Emerald Sea

CHAPTER FIVE

Jason coasted to a stop parallel and slightly above Bruce the Black who was observing a group of mer, men and women, repairing one of the fishing nets. The material available for the nets was horrible, a type of long seaweed, a green algae in reality, whose “stems” were soft and pliable. Braided it was marginally effective as a net unless someone tried to capture, as in this example, a school of dorado, which were some of the fastest fish in the sea.

But between the nets, and scavenging for crayfish and the sea plums, and the occasional large fish that hunters like Jason speared with bone-tipped harpoons, hunger was kept at bay. That was about all that could be said about the happy life of the mer-folk. Oh, and the Work went on.

“Representatives Freedom come,” Jason pulsed. The mer, unlike dolphins or other marine mammals, used gills and had no air available to create sonar. Instead they had a small bone, equivalent in basic design to those of the inner ear, located in the nasal passages in their forehead. They could send commands to the bone that pulsed their words and turned them into high frequency sonar. It was also adequate, barely, to maneuvering in zero visibility, be that in the dark or in a cave or even in light silt. And they could receive and process, to an extent, the sonar images created by the delphinoids, who had a much more advanced system. But for conversation, the mer relied on verbal shorthand.

“Destiny, too,” Bruce answered. The name “the Black” referred to a joke that had circulated early in his years as a mer. He had said that his real purpose was to find the treasure of an ancient pirate named Blackbeard and spent a fair amount of time in the search. He was anything but black. His skin was a nearly perfect white, his hair was blond and his tail-section was covered in golden scales. But someone had called him “Blackbeard” and it had stuck, even after he became one of the leaders of the Work, the apparently eternal project of putting the coral reefs back into a “prehuman” condition.

The Fall had set back the Work, beyond question. Even Bruce the Black had been forced to recognize that hunting and gathering on the reefs was a necessity, not a barbarous hobby. And sea plum, a human-generated weed for all intents and purposes, which had been ruthlessly pruned, was now tended with nearly the same care as mer-children. But the Work went on.

Bruce the Black had been one of the most notable members of the mer community and he had been an outspoken proponent of continuing the Work to the best of their ability. It had been taken up as an article of faith among the mer, that the Work was more important than any temporary squabble among the Powers-That-Be.

Sometimes Jason wondered if there might not be more to life than the Work. Such as, for example, trying not to get trampled by the oncoming war.

“Fight will,” Jason said.

“Fight/lose,” Bruce replied. “Always fight/lose. Neutral are. Neutral stay.”

“Freedom…” Jason replied.

“Destiny! Freedom! Fight/lose! Neutral stay!” The last was said with a blat of sound borrowed from the dolphins. In tonal shorthand it said “I’m the leader and you’re not and you will obey!”

Jason, however, recognized the undertone, that of a porpoise mother chastising her infant, and was less than happy about it. There was, however, not much that he could say in return.

“Freedom representative Talbot. Going am.”

“Where?” Bruce asked, finally turning to look at the younger mer.

“Hunt will,” he said with a contemptuous gesture at the nets. “Food need. Neutral stay.” With that he turned and gave a powerful flick of his tail, enough motion that the water assuredly washed over the older mer.

If Bruce took it as an insult, that wouldn’t bother Jason one bit. He was half tempted to pee in his wake.

Herzer turned down an offer to have dinner with Edmund and gravitated to the officers’ mess instead. For one credit chit he was served overcooked and oversalted roast beef, lumpy mashed potatoes with slightly burned gravy and greens cooked to mush. However, he consoled himself that it was better than monkey on a stick. He didn’t recognize any of the people in the mess, except occasionally by sight. He’d checked around and there were none of his class currently present, not that there had been many survivors. After dinner he drifted back to his room, uncertain about where to go or what to do. He could get all spiffied up and go to the O-club bar and get shit-faced, but that had little appeal. There were always some women hanging around and if he flashed his medals he’d probably get laid. But he liked to think that he was beyond that. He lay down on his bed and tucked his hand behind his head, and tapped his prosthetic in thought. He should have gone to dinner at Edmund’s. He’d barely said hello to Rachel and Daneh, who were two of his favorite people on earth. He should go to the bar; at least with a few belts in him he could probably sleep. The bottom line was that he had gotten so used to having something to do, constantly, that he didn’t know how to relax anymore.

