stopped in front of Sten. “My welcoming committee.”
“Call it that,” Sten said.
“What’s been happening in the big wide world?”
“Not much worth talking about.”
“So the war’s still not over. And by the way, why aren’t you calling me by my rank, Firecontrolman.”
“Sorry. Captain.”
“Forget it. I’m just up to here with clottin’ screws. Thanks for the welcome. Now I want to see if the ‘freshers are on yet.”
They were in a deserted section of the corridor.
“We have something to talk about first,” Sten said.
“GA.”
“You tried to get out solo. A real cowboy move.”
“So?”
“No more. Any escape attempt’s gotta be registered and approved by the committee.”
“Not mine,” St. Clair said. “Committees screw things up. Committees start war. I like my own company.”
“This isn’t a debate, Captain. It’s an order.”
St. Clair leaned back against the wall. “You’re Big X?”
“You have it.”
“Nice meeting you. But as I said—”
“Listen to me, Captain. Read my lips. I don’t give a damn if you want to try a single run. Anybody who’s got any way out of this coffin has my blessings. But I am going to know about it and approve it—before you go.”
St. Clair allowed herself six deep breaths before she said anything. She smiled. “Again, my apologies. I’ll follow orders. Of course. Whatever you and your committee want.”
“Cute, Captain St. Clair. And I think you’re blowing smoke at me. Those are my orders. You will follow them!”
“And if I don’t?”
Sten spoke very quietly. “Then I’ll kill you.”
St. Clair’s face was impassive.
“One more thing, Captain. Just to keep you out of trouble, I’m appointing you my chief scrounger.”
“Scrounger? I’m not familiar—”
“Thief.”
St. Clair bristled. “I am a gambler. Not a clotting burglar!”
“I don’t see the difference.”
Again St. Clair buried her anger. “Is there anything else, Firecontrolman?”
“Not right now.”
“Then you’re dismissed!”
Sten came to attention and saluted her.
St. Clair waited until Sten had rounded a corner, then gave herself the luxury of a silent snarl of rage. Then her face pokered, and she started looking for her long-overdue shower.
* * * *
Outside in the courtyard, the distribution of the Prisoner’s Aid parcels was under way. Sten noticed that as each crate was opened Alex would remove one or maybe two packs and set them unobtrusively aside. Good. Then he saw, leaning against one of the half-ruined columns, what had to be the Empire’s oldest warrant officer. The man looked like the grandfather Sten had never known. He was holding a small pack of what Sten guessed were biscuits and an equally tiny pack of fruit spread. Part of his share from the parcels. The man was crying.
Sten shuddered.
It was time they all went home.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
BIG X WAS flexing his muscles.
Through his cutouts, Sten had deployed the surveyors. The surveyors were reluctant prisoners who were given improvised metric rules and told to measure everything and anything. Sten was trying to find out what he had to work with and work from. Since there were no plans that he could find or steal for Koldyeze, he would make his own.
The details reported back. A hallway measured so many meters wide, long, and tall. The rooms branching off that hallway measured B meters wide, long, and tall. The wing itself measured C meters wide, long, and tall. And none of the figures matched in Sten’s mind. He wished desperately that Alex and his team could move a little faster on the computer. What the clot! Probably wouldn’t work, anyway.
Sten tossed aside the bits of paper he had been figuring on. Later for that drakh. In the meantime, which meant on the morrow, he was on a work detail.
The work detail was commanded by someone who seemed to be the first of the Tahn quislings.
* * * *
Chief Warrant Officer Rinaldi Hernandes seemed to call everyone “my friend”—except the Tahn guards, whom he referred to, with a completely obsequious bow, as “honorable sirs.”
“My friends,” he cajoled. “Come, now. Lift together. We can do this.”
“Doing this” was muscling a huge generator that should have had a McLean sled to raise it up a ramp into a cargo ship.
“You aren’t trying, my friends,” he said. “I am disappointed that I shall have to report you to our commandant when we return. Remember, we are being given a fair day’s ration, and we should be prepared to deliver a fair day’s work.”
Sten grunted, along with twenty others, and slowly the generator groaned up the ramp into place. He, like the others on the work crew, hated Hernandes. Suddenly Sten realized that in spite of the constant threat, no one assigned to Mr. Hernandes’s work crews had ever been reported for anything.
Interesting.
The generator loaded, the prisoners sagged in exhaustion. Hernandes walked among them, patting, joking, and ignoring the muttered obscenities he heard.
“That wasn’t bad, my friends. Come on. The shift’s barely begun. Come on. We’ve got to show our honorable masters we’re as good as they are.”
The prisoners groaned to their feet. The next task was simpler: loading crates into another offbound ship.
Sten realized he was spending less time watching Hernandes than watching Heath’s spaceport. Which ship could be stowed away on? Which ship was outbound for where? What were the security measures taken once a ship was loaded?
He humped a crate up a laddered ramp. Hernandes was standing at the ship’s cargo door in his typically baggy oversized coveralls.
“Hi-diddle-diddle,” the officer chanted. “Right up the middle, friend. We’ve got to get this ship loaded and offworld.”
Definitely, Sten thought, a traitor. But isn’t he a little obvious to be an agent?
“There are troops freezing on an arctic world,” Hernandes went on. “We’ve got to make sure they have what they need.”
Sten glowered at the warrant officer and continued on, part of the antlike procession, into the ship’s hold, where he dumped the crate he was carrying. And then he stared at the loading slip on its side: Uniforms, tropical, working dress.
He quickly scanned some slips on other crates: Recreational equipment, E-normal environment (low-caloric); Rations, beasts of burden (not for Tahn Consumption); Livies, medical, educational, avoidance of social diseases; Livies, counselatory, what to do when your mate leaves; Spores, seedable, rock garden, for issue to general officers and above.
That should have had an interesting effect on any Tahn crunchie—on whatever frozen world the ship was bound for—who had to unload or consume any of the crates.
As he made his way back toward the ramp, Sten looked at Mr. Hernandes a bit differently. To make sure, he