“You could have shot him, back in that shop,” Dahl said. “He had a weapon in his hand, a loaded weapon. He was not obeying our commands. We still would have gotten a gun off the streets. We would have been in the right, legally. But we wouldn’t know about the technician who sold it to him. The one who has the tools and the knowledge to bypass the biometric lock on a military sidearm.”
“If you weren’t going to take the shot, I wasn’t going to either,” Idina said. “You’re better at not pulling triggers than I am.”
Dahl smiled at her statement.
“You are not so terrible at it yourself. That young fool gets to live out the rest of his life. In exchange for a year in the detention facility. Someday he will look back at this and realize just how low a price that was.”
Idina checked the time. She had dismissed her platoon three hours ago already, and the next JSP platoon on the roster was now out on patrol in the city with their Gretian counterparts, a new pair of patrol supervisors in the air above them. Technically, she had sat in on that interrogation on her free time.
“I need to head back to the base and check in with Lieutenant Liu before he sends the quick-reaction unit after me,” she said. “I’ll see you at 0800 for patrol.”
“Take some rest,” Dahl said. “Today was not a bad day.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Idina said. “Not a bad day at all.”
When she walked across the atrium to the elevators, her legs started to ache, as if she had given them permission to show their fatigue by thinking about the end of her shift. A passing Gretian police sergeant glanced at the kukri on her left side with curiosity, then gave her a friendly nod. On her right side, the pistol counterbalanced the blade. The familiar weight of her gear usually comforted her, but tonight it felt like she was back in Pallas gravity. Maybe she was starting to tire of it all.
Back at JSP Base Sandvik, the company building was lit up in purple and gold, the colors of Pallas. The buildings of the JSP companies all had white exteriors, and the Hadeans had started a fad last month by projecting stripes of orange light on the front of their building at night to make the structure look like the flag of Hades. All the other companies had followed suit in short order: Acheroni yellow, Oceanian blue, Rhodian red. The Palladian CO had held out longest, but it seemed that even Major Malik wasn’t immune to peer pressure. She suspected that he had most likely started to play along just to preserve the uniformity of the battalion square’s appearance, even if the new trend was a little gaudy.
Lieutenant Liu’s office was empty, and the door was locked. Idina shuffled off to her own office to log the day and sign off for the night.
“Color Sergeant Chaudhary,” Major Malik said when she walked past his door. She stopped and turned on her heel.
“Sorry, sir. I thought everyone had left for the evening. Lieutenant Liu’s office is closed.”
“Everyone but me and Second Platoon, it seems. Come in, please.”
“Sir.”
She stepped into the company commander’s office. He was a hands-off sort of leader and trusted his lieutenants and senior sergeants to run their platoons without constant micromanaging. With her ever-changing patrol shift rotation, she hadn’t talked to him directly in a month or more.
“I’m late off patrol because we had to do an interrogation at the Gretian HQ. The stadium suspect with the weapon,” she said.
“Yes, I saw that in the logs. Good work. You don’t spend much time in the air, do you?”
“No, sir. Much easier to get good intel on the ground.”
“I’ve checked the roster history. You’ve put in a lot of extra time since Principal Square. More than any other platoon sergeant.”
“I’m not much for sitting around the base and polishing my kukri, sir.”
“That makes two of us,” he said. “But that’s mostly what I seem to be doing with my time these days. Have a seat, Colors.”
Idina did as she was told and watched as the major turned around and looked out of his window at the battalion square and its newly multicolored assembly of buildings.
“I predict that light show will last until the next Palladian rotates in as battalion commander,” he said. “How have you been feeling lately?”
The question took her off guard.
“Fine, sir,” she said, trying to gauge his intent. Was she in for a dressing-down?
“Lieutenant Liu has shared some concerns about you. He forwarded me your medical data from the last few weeks.” He opened a screen and showed her a data page.
“There is nothing wrong with me, sir.”
“Your vital statistics say otherwise, Sergeant. Your muscle mass loss is right at the limit, and your lung capacity is down by almost a double-digit percentage. You’ve been off Pallas for too long.”
“I have two months left in this tour, sir,” she said.
“You’ve done your last two tours back-to-back,” Major Malik said. “Two consecutive tours off-world is the hard limit. But this looks to me like you’ve hit your limit a little early. Maybe it’s the pace you’ve been keeping up since Principal Square. Maybe it’s your age. Infantry duty is hard on the body. But if you don’t return to Pallas soon, you’ll be medically unfit for duty in a few months. At your age and time in service, it would be hard to catch up. You’d have to spend too much time rebuilding muscle and getting your bone density back up for brigade medical to clear you for infantry duty again. They may just decide that you’ve done your share and transfer you to an admin unit.”
The thought horrified her.
“Sir. I have no