Finally he stripped off his tunic and opened up his wall locker. It took him two checks to determine that he had, precisely, zero civilian clothes.

“Herzer, you’re getting way too into this shit,” he muttered. Finally he pulled out an undress tunic and a field cloak and stomped out of the quarters.

He headed downtown in the general direction of Tarmac’s tavern, then took a left and, on an impulse, headed for the public baths. When he got near them he stopped and whistled. What had once been a rather small set of three wooden buildings was now a complex of at least half a dozen. And from the traffic going in and out half the town was there.

He headed up the front entrance and passed through one of several doors. There was a small antechamber, heated against the growing cold of fall, and he stripped off his cloak before passing through the second set.

The far room, which smelled of chlorine and was, frankly, overheated, had tables down either side with at least six people at each of them. He didn’t recognize any of them and he hoped that it was mutual. He stepped to the right where a teenage girl wearing a bathing suit nodded at him.

“Lord, you’re a big one,” she said with a smile. “I haven’t seen you before.”

“I haven’t been here in…” He had to stop and think for a moment. “Oh, at least two years. So I think you’ll have to walk me through the procedures.”

“Well, I have to stay here or I’d be happy to.” She grinned. “But it hasn’t changed much.” She dipped under the desk and came up with a bag marked with a complicated symbol and a wooden marker. “Take the bag, go through the doors. There are disrobing rooms in there and towels. Grab a towel, put all your stuff in the bag and give it to an attendant. They’ll seal it and you keep the marker.”

“What are all the buildings?”

“Well, there’s a shower room, please pee and take a shower before you climb in the baths,” she said with her first frown. “There’s one building for women-only baths, another for men; they’re marked. Then there’s the pool room, which is unisex. You can eat in there as well. And the fitness center.”

“Fitness center?” Herzer asked. “I’m getting a sinking feeling. Do people wear bathing suits in here?”

“Some do, some don’t,” the girl smiled. “And there are some for sale in the gift shop, which is right around the corner,” she added, pointing.

“I think I’ll stop there, first,” Herzer said.

He followed her directions and found a fully appointed gift shop. Not only were there bathing suits, there was a complete line of toiletries, soaps, shampoos, towels with the Raven’s Mill logo and even shirts and coffee mugs. He picked one of the latter up and grimaced. “Raven’s Mill, Home of the Blood Lords” was baked into the ceramic.

“Can I help you?” a cold female voice asked from behind him.

“Morgen!” he said, when he turned around. “I thought you’d run off to another town!”

Morgen Kirby was about a hundred and seventy centimeters of slim redhead. They had had a very brief relationship just after the Fall, before he had joined the Blood Lords. Very brief. Basically a half a day at the end of which they had a flaming argument. He couldn’t, off-hand, recall about what.

“I did,” she said, sighing. “I went to Resan.”

“Oh, shit,” was all Herzer could say. The town of Resan had been one of the first that Dionys McCanoc’s forces had hit and because the town elders had a policy of “strict nonviolence” his forces had gone through it like a hot knife through butter. And that reminded him what the argument had been about. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. How…” He paused, unsure how to go on.

“McCanoc attacked just before dawn. I was working for one of the established people in the town and had gone out to one of the farms for milk; Mistress Tabitha had to have fresh milk for breakfast every morning.”

“So you got out,” Herzer sighed.

“Not… entirely unscathed.” She frowned. “After that I went to Washan but after you and Edmund stopped McCanoc I decided the one place I wanted to be was back in Raven’s Mill. Even if I didn’t have my head screwed on straight, I could at least be somewhere where others did.” She paused and shrugged. “You were right. Shilan and Cruz and all the rest were right; this world can’t afford peaceful innocence. There are too many bad people in it. I always sort of expected you to turn up and gloat. But after a while I figured out you weren’t the gloating type.”

“No, I’m not,” Herzer said. “I’m the worrying type. I actually thought of you earlier today; I saw Crystal. She’s Edmund’s secretary.”

