Honor Among Enemies

caution. They sickened her, yet there was nothing she could do about it.

At least he was back up and around, but he'd developed a talent for disappearing whenever he had free time. Ginger had tried to figure out where he was vanishing to, but without success... which didn't make a lot of sense. Wayfarer was a big ship, but her outsized crew packed her life-support spaces. It shouldn't be possible for Aubrey to simply turn invisible this way, and the thought that he might have been so frightened that he'd found some isolated hiding hole and scurried straight into it the instant he went off duty tore at her heart.

But if she couldn't find him, Steilman probably couldn't do it either, she told herself. That had to count for something.

Aubrey Wanderman grunted in anguish as the training mat hit him in the face again. He lay there for a second, gasping for breath, then levered himself up on his hands and knees and shook his head. Everything still seemed to be attached in more or less the right places, and he shoved further up to kneel and look up at Gunny Hallowell.

'Doing better there, Wanderman,' Hallowell said cheerfully, and Aubrey dragged his exercise suit's sleeve across his sweat-soaked face. Every bone and sinew ached, and he had bruises in places where he hadn't realized he had places, but he knew Hallowell was right. He was doing better. The combination he'd just attempted had almost gotten through the sergeant majors guard, and he suspected he'd landed so hard because Hallowell had been forced to rush his own counter and thrown him with rather more energy than he'd intended. Aubrey came back into a set position, still panting, but Hallowell shook his head.

'Take five, lad,' he said, and Aubrey collapsed gratefully back onto the mat. The Marine grinned and dropped down cross-legged beside him, and Aubrey suppressed a familiar stab of envy when he realized Hallowell wasn't even breathing hard.

Aubrey rolled onto his back and stared up at the deckhead while Wayfarer's off- watch Marines continued to work out around him. Until he'd started training here, he hadn't realized the degree to which the Marines formed a separate community within the ship's company. Oh, he'd known about the traditional rivalry between the 'jarheads' and 'vacuum-suckers,' but he'd been too immersed in the close-knit world of his own watch section to recognize that Wayfarers crew actually consisted of an entire series of unique worlds. A man knew the others in his branch of the ship's duty structure, and while he might have a few friends scattered in other departments, those friends had their own concerns. In most ways that counted, he had less in common with them than he did even with people he disliked from his own organizational niche.

And if that was true where fellow Navy personnel were concerned, it was ten times as true for Marines. Marines might man weapon stations at GQ, but they had their own mess, their own berths, their own exercise areas, their own officers and noncoms. They had different traditions and rituals which didn't make a lot of sense to a naval rating, and they seemed perfectly content to keep it that way. All of which left him wondering just why Gunny Hallowell had agreed to help one Aubrey Wanderman, who had absolutely no ambition ever to become a Marine.

He lay there for another moment, then gathered his nerve and shoved up on an elbow.

'Sergeant Major?'

'Yeah?'

'I, uh, I'm grateful for the trouble you're taking, but, well...'

'Spit it out, Wanderman,' Hallowell rumbled. 'We're not sparring now, so you probably won't get hurt even if you say something really stupid,' he added with a grin when the younger man paused, almost wiggling in obvious embarrassment. Aubrey blushed, then grinned back.

'I was just wondering why you're doing it, Gunny.'

'I could say its because someone has to,' Hallowell replied after a moment. 'Or I could say it's because I don't like bastards like Steilman, or even that I just don't want some kid who barely shaves yet on my conscience. And I guess, all things considered, just about any of those reasons would do. But to be honest, the real reason is that Harkness asked me to.'

'But I thought...' Aubrey paused, then shrugged. 'I appreciate it, Sergeant Major, but I, uh, I thought the Senior Chief didn't exactly get along with Marines, and, well...'

'And vice-versa?' Hallowell finished for him with a subterranean chuckle, then shrugged. 'Once upon a time you probably wouldn't have been too far wrong, lad, but that was before he saw the light and married a Marine.' Aubrey’s eyes opened wide at that, and the sergeant major laughed out loud. 'You mean he didn't tell you about that?'

'No,' Aubrey said in a shaken voice.

'Well, he did, and she's an old friend of mine; we went through Basic together. But I doubt most of us jarheads ever really held his habits against him. You see, Wanderman, Harkness never meant it personally. He just liked to fight, and picking on Marines was a way to keep it in the family without getting too close to home.'

'You mean all those fights, all the times he got himself busted, were for the fun of it?'

'I never said he was smart, Wanderman,' Hallowell replied with another grin, 'and the way I hear, about half the times he got busted had to do more with black markets than fights. But, yeah, that just about sums it up.' Aubrey stared at him, and the sergeant major shook his head. 'Look, kid, by this time you should be starting to grasp how my people go about it when they're serious, and you've worked out almost as much with Harkness as with me. Much as it pains me to admit it, he's pretty damned good himself, for a vacuum- sucker. Not much into science, mind you, but a hell of a brawler. D'you think somebody like him could spend twenty years picking bar fights without getting killed, or killing someone else, if he wasn't doing it for the fun of it? I mean, think about it. If he'd meant it seriously, somebody would've gotten med-evaced, and aside from the occasional contusion or a few stitches here and there...'

Hallowell shrugged, and Aubrey blinked. The notion of picking fights with big, tough, well-trained strangers for fun was more than alien to his own thinking; it was incomprehensible. Yet he knew the sergeant major had put his finger on the truth. Senior Chief Harkness simply liked to fight, or had before he reformed. And apparently the Marines had known it all along. In fact, Hallowell sounded obscurely pleased Harkness had chosen to fight Marines rather than fellow Navy types, as if it were some sort of compliment.

And as he considered it, Aubrey realized the idea was more understandable than he'd first thought. It wasn't like Steilman. The power tech didn't like to fight; he liked to hurt people. And he didn't pick people who were likely to fight back; he picked victims. But Harkness loved the challenge. For him, it was all about competition, a desire to match himself against someone just as tough as he was. Aubrey suspected the senior chief would deny any such ambition, probably vehemently and colorfully, but that wouldn't make it untrue.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, Aubrey was beginning to see how someone could feel that way. He'd always been pretty good at team sports, but he'd never contemplated trying anything like the martial arts. Nor would he have now, he admitted, if Steilman hadn't... motivated him. Yet now that he was beginning to figure out how it worked, he was more than a little surprised by how much he enjoyed it. For one thing, he was probably fitter than he'd ever been in his life, but it went further than that. There was a sense of discipline, the important kind that came from within, and of competence. Everything he'd learned so far only showed him how much more there was to learn, and it was harder work than anything he'd ever done before, yet that only made his progress even more satisfying. And one thing Gunny Hallowell and Senior Chief Harkness had managed, he thought wryly, was to reteach him that the occasional bruise or sprain wasn't the end of the world. Whereas Hallowell was working with him on technique and attitude, Harkness had an even simpler teaching style, which probably had something to do with the fact that, unlike the sergeant major, he was entirely self-taught. His methodology was to teach Aubrey how to pound on Steilman by pounding on him with every trick he'd learned in his colorful career until Aubrey got fast and tough enough to pound back, and it was working.

'The thing you've got to remember here,' Hallowell said after a moment, in a different tone, almost as if he'd been reading Aubrey's thoughts, 'is that what you and I are doing, or even what you and Harkness are doing,