Tanderon (25 page)

I stared at him silently for a moment, then tore my gaze away as I found it impossible to look at him any longer. We’d been friends for years, and I don’t make friends of people I care nothing for. Sure there were stories about the sort of things Special Agents did for a living, and my name wasn’t unknown among the people who were at times involved with agents. I just hadn’t expected a friend to listen to those stories.

“What do you expect me to do about it?” I asked in as toneless a voice as I could manage, staring down at my hands. “I can’t forget everything I’ve learned. I’m the same person I’ve always been.”

“No, you’re not!” he denied forcefully, and I could hear his chair creak as he shifted his weight. “You’re a swamp viper dressed up as a sweet snake, and the difference between the two doesn’t matter until you’re bitten! You don’t hand arbitrary orders to a hyper-A if you want to stay whole, but you do try to straighten out a brat in your charge. Thinking you’ve got the second when you really have the first can be fatal if you push it too hard. I’ve just had a staff reduction; I can’t afford to lose any more personnel.”

The fluttering in my middle became a sudden stab, and I couldn’t take anymore.

“I’ll settle the whole thing,” I said, standing up and still not looking at him. “I’m going over to 2, and I’ll stay there. If the Council asks, I’m here and doing fine. I won’t show up anywhere else and embarrass you.”

I started for the door, all thoughts of taking off totally gone from my mind. There were enough places at 2 that were good for holing up in, and that was what I really needed right now. What Pete had said had hurt me, more than if he’d simply slapped me in the face. I felt betrayed and rejected, the sort of things I’d gotten used to feeling among strangers. Getting the same feeling because of someone who was supposed to be a friend was more than I could handle.

“You are not going to 2,” Pete growled before my hand could touch the doorknob.

“You’re going to come back to that chair and listen to me.”

As upset as I was, the calm in his voice rasped right along my nerves. I turned fast to face him again and demanded, “Damn it, Pete, what do you expect of me? I can’t stay here because you’re afraid I’ll kill everyone in sight. I can’t go to 2 because the idea doesn’t appeal to you. Would you like me to go up in a puff of smoke? Right now I wish I could oblige you!”

“I would like you to be here where you’re supposed to be,” he grated, gaze locked hard to mine. My voice hadn’t been exactly even, but he didn’t seem to have noticed.

“No matter what I said I know you’re not about to go on a killing spree, but what happens the next time a proctor leans on you and you try a fresh comeback? If it’s the wrong proctor, you could find yourself in too much of a hurry to watch what you’re doing! Can’t you even try to remember what you were like at fifteen?”

“I do remember,” I muttered, looking down at the floor to counter the whirling in my mind. “At fifteen I was just the same as I am now. What wrong with my going to 2?”

“You were assigned here and you’ll stay here,” he insisted. “I wasn’t trying to tell you just now that I’m afraid to turn my back on you. I was trying to point out the biggest part of this whole mess. Do you see it now?”

I wasn’t looking at the same thing he was, but there was no reason to go into the difference.

“I see it,” I answered, pushing aside all traces of how I felt. “I just don’t see what can be done about it.”

“I do,” he returned in a hard voice. “Come back here and sit down.”

I took a deep breath, then went reluctantly back to the chair. When I sat down, I saw those eyes on me again.

“I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but the answer’s obvious,” he said, rubbing his face with one hand. “You gave it to me yourself when you said you never watch what you say unless it’s business. Very well, this is now business.

You’re under my command, and I’m assigning you the job of acting like a normal fifteen-year-old girl. One who doesn’t know anything at all about self defense or offense – especially offense.”

I stared at him in shock, not believing I’d heard him say what he had.

“You don’t know what you’re asking,” I protested after a moment. “When I’m in a role I have to stick with it. That would make this whole thing ten times worse than it is.”

“That wasn’t a request, it was an order,” he growled, still having no trouble meeting my gaze. “I don’t know what you did to get yourself sent here, but it doesn’t matter.

You’re here, and this is the only way I can be sure everyone will be safe.”

“Everyone but me,” I countered, then gestured slightly behind me. “Do you know what those proctors would do to me under those particular circumstances?”

