Tanderon (31 page)

“Val,” I began with a frown. “You wouldn’t – ”

“Explain this away,” he said, his tone as dry as his gaze was hard. He stopped dancing, held me so tight I couldn’t breathe, then kissed me as though we were alone together in bed. I pounded at him with my fists, but I might as well have been waving them in the air. Normally I could have gouged his eyes with my thumbs, dug my fingernails in his ear lobes, gone for the pain spots under his jaw – anything! But I wasn’t supposed to know about things like that. I struggled and managed to knee him while pretending to kick his shins, and when he folded a little with the pain I pulled loose.

We were standing in almost the exact center of the hall, and in all that crowd there wasn’t a single sound to be heard or a single eye that wasn’t on us. Then there were a lot of sharp, rustling noises that started behind me and spread quickly to the rest of the hall. When I saw everyone in view standing at attention I turned slowly – to see Pete standing ramrod straight watching everything that was happening. With a silent groan, I also got to attention.

“What’s going on here?” Pete growled, coming closer to stare at Val.

“Sir, he – ” I began, but Pete cut me off.

“Not you,” he ordered, keeping his eyes directly on Val. “You.”

“It’s all my fault, Colonel,” Val said, looking really and truly ashamed of himself. “I shouldn’t have come here, but we did get to know each other on the liner coming out, and I thought that seeing her one more time wouldn’t hurt anything. I know she’s really too young to completely understand what she’s doing, but I’m old enough to understand and should have controlled myself no matter what she said or did. I’d like to apologize for what happened, and assure you that it will never happen again.”

Hearing all that, I wanted to close my eyes with the pain. No fifteen-year-old girl is too young to understand about sex, no matter where she comes from. Pete moved his green-ice eyes to me, then looked somewhat past me.

“Major Drummond,” he said. “Have you been here long enough to see the beginning of this?”

I hadn’t known that Freddy was in the hall until he came out of the crowd to stand beside me.

“Yes, sir,” he told Pete. “I saw the whole thing. I beg your pardon, Colonel, but it did seem as if she was – ah – encouraging him.”

Pete turned back to Val, and that was when Freddy leaned toward me and whispered, “I remembered this time. Go ahead and protect yourself.”

“I think you’d better leave now,” Pete was saying to Val while I told myself I was being an idiot for feeling odd. So what if they’d ganged up on me at a time when I wasn’t free to fight back? Wasn’t that the way the universe usually handled things? I just hadn’t thought they would … foolish of me…

“I think you’d better leave now,” Pete said to Val. “I’ll see that this is straightened out, but you’d better understand that it won’t be smart if you come back.”

“I do understand,” Val said in a quiet, serious way. “Good night, Colonel, and I hope you accept my apology.”

Pete watched Val leave, then he turned back to me and his green eyes were frozen solid.

“As for you,” he growled, “you come with me.”

He grabbed my left wrist then took off for the kitchen, dragging me along behind him. He moved so fast that I almost couldn’t keep up, forcing me to half run just to stay on my feet. He blasted through the swinging doors, stopped about ten feet inside, then pulled me around in a half circle to face him.

“Sir, he’s lying,” I said quickly, knowing the war was lost but still needing to try. “I didn’t – ”

“Is Freddy lying too?” he rapped in a fury, still holding tight to my wrist. “If I hadn’t taken his suggestion and come here to check on you tonight, you probably would have gotten away with it! Whoever that agent is, I doubt if he would have reported you!”

I realized then that Val’s name hadn’t been clearly visible on his I.D. If Pete had seen the name he might have suspected I was being framed. I wanted to tell him who Val was, but there were dozens of faces pressed close to the glass in the kitchen doors and double dozens of ears opened wide.

“Sir, please listen to me,” I tried again, trying to pull myself out of the weariness that had joined the tiredness. Weariness isn’t the same feeling, but I might as well have saved my breath. Pete was still too mad to listen to anything.

“If you came here with the express purpose of embarrassing me, you’ve achieved your goal,” he rasped. “You’ll forgive me if I return the favor.”

