It took a hell of a lot of work to maintain a military-grade wire job. Hours of gym time just to keep up the muscle strength and bone density that protected you from stress fractures. And though Li’s construct genes gave her the luxury of skimping on that work, she didn’t. It was her one vanity.
She glanced in the mirror again. Cohen was right, she thought critically; she looked thin. Too many jumps, too little gym time. She ought to get Sharpe to send up a case of hormone shots before she overdid it and pulled something.
“You don’t go in for the smart tattoos, huh?” McCuen said, pointing to the baby blue UNSC on her left shoulder.
She’d gotten the tattoo along with her whole platoon sometime during the wild week of drinking that had followed her first live-fire action. The names of her fellow initiates had slipped out of soft memory, but she still felt the cold sharp sting of the needle, could still see the intent face of the dockside tattoo artist bent over his work.
“Good thing it’s not on the other arm,” McCuen said. “Scar would have gone straight through it.”
Li twisted to get a glimpse of the blue letters, the first time she could remember looking at them in years. She grinned, acutely aware of the clichéd ridiculousness of the tattoo. “Perish the thought!”
She’d set up the Security-personnel physical-training program for fun more than anything else, and any benefit to on-station morale was a side perk. The main point of the sessions was that they created an at least arguably official excuse to round up the half dozen Security personnel on-station and tussle. She wasn’t going to give them some line of crap about how practicing carefully choreographed moves with a line soldier whose internals were powered down was going to open up glorious new career opportunities. She just set a time, showed up, and left it at that. If they wanted to come, they could. If they didn’t, they didn’t.
And McCuen had wanted it. Wanted it enough to show up, morning after morning, and take the punishment she doled out. He was on fire, a single track of idealistic ambition. When she worked with him Li could feel the old heat coming on, the sharp edge of a happiness she hadn’t felt since long before Metz. If she could get him a ticket off Compson’s, she caught herself thinking, maybe her time here wouldn’t be a dead loss after all.
“You’ve really never been back here since you enlisted?” he asked, as they worked on the footing for a particularly complicated throw Li was trying to teach him. “Why not? Bad memories?”
Li loafed over to the side of the mat, took a drink of water, wiped her face and hands. “Not really. Just never had a reason to.”
“No family?”
She hesitated. “Not that I know of.”
They worked through the move a few more times in silence, McCuen picking it up quickly and grinning with delight when Li finally let him throw her at something like full speed—an indulgence she knew was a mistake the moment her sore shoulder hit the mats.
“No family makes it easier, I guess,” he said, picking up where they’d left off. “My parents aren’t so hot on the Corps. They’ve been reading about wetware side effects, jump amnesia.” He smiled and shrugged, trying to pass off the concern as his parents’, something only old people would worry about. Li answered the implied question anyway.
“If you cooperate with the psychtechs and back everything up carefully, you shouldn’t forget much. Otherwise… sure, you can lose a lot. But even if something goes wrong, it’s not the way it was ten years ago. They’ve been minimizing jumps, moving personnel around much less. Even enlisted troops. Hell, you could pull a permanent assignment on one planet, never jump more than a half dozen times in your whole career. If the peace holds.”
“If the peace holds. That’s the kicker, isn’t it?”
“What do you want?” Li asked, amused to hear herself echoing Haas’s words of a few weeks ago. “Promises?”
A flush bloomed behind McCuen’s freckles. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just… the war gave a lot of colonials a chance to prove themselves. People like you. People who would never have gotten a shot at command in peacetime. Now that’s gone. And back home it’s even worse. We’ve got the multiplanetaries doing business with the Syndicates, trading away what few jobs there were on Compson’s for locals. There are mines on the southern hemisphere that already have D Series constructs working underground. Replacing miners. My dad keeps telling me to stay home and run the store, but where’s the future in it? Once the multiplanetaries figure out they can use Syndicate labor, that’s the end of the independents and the bootleggers. And no more bootleggers means no more UN currency on-planet. And no more UN dollars means company scrip only, which means the company stores are going to finally squeeze out the rest of us. Things keep going the way they’re going, and there’ll be the Ring-side multis and the Syndicates, and that’s it. Nothing left for the little guy except a government post. If you can get one.”
“They really have D Series working Bose-Einstein deposits?” Li asked. She’d never heard that, couldn’t imagine how TechComm had allowed it.
“Working everywhere,” McCuen said. “You name it. Why hire a born worker when you can sign a thirty-year contract and get someone who’s programmed to do the job for free and can be replaced with another clone if they get sick or start causing trouble?”
Why indeed?Li thought.
“Hey,” McCuen said. “Sorry to rant. You want to grab dinner tonight with some of the other day-shift guys? Catch a game or something?”
“Can’t.” Li grinned. “Hot date.”
McCuen looked at her and bit his lip.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just… it’s not with Bella, is it?”
“Excuse me?”
“Small station, that’s all. Rumors travel.”
“Well, in this case, they’re unfounded. Whatever they are.”
“Good,” McCuen said. He seemed about to add something else, then stopped. “I just wouldn’t like to see you get hurt,” he said finally.
Li was about to ask who he thought was going to hurt her when Kintz walked into the gym with his usual gang of sidekicks.
“Morning,” he said to Brian. “Getting a little private tutoring?”
McCuen flushed, just as Kintz had intended him to, and Li groaned internally; McCuen would never command a grade-school class, let alone combat troops, if he couldn’t learn to brush off that kind of nonsense.
“Feeling neglected?” she shot at Kintz. “I can fix that.” And within a minute the others had taken her unsubtle hints about applying themselves to the weight machines, and she and Kintz had squared off against each other on the last practice mat away from the door.
Kintz was fast and accurate, and even with his internals powered down for safety purposes he moved with the surefooted speed of a professional. Normally it would have been an unadulterated pleasure to be faced with such an able opponent. But there was something about Kintz that made Li not want to get into the clinches with him. Not want to touch him, even.
She settled into her rhythm, feeling out her opponent, looking for whatever she could use against him. Kintz was good. Far better than anyone else on-station. But he wasn’t as good as he thought he was, and that faint tinge of complacency gave Li a hole big enough to drive a tank through.
She moved him around the mat, still assessing his footwork, letting him feel like he was getting a few hits in. It was a necessary sacrifice given his longer reach, but every time he landed a blow she regretted the pounds she’d dropped since Metz—pounds that would have spared her ribs and given her something to push back with when he closed on her.