“Nothing you don’t deserve,” he said, pointing a finger at me. “And if what you said was true, you’ve been deserving it since you were fifteen the first time. Personally, if any daughter of mine acted the way you’ve been acting, she would regret it with her whole being. Your father looked at it differently?”

His eyes were glittering in a way I’d never seen before, but I recognized the attitude from my time with Captain Lowell aboard the Swamp Fox. Captain Lowell had been constantly comparing me to his own daughters, remembering my hyper-A status only with a great deal of effort. It had never occurred to me before, but men were also susceptible to being “in a family way.” Only it wasn’t their bodies that swelled, it was their heads. Pete was still waiting for an answer, so I shrugged.

“Personally, I see nothing wrong with being independent. Pop might have agreed with your outlook if he’d been there, but I get my itchy foot from him. That’s why my mother refused to marry him after she chose him as the father of her child. He would have been as impossible to live with as most Explorers are. As it was he came home every year or two, stayed for a few weeks, and promised to settle down if Laura would marry him. She and I both knew better, so she always refused and off he went again.” I smiled a little at the memory. “I haven’t seen him for some time now. I wonder how he’s doing.”

“Get that roving look out of your eye!” Pete ordered. “You’re not going anywhere! If you missed having a father to show you the way the first time, you won’t be missing it again. And you can practice that part right now. The required response to my orders is ‘Yes, sir.’”

“Oh, yes, sir!” I flared, jumping to my feet and snapping to attention. “Any other orders, sir? Maybe an hour on the rack if I sneeze without permission?”

“Don’t you use that tone with me!” he roared, his hands flat on the arms of the chair.

“Are you or are you not going to consider yourself on assignment?”

I glared at him for a moment, then turned my back and folded my arms. Pete had no authority over me and technically I outranked him, but as head of a Federation facility he had the right to offer me an assignment. I wasn’t required to accept that assignment, not when the Council hadn’t added their stamp of approval, but in twelve years as an agent I’d never refused an assignment no matter what it was like.

“I have no choice whatsoever,” I finally admitted, hating the trapped feeling suddenly filling me. “Tell me you thought I’d refuse.”

“No,” he said with grim satisfaction. “No, I didn’t think you’d refuse. You refuse orders, not assignments. I haven’t known you all these years without learning something about you. Now, let’s see what a normal fifteen year old looks like.”

I couldn’t let him get away with that. I swung around to face him and raged, “If you call me abnormal one more time, I’ll -”

“You’ll what?” he demanded, looking up at me without moving – and with no expression on his face.

“I’ll cry,” I finished miserably, turning slightly away from him. “Isn’t that what normal teenage girls do? But then, how would I know? I’ve never been a normal anything.”

“Diana,” he said in a more gentle tone than I’d ever heard him use before. “If you were normal in the everyday sense of the word, you couldn’t do the sort of job you’re so good at. Right now it’s the situation that’s abnormal – and dangerous. I don’t want to see you getting hurt either.”

He got up and came around to my side of the desk to stand behind me, and suddenly his voice was hard again.

“But if you think you’ve made me feel guilty for what I said, forget it! I happen to know hyper-A’s take pride in the fact that they’re abnormal. The bunch of you think of yourselves as better than normal people, and you were trying to con me.”

Damn it, he had no business knowing that. I looked up at him over my shoulder, and the green ice was colder than ever.

“Don’t normal girls ever try to con their fathers?” I asked in an innocent way, then turned to face him. “You did say you were going to be my father this time around?

I’m just practicing on you.”

“And I’m going to practice on you,” he growled in answer. “I’ve never been a father, but I know how the part goes. Then he reached for the tickler on his desk. “Now show me what a girl looks like when she knows she’s about to be punished. But don’t hold out your hand. That’s not the part of you I’ll be aiming at.”

He seemed to be half expecting something physical from me, but I didn’t move.

Instead I put a solemn expression on my face, and let a hint of tears start in my eyes.

“Are you going to hurt me just because I tried to make you feel sorry for me?” I asked quietly, meeting his gaze but not defiantly. “Everybody needs that sometimes, even me. If you think I was being unreasonable, go ahead and do whatever you like.

