Headquarters and billets for the enlisted men of Battery D were in a basement room of the Palace of Government, converted to the purpose from a disused workers' cafeteria. Desoix sighed to see it again, knowing that here his superior would let out the anger he had bottled up while the two of them stalked through hallways roamed by folk from outside the unit.
Control, the artificial intelligence/communications center, sat beside a wall that had been pierced for conduits to antennas on the roof. It was about a cubic meter of electronics packed into thirty-two resin-black modules, some of them redundant.
Control directed the battery in combat because no human reactions were fast enough to deal with hypersonic missiles—though the calliopes, pulsing with light-swift violence, could rip even those from the sky if their tubes were slewed in the right direction.
The disused fixtures were piled at one end of the room. Control's waste heat made the room a little warmer, a little drier; but the place still reminded Desoix of basements in too many bombed-out cities.
Major Borodin pulled shut the flap of the curtain which separated his office from the bunks on which the off-duty shift was relaxing or trying to sleep. In theory, the curtain's microprocessors formed adaptive ripples in the fabric and canceled sounds. In practice—
Well, it didn't work that badly. And if you're running an eighty-man unit in what now had to be considered combat conditions, you'd better figure your troops were going to learn what was going on no matter how you tried to conceal it.
"You should have called in at once!"the battery commander said,half furious, half disappointed, like a parent whose daughter has come home three hours later than expected.
"I needed you at that meeting," he added, the anger replaced by desperate memory. "I . . . you know, Charles, I never know what to say to them up there. We're supposed to be defending the air space here, not mixed up in riots."
"I got a good look at that this morning, Sergei," Desoix said quietly. He seated himself carefully on the collapsible desk and, by his example, urged Borodin into the only chair in the curtained-off corner. "I think we need to reposition Gun Three. It's too close to where—things are going on. Some of our people are going to get hurt."
Borodin shook his craggy head abruptly."We can't do that,"he said."Coverage."
"Now that Five's back on-planet—" Desoix began.
"You were with that woman, weren't you?" Borodin said, anger hardening his face as if it were concrete setting."That's really why you didn't come to me when I needed you. I saw her slip in just before you did."
Yes, Daddy, Desoix thought. But Borodin was a good man to work for—good enough to humor.
"Sergei,"he said calmly,"now that we've got a full battery again,I can readjust coverage areas. We can handle the seafront from the suburbs east and west, I'm pretty—"
"Charles, you're going to get into really terrible trouble," Borodin continued, his voice now sepulchral. "Get us all into trouble."
He looked up at his subordinate and added,"Now, I was younger too, I understand . . . But believe me, boy, there's plenty of it going around on a businesslike basis. And that's a curst sight safer."
Desoix found himself getting angry—and that made him even angrier, at himself, because it meant that Anne mattered to him.
Who you screwed wasn't nearly as dangerous as caring about her.
"Look,"he said,hiding the edge in his voice but unable to eliminate the tremble. "I just shook a calliope loose on Merrinet, and it cost the unit less than three grand plus my transportation. I solve pro—"
"You paid a fine?"
"Via, no! I didn't pay a fine," Desoix snapped.
Shifting into a frustrated and disappointed tone of his own—a good tactic in this conversation, but exactly the way Desoix was really feeling at the moment also—he continued, "Look, Sergei, I bribed the Customs inspectors to switch manifests. The gun was still being held in the transit warehouse, there wasn't a police locker big enough for a calliope crated for shipment. If I'd pleaded it through the courts, the gun would be on Merrinet when we were old and gray. I—"
He paused, struck by a sudden rush of empathy for the older man.
Borodin was a fine combat officer and smart enough to find someone like Charles Desoix to handle the subtleties of administration that the major himself could never manage. But though he functioned ably as battery commander, he was as lost in the job's intricacies as a man in a snowstorm. Having an executive officer to guide him made things safe—until they weren't safe, and he wouldn't know about the precipice until he plunged over it.
Desoix was just as lost in the way he felt about Lady Anne McGill; and, unlike Borodin, he didn't even have a guide.
He gripped Borodin's hand."Sergei,"he said,"I won't ask you to trust me.But I'll ask you to trust me not to do anything that'll hurt the battery. All right?"
Their eyes met. Borodin's face worked in a moue that was as close to assent as he was constitutionally able to give to the proposition.
"Then let's get back to business,"Charles Desoix said with a bright smile."We need to get a crew to Gun Five for setup, and then we'll have to juggle duty rosters for permanent manning—unless we can get Operations to send us half a dozen men from Two to bring us closer to strength."
Borodin was nodding happily as his subordinate outlined ordinary problems with ordinary solutions.
Desoix just wished that he could submerge his own concerns about what he was doing.