I shrugged. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“But how could that have happened?”
“Well, you have to understand, out on Dust World they don’t have all the same fancy equipment that we do on Earth. The Investigator has to make-do, see?”
She blinked some more, and then her eyes became squinty again. I hated that look on her face—on any girl’s face.
“You did some kind of bootleg revive on him? With a stew of genes that you somehow got wrong? Why the hell did you do that?”
“It wasn’t me, it was the Investigator.”
“Yeah, but why him? What was wrong with a proper revive at Central?”
I winced a little. I’d hoped to avoid this topic, but Jenny was too smart, too inquisitive. I tried a few dodges, offering her some wine I had in a picnic basket, and such-like. It was all no-dice. She wanted answers, or this date was going to be dead-on-arrival.
“Okay, okay. The problem involved two things. First off, all I had left was one of his claws. There was a little meat on it, but it was kind of messed up by the time I got to Dust World—”
“That’s awful!”
“That’s what I said! But see, the hogs back at Central didn’t want to help much. They claimed all kinds of nonsense about tissue damage and unreadable DNA and whatnot. Anyways, I had his mind in my tapper, so all I needed was a body. The only man in the cosmos who was willing to do the trick was the good old Investigator.”
Jenny looked away, and she gave a little shudder. I hadn’t meant for her to be imagining herself under these awful circumstances. That wasn’t going to buy me squat. In an effort to switch things up, I told her there was something amazing and new at the lagoon.
“What is it?” she asked.
There you go. Curiosity was her weak spot, always had been. She wasn’t curious about tech stuff the way Natasha was, but she couldn’t stand the idea that some cool event had happened without her knowing the details. She liked a good story, and I could spin-up the best of them.
She followed me to the beach, and we walked along together, with me talking a mile-a-minute. Eventually she noticed that there was absolutely nothing new or different at the lagoon, but by that time, we were sipping drinks and smiling at each other.
The long and short of it was she figured I’d given her enough gossip to pay my debts, and we had a sweet time out on the beach when the fake sun went down.
-29-
The next morning we were rolled out of our beds—literally.
A new wake-up-and-scramble system had been installed since our last campaign out to Edge World. Apparently, the brass had done some timing studies and decided we weren’t getting our hindquarters down to Red Deck fast enough.
Accordingly, they’d installed servos that whined and pitched everyone out of our bunks and onto the floor. Grunting and cursing up a blue-streak, I got to my feet and dragged on my uniform. I straggled out into the passages with everyone else in my unit’s module.
“What the hell was that?” Carlos demanded. “I landed on my dick!”
“No harm, no foul,” Sargon told him.
That earned him a dark look. They were still butting heads over Kivi, who was undoubtedly just messing with both of them for fun.
Slamming my hands together, I called the troops to roll-call. Everyone was present and accounted for, so when the floor lit up with red arrows—that meant the combat forces were to follow these indicators—we hit the passages hustling and moving at a trot.
I checked in with Graves, just in case. “Is this a real emergency, Primus?” I asked. “Or a drill—or is it just bullshit?”
“Follow the arrows, McGill.”
I tried to say more, but he’d dropped the connection.
“This is bullshit, right sir?” Harris asked me. He was jogging at my side, listening to the call.
“That’s more than likely. Still, as we’ve gotten no orders calling this a drill, and we’re passing the armory on this deck, I think we should override the locks and help ourselves.”
Harris chuckled, and we handed out weapons. Normally, we kept our rifles in the armory when we weren’t in a combat zone. That was to keep down the odds of an argument turning into a fire-fight between the boys.
Talking to all my officers, I made an announcement. “Since we’re clearly on an emergency footing, I feel more than justified to issue weapons and live ammo to my troops in this moment of uncertainty.”
Barton and Leeson exchanged worried glances, but they shrugged and handed out the guns. A few minutes later, we were jogging along armed and dangerous.
Manfred spotted me at the next junction. His eyes fell on my full armament, and his eyebrows shot high. “What’s this? We’re really going into action? I thought this was some kind of exercise—or worse, a briefing.”
“Better safe than sorry,” I told him.
He nodded, and after frowning a bit, he ordered his troops to make a pit stop as well. As we followed the arrows farther, I saw more units doing it.
“Monkey-see, monkey-do,” Harris quoted to me. “The brass is going to shit bricks.”
“Maybe.”
After another minute passed, Jenny contacted me as well. She confirmed that I was wearing my full gear, and she assumed I knew something she didn’t.
That’s one of the dangers of being a maverick who involves himself in constant conduct-unbecoming. People tended to start rumors over every random thing you did. They saw me as a trend-setter, rather than a loose cannon.
In this case, however, I was happy about the fact half my cohort was arming themselves like it was the end-times. It gave me excellent cover. If everyone had misunderstood the situation, how could I catch
