An Officer’s Duty (26 page)

“So. What made you think of bleaching your hair white?” he asked her. Meyun grabbed the back of his chair and pulled it farther back from his desk, straddling it so that he faced her.

“I didn’t. I was born this way. Light brown eyebrows, light brown lashes, light brown body hair…and a scalp full of old woman white.” Saving the work on her pad, she rested it against her uplifted knees. Apparently he was in the mood for another getting-to-know-you chat. Ia shrugged. “Of course, my lashes
and brows were so thin and fine, the doctors took one look at my pale hair and blue eyes, and promptly pronounced me an albino…even though I had this slight Asiatic tan to my skin from birth.” She extended an arm in indication, then rested it on her blue-clad knee. “They thought maybe it was a touch of V’Dan in my father’s background.”

“When did they figure out you weren’t an albino?” Meyun asked her, crossing his wrists on the back of the chair. He rested his chin on his forearms, slouching a bit.

“I think my biomom said my eyes changed color at about three months of age. It was a bit early, but not unheard-of,” she added. “Then again, being heavyworlders, we do age a little faster.”

“
Mm
, true. Mine started out dark blue, and didn’t change for a good eight months, according to my mother. She was hoping they’d stay blue, or turn green, since there’s a recessive gene for that somewhere in the family line,” Meyun told her. “On the Irish Harper side of the family, naturally, not the Hwang. Green eyes are supposed to be lucky.”

“I kind of like your eyes being that shade of dark brown,” Ia offered. She felt an urge to blush as she said it, but fought it down.

He smiled. “I like yours, all honey brown. Or maybe amber brown. Baltic amber. Like a contradiction, hard and lightweight, warm and unyielding, yet very lovely.”

The blush won. Ia looked down at her pad, waiting quietly in standby mode. Harper cleared his throat.

“Not that I’m particularly good at forming compliments,” he muttered. “Plus there’s that whole fraternization rule, making things awkward if I witlessly babbled anything more…”

The blush deepened, heating her cheeks further. Ia felt her heart skip a beat and struggled against the urge to both grin and scowl.
Do
not
feel such things,
she admonished herself. She couldn’t let his comment pass unanswered, though. “Then I’ll take it exactly as it’s no doubt meant: a simple, poetic compliment. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Straightening, he swung his arms, flexing his shoulders, then rested his elbows on the back of the chair. “It’s almost nine thirty…twenty-one thirty, rather. I’m still getting used to converting everything into military time.
Anyway, they were talking about that new Gatsugi comedy show coming on about now,
Red Is Green
. Did you want to head to the common room and watch it with everyone? It’s supposed to be really good.”

Ia shook her head. “You go on. I’m still working on my essay questions.”

Rising, he leaned over the back of the chair for a moment, giving her a mock-chiding look. “All homework and no play makes Cadet Ia a dull little girl. You really should try to socialize more, you know.”

“I will. Later,” she promised. “Gatsugi humor is pleasantly translatable for Humans, but I’m not in the mood for eye-blaring colors right now. Trying to come up with my ‘own interpretation’ of ‘the thermal efficiency of the Stirling engine design as incorporated by the modern military into shipboard hydrogenerators’ is giving me an engine-sized headache. There’s really only so many ways you can describe a heat transference regenerator before you run out of words that haven’t been said over and over, before.”

“Well, I suppose adding alien fashion-emotion color sense on top of a headache isn’t a good idea.” Shifting free of the chair, he pushed it back into his desk. “I’ll see you in about half an hour, then.”

Nodding, she picked up her writing station and made a pretense of reactivating the pad. Covertly, she watched him tug his T-shirt back into place, smooth his hair with his fingers, and head for the door. Only when the door had slid shut behind him did she move, setting the pad aside and rising from the bed.

Might as well get my nightly blood draw out of the way.
Fetching the kit box from her bureau, she moved into the bathroom. She had the box halfway open when she heard the dorm room door slide open, and quickly fumbled the plain plexi box shut again. It was a good thing, too, for the next thing she knew, Meyun had hooked his arm around her elbow and was pulling her out of the smaller room.

“I’ve changed my mind. You
need
some serious fun and socialization, Cadet,” he mock-chided her.

“Harper!” Ia protested. She didn’t want to hurt him, which his implacable hugging of her right arm would risk if she tried to free herself. Awkwardly tossing the box into the bathroom
sink, she let him draw her out of their shared quarters.
Stupid of me not to close the bathroom door, first…
“Harper, honestly, I
don’t
need socialization.”

“
Ah
, but you
do
need fun. You can’t quite bring yourself to deny that, can you?” he teased. Grinning, he tugged her down the hall. Ia rolled her eyes, doing her best to match his stride.

“They’re just going to bother me again about being Bloody Mary,” she muttered, wondering what this was going to do to her scheduled plans. Or worse, the perceptions and reactions of the other cadets, and their impact on the future. She didn’t think Meyun was psychically sensitive, but she couldn’t risk dipping even lightly into the timestreams while anyone was so physically close.

“So what if they do? Just redirect their attention to
Red Is Green
or something,” he told her. “Or better yet, we can don the virtual gear and play a shoot’em game on one of the spare vid consoles.”

