I should have felt pity for Quint, I know. Instead I felt a smoldering resentment, almost anger.
Frede read my face. “He can’t help it,” she said. “He’s not goldbricking.”
“How do you know?”
She shrugged. “What difference would it make?”
I realized she was right. What difference would it make? Despite all the training, despite being gestated specifically to be a soldier, despite a lifetime of nothing but the military, Quint had taken all the fighting he was ever going to take. I should have seen it coming. I should have realized that while we were fighting for our lives on Lunga he was hiding in a hole somewhere, keeping his head down, unwilling or unable to face the death that the rest of us did not even think about in the heat of action.
“It’s not a good thing for soldiers to think too much,” Frede told me as we left Quint to the medics and went to find our quarters and the rest of the troop.
“Maybe not,” I muttered, thinking of Randa, who did not really believe soldiers were capable of thinking at all.
“You’re now my second-in-command,” I told her as we walked along the metal passageways, guided by the computer displays on the bulkheads. Most of the others in the passageways in this section of the station were humans, although we passed several Tsihn and even a few other species.
She nodded. “Are we going to stay here on this station, or will they ship us to an R-and-R center?”
“No R-and-R,” I said. “We’ve got a new assignment.”
“Without a rest and refit from the last one?” She was immediately indignant.
I suddenly realized that it was my fault. “I asked for you,” I said, “when I got the assignment.”
“What assignment?”
“Bititu. It’s an asteroid in the—”
I stopped. Frede’s eyes seemed to glaze over for a moment. The trigger word. I could have kicked myself. All the data from the subconscious briefing came surging up into her awareness.
“Sheol,” she murmured. “They don’t give you the easy ones, do they?”
“I shouldn’t have asked for you,” I started to apologize. “Maybe I can get you released for R and R.”
“Not now. Not once we’ve been briefed. They’ll either ship us out or freeze us.”
We started walking along the passageway again. I didn’t know what to say. It had never occurred to me that the troopers deserved a spell of rest and recreation after their ordeal on Lunga. Bititu promised to be even worse.
“There’s one glitch in the planning that I’ll have to fix,” Frede told me as we approached the section where we would be quartered.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The sleeping arrangements. They’ve paired each of us off with other people.”
“That’s standard procedure, isn’t it? The army doesn’t want us forming emotional attachments that are too close.”
“Right. But you’re battalion commander now and rank has its privileges.”
“I don’t know if I should—”
“Not you,” Frede said, her eyes twinkling mischievously. “If I’m your second, then I can pull my rank to supersede the bitch they’ve assigned to you.”
CHAPTER 19
So when we boarded a Tsihn troopship for the flight to Bititu, Lieutenant Frede was my second-in-command and my bunk-mate.
Our ship joined a sizable battle fleet of cruisers and dreadnoughts. The plan was to make the run to the Jilbert system at superlight velocity, so we could not be detected until the very last moment, when we slowed to relativistic speed. Navigation was going to be tricky, but the Tsihn admiral assured me that they could get us to within a few light-hours of Jilbert.
“In that way,” it told me at one of our conferences in its quarters, “the Hegemony will have no warning time to reinforce the system.”
Its conference room was hot and dry; like being in a sunbaked desert, except that we were seated around an uneven conference table. Half of the table was set at a height to make humans comfortable, the other half several centimeters higher for the comfort of the big senior officers among the reptilians. The admiral, of course, was the biggest of them all: nearly three meters tall when standing, the dun-colored scales of its chest almost completely covered with symbols of rank and distinction.