I won’t even try to stop you.”

He stared at me for a long minute without moving, trying to keep the anger going, but finally he threw the tickler back on his desk.

“You are good,” he said gruffly, his gaze softer than it had been. “If you can keep that up, neither one of us will have a problem. Now get back to your quarters. It’s almost lights out.”

“Not so fast, daddy,” I countered, relaxing back to normal and folding my arms.

“What do I tell those proctors about my sudden change of heart? They’re not pliable males like you.”

He started to get mad again, hot over being conned a second time, but then he suddenly lost the stiffness and grinned.

“I’ve never seen anybody able to turn it on and off like that,” he said, really seeming to be amused. “I was wrong before, I do want to see you work – so I’ll be watching you every step of the way. That means the next time you try to put anything over on me you won’t sit down for a week! Tell the proctors anything but the truth. Get going!”

I threw up my hands in complete resignation and started for the door, but an unpleasant thought made me stop and turn back to him.

“Pete, since when have there been dances on day 6?” I asked. “I don’t remember ever hearing about them.”

He was looking at something on his desk, but raised his head to grimace at me.

“We got hit with a Council inspection a little over a year ago,” he explained in disgust. “Some fool in the bunch noticed that we had little boys and little girls, but no social mixing. I tried to point out that this isn’t a boarding school, but the fool pulled more weight than I did. That’s why we now have dances on day 6. If you’re looking for a date, ask Freddy. I never go.”

“I’ve already got a date,” I said with my own disgust. “I’ve got an admirer.” Then I brightened. “Isn’t it too bad that between extra duty and the course at 2, I won’t be able to make it.”

“Guess again,” he said with a nasty grin. “All the other normal little girls will be there, so you will too. Or at least you’d better be there. No more trouble, remember?”

“Tell me something,” I said, looking him over in a pleasant way. “Are you a born sadist, or did you have to practice?”

“It’s all native talent,” he commented with something of a grin, giving his attention to the paperwork again. “Beat it.”

This time I made it through the door, but after pulling it shut behind me I took only one more step before almost tripping over Freddy. He checked me out with his eyes as if he were trying to guess my weight, and when he seemed satisfied that I was still in one piece he grinned.

“For a while there we thought we’d have to call in a referee,” he said, leaning one hand against the wall near me. “The problem was no one was willing to get between you two. How did it go?”

“Doesn’t he ever miss getting his own way?” I asked, glancing back toward the closed door. “I’d hate to work for him as a regular thing.”

“That’s our C.O.,” Freddy agreed with a laugh. “Do you need a shoulder to cry on?”

“At least one,” I answered with a smile. “Will you walk me home?”

“Sure,” he said, showing a matching smile as he took my arm. We left the building and walked slowly down the darkened street without talking, and I used the opportunity to consider my problem. I had a ready-made solution for the proctors, and Pete couldn’t say he hadn’t asked for it. Telling me to tell them “anything but the truth” was a mistake Ringer never would have made, but then Ringer knew how I operated. Maybe I could still have some fun even if I did have to be a good little cadet from now on. Then I sighed and turned to Freddy.

“Why didn’t Pete ever make general?” I asked. “It couldn’t be that he isn’t qualified.”

“It couldn’t be and isn’t,” Freddy confirmed with a nod. “He’s turned down the promotion more times than other people have it offered to them because if he makes general they’ll pull him out of here. Since he has no intention of going, he stays a colonel.”

I hesitated a minute, then looked directly at him.

“Why didn’t you tell me you’d spoken to Pete about me? It might have kept my big mouth closed earlier outside the mess hall.”

“You’re not the easiest gal to tell things to,” he responded with a shrug, rubbing briefly at my cheek with the side of his finger. “And besides that, it wasn’t worth talking about. I like to report success, not failure.”

“Success?” I echoed, giving him a vague look. “What’s that? I haven’t run across it in so long, I don’t even think I can spell it anymore. Thanks for keeping me company, Freddy. I needed it.”

We were outside my barracks building, but Freddy didn’t seem to want the stroll to end.