn’t
wrong
, so much as . . . as . . .”

“Politically inconvenient?” Ia offered. Both women shared a brief, wry smile. The light changed, permitting them to cross the street. “I don’t believe in letting anyone with good, useful talents go to waste.”

“What, everyone? Even serial killers?” Sunrise asked, glancing her way. Across the street, a four-winged bird-thing tried to fly close to the building. It smacked into the unseen force field covering the upper floors of the structure with a shower of sparks and an indignant squawk. Undulating rapidly, it flapped off to find a safer perch.

Ia, watching the Dabin-style bird flee, nodded. Her brother was doing exactly that, back home. Under her orders. “If they’re particularly good at it, yes. Provided they’re willing to cooperate and toe the line. There does come a point where they could stop being useful and start being harmful . . . and at that point, I’d take ’em out and find someone else to carry on with their job.”

“I guess I can’t complain, then. And I know I’ve been useful, even as a mere ‘mousey, boring clerk.’ Of course, rumor has it the first batch of Knifemen
were
alleged serial killers,” Sunrise added. She offered her arm unit to be scanned by the sergeant guarding the nearest door into the office building. “My history teachers told us that they and the people who became the first Troubleshooters were recruited to fill the gaps in the various old Earth intelligence and counterintelligence bureaus that got broken up and amalgamated into the TUP’s one-world government. There’s a couple divisions similar to the Troubleshooters in the Peacekeepers’ organizations from what I hear, but nothing quite like the Corpse.”

Knowing she meant the Knifeman Corps, Ia nodded and turned her attention to the building. Instinct had brought her here—Sunrise’s instincts—but now that she was here, she might as well go in. However, there was one slight problem. “You’ll have to use a palm scanner instead of my ident,” Ia told the sergeant waiting at the door they had approached. She lifted her left arm, showing the blackened case of her arm unit. “Mine got slagged in combat.”

“I’m surprised your whole arm didn’t get slagged, sir. Those units are tough, but they aren’t meant to be armor,” he stated. Poking through a couple of the pockets scattered over his fatigues, he found and extracted his portable palm scanner. His brows rose after the beam swept over her upturned hand. “—Ship’s Captain Ia? Sir! Brigadier General Mattox has standing orders regarding
your
visit, sir.”

Ia had no clue what those orders were. There were too many possibilities, all of them ruined by certain meddling forces. Clamping down on the reflexive need to check the timestreams, she shook her head. “Oh, we’re not here to see the brigadier general. That’s a visit for another day.”

“Sir, the Brigadier General left strict orders for you to be escorted upstairs right away,” he stated. Touching his arm unit, he spoke into the pickup wire on his headset.
“Sergeant Kukley to Major Tonkswell . . . Yes, sir, it’s important. I have Ship’s Captain Ia at the southwest entrance . . . Yes, sir, right away, sir.”

Opening the door, he leaned inside the foyer and called out a name. “Corporal, front and center!”

A clean-cut man in crisp fatigues and lance-corporal stripes jogged out to join them. Saluting the sergeant, he held himself At Attention. “You needed me, Sergeant?”

“Lance Corporal Aston, escort these two meioas to the Brigadier General’s office,” Sergeant Kukley instructed, saluting back. He then saluted Ia with one hand and opened the door with the other. “Ship’s Captain Ia, welcome to the 1st Division 6th Cordon Army Headquarters. I hope you have a nice day, sir—you, too, Private.”

Ia saluted him in return, then followed Sunrise and the lance corporal into the building. They were halfway to the bank of lifts when Mara murmured in V’Dan,
“Ma’a ni-uol s’tiettra a’amul’o, neh-yah-veh?”

“Neh-yah-veh,”
Ia agreed. She, too, thought this warm welcome was rather odd coming from a man and his staff who had deliberately lied to them about their willingness to follow Ia’s battle plans. It was definitely going too smoothly.

Mara gestured at a door recessed a couple meters from the lifts. Ia nodded; it was an instinctively better choice. They swerved to the side. It wasn’t until the heavy door clicked open that their escort realized they were no longer following him to the elevators.

