"Oink! I mean, Lieutenant," said Ewen, the big private grinning all over his ugly face. But, also, saluting earnestly.
"At ease," said the newcomer to Ariel's chief supplier. "I feel uncomfortable enough with this bird shit on my shoulders without having to run into my old squad. What are you doing here, Ewen? I thought you'd been posted to the artillery."
The big private shrugged. "I got caught running a black-market trade with the rats. When it got to the court-martial they couldn't quite pin it on me. So I got posted here to 'Fort Despair.' What did you do wrong?"
"Other than graduate from the OCS course, nothing I can think of. Why?"
Ewen shook his head. "You always were a bit slow—sir—even when it came to making a bed." The private grinned broadly at the memory. "This is 'Fort Despair.' Where they send the malcontents and troublemakers. It's a hot sector. The Maggots are pushing forward fast and hard. The Maggots are supposed to do the job for them without having to go through all the hassle of finding evidence for a court-martial." The private laughed. "We read all about your little court case, Oi . . . Lieutenant."
"We'll have to keep it 'Lieutenant,' Private. Too damn difficult otherwise."
The big man smiled. "I reckon I won't have any trouble taking orders from you. Sir."
"This is Lieutenant Fitzhugh. He is the new OC for this sector," said the sergeant.
The rats seemed vastly uninterested. The humans—and they were a rough-looking lot—looked as if they were already planning to desert or kill him.
Fitz looked speculatively at them, without saying a word, until they began to get uncomfortable. Then he sighed. "Right. Listen up all of you. I gather you are all here to save the army the trouble of killing you legally." There was low-throated grumble. "It probably hasn't occurred to you that they'd give you an officer that they feel the same way about."
The grumble was silenced as they digested this one. Fitz ground his fist into his palm. "I'm planning on pissing on their fireworks, soldiers. I'm here because I got up the noses of certain powerful Shareholders. Private Ewen here will fill you in on all the gory details. For a fee, I'm sure. But to cut a long story short, I was a boot with the conscripts. I know every 'stute trick you lot can pull. And they will not happen. Is this clear?"
There were a few mutters. "On the other hand, I am not going to waste your time with petty crap. There will be weapons drills, come hell, high water or shelling. Your bangsticks will be sharp and ready. Hygiene will be of the highest standard we can manage out here. God help anyone I find crapping in their foxhole. For the rest, I'm really not interested. When, if, we get out of here, you'll worry about polished boots and belt buckles. Until then, don't waste your time or mine." There was a muted cheer. He hushed it with a wave. "I'll want to talk individually to all of you, especially the combat vets. I've no intention of obliging anyone by dying easily. I want that attitude from all of you. Dismissed. Back to your posts."
There was a silence. And then Ewen began clapping . . . It caught on.
Fitz waved it down after a minute. "Enough. We can see if you still want to clap in a week's time. To your posts."
Fitz leaned against the dugout wall. His father had given him two items on that last pass. "Take this tin of boiled candy. The candy is new. The tin isn't. It's been through four Earth wars with various Fitzhughs." The tin was a thin, flat one. The paint had long since worn off. But there was a deep gouge right across it. "Tradition has it that you will keep it in your left breast pocket."
The other thing he'd given him was a piece of advice: "Forget what they told you in OCS. When you get to your unit, talk to your NCOs. Let them lead you around quietly until you know enough not to make a fool of yourself."
"So tell me about the rats, Sarge," said Fitz to the rat-corps sergeant. "Before I make a fool of myself."
The sergeant permitted himself a hint of a smile. "Bit different from our last lootie, sir. He knew it all when he got to us. They told him at OCS how to deal with them."
Fitz raised one eyebrow. "Sergeant. They also told me how to deal with Vat-conscripts. Seeing as I've been one of those, and I know how they messed up there . . . I thought I might try asking one of the people who really run things."
Now the sergeant was grinning openly. "Ewen said you were a 'stute one. Well, sir, there is a whole set of different rules for dealing with them. They've got no morals at all, for starters. And they speak sort of English, but they don't think like we do. They take things very literally, and they still think like rats—you know, food, sex and strong drink are the only important things in the world, and devil take tomorrow and the hindmost."
"Ah!" said Fitz with a smile. "Like most of my boot-camp Vat-companions."
