Tap-Dancing the Minefields Page 6

  The commissary was almost empty, and yet John came walking between the long tables with a tray overloaded with food. He did have a talent for finding food. He announced, “Some of them might survive the ships.” From John that was high praise indeed. Clyde considered himself one hell of a fighter, and the Army agreed. Still, the gladiator fights on the ship where they’d met John had nearly cost Clyde his life several times over. Lev wouldn’t have stood a chance, but John and Clyde had taken all his fights, leaving Lev free to figure out how to hack the locks and get them out. Thank God for lax security and transporters.

  “I heard a few rumors about today’s training,” Washington said with a smirk. He was a good man and a great fighter, but Clyde did not feel like sharing honest opinions in front of junior officers, especially when the man had the bad taste to like the Atlanta Falcons.

  Clyde told Washington, “Talk to Captain Black about getting on the war-college list for next semester.” Sadler was secondin-command for the base, but Captain Black was the backup leader for the tactical strike teams.

  Washington took the hint and stood. “Yes, sir.” He nodded to the others before leaving. “Major. John.”

  “Lieutenant,” Sadler said. John was too busy eating for pleasantries.

  “Do you think Washington is going to work out?” Sadler asked. Clyde understood her concern, because entirely too many of their recent recruits couldn’t handle the isolation or the lack of clear victories to celebrate. They weren’t trying to win the war—they were attempting to minimize how badly humans got their asses kicked.

  “I think so. Black likes him.” Clyde considered that a good character reference. “So how are the new recruits?”

  “Richas is good,” Sadler noted. “She didn’t get distracted when Butler grabbed her crotch.”

  “He what?” Clyde nearly choked on his cake, which would have been a terrible waste of carrot cake. “What sort of training session did you two run? Am I going to be doing paperwork on sexual harassment? Because you know how I feel about paperwork.”

  Sadler made a face and then reached up to touch her nose. “It was an interesting day.”

  “This group is more flexible in their thinking,” John said. Clyde narrowed his eyes. John’s definition of flexible thinking could be a little scary.

  “That would be Tankersley’s fault.” Sadler stole an apple off John’s tray—but then, John had gotten three apples, so he probably expected it.

  “Wait, Private Tankersley? The guy Lev….” Clyde hand-waved the rest of the sentence away. He knew what Lev and Tankersley had done, but that didn’t mean he had to say it out loud. He was grateful as hell that he had been at the plane when the alarm had sounded, sealing off the base. He would not want to deal with all the fallout of sleeping with a subordinate. He wondered if the doctor had any suggestions for sex-repressing drugs they could keep on hand if this happened again. They couldn’t afford too many disasters with that system. At least twenty soldiers had asked to change units, and three women were pregnant. Apparently safe sex slipped people’s minds when exposed to the hormone, and one of its side effects was increased fertility. At least the aliens hadn’t figured out how to get the guys pregnant. He tried to forget that thought had ever crossed his mind. Clyde figured if he kept this up, his mental-repression closet was going to be so full he was going to have to build a new addition onto his brain.

  “What does Tankersley have to do with the training session getting out of control?”

  “Everything,” Sadler offered, shaking her head. “He makes Lev look positively competent.”

  Clyde cringed. Lev was damn good at his job, but he was a menace militarily. The man ran through friendly fire, misjudged enemy positions, and generally had his head up his ass until the gunfire threatened one of his alien machines. Worse, he’d draw enemy fire, run into ships, and generally put himself in grave danger to get a new toy to take apart.

  Clyde admired the hell out of Lev. This was a man who had figured out how to break out of an alien cell. Without him, Clyde and John would both still be out there fighting for their lives in an alien gladiator pit. He had reverse engineered a fucking transporter. He had re-created a half-dozen alien tools and weapons using Earth technology. Even with all that, Clyde still wanted to murder him on a semiregular basis.

  “You’re full of shit,” John told Sadler. “Tankersley disabled a man twice his size.”

