Tanderon (24 page)

The man’s gaze was locked to mine with a sort of helplessness, at the same time flinching away from the expression I tend to project when I’m all through playing games. He tried to recapture his former mood and calm from when he’d been looking at me as no more than another cadet, but didn’t make it. Finally he just tore his gaze away, then busied himself with paperwork.

There was no comment that needed to be made on such a sensible course of action, so I just turned my head over my shoulder to look back at Freddy, who hadn’t made a sound. He stood not far away from the sergeant’s desk and watched me with no expression on his face, but when my eyes came to rest on him he shrugged.

“Only the sight of my own blood being spilled bothers me,” he commented. “You can do whatever you like with yours.”

He walked over to a chair on the other side of the room, sat down, then folded his arms. We waited in dead silence, but we didn’t have to wait long. The door to Pete’s office opened and Pete started through, but he stopped almost immediately when he saw me.

The other two weren’t taking any chances and had gone to full attention at the first sound of the door opening, but I stayed where I was. I had never realized before that it was possible for a man to register such intense rage without ever changing his expression, but Pete managed it. You would have thought he’d caught me killing his mother.

“I see,” he said in a flat voice. “You’ve decided to claim insanity to get out of here.

Well, it won’t work.” Then his voice rose to a roar. “Get on your feet!”

“No,” I said, my tone as flat as his had been. “I’ve had enough of playing soldier, and I have just one question for you. You’re real gung-ho on this military bit. How good a cadet would you make?”

“A hell-of-a-lot better one than you’re making,” he grated, taking another step forward. “I know how to follow orders!”

“Now you’re seeing the real point,” I pounced, putting my feet down and standing up. “Remember me, Pete? I’m one of those undisciplined characters whose orders don’t come any more detailed than ‘Do it!’ If I needed a blueprint before I could do my job, I wouldn’t have that job even if I lived through it. I’m thirty years old, and I’ve spent the last twelve of them in some pretty peculiar places. You’ll forgive me if I tell you to be glad you weren’t in some of them. The next time Jeff comes by, ask him. He knows what I mean.”

For some reason my heated lecture had turned Pete calm again, his ice-eyes staring at me.

“You’re talking about that Zalento operation, aren’t you?” he asked quietly. “I remember when you and Jeff were brought to Blue Skies afterward. How many hyper-A’s went in on that?”

“Six,” I answered. Zalento wasn’t the only assignment I’d been thinking about, but it might have been the best example possible. I could still remember the day we landed on Zalento, a cold, wind-driven rain the only thing around to greet us. The Council had been disturbed over rumors coming out of Zalento, rumors that whispered about planned attacks on key Federation planets. With Hidemite, our capitol, being the first name on the list, the Council was understandably nervous.

If it had been any other planet than Zalento everyone would have laughed at the idea, but Zalento had been a trouble spot for more than a century. The planet housed malcontents and discontents, retired pirates and active pirates, flourishing slavers and slavers hiding from death warrants. Anyone who had a grudge against the Federation Council found a welcome on Zalento, but lord help anyone who couldn’t account for gaps in his or her past. Spies faced a messy execution, but a few agents had managed to slip in through their cordon of questions and suspicions and that’s how word had gotten back to the Council. The natives of Zalento were growing more and more restless, and the Council halls of Hidemite would be their number one target.

Council members panicked in droves, but some of them got mad instead of shaky and began to make counterplans. Since no overt move had been made by the Zalentons Federation troops couldn’t be sent in, but that didn’t mean a lesson couldn’t be taught the upstarts. Six thousand volunteers were recruited from the ranks of the army – mainly by the “you, you, and you,” method – and six Special Agents were chosen to lead them.

A punitive guerilla expedition was envisioned by the Council members who made the plans. The fact that excepting the Special Agents none of the troops being sent to Zalento knew anything about guerilla warfare was a mere detail to be ironed out in the field. Jeff and I and the other four hyper-A’s shouted ourselves hoarse, but the Council had decided to punish Zalento and nothing would change their minds.