"Bit like, sir. But the difference is they don't seem to get concepts like respect for rank or a uniform. You earn respect personally. They don't have much loyalty, not even to each other. You can force them to do things, but the minute your back's turned they won't do them. The honest truth is it is easier to buy 'em than to try and do it any other way."
He looked warily at his new CO. "Er. I've heard, sir, all the human rat-corps NCOs who survive crook the mortality records so they've got some extra grog on hand."
Fitz didn't turn a hair. "Hmm. I trust you will continue to do so. And what else do they fancy?"
The sergeant was getting to like his new lieutenant. "Well, drink's best, sir," he said with a grin, "but you'll find lads like Ewen run a good black market in chocolate, lighters, knickknacks, fancy goods. They find tails the sexiest part of the body so they like to ornament them."
"And where do they get the money for all this?" asked Fitz. "I was under the impression they weren't paid."
"Ah," said the sergeant, giving him the sort of look a proud teacher might give a star pupil. "There you have it, sir. The rats' chief vice is looting. If the Maggots had loot, we wouldn't be able to hold them back."
The rats were lounging in the OP, discussing the curious behavior of the humans. "Methinks he is popular enough with them. They clapped."
"You mean he is pronging yon Linda. Methinks I have heard of that. They call it Vat-shagging," said Gobbo, knowledgeably.
Ariel stared at him in puzzlement. "Art mad? What sayest thou?"
"Well, he hath got the clap," said Gobbo. "Ewen said he was sure he had it from her."
"Not that sort of clap. The clapping you get for being popular."
" 'Twas my thought you could not be my kind without being popular," said Gobbo earnestly. His ears twitched. "Hist. He comes."
The rats were earnestly doing what they were supposed to when Fitz arrived. None of them leapt to attention. "As you were," said Fitz, dryly.
They went back to their lounging, which hadn't been quite what he'd meant. That was what the sergeant had meant by "take things very literally." Well, he could work against them, or work with them. . . .
He sat down, and hauled out Van Klomp's parting gift. A hip flask full of HAR's best yet attempt at a single malt. It was a reasonable exchange for the gift of an Aston Martin replica. "Does anyone here want a drink?"
One rat—smaller, therefore a female, at a guess—with a rakish tilt to her tail and a particularly rich chocolate color to her fur, was quickest. She snatched the hip flask and leapt to a niche in the wall while the others were still gaping. " 'Tis mine!" she squealed triumphantly.
" 'Tis not right, Ariel. That's not what the whoreson said!" protested another of the rats.
Fitz saw that a mighty fight was brewing. So he neatly snagged the hip flask back. It came with a clutching rat. "All of us." He stared at the rat who was still clinging to the hip flask, but whose teeth were now bared viciously. "And I will personally bite the tail right off any rat who tries to hog it all. Which would be a shame as yours is one of the sexiest I've ever seen."
To the sound of ratty chuckles and a couple of very credible wolf whistles, she let go. And winked salaciously at him. Then she sniffed. "You've got chocolate," she said, suddenly fiercely intent.
"Indeed. And we'll discuss my parting with some in a few minutes."
A pompous-looking rat strutted forward, a cup made out of a bangstick cartridge outstretched. He motioned at the hip flask. "For a suitable insult, I, as Minister for Interior Affairs, will tell you her weaknesses. Although, as Minister for Defense and Lord High Archbishop, I will say Ariel's tail is not without risks."
Ariel, remaining perfectly confidently standing on Fitz's knee, her eye fixed on his breast pocket, said, "Shut up, Pooh-Bah."
He'd placed the names now. Ariel—the sprite in Shakespeare's Tempest. Pooh-Bah from The Mikado. The names were an affectation he'd heard about. A side effect of the language download into their Korozhet-built soft-cyber units. As the soft-cyber unit selected the nearest approximate meaning to what the user meant, the name would probably reflect the nature of the beast. "Let's start with names."
"Bardolph." "Gobbo." "Pitti-Sing." "Trinculo." "Caliban." "Poo-Bah-for a reasonable fee." "Hymen." That one arched her tail provocatively at him.
"Paws off, bawd. I found him first," said Ariel.
No heroes. No kings. Rogues and lechers, in their own self-image, by the sounds of it. Well, he'd have to work with the clay he had.
