Huber could have understood it if troopers turned their backs on him and whispered: five dead in a matter of seconds was a heavy loss for a single platoon. That wasn’t what was happening.
Lieutenant Adria Basime—Doll to her friends—was bent over the desk of a warrant leader by the door, pointing out something on his console. She saw Huber and brightened. “Arne!” she said. “Come back to my office! My broom closet, more like, but it’s got a door. Tory, have me those numbers when I come out, right?”
“Right, El-Tee,” agreed the warrant leader. Even Huber, who’d never seen the fellow before, could read the relief in his expression. “Just a couple minutes, that’s all I need.”
There were a dozen consoles in the outer office, only half of them occupied. Three of the personnel present were Slammers, the others locals.
“I’ve got ten more people under me,” Doll explained as she closed the door of the inner office behind her. “They’re out trying to set up nets that we can at least pretend are secure. Plattner’s World has a curst good commo network—they’d just about have to, as spread out as the population is. The trouble is, it all goes through Solace.”
Doll’s office wasn’t huge, but it compared favorably with the enclosed box of a command car, let alone the amount of space there was in the fighting compartment of a combat car like Fencing Master. All a matter of what you’ve gotten used to, Huber supposed. Doll gestured him to a chair and took the one beside it instead of seating herself behind the console.
“What’re you here for, Arne?” she asked. “Did you debrief to the Colonel in person?”
“I thought they were pulling me back to cashier me,” Huber said carefully. “I didn’t need Major Steuben to tell me how much damage we did to Rhodesville in the firefight. Apparently the locals want to void our contract for that.”
Doll frowned. She was petite and strikingly pretty, even in a service uniform. She wore her hair short, but it fluffed like a dazzle of blonde sunlight when she wasn’t wearing a commo helmet.
“Some of them maybe do,” she said. “The government’s in it all the way now, though. They can’t back down unless they want to risk not only losing their places but likely being tried for treason if the peace party gets into power.”
“Well, I’m transferred to run local transport,” Huber said. He felt better already for talking to Doll. She came from a powerful family on Nieuw Friesland and had a keen political sense. If she said Huber hadn’t jeopardized the Regiment’s contract, that was the gospel truth. “They had to get me out of the field after the way I screwed up, after all.”
“Screwed up?” Doll said in surprise. “You guys got ambushed by a company of Harris’s Commando while you were still aboard the ship that brought you. You not only saved your platoon, you wiped out the kill team pretty much single-handedly, the way I heard it.”
“That’s not—” Huber said; and as he spoke, his mind flashed him a shard of memory, his finger selecting three segments of the Automatic Defense System and the Whang! as they fired simultaneously. He hadn’t been thinking of the bunched infantry as human beings, just as a problem to be solved like the jammed turnbuckle. They were figures on his display; and after he’d fired the ADS, they were no longer a problem.
“Via,” he whispered. “There must’ve been twenty of them. . . .”
Huber had killed before, but he hadn’t thought of what he’d done in Rhodesville as killing until Doll stated the obvious. He’d been thinking of other things.
“Yeah, well . . .” he said, looking toward the window. “Given the way they caught us with our pants down, things went as well as they could. But we were caught. I was caught.”
Huber shrugged, forced a smile, and looked at his friend. “Major Steuben said you could give me a rundown on my new section, Doll. The people, I mean. I called up the roster on my helmet on the way here, but they were mostly locals and there’s nothing beyond date of hire.”