Space Eater Read Free Page B

that silly defense button—
    The calculation must have showed, because that white hand scuttled for the button again. Surely she didn’t expect a Forceman not to solve her defenses when handed the problem—any more than, if given a form, she’d stop herself at least working out how to fill it in. As an academic exercise.
    “Yes,” she said again, and her left hand stroked up and down her jawline. “That would seem to cover it.
    Yes. I’ll recommend your application, Forceman Jacklin: just a formality.”
    “So it’s back to duties until the official word comes through?”
    A little smile, adding to her wrinkles. Stupid Forceman, not knowing that! “No indeed. As a recommendee, you’re already under the security umbrella. You’ll be isolated from non-cleared personnel until further notice.”
    That was bad. There are rituals that help keep the Force together: a one-man assignment, you say your good-byes and buy a few rounds of juice, name the pals who get your pay balance and wargame credits if they don’t recover enough of you...
    “Has it got to be like that? Captain.”
    “Yes. These are our orders.” A very self-satisfied look.
    I wanted to scare her then, wanted to dance around that booby-trapped desk, tweak her nose and say Boo! But that would mean demerits and removal from the assignment (and a good lot of jeering from the boys as well, if she killed me on the way): I was curious now, I wanted to know whatever was going on in space to need a force of, it seemed, one. So I swallowed and said: “Permission to leave, Captain?”
    “Dismissed, Forceman.” And the finger right on the button, tense and terrified, as I got up very slowly, very carefully, and went to the door. Just before I reached it, I stopped short for half a second and could almost hear her jump. Maybe she could almost hear me chuckle. Outside her secretary was waiting, twitchy but not so twitchy as ADMIN. CAPT. SINCLAIR, to lead me away. Off to isolation until I got a briefing from someone who actually knew something.
    Once or twice in training there’d been fights in the bar or more often in the game room, nothing to write home about; two, three people killed, on their feet next day to face the jokes about “Hey, you’re getting slow—“ Culprits got tossed into the brig to cool off for a week; the brig was another of those bare gray rooms with a smell of disinfectant and no distractions at all to keep you from thinking what a wicked person you were. (Some of the fellows would always say afterward that they got themselves brigged on purpose—it was supposed to give you an edge in Sensory Deprivation I.) And the isolated quarters they gave me now weren’t one damn bit different from the brig. Temporary rank hath its privileges. I could almost hear Sinclair chuckle.
    Three
    The thing we all hate about Security is the hit-and-miss way they operate. Sometimes you feel it’s like a bomb with a one-direction trembler; kick it this way and nothing happens, touch it with a feather on that side and blam. So when we had this bet back in my early Force days and smuggled out the IR laser to burn our names on a few walls in the no-go area south of Oxford street, it was all ho-ho and what naughty boys you are, don’t do it again. But the next week, Shuttle the Armorer left a sheet of weapon specs in the Force bar, real low-level restricted stuff—and at the court-martial they busted him back to trainee. There is a trick they use in grenade training, when you’re throwing clear over the training-ground rocks (or sometimes it’s the maze ground at what wasHampton Court ) and the other men’s grenades are coming back at you. You dive and dodge and throw, and once in a while someone forgets to pull the pin and you get a spare grenade coming over. If you like, you can arm it and throw it back. Only somewhere out there is an instructor with some very special grenades whose firing delay is not ten seconds nor five but about half a millisec, and