"Get some mugs." He gestured with the hip flask. There was a scamper and a scattering. Except for Ariel. She merely unscrewed the silver cup off his flask, and grinned rattily at him. "Methinks I'll stay put, 'til I have that chocolate."
He shrugged. "I'll drink out of the flask."
"I should have thought of offering to do that," she said, as he doled out liquor.
"You snooze, you lose," he said cheerfully. "Now, to business. I've decided to pay a bounty on Maggot chelicerae. For every left chelicerae you have for me after the next assault, I'll pay one HAR cent—multiplied by the number of live troops I have under my command. At the moment I have some two hundred rats and sixty men, four NCOs and myself. Work that out in booze or bars of chocolate."
The rats began frantically counting on paws and toes and tails. After a while Ariel said. " 'Tis no use. Help us with the mathematics. Our base eleven doth make calculation much labor."
"How many Maggots can you kill in one assault?"
The rats blinked at him. "As many as is needful. As many as doth threaten us. Sometimes there are too many," said Ariel. "Then we run away."
"Call it ten each. At that rate—if everyone survives, you rats will get $26.50 each. Of course it gets less if anyone dies."
"Methinks I have found more looting in a lieutenant's pocket," said Trinculo.
"Ah." Fitz was unsurprised by the admission. "But then he's dead, and there is no more. And that's one lieutenant among two hundred. Your chances are not good. This way . . . you're onto a sure thing. Of course I'll have to put a ceiling on it, or I'll go broke. Say $50 a month. That's what the army gives conscripted privates."
Ariel tapped the side of the hip flask suggestively. "I'm in. Now this rotgut sack you have in here: 'tis remarkable easy to drink compared to issue grog, even if it doesn't have a proper bite to it. How about another, then?"
"Well, for those who are in, naturally," said Fitz, innocently. He could afford $10,000 a month for a private army, he thought as he poured. Candy's apartment had cost him about that—and he wasn't having to pay for that anymore. He'd cancelled the lease.
Ariel drank the whiskey slowly, speculatively, unlike most of the rats who were into chug-and-splutter. "Methinks I shall nursemaid this one," she announced. "For if he dies, we get naught." She looked curiously at him. "Besides, I want to inspect his naked weapon and see if he's adequate for a girl like me." She wrinkled her whiskers and revealed that the stories of his exploits had reached the rats. "This 'woman's underwear.' Explain?"
Fitz was still blushing at the idea that a rat might consider his wedding tackle too small. Or interesting. The sergeant had been right about no morals . . . or inhibitions! "Ah. Underclothes. Um. Panties and brassieres. Suspender belts."
"Doth speak riddles. Small pants? Things for grilling meat?"
"Women . . . um, men too, wear a second pair of pants under their clothes. To cover their private parts."
The rats would obviously have found astrophysics more comprehensible.
Fitz discovered that Ariel took "nursemaid" to mean she was going to take up residence in his magazine pouch, or on his shoulder. But the day wasn't out before he discovered that this casual invasion of his privacy was worthwhile.
The nightmare creatures struck just at dusk. None of the pictures or lectures had prepared Fitz for the reality. Or for the speed and ferocity of it all. They'd said at OCS that up to seventy percent of human soldiers never survived the first major assault. Now Fitz understood why. And he also knew that if it wasn't for his pocket assassin-cum-bodyguard, he'd have been dead five times over in that assault. Rats were everywhere. Blur-fast lethal killers with a terrifyingly casual attitude to their killing. And Fitz discovered that "ten each" was a gross underestimate of their potential and the Magh's sheer numbers.
"Sector headquarters on the blower, Lieutenant."
"Hell's teeth. Have you told them we're under attack?!"
"They know, Lieutenant. The line on either side of us folded. They're sending reinforcements into those trenches, hoping to hold line two. They thought we—being in the center of the attack—must all be dead. They want us to retreat."
"Tell 'em we're still holding. We don't want to be outflanked though." Fitz turned to one of the NCOs. "What are our losses like, Corporal?"
The man was grinning like a dervish, despite the blood soaking his shirt from a gash on his chest. "Slight, sir. Five men I know of. Some wounded, but there are no more Maggots coming over. We're fighting them coming along the trenches from the sectors next door now."
"Are we going to hold them, Corporal?"
