The cop grimaced. “I wish the Commander Miltianas would get the lead outa his pants and take over here,” he went on. “Of course, he probably doesn’t want to be mixed up in this either—but curse it, it’s what they’re paying him the big bucks for, right?”
“There’s four fuel cells in this model,” Tranter said, his head inside the vehicle’s stern section. “The back three are disconnected and there’s a puncture in the forward cell.”
He straightened, looking puzzled and concerned. “El-Tee,” he said. “It looks to me like—”
“Drop the subject for now, Sergeant,” Huber said. He gestured to their own vehicle, a ten-place bus rather than the little runabout Tranter had used to ferry Huber alone. Four troopers in combat gear would’ve been a crowd and a burden for the smaller car. “We’ll talk on the way back to the office.”
“But—” said Tranter.
Deseau rapped the side of Tranter’s commo helmet with his knuckles. “Hey!” Deseau said. “He’s the man, right? He just gave you an order!”
Tranter looked startled, then nodded in embarrassment and trotted for the bus. There were three aircars approaching fast from Benjamin. Two had red strobe lights flashing, but they weren’t running their sirens.
Huber turned to the cop. “Thanks for letting us look over the site,” he said. “We’ll leave you to your business now. And we’ll get back to our own.”
“Yeah, right,” said the local man with a worried frown. “I sure hope I don’t wind up holding the bucket on this one. A death like this can be a lot of trouble!”
“You got that right,” Huber muttered as he got into the cab with Tranter. The tech already had the fans live; now he boosted power and wobbled into the air, narrowly missing a line of trees.
Kelso would have done a better job driving, but this was no longer business for civilians. Huber locked his faceshield down.
“Unit, switch to intercom,” he ordered. Nobody but the three men in the car with him could hear the discussion without a lot of decryption equipment and skill. “Tranter, I’m leaving you in the circuit, but I’m not expecting you to get involved. You’ll have to keep your mouth shut, that’s all. Can you handle that?”
“Fuck not being involved,” Tranter said. His hands were tight on the control yoke and his eyes were straight ahead; a degree of hurt sounded in his voice. “I knew the deputy better than you did, sir. She was a good boss; and anyway, she was one of ours even if she didn’t wear the uniform. Which I do.”
“Right,” said Huber. “Deseau and Learoyd, you don’t know the background. I figure her brother killed her or one of his thugs did. It was probably an accident, but maybe not. She’d have gone to see him, threatening to tell the world he was an agent for Solace. She maybe even guessed he’d set up the ambush at Rhodesville.”
Sergeant Deseau made a sound loud enough to trip the intercom. In something like a normal voice he went on, “We gonna take care of him, then?”
“He’s got a lot of pull,” Huber warned. “I went to Major Steuben about him and got told to mind my own business. It’s going to make real waves if somebody from the Regiment takes him out. Real waves, about as bad as it gets.”
“El-Tee?” Learoyd said, frustration so evident in his tone that Huber could visualize the trooper trying to knuckle his bald scalp through his commo helmet. “Just tell us what to do, right? That’s your job. Don’t worry about me and Frenchie doing ours.”
Learoyd was correct, of course. He had a simple approach of necessity, and he cut through all the nonsense that smarter people wrapped themselves up with.
“Right,” Huber repeated. “There’ll be a gang of thugs at the guy’s townhouse, and they’ll have guns available even if they aren’t going out on the street with them just yet. It could be that he’d got a squad of Harris’s Commando on premises. I doubt it because of the risk to him if it comes out, but we’ve got to figure we’re going up against people who know what they’re doing.”