“You were right about that, too,” she snorted. “She was being snippy because I was with you. When I got back here I was a bit loopy and she tried to ‘comfort’ me. Big mistake. She found out how over ‘nonviolence’ I am.”

“Um…” Herzer scratched his chin and frowned. “I… well we get briefings about combat aftermath. You know, you really need to talk to a counselor…”

“I have been,” she smiled. “For damned near a year I’ve been going to the post-rape trauma groups. I’m actually bucking for a junior counseling spot and Mistress Daneh thinks I can make it.” She suddenly frowned again and looked at his prosthetic. “What the hell happened to you? Where’s your hand?”

“McCanoc,” Herzer said with a shrug, raising the prosthetic. “It’s okay, it’s got a little latch for holding my shield, takes all the trouble out of it. Better than a hand in some ways.”

“I didn’t know.” She frowned again, looking at the clamp and hook of glittering metal.

“And you work here?” Herzer said, changing the subject.

“And I work here.” She shrugged, still looking at the prosthetic with a troubled expression. “Three nights a week. And the sawmill during the day. So, were you looking for me, or…?”

“Actually, I was looking for a suit,” he admitted. “I haven’t been to the bathhouse in a year or two and it’s really changed.”

“Not as much as you might think.” She smiled. “Some people use them by the pools, but most don’t. And, frankly, I don’t think we have anything that will fit you.”

“Story of my life,” he grumbled.

“Well, you never were an off-the-rack kind of guy,” she said with a grin.

“I guess I’ll go brave the baths then,” he said. “I’ve been in Harzburg for a year and they’re… pretty uptight about body modesty. I guess some of it rubbed off.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’ll get back into the evil ways of Raven’s Mill.” She grinned again.

“Well… see you later?”

“Maybe,” she said with a shrug. “I’m… not sure it would be a good thing to just pick up where we left off. I’m… over it but not that far.”

“Believe me, I understand,” Herzer said, frowning. “I’ve never had that particular experience, but I’ve seen the aftermath enough times. Take care of yourself, and… I’m here. Shoulder, bed, sword, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, dimples appearing on her cheeks. “Go have fun.”

“Fun, right,” he said, throwing the bag over his shoulder.

The changing room had altered as well. There were closed stalls for changing; before it had been totally open. And there were two attendants waiting for his clothes and gear. From prior experience he knew he could trust them to not pilfer anything out of the bags so he added his money pouch after a moment’s thought. That done, he tucked a towel around his waist firmly and headed through the door marked “Showers.”

More changes. The showers were individual stalls; before they had simply lined one side of the room. There were males and females in the room and when one of the latter, a tall, lithe blonde, came out of a shower stall stark naked he actually started to feel more at home. He still put the towel back on before leaving his own stall.

Beyond the room was cross corridor with several doors. One was marked “Baths, Male” another “Baths, Female” and a third “Pools.” He pushed open the male bathing room and saw a line of large wooden tubs, much like he remembered. There were a few guys in the far tub but the room was otherwise empty. He didn’t recognize any of them so he headed for the room marked “Pools.”

He wasn’t sure what to expect but it wasn’t what he got. The room was long, apparently one large building, the walls made of paneled wood and lined with oil lamps. More oil lamps were hung throughout the room and in several spots there were round fireplaces with metal covers and chimneys to let the smoke out through the roof. The floor was tiled and the “pools” were just that, nine pools of varying sizes scattered around the room. There were benches and low tables as well and most of the people who had been coming in and out apparently gravitated here. The conversation was loud and echoed across the room.

He stepped through the door and looked around trying to decide what the standard mode of dress was but there didn’t seem to be any. Some of the people had on light bathing suits but the majority were naked and there didn’t seem to be any discrimination. A blonde in a suit so sheer she might as well have been naked was talking to a male who was. Two guys in bikini bathing suits were talking to the woman who had walked out of the shower starkers. He finally recognized one of the instructors at the Academy and had started across the room when he heard his name screamed and the next moment found his arms filled with naked female.

He was having such a hard time trying to figure out where to put his hand, and hook, that it took him a moment to recognize her.