The cold rain greeting us on the planet turned out to be the best of it after all. Once we six split up to go our own separate ways, we discovered the size of the Zalenton army waiting to pick a fight with us. Spying has always been a two-way street, and the officials of Zalento had taken the trouble to make the trip. The unsuspecting populace we had come to harass and punish had already been stuffed into uniforms, taught to march and fire a gun, and was more than willing to practice their new arts on us.

Guerilla warfare takes a certain talent and experience, and very few of the thousand men and women I had with me showed any traces of either. At that point I did what I found out later had been done with the other five units, and turned my thousand back into uniformed foot-sloggers. We used military procedures familiar to the whole force, fought when we outnumbered the enemy or could ambush one part of a larger contingent, ran when we were outnumbered or were in danger of being surrounded.

That may sound like guerilla warfare to you after all, but believe me, it wasn’t. I had no time to train my force on how to disappear into the landscape, so we were constantly on the run. Putting a decent intelligence network together was impossible, so we stumbled around not knowing where we were going or what was worth going after. The populace hated us as invaders and oppressors, so we had to avoid both civilians and the military.

A thousand people are too many to hide easily and too few to make their presence really felt, but the thousand didn’t last long enough to make the problem a problem.

In spite of the toll we ourselves took, our numbers melted away into the rain and mud until we were a shadow of our former strength. Since everyone fought, a large number of my survivors were wounded more or less seriously and no one had come away without a scratch. I’d been hit a couple of times myself, a condition which was compounded by the time I got my stragglers to the prearranged rendezvous point for pickup.

We were ferried right up to the waiting transports and medical attention, but the ferries never made even half the trips they thought were going to be necessary. Three of the six companies were wiped out completely, they and the three hyper-A’s leading them. Walt Evington, the fourth Special Agent, got his survivors to the rendezvous before letting himself bleed to death, and that left Jeff and me.

“Six going out, two coming back,” Pete muttered, his hand rubbing his face in anger at such waste. “If I remember correctly, it was quite some time before they decided it wouldn’t be six out and six lost.”

“Jeff and I have never been ones to sit safely back out of the fighting and danger,” I allowed with a shrug. “But the Council wanted a job done and it got done. The Zalentons destroyed us, but they didn’t come out totally untouched. Then their citizen army began to desert in droves, and the attack on Hidemite never came off.”

Pete was nodding, remembering the time nearly as well as I did, but I wasn’t there to toss the ball of nostalgia.

“Pete, do you understand what I’m talking about?” I pursued. “I know you and respect you, so if it makes you happy to have me stand at attention and call you ‘sir’

I don’t really mind. I’m willing to go along with the gag because nobody gets hurt and it’s good clean fun. But when you tell me to give the same treatment to those half-baked proctors of yours, the fun’s over. I’ve never had to watch what I said unless it was business, and I’m not about to start watching it now. As I said before, this isn’t going to work. You’d better call the Council and tell them to forget it.”

“I can’t call the Council,” he said, the expression in his eyes now disturbed. “Come into my office. We’ve got to talk about this.”

He turned and walked stiffly back into his office, and after a brief hesitation I followed. When I stopped to close the door, I saw Freddy and the sergeant staring at me with the most peculiar expression on their faces. It must have been a long time since anyone had gotten away with saying “no” to Pete.

This time I took the guest chair and got no argument. Pete was seated behind his desk, and was playing with something that cadets called a “tickler.” It’s a thin piece of wood about fifteen inches long and two inches wide, a strip that’s more flexible than some might think. It was carried by classroom instructors – usually officers –

and had a very interesting use.

If a cadet messed up an assignment or in some other way displeased his or her instructor, the cadet was ordered to the front of the room and told to put out the hand that wasn’t used for writing. The instructor then proceeded to apply the tickler to the palm of the cadet’s hand, one stroke for each demerit earned. It didn’t hurt that much to begin with, but if you kept messing up you could find yourself with a very sore hand. The tickler had played a big part in my leaving the first time around… I’d had no trouble with the work, but my instructors kept getting me for “attitude.”