“Lovely, a shooter game,” she muttered. “Let’s dredge up memories of my days in the Corps, oh, yes,
that’ll
relax me.”

Meyun switched his arm from her elbow to her shoulders, giving her a sideways squeeze. “Hey, it’s for that very same reason that I can’t think of anyone else I’d want firing away at my side during the zombie apocalypse.”

“Try Cadet Djalu,” Ia quipped back, her freed arm treacherously slipping around his waist. “She has better aim than I do.”

“Nah, I figure she’ll be somewhere near ground zero when the invasion comes,” Meyun dismissed, guiding her down the hall toward the common room at the center of the dorm building.

“Nonsense,” Ia scoffed. “She’d be holed up at the secure fortress, up in a guard tower position with a sniper rifle and the paranoid fear that someone with an infected scratch might make it through the gate.”

“Which would probably be Cadet Bruer,” Meyun joked as they entered the common room.

“Do I hear my name in vain?” the brown-haired cadet asked, looking up from his hand. He and three others were playing some sort of V’Dan card game, based on the triangular cards.

Meyun released Ia’s shoulders. That forced her to release his waist. Hands dropping to his hips, he shrugged lightly. “Oh,
we were just figuring who’d be the sap who tried to smuggle an infected scratch in through the fortress gates during the inevitable zombie apocalypse.”

“Bruer,” three of their classmates immediately agreed in near-perfect unison.

“Hey!” Bruer protested. “I’ll have you know that I’d be too damned cowardly to even
leave
the fortress in the first place. No, I’ll be the guy in the back of the bunker, hogging all of the
good
supplies for myself.” He scooped up a handful of snack nuts from the bowl and munched on a few, gesturing at Ia with the rest. “Besides, it’d be our resident spacegrunt, here, who’d charge into the zombies, slaughter the masses, then come limping back to a hero’s welcome, desperately trying to hide her infected wounds.”

Now that Meyun wasn’t touching her, Ia could safely tap into the timestreams. Bruer’s comment gave her an opening, a small shortcut in establishing the reputation she would one day need. Sauntering up to the table, she rested her hands on her hips, subconsciously imitating her roommate. “Now that’s where you’re wrong, Bruer.”

He raised his brows at that, munching on a few more nuts. “What, you think you’d be cowering in the back with me? If you’re
nice
, I might let you have some of the bourbon…but only
some
of it.”

“No, I meant I wouldn’t get scratched,” she corrected.

“
Pff
yeah, right,” he scoffed. The other cadets playing the card game with him smirked as well, not believing her.

Picking up the bowl of nuts, Ia smiled at him—and sharply flicked her wrist, tossing the contents straight up, some of them by over a meter. Eyes and hands working in coordination, she guided the falling peanuts, almonds, pecans, and hazelnuts with her left hand, guiding them back into the bowl held in the right. Catching the last nut just before it reached table height, she slid the wooden bowl back onto the card-scattered surface. She had only tossed twenty or so nuts from the nearly empty bowl, an easy catch for her reflexes, if a little difficult for a lightworlder.

“As I said, I wouldn’t get scratched,” she murmured, smiling at him and his impressed classmates. Her smile deepened into a grin. “
Mainly
because I’d run farther and faster than the rest
of you, grab the nearest fighter ship, and bombard the zombies from a nice, safe distance.”

“Dibs on being your copilot!” one of the other female cadets quipped from her spot on one of the sofas. The brightly hued opening credits for the
Red Is Green
show were starting to roll, so Ia didn’t quite look that way, but she lifted her chin in acknowledgment.

Bruer lifted his own chin sagely. “
Ahhh
, yes, the old ‘Nuke them from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure’ gambit. An oldie, but a goodie…unless you’re one of the saps still stuck out in the open, and not safely tucked away with me in my bunker.”

“Tucked away with all the good bourbon, too, you lousy bastich,” the cadet to his right muttered. “Just don’t hog all the scotch.” He tossed down one of his triangular cards, aligning it with the other cards on the playing mat. “Three of Crystals, to the Red Keeper of the Dawn. Your move, Bruer.”

Ia turned away from the card game. Meyun had moved over to the vid consoles and was skimming through the titles. He beckoned her over. Resigning herself to losing an hour or so of sleep later in order to make up for the loss of prophecy-writing time now, she joined him. It wouldn’t hurt the future too much if she socialized, and maybe even help her cause a little. She just couldn’t afford to make a habit of it, that was all.

JANUARY 30, 2493 T.S.
TUPSF
VASCO DA GAMA
ACADEMIA DE MARINHA ESTRELAS

The ship jolted and shuddered around them to the left, rocking with the simulated impact of projectile missiles. Cadet Bruer, seated in the captain’s chair, grunted as the restraint straps bit into his shoulders when his body slammed to the left from inertia. The black projection nodes squeezed them into place in short pulses that dampened some of the kinetic energy jolting through the ship, but couldn’t stop it all. With the ship already damaged from the start of the scenario, they had limited options left. That, of course, was the point of this exercise.

Bruer wasn’t the only one to grunt; even Ia winced at the strength of the blows from the enemy’s cannon fire.