“Shilan!” he yelled. “Damn, it’s good to see a familiar face.” Hsu Shilan had been part of his apprenticeship class, a lovely trim brunette with whom he’d had an “off-again” relationship until he joined the Blood Lords and basically lost track. Last he’d heard she was a textile designer at one of the mills. She’d put on a bit of weight since then, but since she had been skinny to the point of anorexia it looked good on her. Too good. Herzer found himself stroking her back and wished he had more clothes on.

“Well, if you’d stay in town for a while,” she said, sternly. If she noticed the stroking it was only to lean into it a bit.

“My master’s voice,” he replied, carefully removing his hands lest he get a little too enthusiastic. “I go where they tell me. This time it was Harzburg for a year and a half.”

“You haven’t met my husband, David,” she said, dragging him to one of the pools.

“Husband?” he squeaked.

One of the bathers had risen out of a nearby pool and held out his hand.

“So you’re Herzer Herrick,” the man said. Herzer noted as he took the hand that it was soft and that he out-massed Shilan’s husband by at least twice. So if it came to cases, he could probably punch David through the nearest wall. He still intended to be extremely correct and punctilious. Damnit. The mission in Harzburg meant that he was trying to uphold the reputation of the Federal forces. And although an ancient general had said “A soldier who won’t fisk, won’t fight,” the Harzians were such stuck-up pricks that he’d had to play saintly soldier boy the entire year. It had been a looong year.

“Shilan has told me an awful lot about you,” David continued.

“It’s all lies and damned lies,” Herzer said, squatting down as modestly as he could with a towel on. Shilan had slid back into the pool but her breasts, which were noticeably rounder and fuller than the last time Herzer met her, were fully exposed.

“Come on,” Shilan said, waving at the pool. “Jump in. The water’s fine.”

“Um…” One hundred twenty-eight times three is… three times eight, carry the two… By the time he was barely a quarter of the way into the equation he’d gotten to the point he wouldn’t embarrass himself and he pulled off the towel.

“See, told you he was hung like an ox,” Shilan said with a chuckle.

So much for not being embarrassed.

“Yep, the reason we never had a relationship was she saw me in the showers and fainted,” Herzer replied with a growl.

“With excitement, maybe,” David laughed. “I see some of us got ‘enhanced’ before the Fall.”

“Natural genetics,” Herzer replied, tightly. “I had the muscles built on, but that was because I had a degenerative condition. I’d worked for them, they just wouldn’t stay. When I got cured, I had a bod-mod, but it was only for the muscles. Then I maintained them. The rest is genetics. The size overall and… in places.”

“Big hands,” Shilan chuckled. “That’s what you meant.”

“Hand,” Herzer noted, holding up his prosthetic.

“Sorry,” Shilan said, suddenly contrite.

“Not a problem, it’s great for opening beers,” Herzer replied with a shrug.

“You’re Herzer Herrick?” The woman from the showers slid into the pool, looking at him with a quizzical frown. She looked to be in her twenties but her movements were so smooth and precise she had to be nearing her first century. “I was expecting someone… older.”

“At your service, Mistress…?”

“Miss,” the woman said with a smile. “Stephanie Vega.” She held out her hand, reaching across the pool to do so.

She was blond, a natural apparently or at least with either transformed genetics or very ready in her use of dye, long and slender in the hipless, bustless look that was fashionable pre-Fall. A face that was a little too perfect to be natural. Herzer wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers. Well, maybe if she was really messy about it.

“And, yes, I’m Herzer Herrick,” Herzer said, giving her his patented big-dumb-goofy grin. To most women big seemed to equal dumb and if dumb was what they wanted, he was their man.

“The Blood Lord?” she continued, her eyes widening, as if she still didn’t quite believe it. Her pupils were dilated so far it was hard to tell she had green eyes.

“You might say the Blood Lord’s Blood Lord,” Shilan said somewhat cattily. “When they recruit they ask ‘Do you think you can be as good as this?’ ”

“I wasn’t disbelieving you,” Stephanie said, smiling disarmingly as she leaned back against the wall of the pool. “But the stories that you hear…”

“We only eat babies if they’re particularly tender,” Herzer said. The woman was oozing charm, which suddenly set off alarm bells.