  Clyde frowned and looked from Sadler to John. Sadler didn’t look convinced, and he trusted her evaluation of people’s leadership abilities. She was the head of the science contingent, but she was also the second-highest ranking officer and his XO. More than that, she kicked ass. Clyde actually took fewer military assets into the field than any of the previous commanders because of Deborah. She could do double duty—programming shit while shooting at other shit, occasionally at the same time. It gave him more maneuverability and an ability to get in and out of places without raising too many red flags.

  However, he trusted John’s evaluation of fighting skills, and John had that angle to his head that meant he wasn’t budging in his opinion. “What exactly happened?” Clyde mentally scheduled time to go and pull the security tapes.

  “He ran,” Sadler started, but John quickly corrected her with, “He got into a better position.”

  “He ran where?” Clyde wondered if they shouldn’t go and pull those security tapes now, because whatever had happened, Sadler and John had very different opinions about it, and that was rare. Most of the time, Clyde trusted his people to come to the right answer and agree—all except Lev, who had both the worst and best ideas of any of them. The problem was sorting out one from the other.

  John inclined his head toward Sadler, ceding the floor to her. Putting her apple down, Sadler started, “He ran from the fight. We’re talking rabbit levels of jumping and running and hiding behind the gym equipment. I haven’t seen Lev run that fast, although if I had to teach him a fighting style, that wouldn’t be a bad one for him.”

  “He disabled better-trained opponents,” John observed.

  Clyde frowned. “Between the jumping and the running he managed to clock a battle-trained soldier? The quality of the candidates is dropping around here.”

  “It was an accident,” Sadler insisted.

  John snorted, which was his way of calling someone a fucking moron. At least Clyde had house-trained John out of doing that.

  “Would one of you like to explain what happened?”

  Sadler started before John could. “Tankersley was hiding behind a chest-press machine, and Bothell reached through the machine to grab him. Tankersley dropped to his knees, and Bothell’s elbow got slammed on the metal plate.”

  Clyde cringed. That was going to sting.

  “He did that on purpose,” John said firmly.

  “You think he used a weight machine as a weapon?” Clyde asked. For a second, John just looked at him. Clyde could almost hear the snort that John didn’t make. “Why do you think it was intentional?” Clyde amended himself.

  “Private Tankersley beat a bunch of your guys, and he’s the only one to land a hit on Major Sadler.”

  “Sadler! Tankersley hit you?” Clyde stared at his secondin-command in horror. He didn’t know who had taught her hand-to-hand combat, but either the trainer had been very concerned about teaching Sadler to defend herself, or he’d been trying to drive a woman out of the service. Either way, whoever had trained her had turned her into a beautifully vicious fighter.

  Her answering glare would have stripped the paint off a house. “And I put him on the ground, sir,” she snapped right back.

  “Yeah, and you’re the only one who could,” John pointed out. “You guys keep telling me that you’re bringing your best fighters up here, but most of these guys wouldn’t make it out of their first fight. They’d bleed out on the floor whining about how it wasn’t fair. Tankersley held his own.”

  Sadler was touching her nose again, probably feeling for sore spots. It
really did look puffy and red, but Clyde figured one Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer joke and Sadler would put him on the floor the next time they sparred. Clyde wasn’t a young man anymore, and Sadler was a dirty fighter. “And I was trying to be nice to him,” Sadler complained.

  Clyde didn’t buy that. When it came to sparring, Sadler wasn’t nice to anyone. The woman was the heart of charity off the gym floor, but no way would she have cut Tankersley slack, especially not if he was pulling some crazy stunt like running away from his opponent.

  “I mean,” Sadler kept going, “after Cantone pulled his caveman routine, I felt bad for the kid.”

  “Warrant Officer Jason Cantone?” Clyde asked.

  John nodded once. “The man wanted to kill Tankersley.”

  Clyde ran a hand over his face. The last thing they needed was some testosterone-driven caveman who couldn’t rein in his own frustration. Clyde definitely needed to pull the video from this afternoon.

