Redliners by David Drake

The blonde ducked down. Her elbows knocked against containers as she scrabbled to put clothes on in the tight space.

“Hey, it’s okay, sweetheart, nobody’s going to tell Momma,” Nessman soothed. He looked up at Meyer again.

“I was going to check the gun,” Meyer said. “Ah, I didn’t know anybody was here.”

“Steve, please, make her go away so I can get dressed,” the concealed voice pleaded. Meyer’s first thought had been that the girl was barely sixteen, but she guessed that was wrong by a few years. Civilians looked younger than the people Meyer was used to being around.

“Look, Essie, give us five, okay?” Nessman said. A bare knee lifted beside him. He put his hand on the girl’s hands to prevent her from tugging up panties of rose-pink lace. “Now, sweetheart, don’t worry about that just yet.” He forced a smile at Meyer again. “Okay, Essie?”

“Yeah, sure,” Meyer said, backing away. “I wasn’t—hell, there’s no need to look at the stuff. I won’t, I won’t be back, you know.”

As she reached the armory door, she heard Nessman saying, “Now, sweetheart, it’s okay. Nothing’s going to happen, you see? I told you I’d take care—”

Meyer closed the door.

Christ!

There was absolutely no reason Nessman shouldn’t be doing exactly what he was. The kid’s mother might go off like a bomb—would go off, from what the kid had said—but that was no concern for Meyer or Major Farrell. There wasn’t any regulation against contact with the civilians.

Actually, there’d never been regs against contact with civilians. For all practical purposes strikers didn’t come in contact with real civilians except on leave—if then. If God up on Deck 25 had a problem with Steve Nessman doing what came naturally, he should have said so earlier.

Meyer walked down the corridor to her compartment. Some strikers had started going down to the civilian decks for a change of scenery. Nessman probably wasn’t alone.

Good for you, Nessman, she thought. At least one member of Heavy Weapons was fitting in.

Deck 8 was only partly filled with cargo. Parents had turned the empty remainder of the volume into a playground, creating slides and a jungle gym with construction materials from the cargo. Glasebrook stood arms akimbo, staring with satisfaction as kids crossed the horizontal ladder the rest of 3-3 had helped him build.

“Wish we could build a decent rope swing,” Glasebrook said. “The ceilings just aren’t high enough.”

Adult civilians, not only parents, and a dozen or more strikers stood around the edges of the common space watching. Star travel—the mass version common to troopships and colony vessels, at any rate—was dead boring. You could only study your destination for so long at a time. Besides, Abbado wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the civilians refused to look into the database again once they’d gotten a taste of how bad Bezant was going to be.

“We might be able to rig something in the lift shafts,” Abbado said after thinking about the problem. “Disconnect two cages, drop them to the bottom, and take out the partition between shafts.”

Glasebrook frowned. “Jeez, Sarge, I dunno,” he said. “I think that’d be pretty dangerous.”

“Have you taken a good look at Bezant, Flea?” Abbado said. “But yeah, I know what you mean. Well, it’s just another week anyway.”

A heavy-set man of forty with coarse, intensely black hair walked over to the strikers. He looked vaguely familiar.

Glasebrook took his hands off his hips; Abbado changed his stance slightly. The civilian had something on his mind. Until the strikers were sure what it was, they remained wary.

“Gentleman,” the fellow said, “I am Dr. Ahmed Ciler.”

He held out his hand. Abbado shook it, then Glasebrook. “I believe you were the soldiers who guided us to our deck, were you not? I’d like to thank you for your support when we were being mistreated.”

“Yeah, us and Ace Matushek,” Abbado said. “Sure, I thought I’d seen you before. And no big deal with the cops. We’ve had our own problems with cops.”

Most strikers had. In not a few cases, that was the reason they’d enlisted in the first place.