The door flashed special projects/teitelbaum an instant before it opened.
“Where the hell have you been?” snarled Grant.
His briefcase lay open on the desk. A gossamer filament connected the workstation to the office’s hologram projector. Fuzzy images of battle and confusion danced in the air while the portrait of Admiral Teitelbaum glared down sternly.
“I had to check out my people,” Kowacs said as he leaned his blackened rifle against one of the leather-covered chairs. He lifted one, then the other of the crossed bandoliers of ammunition over his head and laid them on the seat cushion.
“I said at once,” the civilian snapped. “You’ve got platoon leaders to baby-sit, don’t you?”
“I guess,” said Kowacs. He unlatched his equipment belt. It swung in his hands, shockingly heavy with its weight of pistol and grenades. He tossed it onto the bandoliers.
God, he felt weak. . . .
Grant grimaced. “All right, give me your helmet.”
Kowacs had forgotten he was wearing a commo helmet. He slid it off carefully. The room’s filtered air chilled the sweat on the Marine’s scalp.
The civilian reversed the helmet, then touched the brow panel with an electronic key. Kowacs knew about the keys but he’d never seen one used before.
Line Marines weren’t authorized to remove the recording chips from their helmets. That was the job of the Second-Guess Brigade, the rear-echelon mothers who decided how well or badly the people at the sharp end had behaved.
Grant muttered to his workstation. The ghost images shut down. He put the chip from Kowacs’ helmet directly into the hologram reader. His own weapon and shoulder harness hung over the back of his chair.
“Didn’t your equipment echo everything from our helmets?” Kowacs asked.
He remained standing. He wasn’t sure he wanted to sit down. He wasn’t sure of much of anything.
“Did a piss-poor job of it, yeah,” the civilian grunted. “Just enough to give me a hint of what I need.”
He scrolled forward, reeling across the seventeen-minute operation at times-ten speed. Images projected from Kowacs viewpoint jerked and capered and died. “Too much hash from the—”
There was a bright flash in the air above the desk.
“—fucking plasma discharges. You know—” Grant met the Marine’s eyes in a fierce glare, “—it was bughouse crazy to use a plasma weapon in a finger corridor. What if the whole outer bulkhead blew out?”
“It didn’t,” said Kowacs. “You got complaints about the way the job got done, then you send somebody else the next time.”
Grant paused the projection. The image was red with muzzle flashes and bright with pulmonary blood spraying through the mouth of the man in the tattered spacesuit.
“Smart to bring back the body,” Grant said in a neutral voice. “Too bad you didn’t capture him alive.”
“Too bad your system didn’t work the first time so we could’ve kept using the stun gas,” Kowacs replied flatly. The parade of images was a nightmare come twice.
Grant expanded the view of the dying man’s face. “We’ve got a hard make on him,” he said. “There was enough residual brain-wave activity to nail him down, besides all the regular ID he was carrying. Name’s Haley G. Stocker, Ensign . . . and he disappeared on a scouting mission.”
“A Syndicate spy?” Kowacs said.
“That’s what the smart money’s betting,” the civilian agreed.
He backed up the image minusculy. The blood vanished like a fountain failing, the aristocratic lips shrank from an O of disbelieving horror into the sneer the ensign bore an instant before the bullets struck.
“Only thing is,” Grant continued, “Ensign Stocker disappeared thirty-five years ago.”
He looked at Kowacs and raised an eyebrow, as if he were expecting the Marine to come up with an explanation.
“Bullshit,” said Kowacs. “He’s only about twenty. He was.”
“Close,” the civilian agreed. “Twenty and a half standard years when you shot him, the lab says.”
He let the projector run forward. The spy, the boy, hemorrhaged and died again before his mind could accept what was happening.
“I don’t get it,” said Nick Kowacs. He heard a persistent buzzing, but it came from his mind rather than the equipment.
Grant looked . . . tired wasn’t the right word, lonely wasn’t the right word, but. . . . Grant had paid a price during the operation too—