  Sadler agreed. “I haven’t ever seen anyone take such a sudden hatred of a simple private. Although it was worth it to see Cantone’s face after Tankersley pointed out that beating up on a cook made you pathetic. Tankersley does know how to run his mouth.”

  “Great.” Clyde sighed. “Just what we need, another mouthy geek.”

  “At least this one isn’t going into the field, not if he keeps running away from anyone who raises a fist to him,” Sadler reassured him. However, the look on John’s face told a whole different story. He clearly wanted to take Tankersley the next time they got orders to chase some aliens off the planet.

  “Considering he’s our dishwasher with a part-time pass to play with gears, I don’t think it’s an issue.” Clyde stabbed his cake with his fork. This was getting a little too messy. “Speaking of Lev, one of us should probably blast him out of his office before he falls asleep inside some engine, or worse, doesn’t go to sleep at all. One of these days the man is going to forget to breathe, and won’t that be a mess?”

  “He’s long gone,” John said. “Probably back at his quarters by now.”

  “Whoa. Really? What, did they have some big documentary on the most boring subject ever and his VCR is broken?” Clyde loved Lev, but his taste in television was atrocious. Some days Clyde was sorry that Lev had fixed the alien signal booster and managed to get them radio and television transmission again, because it had led to nights watching shows about ancient cultures and alien technologies and conspiracies. The man was inanely amused by conspiracy shows. If anyone ever did out the IF program, Lev would know first.

  “He met Private Tankersley at the gym. They left for Lev’s quarters,” John said before shoving half a piece of cake in his mouth.

  Clyde had a moment of mental grayout. He couldn’t even come up with an appropriate response for that. Lev left with Tankersley. Lev voluntarily left his work to go with Tankersley. Lev voluntarily left his beloved engineering to go home with a man he had pinned in a closet and demanded sex from while under the influence of an alien device. Nope. Not computing.

  “Really?” Sadler asked. “After, you know….”

  “I still like the person I fucked,” John said with his mouth full, and the look he gave Sadler made the hair on Clyde’s arms stand up. Oh, no. No, no, no. Clyde refused to even consider that John and Sadler had… yep, brain not going there. Clyde started building that mental addition onto his repression closet. Besides, Sadler’s husband would perform an elective lungectomy on John if he ran around making that claim.

  “Lev and Tank are friends,” John said. Sadler was too busy blushing to respond, and Clyde really wished he knew exactly what definition of “friends” John was using, because this whole situation was odd, and coming from him, that was saying a lot. Clyde had seen more odd in his life than he cared to remember.

  “I’m surprised Lev left that early. We finished up in the gym at, what… eighteen hundred? I’ve never seen Lev leave work before twenty-two hundred, and usually that’s only when the colonel orders him.” Sadler shook her head in a sort of fond disbelief.

  “Lev came to the gym at twenty-one hundred.”

  Clyde frowned. “Tankersley was still there three hours later?” Clyde mentally snickered at the thought of the man taking a three-hour hot shower. Sadler might have really taken him down a peg or two. It surprised Clyde how much satisfaction he took from that thought.

  “He wanted to know how to fight aliens. We practiced some.”

  Narrowing his eyes, Clyde studied John. He was hiding something under too much calm, and Clyde wondered if the thing he was hiding had anything to do with why his opinion on Tankersley differed so much from Sadler’s. “What exactly did you do for three hours?”

  “I showed him how to fight these guys.”

  “Okay, you aren’t talking about that whole work-through-the-pain thing, are you?” Medical had given strict orders to never again allow John to design a training program. Maybe John had survived his years of training and come through as the scariest fighter in the fucking universe, but most of the people he had trained with were dead.

  John raised an eyebrow. Okay, either Tankersley liked getting his ass kicked, or he was a little too savvy about understanding the enemy to be a dishwasher. Clyde scratched the side of his neck as he wondered if someone could have slipped a plant into the base. Of course, acting like an idiot during training didn’t make much sense. A double agent would either keep his head down or try to impress the targeted organization. From the description of Tankersley’s actions, he hadn’t done either. None of it made sense.

