The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

"Sergei,"he said calmly,"now that we've got a full battery again,I can readjust coverage areas. We can handle the seafront from the suburbs east and west, I'm pretty—"

"Charles, you're going to get into really terrible trouble," Borodin continued, his voice now sepulchral. "Get us all into trouble."

He looked up at his subordinate and added,"Now, I was younger too, I understand . . . But believe me, boy, there's plenty of it going around on a businesslike basis. And that's acurstsight safer."

Desoix found himself getting angry—and that made him even angrier, at himself, because it meant that Anne mattered to him.

Who you screwed wasn't nearly as dangerous as caring about her.

"Look,"he said,hiding the edge in his voice but unable to eliminate the tremble. "I just shook a calliope loose on Merrinet, and it cost the unit less than three grand plus my transportation. Isolvepro—"

"You paid a fine?"

"Via, no! I didn't pay a fine," Desoix snapped.

Shifting into a frustrated and disappointed tone of his own—a good tactic in this conversation, but exactly the way Desoix was really feeling at the moment also—he continued, "Look, Sergei, I bribed the Customs inspectors to switch manifests. The gun was still being held in the transit warehouse, there wasn't a police locker big enough for a calliope crated for shipment. If I'd pleaded it through the courts, the gun would be on Merrinet when we were old and gray. I—"

He paused, struck by a sudden rush of empathy for the older man.

Borodin was a fine combat officer and smart enough to find someone like Charles Desoix to handle the subtleties of administration that the major himself could never manage. But though he functioned ably as battery commander, he was as lost in the job's intricacies as a man in a snowstorm. Having an executive officer to guide him made things safe—until they weren't safe, and he wouldn't know about the precipice until he plunged over it.

Desoix was just as lost in the way he felt about Lady Anne McGill; and, unlike Borodin, he didn't even have a guide.

He gripped Borodin's hand."Sergei,"he said,"I won't ask you to trust me.But I'll ask you to trust me not to do anything that'll hurt the battery. All right?"

Their eyes met. Borodin's face worked in a moue that was as close to assent as he was constitutionally able to give to the proposition.