Lindeyar and his new escort were already entering the TOC, four buried climate-controlled trailers. Corrugated planking roofed the hub, and there was a layer of dirt over the whole. It wouldn’t do much against a direct hit by artillery, but the air defense tribarrels took care of that threat. A sniper with a 2-cm powergun could be dangerous from an aircar many kilometers away, though; burying the TOC avoided possible disruption.
Rather than call Log Section for another ride, Huber nodded to the troopers on guard and walked toward a temporary building a few hundred meters away. He wasn’t in a hurry to get back to the operations annex. The Lord knew, he’d always tried to do his job; but it was hard to see what good he was doing there, or what good he or anybody else could do in a ratfuck like Plattner’s World was turning into.
A combat car drove slowly along the clearing outside the berm; Huber could see only the upper edge of the armor. The trooper in the fighting compartment was part of the training cadre, giving a newbie driver some practice. The car was either worn out or a vehicle straight from Central Repair, being tested before it was released to a field troop.
Either way, the car and both troopers were going to be in combat very shortly—unless the UC faced reality and surrendered. The Colonel’d have to throw everything in to stop the Solace juggernaut, and it wouldn’t be enough.
The building’s open window had screens whose static charge repelled dust. The door with the stenciled sign Signals 2 wasn’t screened, so Huber stepped inside quickly and closed it behind him. Three troopers looked at him through the displays of their specialized consoles.
“Is Lieutenant Basime here?” Huber asked. “I was told—”
Doll Basime stepped out of a side office, looking elfin although she wore issue fatigues without the tailoring some rear-echelon officers affected. “Arne! Come on in. Yeah, I’ve been at Central the past three weeks. Are you okay, because from what I’d heard . . . ?”
“Hey, I’m walking around,” Huber said with a laugh. “That’ll do for now.”
Doll’s office was really a cubicle, but it had a door as a concession to her rank. She closed it behind Huber and motioned him to the chair behind the console, taking the flip-down seat on the wall for herself.
“You’re going to be a remf like me from now on, Arne?” she asked, smiling but obviously concerned. She and Huber had been good friends at the Academy, a relationship simplified by the fact that neither had any sexual interest in men.
“Just for now,” he said as he sat down carefully. “I’m getting movement back day by day, and it doesn’t hurt much any more.”
He shrugged, wishing he could truthfully say more. It felt really good to take the weight off his left leg, and that scared him. “A trade representative arrived from Nonesuch for a meeting with the Colonel and wound up in the wrong place. I got to bring him back here.”
Doll’s face went grim. “Do you know anything about what’s going on, Arne?” she asked. She patted her console. “Because I wasn’t about to eavesdrop on the Colonel’s private meetings.”
“Could you?” Huber said, interested.
She grinned, a more familiar expression. “Yeah,” she said, “but I couldn’t do it without leaving a trail that the counterintelligence people could follow. I don’t want to discuss that with Joachim Steuben.”
“It’d be a short discussion,” Huber said, also with a smile of sorts. Major Steuben was as pretty as Doll herself. Frequently his duties involved killing somebody, a task at which Steuben was remarkably good. Inhumanly good, you might say.
“I don’t know anything about Lindeyar except he seemed to expect a red carpet and wasn’t best pleased not to have one,” Huber said. He rubbed his neck; Doll gestured to the box of tissues on the console.
“Doll?” he went on, meeting her eyes. “Do you know how bad it is out there?”
She shrugged in turn. “I know it’s not good,” she said. “My section’s job is to keep up the links with friendly units, so I see all the traffic whether I want to or not.”