“Fight until you die and drop and all that,” Stephanie said. “You’ve been out of town?”

“Harzburg,” Herzer said. “Great place to visit, wouldn’t want to live there.”

“What were you doing?” Shilan asked.

“Tarson had declared for New Destiny,” Herzer shrugged. “They were raiding Harzburg. Harzburg screamed for help. They got me.”

“One war, one Blood Lord?” Stephanie asked.

“One minor little campaign,” Herzer said with a frown. “They had some issues with their ‘support.’ They got over it in time.”

“How?” Stephanie asked, leaning forward again and putting her hand on his knee, under the water.

It had been a long year so he recited some more multiplication tables.

“Tarson had been sending parties to raid the outlying farms,” Herzer said. “Look, do you really want to hear this?”

“I want all of it,” Stephanie said, throatily.

“I want to hear it, too,” David replied when Herzer just looked at her, his face blank and hard.

He looked up at the ceiling when he realized other people, including the Blood Lord instructor he had seen across the room, had gathered around. He thought about the blood, the hacked remnants of what had been human beings scattered across a farmer’s field. He realized what his face must look like so he, with difficulty, slid a friendlier mask onto his face.

“Tarson had been sending raiding parties out,” he repeated, turning to look at Shilan. “They’d burned a couple of the farms in the area that wouldn’t, or couldn’t, pay their ‘taxes.’ I took to riding around…” He paused and shrugged.

“Blood Lord training is designed for formation; fighting as an individual is entirely different. But we cross-train.” He looked over at the instructor from the Academy who nodded at him. “I’d… done more cross training than normal, for that matter. Anyway, I was out at one of the farms, just visiting. I’d been riding around to them, helping out sometimes, meeting people. And there was a scream from outside and Diablo was whinnying.” He closed his eyes and tried to smile but it just wouldn’t come.

“The farmers had a daughter, just about eleven. When I got outside some of the Tarson had her on the ground. Others were headed for the house, torches in their hands. I… well, it gets pretty blank in that kind of combat. My shield was on Diablo but I was in armor. They weren’t.” He stopped talking.

“That’s it?” Stephanie said after a long pause. “What’s the rest of the story?”

“The rest of the story is in the after-action report,” the instructor said. “Fifteen raiders, motley weapons. Axes, swords, spears. One Blood Lord. You did us proud that day, Lieutenant.”

“Thank you, sir,” Herzer said, modestly, trying very hard not to remember. “I don’t really remember most of it,” he lied.

“What happened to the girl?” Shilan asked.

“She’s never going to look at slaughtering the same for the rest of her life,” the instructor said, grimly.

“She was fine,” Herzer said. “Shaken up, but fine. They hadn’t had time to get their pants down much less get stuck in. I talked to her a few times afterwards; she needed to talk it out and she didn’t feel like she could with anybody else. She’s fine.”

“You’re not much of a storyteller are you?” Stephanie asked.

“It’s hard to talk about some things with people who haven’t been there,” Herzer admitted with a shrug. “The… feel of your sword crunching through a rib cage is difficult to describe. What it feels like to have your sword stuck in a corpse’s spine while someone is hammering on you with an axe. What a field looks like after you’ve chopped a dozen human beings into their constituent parts. Having to decide whether to try to save someone’s life or just give them mercy.”

“I take it back,” Stephanie said, leaning back. “You can feel free to leave out the little details.”

“I didn’t care about the ones headed for the house,” Herzer said, suddenly loquacious. “If I raised enough of a ruckus they would either run to help or run off. I do remember bowling a couple of them over as I went through, and…” He looked up and his right hand made a motion like a butterfly drawn in air. “And a bit more to a couple of others. I made a mistake with the girl, though. I was so angry. The guy who was trying to rape her… his teeth chattered on my sword blade like a toy. Chit-chit-chit-chit-chit. That was when it got stuck, in the back of his brain really.” There were grimaces in the audience but he didn’t notice, being somewhere else.