“. . . Sir? Sir! The lifts are over here, sir,” he called out. Hurrying to catch up with them, he pushed the closing door back open in their wake. “Captain, why are you taking the stairs to go
up
on a heavyworld? You’d be pushing almost 4Gs with each step!”

“Lance Corporal, I used to take the stairs on
my
homeworld,” Ia stated briskly, mounting the stairs at a steady pace. “That’s over 6.4Gs of pure upward force, every single step.”

“But it’s four full floors up, and the lift is faster,” he protested.

“My Captain is being kind by accompanying me,” Sunrise interjected. “She knows I dislike small, enclosed spaces. Don’t worry; we’ll meet you on the fourth floor.”

He hesitated so much, they got a full floor ahead of him before the two women heard his exasperated sigh. Footsteps echoed up the stairwell in their wake. Glancing back at Ia, Mara rolled her eyes, but she didn’t stop climbing the stairs. They both knew the reason why Sunrise had picked a different way to get to the top floor. Laborious as it was, no one could cut power to a stairwell and trap the people trying to use it, like they could to an elevator car.

Ia very carefully thought about the rubbery, cushiony nature of the plain gray plexcrete under her feet, instead of whatever she might do when they reached the top floor. Aside from resting long enough to catch her breath, of course. Sunrise rested with her in the alcove. There was a drinking fountain in the same alcove as the stairwell door, though neither touched it. There was also a power outlet. Standing with her arms behind her back and her back to the wall, Ia extruded a bit of crysium down to the holes and plugged herself into the circuit. Electrical energy pulsed up the hidden line, as refreshing and filling as a long drink of cool water.

Politely waiting for the lance corporal to regain his breath once he emerged from the stairway, Ia discreetly extracted the line when he straightened and nodded. She could just start to see the edges of energy fields around her but would need more for true Feyori-style vision. She didn’t ask for more time, though.

Politely, the two fatigues-clad women followed the Dress-uniformed man away from the banks of lifts and the fire-door alcove. There hadn’t been many signs of the Army’s presence down in the foyer, but up here, everyone was dressed either in the local reddish camouflage hues with the extra speckles of Army green down each pant leg and sleeve, or in formal Dress Greens with black stripes down the outer seams—mostly in Dress uniforms, suggesting the brigadier general was a stickler for formality. By comparison, Ia and Mara were muddy, even bloody; Ia in particular not only had rents and burn holes in her garments, she still smelled of munitions powder as she walked blithely along with a dingy regen pack strapped to her head. No one they crossed paths with commented, though a few did double takes, sniffed, and stared.

One of the rooms they passed thrummed audibly from the force of the hydrogenerators working inside. The sign posted on the door read
Shield Generator Room 2
. Another was filled with rows of workstations filled with transparent screens displaying tactical information ranging from the colorful hues of real-time radar maps to tiny, crowded rows of words and numbers too small to be easily read at that distance. Ia wanted to see what those screens said, to try to match it up to the timeplains, but carefully refrained.

“Hey, Ginger!” Stooping, the lance corporal held out his fingers to the short-legged, slightly pudgy canine that came trotting out of the open door at the end of the hall.

It was a stubbie, the breed of well-adapted heavyworlder dog descended from a mix between a beagle, a boxer, and a Labrador. With stout, strong legs covered in short, reddish beige fur and cinnamon brown eyes, she looked very much like her namesake, only sweeter.

“Heya, girl, how are you? This is Ginger,” he stated, looking back at the two women. “She’s sorta our mascot here at HQ. Someone found her rooting around in the garbage bins out back, took pity on her, and brought her inside. General Mattox has a soft spot for dogs, so he let ’er stay. She’s really sweet, too. She’s also getting a bit fat, but then we spoil ’er. Aren’t you, girl? Who’s a sweet lil’ fatty?”

He patted her flanks, and the dog just lapped it up, wagging her sleek little tail. The dog moved closer to the newcomers, nostrils flexing in the effort to sniff them. Sunrise didn’t stoop to pet her. That surprised Ia. She hadn’t thought the woman a dog-hater.

“Aren’t you gonna say hello, meioas?” their escort asked, giving them the civilian honorific, since Ia’s and Mara’s ranks were too different to lump together.

