“A moment of your time, Lieutenant Huber,” said Captain Orichos. He jumped. She’d walked over to him while his attention was on the byplay in the camp.
“Ma’am?” he said. Without thinking about it, he stiffened to Parade Rest. “That is, Captain?”
“Mauricia, I hope,” Orichos said. After the battle she’d resumed wearing her beret instead of a Slammers commo helmet. She took it off now and shook her short hair loose before replacing the cap. “I suppose you know your unit will be routed back with a stopover in Midway?”
“No ma’am,” Huber said with a faint grin. “There were rumors, but we’re line soldiers. Nobody tells us anything.”
“Well, I’m telling you,” Orichos said with a mixture of crispness and challenge. “I’ll be flying back by car shortly; there are some things to clear up in in the capital now that the threat’s been dealt with.”
She cleared her throat and looked away. “What I’m saying, Arne, is that I hope when you arrive in Midway, you’ll get in touch with me. I’ll have some free time by then, and I’d really like to repay you for all you’ve done for the Point and for me.”
Orichos smiled. It softened and transformed her face to a remarkable degree.
“I think I can guarantee you a good time,” she said. She touched the back of Huber’s wrist, then turned and went back to her fellows.
Huber rubbed his wrist with the fingers of his other hand as he walked on, thinking about Orichos and about the shooting he’d just watched.
It’d taken skill to hit the running man and not nail a couple of the bystanders. Though it could as easily have been dumb luck: he didn’t suppose either the trooper or Major Steuben would’ve cared if some of the other prisoners had lost limbs.
Huber reached the hatch in the rear of the command car. It opened before he rapped it with the barrel of his powergun. The two men inside had their backs to him as they watched a high-resolution image of prisoners moving steadily through the chute to the shipping containers.
Joachim Steuben was as dapper as if he’d spent the past three days in Base Alpha instead of making a thousand kilometer run over difficult terrain. His companion was blond and in his thirties; Grayle’s chief civil aide, Huber recalled, the one who’d disappeared between the Assembly meeting and the time Captain Orichos found incriminating papers in the files that had been under the aide’s control.
“That one!” the aide said. What was his name? Patronus; that was it. “He’s Gerd Danilew. He was in charge of off-planet weapons purchases!”
“That one,” Steuben said, his amplified voice damped to silence when the hatch closed behind Huber. The pipper of the cab-mounted tribarrel framed the face of the sallow, moustached prisoner walking nervously between the barriers of razor ribbon.
The man looked up. Instead of trying to run, he fell in a faint as limp as if the tribarrel had decapitated him—as the slightest additional pressure of Steueben’s finger on the trigger control would’ve made it do.
“Well, carry him, then,” Steuben ordered into the pickup for the external speakers. He looked over his shoulder at Huber and raised an eyebrow in delighted amusement, then turned back and added, “Now!”
The procession resumed. Patronus kept his face rigidly forward as if he thought that by refusing to acknowledge Huber, he could deny what was going on.
Steuben rotated his full-function chair to smile at Huber. “So, Lieutenant,” he said. “I thought I’d use this opportunity to see if you’re still happy with a line command.”
Instead of the slot in the White Mice that he offered me three weeks ago, Huber thought. He shrugged and said, “Yeah, I’m happy. We did a good job here.”
He guessed he’d made that sound like a challenge, which wasn’t the smartest sort of attitude to show when you were talking to a weasel like Joachim Steuben. Huber didn’t care much at the moment.
“Indeed you did,” Steuben said, nothing in his tone but mild approval. “Both the task force and you personally . . . which is why my offer is still open.”