“I’d kicked one of the guys holding her down on his face but another one was hitting me on the back with an axe. It was just bouncing off my armor so I turned around and punched him and took his axe away. I chopped a space around me and got my sword freed up.” He shook his head and shuddered.

“What?” Shilan asked.

He shrugged and made a stomping motion as his gripped hands moved back and forth as if he was trying to free something. More grimaces, including from Shilan who clearly wished she hadn’t asked the question, and a few of the audience wandered off, hurriedly.

“Diablo had turned up by that time and I made sure he didn’t step on the girl. The ones who had been planning on burning the house were headed back by then and some of them threw spears. I remember one of them bouncing off the armor and another stuck. That just gave me another weapon. I hit them with that for a while, until it broke, then went back to the sword. When there weren’t any more people bothering me, or the girl, or my horse, I went over to the spring and cleaned up.”

“Tired?” the instructor asked, professionally.

“Not really,” Herzer said. “A bit of a case of the shakes, but it hadn’t taken five minutes, all total.” He stopped and shrugged. “It was more like a not particularly intense drill. They weren’t very good.”

“ ‘Nah, fifteen of ’em,’ ” Stephanie mimicked. “ ‘Wasn’t really what you’d call a fight.’ Lord! Brag for God’s sake!”

“Why?” the instructor said, lightly. “I’ll admit that it was a tough fight. There are few among the Blood Lords who would have done as well. I doubt that I would have. But for Herzer, yes, it was child’s play. He is the Blood Lord’s Blood Lord, the icon that we hold up to the students, just as this young lady said. I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name,” he added.

“Shilan,” Shilan said. “I hadn’t realized that you heard.”

“I’d moved over. The point is that the Blood Lords train to do one of three, or all of three, things to their opponents. Outmaneuver them, chop them to ribbons and if all else fails outlast them. We do that partially by being able to rotate units, but the individual Blood Lord is trained to fight, literally, for at least an hour without being significantly fatigued. A five-minute fight — he shouldn’t have broken a sweat.”

Stephanie leaned sideways in the pool and supported herself on one elbow, arching her back slightly towards the instructor.

“In pretty good… shape then, eh?” she asked, tossing her head so her hair swung back and forth.

The instructor just looked at her for a moment, then nodded sharply.

“Pretty good, yeah.”

Stephanie languorously slid back to her place and took a deep breath as she smiled up at him.

“I’m so glad to have such big strong men guarding us!”

Herzer gripped the bridge of his nose to keep from laughing, hiding his face behind his hand. He looked sideways and saw that Shilan was just staring at the woman, her mouth open. She closed it after a moment with a clop.

“Whatever were we talking about?” Stephanie asked.

“I dunno,” Herzer said with a laugh. “Economics comes to mind for some reason.”

“Why economics?” Stephanie asked, clearly puzzled.

“Because it’s the most boring subject I can imagine,” Herzer answered, laughing.

“Oh, I dunno,” Stephanie replied, pushing her hair back with both hands behind her ears and then posing with them out to the side as she thrust her chest forward. “Derivatives can be fascinating.”

Herzer laughed again and shook his head at her incredible forwardness.

“So, I kill people and break things,” he said, looking for any subject that wouldn’t get another rise out of her. “What do you do?”

“I work at the bank,” she said, flatly, frowning. “Let’s not talk about work.”

“Bank?” Herzer said. “What bank?”

“Raven Federal,” Stephanie replied.

“Used to be Tom Sloan’s Loan Shark and Credit Destroyer,” Shilan said with a grin. “They’ve come up in the world.”

“Huh,” Herzer said. “Tom handles all my accounts. I’ve got to see him tomorrow.”

“Accounts?” Stephanie said, raising an eyebrow. “Plural.”

“Plural,” Herzer said flatly. “What are you doing Shilan?”

“I’m still a textile designer,” Shilan said. “That’s where I met David. He’s in sales at the plant.”

“Which is a losing cause,” David said unhappily. “We used to be the only mill in the area. But these days Hotrum’s Ferry has three, and transportation costs are making us unprofitable out of the immediate region.”

“Well, this is just fascinating but I’ve got a date with a bottle of wine,” Stephanie said, standing up. “Herzer, pleasure to meet you,” she added, holding out her hand.

