“Do we have a problem, El-Tee?” Tranter asked as he bent over the console, resting his knuckles on the flat surface beside the holographic display.
Huber noticed the “we.” He grinned. “We’re going maybe to solve one before it crops up, Sarge,” he said. “Are you up to poking around in a combat car tonight?”
“I guess,” Tranter said, unexpectedly guarded. “Ah—what would it be we’re looking for, El-Tee? Booze? Drugs?”
Huber burst out laughing when he understood Tranter’s concern. “Via, Sarge!” he said. “You’ve been on field deployments, haven’t you? All that stuff belongs, and so does anything else that helps a trooper get through the nights he’s not going to get through any other way. No, I’m looking for stuff that our people didn’t put there. I don’t know what it’ll be; but I do know that if something’s there, I want to know what it is. Okay?”
Tranter beamed as he straightened up. “Hey, a chance to be a wrench again instead of pushing electrons? You got it, boss!”
“Pick me up at the front of the building at a quarter of eight, then,” Huber said. “We need to be at Central Repair on the hour—I’ve cleared it with the chief. Oh, and Tranter?”
“Sir?” The sergeant looked . . . not worried exactly, but wary. He wasn’t going to ask what was going on; but something was and though he seemed to trust Huber, a veteran non-com knows just how disastrously wrong officers’ bright ideas are capable of going.
“Don’t talk about it,” Huber said. “And you know that gun you were holding last night? Think you could look one up for me?”
“Roger that, sir!” Tranter said, perfectly cheerful again. “Or if you’d rather have a sub-machine gun?”
Huber shook his head. “I want something with authority,” he explained. “I don’t think there’s a chance in a million we’ll have somebody try to pull something while we’re flying between here and Central Repair tonight . . . but I do think that if it happens, I’m going to make sure we’re the car still in the air at the end of it.”
Chuckling in bright good humor, the sergeant returned to his console. The other clerks looked at him, but Hera was watching Huber instead.
Huber cued his intercom and said, “What’s the latest on the ground transport situation, Hera? Did your father come through?”
The best way to conceal the rest of what was going on was to bury it in the work of Log Section; and the fact that quite a lot of work was getting done that way was a nice bonus.
* * *
Central Repair was a block of six warehouses in the north-central district of Benjamin. Engineer Section had thrown up a wall of plasticized earth around the complex as a basic precaution, but the location was neither secure nor really defensible despite the infantry company and platoon of combat cars stationed there.
Tranter brought the four-place aircar down at CR’s entrance gate. They were tracked all the way by a tribarrel of the combat car there—Flesh Hook, another F Company vehicle—and, for as long as the aircar was above the horizon, by the guns of two more cars within the compound. Huber would’ve been just as happy to ride to Repair in a Regimental-standard air-cushion jeep, but Tranter was proud of being able to drive an aircar. There were plenty of them in Log Section’s inventory since they were the normal means of civilian transportation on Plattner’s World.
Tranter wasn’t a good aircar driver—he was too heavy-handed, trying to outguess the AI—and there was always the chance that a trooper on guard would decide the car wobbling toward the compound was hostile despite Huber’s extreme care to check in with detachment control. Still, Tranter was investing his time and maybe more to satisfy his section leader’s whim; the least the section leader could do was let him show off what he fondly imagined were his talents.
The car bumped hard on the gravel apron in front of Central Repair. The gate was open, but Flesh Hook had parked to block the entrance. Huber raised his faceshield and said, “Lieutenant Huber, Log Section, to see Chief Edlinger. He’s expecting me.”