Farrell nodded to the administrators. He hitched his gear to loosen its grip on his flesh. “I’m moving up with the second section,” he said. “We’re going to be shorthanded till Three-three gets back, but I don’t think we’d be safer to wait.”
“Major?” Tamara Lundie said. “According to his personnel records, Sergeant Abbado has had severe discipline problems. But you trust him.”
“Ma’am,” Farrell said. The conscious part of his mind watched himself and the two administrators from a high vantage. Instinct and emotion controlled everything else. “Since he’s served with me, Sergeant Abbado has never had a problem any time that it mattered. If your records say anything else, you can stuff them up your ass.”
He strode up the column, nodding to strikers readying themselves to move.
The lead bulldozer shook the striker guarding it worse than the tractor pulling the trailers did; but when you dismounted from the lead dozer you didn’t have to run to catch up with the trailers to stow the hard suit. It was a trade-off, and anyway Meyer was too tired to care. After a while you could lose track of what you’d been doing.
She unlatched the gauntlets first. She’d been on the lead. That meant she had a good five minutes to strip before the trailers wobbled by. She wondered if she’d make it.
Somebody sat down beside her. “Can I help you?” he asked.
“Lock?” she said. “You want to throw the catches, you go right ahead. I’m so stiff I’ll crack if I try to get the back of the gorget.”
Civilians staggered by, too exhausted to notice Lock and Meyer except as obstacles in the trail. Most of them had thrown away all personal belongings except the clothes they wore and a bulging pocket or purse. The strikers were tired too, but they kept their weapons ready.
Lock loosened the catches with the forceful certainty of somebody doing a job for the first time and determined to get it right. Meyer shifted her posture so that the civilian could lift pieces of armor as she loosened them.
When Lock had worked the heaviest piece, the back-and-breast clamshell, over Meyer’s right arm, she raised her visor and looked at him. His eyes were a green far more vivid than his chestnut hair.
“What are you after?” Meyer asked bluntly.
“I want you to teach me to shoot,” Lock said, just as bluntly.
“Don’t be fucking stupid,” Meyer snapped. “I’m not training cadre.”
“You can teach me the basics, how to load and fire and the theory at least of aiming,” Lock said in a tone minutely harder. The iron within was beginning to crush the velvet glove. “I don’t expect to become a marksman, but in the event that the savages attack again I can be something more positive than another potential victim whom you need to protect.”
“I can’t—” Meyer said.
“There are extra weapons now,” Lock said, not raising his voice but trampling over the striker’s half-formed thought without hesitation. “Those of your dead fellows. I’ve already spoken to Manager al-Ibrahimi. He’s agreed pending approval by the military authorities.”
The civilian smiled wryly at his formal phrasing. “I realize you’ll have to get permission from Major Farrell,” he added. “But there’s no reason he shouldn’t grant it.”
Meyer began stuffing the pieces of armor into the pouch. She shook her head. “You’d blow your foot off or shoot somebody in the back by mistake,” she said.
Lock held the mouth of the net bag open. “Not if you do your job, Striker Meyer. I don’t have the correct reflexes, I understand. But I don’t have the wrong ones either. I don’t panic.”
The second tractor was getting louder. It must be just around the nearest kink in the trail.
“That savage was holding me,” Lock said. He straightened, lifting the pouch himself. “I don’t need to be a crack shot to help under those circumstances. I just need a gun and the basics of how to use it.”
“The bag goes on the first trailer,” Meyer said. The tractor, its huge blade lifted vertically like a second roof over the cab, snarled into view.
“Striker Meyer,” Lock said. “They were my wife and my daughter. It was my job to protect them and I couldn’t. I should have protected them!”