The man nodded. "The rats have gone kill-crazy, Lieutenant. I've never seen anything like it. The Maggots usually send a lot of 'scorps. This is all light, fast stuff. Easy to kill. Those damned rats would have killed twice as many if they didn't stop to take a claw off each one. Some kind of new rat-craze."
"Tell 'em. Hell, no. I'd better tell them." Fitz ran for the field-telephone bunker.
"Lieutenant Fitzhugh here."
"Captain Dewalt here. Colonel's orders. Sound a retreat for any survivors, Lieutenant," said the voice on the other end.
"We've held them off, sir. And there are no more Magh' coming. We're mopping up."
His words didn't appear to have registered with the Captain. "We'll have stretcher teams in the second trench line. Leave the rats . . ."
"We've held them off, sir," repeated Fitz, louder now. "No need to retreat."
There was a stunned silence. "What! That's ridiculous. . . . I'd better confer with the colonel. Stay near the field telephone."
Fitz didn't. Instead he left—at a run—to see how the fight with the Magh' from the next-door sector was doing.
The answer was: not well. The rats were there . . . but several of them were sitting down, leaving the fight to the human troops. And those that were still fighting were going to die. It was not that the Magh' were overwhelming. It was just that the rats seemed to be behaving like clockwork toys . . . in need of rewinding. "What's wrong?" yelled Fitz to Ariel as he ran forward to the fray.
"Methinks they're faint with hunger."
Of course! He'd been told the elephant-shrew genes gave the rats phenomenal appetites. They must have fast metabolisms and little stamina. "Feed the rats! Give them any food you've got, especially sugar, or we're dead!"
He hauled out the tin of sucking candy and flung it at a sergeant, before running into the fight. "Get someone across the west side and tell them," he yelled, bangstick stabbing through pseudochitin.
He had no idea how fast the rats would recover. He was relieved to discover that it was really quick, and that the average grunt, when faced with death or parting with precious little luxuries he kept next to his skin, would reluctantly part with the luxuries. The east side trenches of the late Lieutenant Zuma soon would be free of Magh'.
As he set off across to the west side, he was met by a panting private. "Sir. Colonel Brown on the line. He's insisting we retreat."
Fitz stopped. "Did you give him your name, Private?"
"I couldn't get a fucking word in edgeways, sir. Sorry, pardon language, sir."
"This is a war, not a kindergarten, Private. A pity Private Johnstone was killed before he could give me the message. He is dead, isn't he?"
The private grinned. "Yes, sir. I saw him die. Poor fellow."
"Stick to that story," said Fitz. "And see that the field telephone has a convincing accident. Cave part of the bunker in. The fight's all over on the east side. If we can lick them on the west, I'm not running."
Ten minutes later Fitz called in from the west side's field telephone. "Yes, sir. My apologies, sir. I was called away from our field telephone to deal with an immediate crisis. Unfortunately the instrument was destroyed and the man I had instructed to remain with it was killed."
He waited for the volcano to subside and then answered the last question.
"Where am I calling from, sir? Why Section B3, sir. On our west side. We've already secured the east side. We'd like some relief, Colonel. We're pretty thin spread holding three pieces of the line."
There was a long silence from the other side. Then: "You're making your fellow officers look bad, Lieutenant. Hum. I'll get some men up to you at once. They're waiting in trench line two."
In the seven weeks that followed, Fitz's section survived a sequence of small probes and one more direct assault. This was somewhat worse than the first one. But Fitz's new system of buddying two rats to each human soldier worked remarkably well. The rest of the rats he used as a free-range strike force. And this attack seemed almost like a spearpoint aimed at his piece of the line. Once they'd stopped it, they didn't even have to deal with the other sections. And then even artillery bombardment slacked off.
They eventually had to retreat after three weeks of near idleness and weapons drill, because the line had folded to the west of them. "It's almost as if they won't hit here, because we're strongest here," grumbled Fitz. He never thought he'd miss Magh' attacks, but the boredom made keeping the troops in readiness hell. There was drunkenness, gambling, and several fights about women . . . and fights about men among the women. Only the rats seemed content.
Sergeant Ellis nodded. "It's always like that, sir. The Maggots always attack where we're weakest."
"Suggests good intelligence, doesn't it, Sarge?"
"Can't be military intelligence then, sir," said the sergeant, handing him a couple of sealed dispatches.
