Sergeant Bradley, the Headhunters’ field first, slipped out of the shower behind his commanding officer. “Anything I can do to help, sir?” he asked.
Stripped, the noncom looked as thin as a flayed weasel. He was missing one toe, a plasma burst a decade before had left half his scalp hairless and pink, and much of the body between those two points bore one or another form of scarring.
“No problem,” Kowacs said—and there wasn’t, but it was nice to know that there was always going to be somebody to watch his back. It kept you alive in this line of work; and more important, it kept you as sane as you could be. “Captain English heads up the Ninety-Second. This—” shifting his gaze to the taller officer—”is First Sergeant Bradley.”
“Toby,” said English, shaking with Bradley—both of them with hands wet from the shower. “Not ‘captain’ yet anyway, though maybe after this last one . . .”
“Hey!” said Bradley with enough enthusiasm to ignore the fact that English was obviously distracted. “You guys did a hell of a job on the port! Nothin’ left but rubble and cinders. Say, they got you looking for that weasel commando that shot up Post Bessemer two nights ago?”
“Ah,” said English. “No, we’re about to lift. As a matter of fact—”
Bradley didn’t need the glance Kowacs gave him. “Sorry, sir,” he said as he ducked back into the shower facility. “Damn good to meet you!”
English spent a moment marshaling his thoughts after Bradley had left the two officers alone again—if alone was the right word for men standing beside one of the main roads crisscrossing the huge base.
Base Thomas Forberry—named to commemorate symbolically the hundreds of thousands of civilians whom the Khalia had murdered—had been woodland and farms gone to brush when the Fleet landed to retake Bethesda less than a month before. Now it had a hundred kilometers of perimeter fence with bunkers and guard towers; a nearby spaceport and naval dockyard ten times bigger than the port that had served the planet before the Khalian invasion; buildings to house more people than there were indigenous humans in the portion of the planet now under the Fourth District Military Government installed here at Base Forberry—
And seven thousand five hundred hectares of mud—the inescapable result of any military construction project save those undertaken in deserts, ice caps, or vacuum.
“Ah,” said Kowacs—he’d have helped English say what he needed to if he’d had the faintest notion of what it was. “Bradley was right. I don’t think—” he paused; but it was true, so he said it, “anybody could’ve done a better job on the port than you guys did. You’ll get your second star for sure.”
“Had a lotta help from the indigs,” English said, letting his eyes slant away toward the horizon. “They got us through the perimeter, you know?”
“No shit?” said Kowacs. He hadn’t heard anything about that.
He was vaguely aware that he was standing stark naked beside the road. Some of the admin types who’d landed when the shooting pretty much stopped might take that badly, but modesty wasn’t a useful virtue among troops who spent most of their time either in the field or packed into the strait confines of a landing vessel.
“I guess . . .” said Toby English with a diffidence that must have been as unusual to him as it would have been in the man to whom he was speaking. “That what your sergeant said was the straight goods? Nothing left at the port?”
“Oh, look, man, I’m sorry,” said Kowacs who finally thought he knew what was bothering the other officer. “Look, we recovered two of your people. But the third one, the suit transponder still worked but there was half the tail of a destroyer melted across him. Nothing we could do, but we tried.”
“Thanks,” said English with a smile that was genuine but too brief for that to have been the real problem. “Dead’s dead. Don’t mean nothin’.”
“Yeah,” said Kowacs, agreeing with the meaning rather the words. “We’ve all sent home eighty kilos of sand with a warning to the family not to open the coffin.”