“No, no, no,” said Sushi quickly. “We don’t want to wake him up. You know how cheesed off he gets. Just let me come in so I can clean up and get a little rest before I have to report to him. I don’t want him giving me the eyeball about my uniform when I’m giving him bad news.”
“Bad news?” It was Gears’s voice this time, sounding concerned. “What kind of bad news?”
His answer was the soft buzz of Zenobian stun rays, wielded by Garbo and Brick. “Bad news for you,” said Sushi softly. The returning group waited a moment, then began to move quietly forward. They were inside the perimeter well before the stunned sentries awoke.
At this time of night, Comm Central was the only place in Omega Company’s camp with much activity, and for the most part, it was pretty much a dead zone. Not even the officer of the day usually bothered to spend the latenight hours at the cluttered desk provided in one corner of the comm area. Thanks to Phule’s introduction of the wrist communicators, it was normally a matter of moments for Mother to contact the OD-or the CO himself-if something required an officer’s attention.
But Lieutenant Snipe had not trained with Omega Company. In his eyes, the company’s officers were unpardonably slack in their duties; he’d been sent here to put things right again, So when the rotation came around to him, he spent his OD duty exactly as the Legion academy had taught him: at the desk, alert and prepared for any emergency. After all, as the major kept pointing out (not that anybody seemed to pay attention), this planet was technically a war zone. Anything could happen, and somebody had better be ready to deal with it. According to the books, tonight that somebody was Snipe.