Fitz cracked the first open. "Well, glory be! This'll cheer the troops up. We've done our two-month frontline stint and we're being pulled back to third line for a month to rest the men."
"Be about the fullest company to get rested," said the sergeant. "Half the time the companies have to be replaced and re-formed before that. The lads'll see some leave, too. You get a week when you're on third trench," she said with relish.
"That'll be a shock to civvy street," said Fitz dryly. Life expectancy in the trenches was about forty days at the moment. Inside, he was deeply grateful that he would be returning some eighty-three percent of his men past that. It was something you didn't dwell on here. But it did make boredom sweet. He opened the second envelope. Blinked. "It appears this bunch of ne'er-do-wells is due to attend a medals parade at sector headquarters. And yours truly is promoted to lieutenant first class. With the corresponding increase in pay of seven dollars a day, and family and retirement benefits."
"The family and retirement benefits sound good, sir," said the sergeant. She'd given up trying to get into Fitz's pants a while back. Ariel was a good dog-in-the-manger. But the sergeant still cast sheep's eyes his way sometimes. Fitz avoided them with care. That was a set of complications he didn't need here, as their CO. Still, as a normal male there were certain intentions he was planning to follow up on that seven-day pass, when he didn't have a minder.
In dress BDUs that now had a row of ribbons on the chest, and a second pip on their shoulders, Fitz blinked at the bright lights outside the troop disembarkation station. He put his bag down and wondered just where to go now.
"To find some food and drink," said the bag, in Ariel's voice, obviously guessing his thoughts.
"What the hell are you doing in there?" he demanded.
"Methinks I am crossing my legs and tying a knot in my tail. Hurry up and let me out before I pee on your kit."
Given the alternative, letting her out seemed the only option. And, tempting though it might be, he couldn't just run off and leave her there. She had kept him alive in the trenches, after all. So, with a curious rat peering out of his magazine pocket, he took a taxi into town. It was at her orders he stopped at the Paradise Pussy Club, too. It had a flashing neon cocktail-glass sign.
The bouncer eyed the man in uniform uncertainly. While officers in full-dress uniform, complete with ceremonial swords, were regular and welcome visitors to the club, men in BDUs were not. However this was definitely an officer, even if he was wearing dress BDUs. Against his better judgement he'd let him in.
* * *
In the pale hours of morning, Fitz looked cheerfully back at the club. It had been a great evening. The lap dancer would no doubt recover from the bite on her well-padded tail-end . . .
He gently patted the rat whose long nose protruded from his pocket, issuing ladylike snores. He'd had a wonderfully vulgar evening with a delightful girl, who had just discovered Cointreau. She'd thought that the strippers and pornographic backdrop movie were the best live entertainment she'd ever seen. Well, it was also the only show she'd seen. Of course, Ariel had also thought it was the side-splittingest comedy she'd ever seen. Rats have no taboos about genitalia or even sex. But what a wonderful girl. She had a biting sense of humor and just happened to be a rat. Damn fool of a bouncer should have understood that. The man would almost certainly recover. Saunas weren't that hot, were they?
It seemed a little early on such a delightful evening—or morning—to go and visit the parental abode. His own residence had been sold. He'd terminated the lease on the only other place he'd had a claim on, and anyway, Candy probably wouldn't have been glad to see him. Perhaps 4:00 a.m. was a little late to go and see if Van Klomp had gone soldiering, finally. He walked idly through an alleyway, where a foolish man waved a knife at him.
"Empty your pockets, soldier," sneered that shifty soul.
Fitz shrugged. "On your head be it."
A few minutes later, now in search of an all-night store that sold chocolate, he'd gently woven his way up to two men in uniform with white bands around their hats and asked directions. One had been about to prod Fitz in the gut with a nightstick, when he saw the pips on his shoulders. While the MPs were pointing Fitz toward an all-night convenience store, someone with a much faster metabolism was opening the doors to the paddy wagon. Ariel had not survived her only brush with the law not to recognize one.
They zigzagged their course onward rather like that extra stray neutron in a fissionable mass. Letting a rat inside the doors of something like Aladdin's cave was rank foolishness. Fortunately, Fitz was by now sober enough to point out the closed-circuit television to her. She was even more fascinated by this concept and insisted on breaking into the security room to inspect the monitors. The puzzled alarm-response crew found nothing.