  “Sadler, get a background check on this kid.” She was a programming goddess, and if anyone could dig more information out of the computer, she could.

  “He passed vetting for access to classified materials, sir.”

  “I don’t care.” Clyde put his fork down carefully before he could slam it down. Something was wrong. “Go deeper. I want to know which hand he….” Clyde cleared his throat. Sexual references in front of his people… not kosher. “I want to know everything,” he amended himself. “John, get a copy of the training-session tape for me and put it in my office.” Clyde stood up.

  “Sir, where are you going?” Sadler called after him as he started out of the room.

  “Lev is too mission critical to risk around a loose cannon like Tankersley,” Clyde pointed out. No way was he leaving his engineer with someone who set off every warning bell in his head. Damn. Lev had even talked him into getting Tankersley into the IF. Heading for the elevators, Clyde wasn’t sure who he was angriest with—Tankersley, Lev, or himself. But the next time Lev wanted someone brought into the program, Clyde was going to…. Kneecapping them was probably out of the question.

  Glancing at his watch, he started making calculations. It was twenty-three thirty. That meant Tankersley had two hours’ head start. Two hours with Lev. God only knew how much trouble Lev could get into in two hours. Clyde could feel panic wrap around his heart as he fought an urge to call Lev on the radio. If there was trouble, Clyde didn’t want Tankersley getting any sort of warning. Nope, Clyde was going with a stealth attack.

  Chapter Six

  “THIS IS your home.” Tank looked around. The quarters were ten times the size of Tank’s room, and archways led to other spaces. Spires and swirls of blues and greens decorated the organic walls, and a lacework of delicate membranes covered the ceiling, diffusing the light. No two walls were parallel, and random struts and pillars interrupted the big room, many of them creating convenient ledges that Lev had filled with stuff.

  This main area seemed to be Lev’s living room and workroom. Several beanbags lay in front of a good-sized television, and a loveseat was set to the side. Tank wondered how they had gotten the furniture to Alaska. Every pound on the transport plane had been accounted for, and Tank had trouble imagining a general signing off on Lev’s couch. The rest of the space was set up more like a workroom. In addition to the built-in alien tables, cheap folding tables held dissected alien toys, several o
f which Tank recognized.

  One was a memory wipe. Zhu’s father had used one to make Ellie, Roger, and Tank forget themselves. That was early on when Zhu and Marie were still in their “we hate each other” phase, and each had blamed the other for screwing up some spell. Tank just remembered the fear and the confusion. He hadn’t known who he was, and two fairly terrifying people were accusing each other of hurting innocent bystanders. Roger had been trying so hard to put on a brave face, while Ellie stared, wide-eyed.

  Luckily the whole thing had worn off after a couple of days. The police had accused them of running away and doing drugs, Ellie’s mom had freaked out, and Tank’s mother had given him that disappointed look that suggested she had never expected any better from him. She’d even said something about him being his father’s son. That hurt.

  A periculum. Shit, this was dangerous. Tank touched the edge of the egg-sized device and tried to keep his tone mild. “What’s this?”

  “Some sort of psychological tool.” Lev came over and picked it up. When he turned it over, Tank was relieved to see the guts were missing. “I’m studying the transmitter, which functions on a level similar to brain waves. We have the emitter in a quarantine room, but I have this here to remind me. There are so many projects and so much work to do, and then we’ll get a call that we have a new report of aliens on the ground and all my projects go on hold so we can go steal artifacts and chase them off.” Lev’s enthusiasm was sexy.

  “You’re on a field team?”

  “Yeah.” Lev gave him a strange look. “Why?”

  Tank shrugged. “I guess I just thought you worked out of here.” Tank wondered if that meant he might get to see Lev again if the military let Tank go. “This place is interesting. It’s almost pretty, in a weird sort of way.”

  “We think these were officer or VIP quarters, but they’re so deep into the ship that most of the others avoid this section altogether.”