Once I was seated, Pete tossed the tickler back onto his desk with a growl.

“I can’t call the Council,” he repeated, “because I’ve already tried. They refused to listen to anything I had to say, and ordered me not to bother them again. They’re in the middle of some big, involved thing that’s got their whole attention.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “I get the feeling that you know what’s going on over there. Am I wrong?”

“No,” I admitted. “Just remember the airlock.”

He looked annoyed for a moment, then got back to the point.

“I can’t let you out and I can’t let you get yourself out,” he stated after puffing out his breath in vexation. “I’d be back to cadet grade myself if I did. But there’s something about this whole thing that you’re missing, and it makes all the difference.

Have you looked in a mirror lately?”

He now stared at me in an intense sort of way, but I didn’t see what he was getting at.

“I may not shave every morning, but I do comb my hair occasionally,” I offered.

“Don’t tell me I’ve turned blue without noticing it.”

“It would be better if you had,” he said, his voice and expression grim. “Sitting here and studying you right now, I would be willing to swear that your next birthday cake would not hold more than fifteen candles, and truthfully that’s stretching it. You gave me a long lecture about how you’re thirty years old and have been an agent for twelve of those years. Do you have any idea what a jolt that gave me? We’ve known each other for seven or eight years now, but every time I look at you all I can see is a fresh teenager. What you can get away with as a woman of thirty, you can’t get away with as a fifteen year old kid. My proctors don’t see a survivor of Zalento, they see a spoiled brat who asks for it with everything she says. And while we’re talking about age, why was I ordered not to allow a bio-detector to be turned on you? I don’t like mysteries, and you seem to be full of them these days.”

“I can’t tell you that either,” I said, feeling the annoyance beginning to build again.

Did everyone in the universe judge other people on nothing but externals? “But I’m not fifteen no matter what I look like.”

“Tell that to my sergeant out there,” he countered, leaning forward as he spoke. “Did you get a look at his face when you were reminding me about who you are? And Freddy. He’s known you as long as I have, so why is it that suddenly he’s all protective about you? I had to threaten to gag him to get him to stop bothering me!

He’s all for letting you do anything you like, even if it makes me look like a fool.”

The vehemence in his voice was unsettling, doubly so because I hadn’t noticed what he had. Pete’s sergeant had looked shaken, but I’d attributed it to the argument Pete and I had had. And as well as I’d known Freddy, I’d never known him to hover as much as he’d been doing lately. If everyone saw me the way Pete did – and I’d had enough maddening experiences to prove the contention beyond any possible doubt –

then it was no wonder I was having so many problems with the proctors.

“You could tell your proctors who I am,” I suggested, moving uncomfortably in the chair. I didn’t much care for the idea of announcing myself as a Special Agent, but it was better than being constantly treated like a child. “At least that would get them off my back,” I added in a mutter.

“Would it!” he came back hotly, his hands clasped tightly on the desk. “There are at least as many damned fools among proctors as there are anywhere else. How many of them would decide that the story was just so much bull and try you for themselves? And if it spread to the cadet population, which it surely would? How long would it stay ‘fun’ if you had to keep fighting off people who would like to say they’d taken a Special Agent? If you were built like Freddy there’d be no problem, but how many of them are going to believe that I had to work at it to get two falls out of three with you? And that only because you were playing? I’ve never seen you work, and I don’t want to. I’ve heard stories.”

His eyes were directly on me as he said that, his leathery face as expressionless as his voice was cold. I felt my back stiffening as my head came up, and a funny flutter got itself started in my middle.

“I don’t think I like the way that sounds,” I said slowly, choosing my words carefully. “I’ve never killed by accident, and I watch myself closely when I’m not working. You make me sound like the next thing to a mass murderer.”

“Aren’t you?” he asked harshly, his cold gaze not moving from me. “How many people died on Zalento? And how many of those did you account for yourself?”