Seeing him, the trooper snapped to attention. “Captain Auerbach!” she said.
“At ease, Private,” Rance answered. “We’re both off duty right this minute.” He shook his head in bemusement. “And since we are off duty, do you mind if I still call you Rachel?”
“No, sir, not at all,” Rachel Hines answered, smiling.
Auerbach shook his head again. He could have picked her up with one hand, but somehow she still looked like a cavalry trooper, even if she wasn’t exactly a cavalryman. She lacked the devil-may-care relish for danger some of his men had, but she didn’t look as if she’d flinch from it, and she did look as if she wouldn’t lose her head while it was going on. But all of those things, in a way, were beside the point. He came to the point: “How the devil did you talk Colonel Nordenskold into letting you enlist?”
She smiled again. “You promise you won’t tell anybody else?” When Auerbach nodded, she lowered her voice and went on, “He tried putting his hand where it didn’t belong, and I told him that if he did it again I’d kick him right in the nuts-if he had any, that is.”
Auerbach knew he was gaping, but couldn’t help it. That wasn’t the way he’d imagined Rachel Hines persuading the colonel to sign her up: just the opposite, in fact. If she’d been smart enough to study the ground and change her plan of attack after she saw that a blatant come-on hadn’t worked with Auerbach, she had more brains than he’d figured. “My hat’s off to you,” he said, and fit action to word. “It took a little more than that, though, didn’t it?”
“I showed him I could ride, I showed him I could shoot, I showed him I could shut up and take orders,” she answered. “He was looking for people who could do those things, and we’re so short of the ones who can that he didn’t much care if I had to go at my uniform with scissors and needle and thread before it’d fit right.”
He looked her up and down. “If you don’t mind my saying so-if it won’t make you kick like a bronc-it fits you just fine.”
“Captain, you can say whatever you please,” she answered. “You got me out of Lakin, out from under the Lizards’ thumbs. I owe you more than I can figure out how to pay you back for that.”
Back when she’d offered him a roll in the hay to get what she wanted, he hadn’t been interested. Now he was-now she sounded interested in him as a person, not a stepping stone. But if she was bound and determined to be a soldier, she’d be a hell of a lot better off not going to bed with an officer. If women were going to fight, the fewer the rules that got bent out of shape, the better for everybody, women and men.
Instead of making any suggestions, then, Auerbach asked, “How’s Penny getting along these days? I hadn’t seen you since I came back here, and I haven’t seen her, either.”
Rachel Hines’ sunny face clouded. “She’s not so good, Captain. She’s moved to a room in the rooming house off the street here, and she mostly just stays in it. Even when she does come out, it’s almost like you’re watching a ghost, not a real person, if you know what I mean. Like she’s here but not quite really all here.”
“That’s what I saw before,” Auerbach said glumly. “I was hoping she’d started to snap out of it by now.”
“Me, too,” Rachel said. “She was so much fun to be with when we were in high school together.” She came to an abrupt halt. Nothing much was left of the Kearny County Consolidated High School, not after the Lizards set up their local base there, the Americans drove them out of it, and then they came back and pushed the Americans back toward the Kansas-Colorado line.
As he had before, Rance wondered what would happen to the generation of kids whose schooling the Lizards had interrupted. Even if mankind won, making up for lost time wouldn’t be easy. If the Lizards won, odds were that nobody would have an education ever again.
He didn’t care to think about that. He didn’t care to think about a lot of the ways the war was going. “Maybe I ought to go over there and see her,” he said after a moment. “It’s my fault she’s here, after all-my fault you’re here, too, come to that.”
“I wouldn’t call it a fault, Captain,” Rachel Hines said. “If we hadn’t come with you, we’d still be back in Lakin, doing what the Lizards told us. Anything is better than that.”
“Tell it to-what was his name? — Wendell Summers,” Auerbach answered harshly. “He hadn’t tried to get out of Lakin, he’d be alive back there today.”
“We all knew there was a chance of that when we went with you people-it was a chance we all wanted to take.” Auerbach didn’t know whether Rachel had seen action, but she talked and shrugged like a veteran. She continued, “Penny has taken that hard, I will say.”
“I know.” Auerbach kicked at the sidewalk. “Maybe she won’t want to see me at all. God knows I couldn’t blame her for that.”
“The worst thing she can tell you is no,” Rachel said. “If she does, how are you worse off? But if she doesn’t, you may do her some good.” She saluted again and headed up the street. Auerbach turned to watch her go, then laughed at himself. He didn’t remember admiring a cavalry trooper’s backside before.
“And a good thing, too,” he said with a snort. He walked over to the rooming house where Penny Summers was staying. The place was always packed, but with a shifting population: refugees who had been there for a while headed farther west into more securely held territory, while a continuous stream of newcomers from Kansas took their place. Penny had kept her room since not long after she’d come from Lakin, which made her well-nigh unique.
Auerbach’s nose twitched as he walked upstairs. The rooming house smelled of unwashed bodies, garbage, and stale piss. If you bottled the odor, you’d call it something like Essence of Despair. No sergeant worth his stripes would have tolerated a tenth of it for a second. But the Army had all it could handle fighting the Lizards and trying to keep itself on its feet. The civilian part of Lamar had been left to sink or swim on its own. He didn’t think that was good management, but he didn’t feel like belling the cat, either.
He knocked on Penny Summers’ door. He didn’t know whether she’d be there or not. A lot of civilians in Lamar spent their days working for the Army, one way or another. He hadn’t seen Penny busy with any of that, though, and Lamar was small enough that he thought he would have if she’d been doing it.
Somewhere down the hall, a baby started to scream. The sound ground at Auerbach’s nerves like a dentist’s drill digging into a molar. You had to be crazy to want to bring up a kid in times like these. Of course, just because you were bringing up a kid didn’t necessarily mean you wanted one, only that you had one.
He knocked on the door again. He was about to turn and go (a prospect not altogether unwelcome, because the baby was doing a pretty good impression of the noise that came from a Lizard jet fighter engine) when Penny Summers opened it. She looked surprised to see him. He got the idea she would have looked surprised to see anyone.
“Captain Auerbach,” she said, and gestured vaguely. “Come in.”
The room was cramped and, even with the window open, stiflingly hot. Dust lay thick on every surface. Auerbach thought about shouting at her like a tough sergeant, but decided it would do more harm than good. Shouting wouldn’t snap her out of the state she was in. He didn’t know what would, but he was sure of that.
He said, “I’m worried about you. You should be out and doing things, not sitting here cooped up like a canary in a cage. What do you do all day, anyhow?”
That vague gesture again. “I sit, I sew sometimes. I read my Bible.” She pointed to the book with the limp leatherette covers and gold leaf that sat on the little table next to the bed.