Then, it was dawn, and since a passing taxi was available, Fitz had taken her to see Van Klomp. Unfortunately for the HAR Bolshoi Ballet company . . .
Van Klomp was only due back from his new unit that night. Fitz had peacefully fallen asleep—a good soldier can sleep anywhere, anytime—on Van Klomp's sofa. So that left Meilin talking to Ariel. And the subject, naturally enough, was Fitz himself—his reputation, and the trouble he'd had with the law, and, of course . . . Candy.
What was less predictable—unless you knew rat-nature—was that this long discussion should also involve pornographic backdrops and closed-circuit television. Meilin knew quite a lot about the latter, as that was one aspect of Van Klomp's business. Neutrons are very small. What they can cause is not.
There was a sonic boom. Well. The return of Van Klomp, anyway.
"Can't you keep away from troublesome women?" demanded Van Klomp, on meeting the rat with a glass of his port in her hand.
She blew him a raspberry, a rather good one, as she'd only learned to do so the night before.
He blew one back that nearly flattened her ears. "So what have you been doing so far, boykie? Nothing as stupid as last time, I trust."
Fitz grinned. "We've toured one of GBS city's finest establishments, namely the Paradise Pussy Club, and visited my father. Cordial terms are restored, but his advice is that we're too alike to keep it that way if we share a house. So I've come to bum a piece of floor. It's got to be drier and more comfortable than where I've been sleeping lately."
"And welcome. Pull up any piece you like. So, what did the old man think of a visit by a rat?" He looked disapprovingly at the bottle Ariel was clutching. "Did you steal his booze too?"
Ariel lifted her nose at Van Klomp. "Pshaw. Of course I was well behaved. 'Twas an experience. I never met a real live progenitor before. He told me to look after Fitz, because it is obvious he can't look after himself."
"True," said Van Klomp, taking the bottle away from her. "And having visited the ancestral home, what excitement is planned for tonight? More visits to cathouses?" he asked with vast tolerance.
Fitz lifted his aristocratic nose. "I am going to introduce Ariel to culture."
Van Klomp snorted. "There's a Bavarian beerfest tomorrow night. Or is that a bit upmarket for a rat who has stolen half my port? Or maybe you were thinking of Chez Henri-Pierre again. He won't let a Vat in the front door. I'm sure he'd be charmed at a rat—especially after your last visit. And then you could go and watch the HAR Bolshoi Ballet's performance of The Nutcracker Suite."
"The latter sounds about right. I think we will give Henri-Pierre the go-by," said Fitz, loftily. "His portions are too stingy for Ariel, anyway."
"Besides, I haven't finished all your port, yet. And Meilin is cooking dinner for us. Curried tripe," said Ariel with an expression of bliss.
Van Klomp laughed. "I'm tempted to come along just to see what a rat makes of the ballet. But I've got work to do tonight. And beside, the beerfest is more my sort of thing."
The acrobatic Ariel thought ballet was quite funny for about five minutes. She was mostly fascinated by the large flatscreen DVD backdrop, which was a great saving in set changes. When Ariel pointed out it was rather reminiscent of last night's pornographic one, only with worse dancing, Fitz had to turn his laughter into a fit of coughing. He still attracted a number of disapproving "hushes."
Ariel also alarmingly disappeared from their private box for a while. There were no screams or other sounds of pandemonium, so Fitz didn't allow the look of glee on her ratty face to worry him too much. She did however adore the Cointreau-centered liqueur chocolates he'd bought her.
He'd have slept less soundly if he'd known that she'd spent the rest of the night driving around with Meilin, part of it in a very exclusive Shareholder neighborhood. And part of it visiting a couple of Vat-girls of negotiable virtue and adaptable morality. It was, Ariel concluded, a lot more fun than the ballet.
"This lot should bring down the house," said Meilin with a particularly evil grin when she'd finished editing the film.
Ariel looked puzzled. "Why? 'Tis very funny, but not explosive."
Meilin snorted with laughter. "Believe me, this is H.E."
"And her," corrected Ariel, pedantically.
* * *
"You're Lieutenant Conrad Fitzhugh?" The MP at Van Klomp's door asked.
"Yes," said Conrad warily. What had Ariel been up to? Besides running up the beer waitress's dress last night?
