Special Forces 01 (16 page)

“You do realize that most men don’t wear that sort of thing to a pool?” Sometimes Rys’s knowledge of Bijordan was incredible—but he also had some sizable gaps in the most unexpected areas. Anne had gotten into the habit of not taking anything for granted where he was concerned, and double checked, just in case he missed something vital.

“I understand that, but I still have stark white colony skin. It will burn easily; most of my skin has never ever been exposed to sunlight. This was the most sensible thing to wear today, to avoid getting an over exposure. I was not issued any sun block; I have never needed it before.”

That sounded completely logical, practical, and well thought out. Why had he blushed when he said it? Anne regarded him suspiciously for a moment and asked, “Rys are you
body shy?”

He gave her an indignant frown. “What would lead you to that conclusion?”

“I am not detecting a denial in there, anywhere,” she pointed out dryly.

“I am only concerned about being broiled like a steak. I had a radiation burn during a spacewalk once, and it was very painful. I had to sleep without a sheet for a week. I was covered in large blisters, and when they broke I looked like a reptile shedding his skin. It was not very pleasant, and something to be avoided if at all possible!”

Alright, he was a redhead; he probably did have to be concerned about sunburn. Another thought occurred to her while she was considering his limitations and she asked, “What about your eye? Can you get it wet without causing any problems?”

“Oh, it will be fine,” he assured her with a nod. He finally located what he had been searching for, and pulled out a pair of goggles from his bag. “My eye is impermeable; Doc made it that way to be universally adaptable in any environment I might encounter on a mission. We never know when we are deployed what we might run into. Sara insisted that I bring goggles for some reason. Do you think I will need these?”

“For your left eye perhaps, since it is organic,” Anne confirmed. “There’s a lot of chlorine added to a pool’s water to keep it free from bacteria that could cause an infection. Chlorine can aggravate the tissue of the eye if it’s exposed too long, or too frequently.”

He seemed enlightened by her explanation, and grateful for the information. “Okay, that’s why she suggested the goggles. What’s next, Coach?”

“Hop in on the shallow end of the pool,” she instructed.

He did so cautiously, with all of the reticence of a person who was not familiar with the effect of thousands of gallons of water pressing in on him. Anne landed in the water next to him, sharing his excited grin when his head broke the surface of the pool.

“I feel lighter and heavier at the same time. This is like being in a zero g suit, and bouncing on the surface of a moon with low gravity, only there is nothing between me and the vacuum of space. This is amazing; I couldn’t fall if I wanted to!” Rys spun around in a quick circle, and enjoyed watching the waves his every movement generated. Anne let him have a minute to just savor the sensation of being immersed in water for the first time. She felt like she was seeing water again for the first time, through his eyes. The pure joy displayed on his face was something that she would never forget.

First order of business would be teaching him how to float. It took several attempts on his part to relax enough and tip his head back. Once he managed it, she explained that even if he couldn’t swim yet, he could at least float unassisted. He was now at least water safe and he wouldn’t drown if he accidentally fell into water over his head.

He looked very heartened by this piece of news, and became a little more adventuresome when she advanced to teaching the technique for treading water.

Erksome and Gremlin showed up at the same time, calling out cheery greetings. Anne nearly laughed out loud when they stripped off their shirts, sporting the same wetsuit that Rys was wearing. What, were all Special Forces body shy? This was a topic she was determined to look into a little more closely. They weren’t the only ones who were good at covert intelligence gathering.

Or perhaps it really was just standard issue, and they didn’t think twice about wearing it.

She coaxed them into the water, and began their instruction on how to float as well. Rys had his assignment, and was practicing treading water. He looked like he was really warming up to his subject, and getting a real kick out it. By the time she was done with them, three more members of his company, that she didn’t know, had appeared.

After that, soldiers seemed to just pop into existence whenever she had her back turned. Within the next fifteen minutes, her pool rapidly filled up. Anne looked around in amazement, counting heads as she turned. Yes, there really were twenty additional people here.

“Anne?” Candace called from the pool’s edge.

“Coming!” Anne swam over to her sister to see what she needed. Candace dropped down into a crouch on the deck above her so she could whisper, “Twenty hot looking guys in one pool? Our pool! Go, sis!”

Anne rolled her eyes, but she had to laugh too. “I didn’t exactly plan for
twenty.”

“I’m still diggin’ the plan,” her sister announced. “I never expected soldiers to be such completely satisfying eye candy.” She cast a significant look around, pausing here and there for a longer look.

Rosalita appeared in the doorway. She caught Anne’s eye, gave her a vigorous thumb’s up and a lecherous waggle of the eyebrows, and then disappeared inside. Anne had seen that look before, and she was sure that she would have a firm ally in her corner when she eventually had to explain all of this to her father.

“I think Rosalita agrees with you,” Anne murmured back. “Well, what are you waiting for? Hop in, half of this is yours!”

“Oh, with
pleasure
, I assure you,” Candace murmured gleefully.

Anne looked around, wondering how to conveniently divide this group up. “Um, guys?” she called out. When they were all looking at her, she pointed toward the pool house. “Everyone to the left of the pool house, come over here. My sister Candace is going to instruct you. Everyone on the right side, stay where you are, you’ll be working with me.”

Anne dove in and swam toward them, putting together a hasty line of attack in her head as she did.

The swimming lessons were very educational—and not just for the soldiers. Anne was watching her ten charges very carefully, and several things became apparent over the next few hours. One, the command structure was firmly in place. Unless Anne completely missed the mark, she had at least three Captains in her group. If any of the men got a little too rambunctious, or a little too familiar with her, a sharp look from any of those three immediately snapped them back into line.

All of the Captains were obviously very close friends. They acted more like brothers than anything, tormenting one minute, and encouraging each other the next. Rys was more relaxed and open than she had ever seen him, although it took a few minutes for her to understand why.