“Same here,” he replied, shaking it. She turned immediately and climbed out of the pool.

“Okay, what just happened?” he asked.

“Social butterfly,” the instructor said, sliding into the pool. “She got exactly what she wanted out of the conversation, then went off to find one where she could get more.”

“Whatever,” Herzer replied. “I’m sorry, I cannot for the life of me recall your name.”

“Mike Fraser,” the instructor replied, holding out his hand. “I’m in second phase at the Academy.”

“I was supposed to be coming back for an instructor’s gig at the O course,” Herzer said, shrugging.

“What are you doing instead?” Shilan asked.

“I just got told,” Herzer admitted. “But I’m not sure I should talk about it.”

“Open secret,” Fraser said. “You’re going to the Southern Isles with Duke Edmund.”

“So much for military security,” Herzer grumbled.

“Like I said, open secret,” Fraser shrugged. “You can’t organize something like that without it getting out. And there are no secrets in the baths.”

“None at all,” Shilan said. “Worst gossip spot in the town. Even including the ‘ladies get-togethers’ that resulted from counseling classes. Although those are more catty. I knew that Edmund was going to the Isles, but not that you were going.”

“Daneh and Rachel took it as a surprise,” Herzer said.

“They don’t come in here much,” Shilan shrugged. “Rachel rarely and I’ve never seen Daneh in here.”

“I can imagine why,” Herzer said.

“It’s not that,” Shilan replied. “I think she’s about as over her rape as it’s possible to be. If not she certainly controls it well. I think she’s just very body-modest. Rachel, too, to a lesser extent. And, of course, they have their own baths at the house. Daneh probably would have picked it up at one of the meetings but she’s been missing those the last couple of weeks. I only heard about it… two nights ago.”

“I don’t care how hard it is to keep a secret in the baths,” Herzer said. “This is still a problem.”

“Yup, sure is,” Fraser nodded. “I’m not sure what can be done about it, though.”

“Education comes to mind,” Herzer replied. “I don’t know what the security classification is on this mission, but I don’t really care. It shouldn’t be talked about in public, period. That’s basic OPSEC, sir.”

“No rank in the baths, either,” Fraser noted. “But I get your meaning. You’re probably right about the education aspect, but we’re all still feeling our way. A couple of years ago, none of us were soldiers.”

“Not my problem,” Herzer shrugged. “It just bugs me.”

“Speaking of feeling our way…” Shilan said, then blushed. “That didn’t come out right.”

“It’s okay,” Herzer chuckled. “It would take a very dirty mind to find anything wrong with that comment. Admittedly, I have a dirty mind…”

“Speaking of trying to figure out stuff about this life,” Shilan said, clearing her throat. “Why is he a captain and you’re a lieutenant?”

“A very good question.” Fraser nodded. “The answer is that I came to the Academy as a lieutenant and have gotten promoted since. I think you were enlisted, Herzer?”

“Yeah,” Herzer said. “I just got my commission before going to Harzburg. That was another one of their gripes. I basically got the commission for the mission and that was pretty obvious.”

“But you got them to see the error of their ways?” Fraser asked.

“It took a while,” Herzer admitted. “The town is run by guilds and they took to their prerogatives, post-Fall, really damned quick. It was more feudal than it sounds. They didn’t want some no-class low-life newly promoted lieutenant telling them how they were supposed to run their militia. For one thing, the militia was only open to those they thought ‘acceptable.’ Which meant those they could trust with a weapon at their back.”

“Under the constitution all voters are supposed to be armed,” David interjected. “I mean required.”

“Yeah, and that has holes you can run an elephant through,” Herzer said. “They were using the ‘bondage labor’ provisions to exclude most of the people in the town, not just the refugees but others they didn’t like and had squeezed out of power. You had to be a full guild member to be a member of the militia.”

“About a fifth their available bodies at a guess,” Fraser mused.