He dropped to one knee, pushed me over the other one, and started to return the favor in the way he’d once said he would. He was really furious, but after only a very short while he seemed to get it out of his system. He pushed me back to my feet and stood, then he stalked over to the kitchen doors. The faces disappeared as if by magic, and he opened one of the doors.

“Morrison!” he roared. “In here!” When Morrison came rushing up, he growled,

“Take her back to her quarters and see that she stays there until further notice.”

Morrison crooked a finger at me, so I went to her without comment. Pete was surely still glaring at me, but he’d gotten his own back so there was no reason to look at him. Instead I followed Morrison through the unnatural quiet of the mess hall and outside, where she stopped and turned to me.

“I told you there were worse things than standing in a corner,” she said with an annoyance that was almost personal. “If you were trying to show him you’re not a baby, you couldn’t have picked a worse way.”

“I guess you’re right,” I agreed, still working to stay in character. “But at least he did get it out of his system.”

“I wouldn’t count on that,” she warned, starting us walking again. “Tonight you brought out the father in him, but tomorrow I’m willing to bet that the colonel will be back in charge.”

I realized she was probably right, but there was nothing I could do about that either.

We walked back to my quarters, and once I was inside she closed the door and left me alone. I stripped and lit a cigarette before getting into bed, but refused to let myself think about what had happened. I still had a job to do, and thinking personal thoughts while working isn’t a very good idea.

Linda and Elaine got back together, and Elaine blushed and refused to look at me.

Linda, though, surprised me by not gloating. She stopped near my bunk and looked down at me, twirling a strand of her hair around her finger.

“I have to admit that he was worth it,” she grudged. “Where did you find him?”

I turned away from the deep interest she showed without answering. Any answer I could have given just would have proved how gullible I really am.

I missed calisthenics the next morning, but I missed breakfast too. Day 7 is usually a day off, devoted to whatever you’d like to use it for, and I’d been looking forward to it to catch up on some sleep. But when Morrison called for me at 0800, I could tell from her face that sleep was the last thing I’d be getting.

“Let’s go,” she said with a sigh. “The colonel is back in charge.” I left my bunk without a word, and when we got outside she headed directly for the exercise fields.

“You’ve got a full day ahead of you,” she added, “and I don’t think he considers you a baby anymore.”

She glanced at me as if expecting me to comment, but there wasn’t really much to be said. I walked along in silence, trying to resign myself to what was coming, but it didn’t work very well. There was a male proctor waiting at the exercise fields, and he looked like the patient but humorless sort.

“There’s a set of fatigues inside the equipment shed,” he said in a flat voice. “Get in them fast and come back out. We have a lot to cover.”

I changed out of my uniform in the equipment shed, and came back out to find Morrison already gone. The male proctor, though, was still very much there.

“The colonel would like you to begin with a brisk trot around the track,” the man said, pointing toward the large dirt oval that we stood near. “In fact, he’d like you to go a number of times around it.”

When he didn’t add anything I asked, “How many times, sir?”

“You’ll find out when you’re finished,” the man said with the hint of a smile, and then it vanished. “Get started.”

There was no way to argue so I trotted around the track until I’d almost worn a rut in it, but the proctor just stood and watched. I was starting what seemed like the four hundredth lap when I tripped and almost fell, and that seemed to wake him up.

“That’s enough for now,” he called out. “You can finish the rest later. Right now I have another job for you.”

I was sweating and short of breath as he led me through the dust to the back of the equipment shed and pointed to a stack of boxes.

“Those just came in, but they’re in the wrong place,” he said. “Move them around to the front of the shed.”

I barely glanced at him before grabbing the first box. It wasn’t too heavy, not when it felt like it was only half full of lead, but the interesting part of the exercise was yet to come. That would be when the man decided he didn’t want the boxes around the front of the shed after all, and I’d have to move them back. I wore a rut around the shed to the left bringing them out and a matching one to the right taking them back, and when I had finally finished there wasn’t enough oxygen left in the air.