Sunrise folded her arms across her chest, doing her best to ignore the canine sniffing around her knees. She didn’t even look at the stubbie, staring instead at the end of the hall. “I’m a cat person.”

Without warning, the dog yapped happily and scampered down the hall, dashing past Ia without so much as a hello sniff. A glance back showed the canine rushing up to a pair of men with enthusiastic displays of body-wiggling and tail-wagging. Both soldiers stooped to pet the stubbie, giving her the same enthusiastic greetings that Lance Corporal Aston had.

Once upon a time, Ia had longed to have a stubbie for a pet. But pets and restaurants did not mix well when it came time for health inspections, so both of her mothers had forbidden it. Living as she did now in the military, with most of her time spent on a spaceship, Ia still didn’t have one. The only animals allowed on board were all in life support, usually a mix of fish and fowl, and were meant strictly for food, not for companionship. It was against the rules and regs to turn any of them into a pet.

Shaking it off, she moved toward the open door at the end of the hall. Inside was a modest front office with a man seated behind the front desk. The name tag pinned to his Dress Greens said Major Tonkswell and his gray-streaked hair formed a wiry halo around his dark head. Behind and to the right stood a pair of fine wooden doors, suggesting this office had originally been meant for some sort of business executive. One of the doors stood slightly open but not enough to see into the next chamber.

Ia recognized the wall behind the major’s chair and felt a brief wash of relief that it wasn’t Major Perkins who was currently on duty. If she’d had to face that woman’s artificially constant smiles, she might have done something a little
too
instinctive. Maybe even downright impulsive. As it was, she had no idea what she was going to say to the head of the Army’s 1st Division, 6th Cordon.

“Major Tonkswell, this is Ship’s Captain Ia, and . . . Private Second Class Sunrise,” the lance corporal introduced them, taking a quick moment to peer at the name patch stuck to the front of Mara’s mottled shirt and the single stripe on her sleeve for her rank.

“You’re both Branch Special Forces, yes?” Major Tonkswell asked, eyeing the two women. Ia and her companion nodded. He gave them a brief smile. “Welcome to the Dabin Army HQ. The Brigadier General will be free in just a few minutes. Can I have the lance corporal get you anything?”

“Some water, please?” Sunrise asked, giving the lance corporal a shy, mousey-clerk sort of smile. “I should’ve drunk from the fountain.”

“I’ll take an electrical outlet,” Ia quipped.

She’d half meant it as a joke, but with only a brief, bemused look at her odd request, the major pointed at the wall to her left. Glancing that way, she spotted the socket holes. Since it wasn’t a bad idea, Ia shifted that way, crouched, and pressed her hand over the opening. Leaving just enough room under her palm, she shifted the now faintly peach-hued, transparent gold bracer tucked beneath her right sleeve, extruding a set of prongs on a self-flexing cable.

Plugging it into the wall, she drew firmly from the outlet, rather than gently as she had earlier; having permission meant not having to hide any energy-drain spikes on the maintenance-system monitors. The overhead lights dimmed a little, though the effect wasn’t overly blatant in the daylight glowing through the windows over the outlet. Stuffing herself with energy, Ia didn’t stop until their escort had come back with a clutch of bottles. By that point, everything was glowing firmly.

Restoring her bracer, Ia straightened and accepted one of the bottles the lance corporal offered to her. His short hair fluffed up a little with static energy as their hands briefly touched. It amused her. It also drained a tiny bit of the glow. Stepping back with the bottle in hand, Ia cast her gaze around the room.

She could now see the power conduits in the walls, the convection currents caused by a mix of warm sunlight streaming in through the windows and the cooling effect of the building’s ventilation currents, the glow of all four bodies in the room, and a blob-shaped hint of a glow from the next room to her left, which looked like it could have been the brigadier general seated at his desk. More glows radiated through the thermal patches of the walls in the other direction. One of them trotted their way, low to the ground, very bright and pug-shaped, replete with a happily wagging tail and panting jaws.

Ia watched the stubbie approach, mind carefully blank. Or as blank as a mental dissertation on the ratio of flaky crackery crunch to savory thickness could get. Her precognitive sense was still locked down, wrapped up in a tight ball so that she didn’t try to touch the timeplains. It made her head feel oddly lightweight, and not in the least bit clear-headed.