“About that,” Herzer said. “And all too busy to bother actually training. I mean, most of them were honestly busy, you know how it is. They had real jobs, hard ones. And the labor pool guys, who were mostly sitting around hoping for work, were restricted from training. I’d been railing about it, quietly, for quite a while. There was also a real split between the farms, who were the ones getting hit, and the town, where they thought nobody would attack. Well, shortly after my little encounter at the farm Tarson did hit the town. Things were pretty screwed up but we managed to stop them after they’d burned the tanneries.”

“We?” Fraser interjected.

“I’d… been training some of the bond labor on the side,” Herzer admitted. “And that was item one in the meeting after the attack. But it was me and a few of them that drove the attackers off.”

“Blood Lord tactics?” Fraser asked.

“Modified,” Herzer admitted. “More of a phalanx approach. Really, I just had them make long spears and learn to march in formation with them. And, yeah, that was tough to arrange. But we got our tools together and drove the Tarsons off. Then the shit hit the fan. There was a pretty… intense meeting. But they had a few unpalatable choices. They could throw me out and try to get something else from the Federals. Pretty damned unlikely. Or they could actually train their ‘organized’ militia. Equally unlikely. Or they could trust the scum with weapons.”

“The scum?” Shilan said, angrily.

“That’s how they felt about the labor pool guys,” Herzer said. “And some of them were scum; Harzburg had a hell of a crime problem for that matter. They started off the meeting wanting to kill me. ‘Violation of local ordinances’ was the crime I was accused of. I more or less told them ‘You and what army?’ By the end of the meeting they’d given me approval to recruit among the laborers. And I made a tiddly little company out of them if I do say so myself.” He looked up at the rafters again and shrugged. “Maybe I’ll have a command again, someday.”

“Count on it,” Fraser sighed.

“So when the Tarsons attacked again we routed them and drove them back to their town. Took the town, burned the ringleaders in their ‘stronghold’ and I put a few of the better of the laborers in charge in Tarson. The people of the town were mostly glad as hell to be liberated. The guild guys tried to make like it was their town but we told them where to stuff it. I worked out a charter for Tarson, got their application in to the UFS, waited until the election — which was as cold and stacked as I could make it — was over and just afterwards got the word to head home. Mission accomplished.”

“In spades,” Fraser said. “What are you getting for this one?”

“Another mission,” Herzer laughed.

“Excuse me, Mr. Herrick,” a soft voice said from over his shoulder.

He looked around and was faced by a tiny tuft of pubic hair. Looking farther up he was stunned by the vision. If the girl standing over him wasn’t absolutely perfect in every way she could see it on a clear day. Brunette, about a meter and a half, perfectly rounded breasts, high and incredibly firm, flat belly, rounded mons. He realized he was staring.

“Yes?” he asked, his voice ending in a squeak.

The girl slid into the water to his left and smiled at him.

“My name’s Sheena. I don’t think you know me.”

“I don’t think so either,” Herzer replied, all charm out the window. Three hundred fifty-seven times four… down boy!

“Back before the attack on the town, you went out with a cavalry patrol,” she said in a soft little-girl voice that practically drove arithmetic out of his brain.

“Yes?” Carry the two…

“My brother was one of the guys on the patrol,” she said, leaning forward and kissing him on the cheek. “I want to talk to you, but I’ll be right back.”

“Okay,” he croaked, then turned back to the group in the bath, all of whom were smiling and trying not to laugh.

“How old do you think she is?” Fraser asked, trying not to be smug.

“Seventeen?” Herzer said.

“Try twelve,” David replied.

“No fisking way!”

“Way,” Shilan replied. “Way, way, way.”

“What the hell is she doing naked in the public baths!” Accosting perfect strangers and ruining their whole day.

“They’re public baths,” Shilan replied with a shrug. “I guess her parents decided she was old enough.”

“They need to have their heads examined!”

Sheena suddenly slid back into the water next to him and laid her hand on his arm.

“I’m really glad to finally meet you,” she said, huskily.

Down, down, down, down, DOWN! Twelve! TWELVE!

“Me, too,” Herzer replied. “So are you going to school now?”

“Oh, yeah.” Sheena frowned. “I didn’t have much before the Fall, you know? So I’m in the little kid classes…”

Okay, I’m clearly not going to get laid tonight, thank God…