and the monster would snap the girl’s hand off at the wrist if she held out a snack. The exobiologists said snappers were the most implacable predators yet discovered on the fourteen planets of the Human Union.
I said, “We’ll care for it for a while. When it’s old enough to fend for itself, we’ll release it into the wild.”
In fact, the Casuni would insist the devil’s spawn be gutted on the spot and its entrails burned. And with three of their own maimed by the beast’s mother, we would have no choice but to turn the little snapper over to the Casuni like a POW.
Harmonious interface with indigenous populations wasn’t all handing out Hershey bars. Sometimes it required tolerating customs we found barbarous. I used the moment to inch closer, within three yards of her. One step closer and I could lunge forward, grasp her rifle’s muzzle, and twist it away.
Her rifle’s muzzle came up again and she snarled. “Liar!”
Crap. I’ve always been a lousy liar.
She fired, point-blank.
FOUR
“SIR?” The whisper was old, gravelly, and familiar. It came from close to my ear, so I heard it over jet-engine shriek.
I opened my eyes, focused, and saw Ord, gray eyes unsmiling, and above him the interior fuselage ribs of a hop jet. I asked, “Sergeant Major? What happened to the girl?”
Ord jerked his buzz-cut gray head, and I followed his eyes. A corpsman knelt beside the private, who lay strapped to the litter next to the one I lay on. Her eyes were closed; her chest slowly rose and fell. Joy juice from a suspended IV bag trickled down a transparent tube into her forearm. A purple streak began at the point of her jaw and traced halfway back to her ear.
Ord said, “Her jaw’s not broken, but you dropped her with a right as you went down, then landed on top of her. That kept her outfit from shooting her and gave them time to get downslope and put cuffs on her.” Ord frowned. “Sir, if you don’t mind hearing my opinion…”
I had minded hearing Ord’s opinion ever since he was my drill sergeant in infantry basic, but he never hesitated to share it with me anyway.
“You took an unnecessary risk.”
I shook my head. “No risk. I heard her shift her rifle to grenade mode. I never heard her shift back, and I talked my way to inside five yards from her.”
Ord nodded. “An M40 grenade doesn’t arm for five yards. So all she did when she pulled the trigger was wallop you in the chest with a low-velocity lump of unexploded shrapnel.”
I smiled a little at the cleverness of me.
Ord, as usual when I did that, frowned. “She could have flicked the selector switch back to rifle in an instant and killed you. She could have shot you in the head, instead of the chest, and killed you. That would have decapitated the offworld chain of command. If your sucker punch hadn’t knocked her flat, the sniper would have killed her anyway. That would have precipitated a crisis with the indigenous population.”
“But none of that happened. Now she gets a ride home. At worst, a Section Eight discharge. At best, administrative punishment and another chance in the army. The army gets a Band-Aid bill for me. I could see she was too distracted to realize she was still in grenade mode.”
Ord stared at me. I suppose he stared the way the caveman who discovered fire stared at the first idiot who stuck his finger into the flame. “Even so, sir, you could have allowed someone in armor, her commanding officer, perhaps, to make the approach. Or waited until the creep-and-peep team could have neutralized the situation.”
I glanced at the ’Puter on Ord’s wrist. A normal transport hauling a creep-and-peep team from Marinus would still be hours away. But only about an hour had passed since I stuck my chest in front of an almost-live grenade.
“That captain said the creep-and-peep team was coming out on a tilt-wing. Six hours. Why did the Spooks divert a hop jet to get out here faster? And why did you come out here on it?”
Ord peered at the IV bag alongside me, and the tube that ran from it into my forearm. “Sir, no need to get into that now. Your-ah-heroics left you with a hairline fracture of the sternum and related soft-tissue damage. The corpsman here just upped your dosage.” Ord smiled. Everybody in my platoon in basic knew an Ord smile meant that whatever the smile-ee thought was about to happen, he was sorely mistaken. Ord patted my shoulder. “Just relax for now, General.”
“I feel fine. Sergeant Major, answer my-”
The engine whine faded into nothing, and then another voice replaced it.
“-pleasure to have a casualty that outranks me, for a change.” I woke to the voice of the light colonel who commanded the infirmary at Human Union Camp, Marinus. Cocoa-skinned, gray-haired, and clad in short-sleeved blue scrubs, he stood in a white-painted single-bed room, staring at the chart reader in his hand. Hippocrates Wallace bared his forearms even though they were slick and puckered with burn scar tissue. I was there when he got burned. He had been a flight surgeon during the First Battle of Mousetrap. He was the only person I knew who had earned a Harvard Med School degree and a Silver Star.
I started to cough. Through the dope, pain penetrated my chest like a dull ice pick twisting. I froze my shoulders and tried to refrain from breathing while I hissed, “Pleasure? You this compassionate with all your patients, Wally?”
He toggled through my overactive medical history with his thumb. “Oh, suck it up, Jason. A cracked sternum’s little potatoes for you.”
I asked, “What about the girl?”
“Your victim? The private won’t be playing the harmonica for a while. Jaw contusions and some dental work. She’s on the stockade ward. I might move you there, too.”
“Now you’re a criminologist?”
“No. But I’ve got an honorary degree in watching screwballs. If you threw yourself into that situation to save the girl, to balance the scales for your perceived inadequacy because Congresswoman Metzger died on Mousetrap, you’re a little nuts. But if you were trying to commit suicide by lunatic, you’re a lot nuts. In which case I’m required by regulation to decertify you for command.”
“I’m fine. Half the Pentagon and two-thirds of Congress are crazier than I am, and nobody decertifies them.”
Wally snorted.
I said, “Remember,
Wally sighed. “If only. Then
I narrowed my eyes at him, about the only body parts I could move without wincing. “Who’s getting shipped back to Mousetrap?”
He raised bushy eyebrows. “Didn’t Ord tell you? You are. Ord got one of those hard-copy encrypted chips that Hibble insists on sending. Why do you think the Spooks pulled an orbit-capable ship away from shuttling back and forth to the Red Moon? And used it to double time Ord out to the Stone Hills to deliver your Spook-o-gram?”
I sighed. “Wally, not even I am supposed to know where those shuttles are going. So don’t spread that around.”
Wally leaned down to me and whispered, “I don’t need to. Everybody on this post knows that whole Moon’s a Cavorite nugget. Though it beats the fecal matter out of me why the Spooks care. The Stone Hills mines produce Cavorite faster than Mousetrap can build ships to use it.”
I changed the subject. Partly because I didn’t want to know how much other classified material was common knowledge in my command. Partly because I was curious about Howard Hibble’s summons to Mousetrap. “How soon can I travel?”