"Colonel Brown has ordered your recall, sir," said the MP apologetically. "There's been a major incursion in your sector. We've got transport waiting for you."
Fitz nodded. "Give me five minutes to get into uniform and get my kit together."
Ariel was unbelievably dozy. It was almost as if she hadn't slept.
It was a long drive to the front. She snoozed most of the way, contentedly.
The general bowed his tiara-wearing plump wife into her seat. Ballet wasn't really his favorite entertainment, although he'd known an entertaining ballerina a year or two ago. But Maria was a true aficionado. And when all was said and done, it was her money. The war and cost-plus on artillery ammunition had made the Cartup clan enormously rich.
Having ogled the dancers and ordered some champagne, and salmon-and-watercress sandwiches for the interval, he settled into a comfortable doze.
He was woken by the buzz in the audience.
And no one was saying "hush."
It took a few moments of unbelieving blinking to be sure he wasn't hallucinating.
This was taking avant garde theater to new limits. The last time he'd seen anything like that backdrop had been at the Paradise Pussy Club. And that hadn't been quite so explicit. And while the female in the leather outfit wielding the whip was a stunning platinum blond . . . her partner did absolutely nothing for his lacy polka-dot knickers and black bra. And even fishnet stockings couldn't help legs like that.
The two dancers continued to pirouette with grim artistic determination as the huge screen behind them showed the details of his brother-in-law's face.
Talbot Cartup had always liked to sport a figure in high society. He was frequently seen at the opera and ballet. But never before in quite such detail.
The general missed the part showing the interviews with the two ladies of the night, discussing his transvestite brother-in-law's enjoyment of the rather bizarre perversion of semisuffocation. They did mention their prices for what was a very risky pastime. But General Cartup-Kreutzler was too busy trying to break into the very securely locked projection unit.
As it turned out, the DVD in the unit was amazingly bare of fingerprints.
And while the booking for the ballet trebled, it did rather change the way people regarded the art form.
"Captain?" said Fitz, looking at the bars being handed to him.
"We're out of officers," said the colonel, grumpily. "We lost seven including two captains and a major when we were pushed back to line three. Those troops of yours are heading for court-martial. They're not exactly refusing orders. They want you. We just lost another two officers and your NCOs pulled the men back into the trenches. And what is this story about troops fraternizing with the rats?"
For a moment Fitz thought that Ariel must have put her head out of his pocket. Then he realized what the man was getting at. "Ah. It's a system we've evolved that works. Men have the stamina, rats the speed."
"Well, like your crazy idea about paying them, I'm not having any of it," said the colonel cholerically. "Just see you that get them over the top and that you recapture line two. You've got two new second lieutenants fresh out of OCS. See what you can do, Captain Fitzhugh. Put some discipline into this lot."
"Impossible, Talbot. He's back in combat. And Major Van Klomp is on a forced march with his men." The general looked in disgust at the telephone. Waited for his brother-in-law to stop rabbiting on. "There is nothing you, or even I, can do about it. Anything direct is almost certain to backfire on you now. I would certainly quietly withdraw those charges, because if the matter comes to court, you're going to end up being sued out of existence. You're a laughingstock and the best you can do is to go to that place of yours in the north and stay there. The town won't forget you in polka-dot panties for a long time."
* * *
Candy Foster was sitting looking gloomily at the door. He hadn't been near here since it happened. Hadn't called. It was his fault, not hers. She did it because that was what he wanted. She had no real interest in sex. Never had had. But it was a useful lever. So she'd panicked when he wouldn't come to after the plastic-bag thing. Her fingers had been stupid with fear and she hadn't been able to get it off. But at least she'd managed to tear the plastic, and hide that stupid leather outfit under a gown when the paramedics came. The story about Conrad had been born out of that panic. Talbot had decided to stick to it to save face. Had that ever blown up in his stupid face!
A brown envelope dropped through the letter slot in the door.
Candice opened it with trepidation. Talbot's brother-in-law's influence had stopped her getting call-up papers before. But this letter definitely began with . . .
"Greetings."
With her academic marks she knew she'd wash out of OCS. Let it be catering or nursing services. That was where nice girls were posted. She could change her hair color and use some skin pigment. Maybe change her name too. No one would recognize her. Hopefully.
Infantry school.