“It’s after 1200 hours,” the proctor mused, looking at his wrist. “I think I’ll get some lunch. You can rest while I’m gone, but don’t worry. I won’t be long.”

I watched him leave before I collapsed where I was. I stretched out flat on the ground, the dull glare of a dust-covered noon baking down on me, fighting not to think how much better a job Eternity would have done that time instead of the Glue.

The proctor came back in about twenty-five minutes, and after he’d given me a drink of water we started all over again. I spent the first two hundred laps around the track wondering where the bread was.

It was late in the afternoon and I’d been standing at attention for more than an hour when Freddy showed up. The proctor glanced at him, then moved far enough away so that he was out of hearing range. I kept my eyes straight ahead and didn’t move, and Freddy stared at me as if he were trying to figure out where to start.

“Diana, I’m sorry!” he said at last, his voice rough and uneven, his eyes filled with hurt as he looked at me. “I didn’t mean for it to go this far! I thought Pete would be satisfied with spanking you… I tried to tell him I’d helped to set you up, but he won’t listen to me. He thinks I’m trying to protect you.”

Talking would have taken too much strength, so I didn’t answer him. He waited a moment, then grabbed my arms and shouted, “Say something, damn it!”

I moved my eyes slowly until I looked straight at him, then acceded to his request.

“Don’t ever be sorry,” I told him in as loud a whisper as I could manage. He stared at me again with an unreadable expression, then let me go and walked away without looking back even once.

The proctor let me go in time to get ready for evening parade. I managed to shower and dress with more trouble than I thought I’d have, then lined up quickly enough to avoid any demerits. Morrison showed up, and stopped in front of me to stare hard.

“Sick call is after evening mess,” she said, looking more than a little disturbed. When I shook my head she stared another minute, then moved on without saying anything else. I made it through parade, but couldn’t eat much afterward. My hand shook too much, and I didn’t have the sort of appetite I thought I would. I’d already pushed my plate away when Morrison came over to my table.

“He wants to see you,” she said in the same quiet way she had earlier.

I moved away from my place, got to my feet, and followed her over to Pete’s table.

When I stopped at attention in front of him he looked up, and for a moment I thought he was going to say something to me. But then he changed his mind and turned to Morrison instead.

“Get her back to her quarters,” he said, then returned his attention to his food.

Morrison tapped my arm and we went out, neither of us saying anything, and when I got to my room I took the uniform off and lay down. I felt wearier than I had in a very long time, but for some reason I couldn’t seem to sleep. I lay there with my eyes wide open and tried to listen to my thoughts, but my mind refused to show me any. Eventually, sleep managed to find me.

Day 1 started it all over again, with one exception. When I reached my class in military regulations, Captain Bennison wasn’t there. We all waited, wondering what had made him late, then the door opened and chief proctor Langley walked in. He strode over to the desk, dropped some books and a tickler on it, then turned to look us over.

“Captain Bennison won’t be back,” he announced without preamble. “My name is Langley, and you’ll treat me the same as you did the captain. You’d better know I have the same power to punish mistakes. Tardiness won’t be tolerated, and you’ll all leave this class knowing regulations as well as you know your own handwriting.

We’ll start now.”

He’d been glancing around the class as if he were searching for someone, and he was. When he spotted me he stopped searching, and a faint smile showed on his face.

“Santee,” he said. “Up!”

I stood up and got to attention as was required in the classroom, and Langley measured me with his eyes.

“Give me section B, articles one through five,” he said at last, which was typical of him. The class had hardly begun on section A, and I was sure he knew it. That meant he still remembered the fun time we’d had on registration day.

“Sir, section B, articles one through five are as follows,” I responded, then began to reel them off. Agents of all grades start out hating regulations, but still end up knowing them cold. When you do something, it helps to also know whether or not you have to cover up. Langley waited until I’d gone through all of it, and then he smiled.

“Wrong,” he said in an ugly voice. “You forgot the punctuation. Five demerits. Up front.”

I stared at him for a second, then walked up to the front of the room and put out my left hand. He took his tickler from the desk then looked me straight in the eye.