He’s surrounded by people that he’s known and depended on for years. He’s in a secure place where he doesn’t have to watch his every word or action, for fear of giving too much away. Will he ever learn to trust me that much?

Rosalita called them out of the pool around noon, directing them toward the shaded back porch area. She had a veritable feast of finger foods laid out on a large table, which were happily ingested by the hoard of hungry teenaged soldiers.

“We really do appreciate all of this, Anne,” Miles told her as they knocked back lunch. With thick black hair and golden brown eyes, he was another of the 01 that could slide into a modeling career without any trouble. “None of us thought we actually needed to learn how to swim, but I am sure glad we came! I wouldn’t have missed this for anything. Swimming, who knew?”

“It’s been a lot of fun teaching you,” she assured him. “And I am glad all of you came over. Rys has shared a few stories with me about 01, and I’ve been itching to actually meet you in person.”

Miles shot a speculative look over his shoulder. Anne followed his gaze; Rys was standing on the other end of the deck talking with Gremlin. “He’s been a lot happier since he met you,” Miles confided in a lower more conspiratorial tone. “Out of our entire group, Rys took the forced evacuation from Fourth the hardest. The past few days, he finally seems to be coming to better terms with it. He told me that was your doing. You have been really plowing the road and knocking down the rough spots in front of him. Thanks, Anne.”

“I just offered him a different set of parameters to consider.” She shrugged.

“
Us,
” Miles corrected. “We’re a very tight knit group, Anne. What affects one of us, pretty much affects the rest.”

“I think I figured that one out,” she replied dryly. The misunderstanding about how many were coming for swimming lessons had hammered that point home. “Well, let me extend an invitation to all of you. You’re welcome to come swimming anytime, this has been a real treat.”

A slow, charming smile took over Miles’s face. “Anne, we will be happy to take you up on that invitation.”

Chapter Nine

One of the challenges of doing reconnaissance missions was that they couldn’t deploy in their usual teams every time. Nova had a great deal of intel on 01—not surprising considering how many times they’d been thwarted by the Special Forces. The United Military Council had known full well that Nova would keep a close watch on all of 01 because of that history. The cover of them being “on sabbatical” and living with Bijordan families had been developed for the specific reason of throwing Nova off their trail.

Of course, to keep from blowing that cover and drawing Nova’s attention back to them, they couldn’t stay in teams all of the time. They had to mix it up and make it look like they were just staying friends with each other.

The whole thing gave Rys a headache.

As the (un)official Man In Charge, he had the wonderful responsibility of figuring out who needed to be deployed where. He had to factor in many logistics and time restraints in order to make it work smoothly, too. So after the swimming party, he’d shut himself up in his room and spent four hair-tearing hours putting together the new teams and writing up reconnaissance parameters for everyone.

They could hardly move en masse on the same day either, as that would look very odd to anyone tracking their movements, so Rys had it spaced out so that one team deployed every other night or so.

By the time he was done, evil thoughts started to percolate in his mind. Maybe he could delegate this task next time. Steve could do it….

His team this mission had every team captain in it. He chose to go to the merchant’s convention as that seemed the most promising target-rich environment for Gremlin to work with.

He didn’t think much about who else might have booked the convention for the evening.

The Castleman Convention Center could not have been described as small in any way. It sprawled across two different streets with walkways that spanned over the road so that people could move from one wing to the other. For all of its massive size, it only had three levels to it — a basement level (where they were headed), a main level that offered everything from small restaurants to novelty shops, and a third level that had smaller rooms and connected directly into two different hotels.

He assumed that the complex had a certain elegance to it, except he couldn’t actually see that to confirm it. There were so many people going in every possible direction that he found himself dodging people only three feet inside of the door. In fact, the only reason why he knew that there were indeed restaurants somewhere nearby was because his nose had picked up the smells of sizzling meat and some sort of tart, tangier scent that he couldn’t identify.

The rest of his team had stopped right behind him, looking around with the same sort of bewilderment he felt.

Aaron opened a channel and sent to the group in general,
“So where is it we’re supposed to go?”

“Basement,”
Steve answered succinctly.

“Uh, yeah, and how do we get there?”

Rys had been navigating mining facilities, spaceships, and the regions of space since his preteens. He’d always considered himself to be proficient at reading maps and having a good sense of direction. Now he had to consider that maybe he’d never really been challenged before. He hadn’t the faintest clue on how to reach the basement level entrance and that was
with
the blueprint saved to his chip.

“Well, we came in the south entrance and there’s supposed to be stairs down on the east side, so…”
Duane inclined his head toward the right.
“That way, I guess.”

As good a guess as any. As a group, they started moving in that general direction. Rys found it harder to focus on his mission than normal because of the crowd all around them. He’d never seen outfits like these. They were every color of the rainbow, some of them particularly bright and garish. There were wigs that ranged from white to black, of every possible length and style — as well as a few impossible styles. Not content with just interesting costumes (he sincerely hoped they were costumes) a good majority of them had on face paint as well. Some designs were simple, such as a trio of stars painted near the corner of an eye. Others were more disturbing with blood and teeth painted on the side of a cheek, or long scar tissue. There didn’t seem to be any pattern or rationale for it, the costumes as varied as the people themselves.

Miles caught his eye and gave an elaborate look around them.
“Rys, who else booked the place?”

I don’t know,
he admitted frankly.
Gremlin’s actually the one that looked everything up. All he told me was that the only Novan group to have the place was the Traders Union.

Duane, clearly not waiting for the answer, had already tapped into the Convention’s network and found the answer for himself.
“It says that the Sixth Annual Bijordan Anime Convention and the Tattoo and Horror Convention have also booked space here.”