[8]

That night, after everything was attended to, after Tara fussed over us and demanded every single detail, and the men finished doing whatever men do to work out their resentments over who fought and who just tracked and who stayed home, there was a contest. It was field-stripping and rebuilding lasguns to see who was fastest. We joined in. I guess the Guardsmen didn't know that the Schola Progenium drills every Scholar with military surplus guns, because I took my first opponent by surprise and won the first round. Maybe it helped that we were out of armor, and didn't look like warriors without it.

But we also hadn't trained with lasguns since our noviciates, and none of us won a round after that. Still, we made them work for it. Tara was especially fast, like she'd been doing the drill a week ago, not years. Stripping off the cover and thumbing out the overcharge assembly in one motion, popping the ignition pin into her mouth to keep it from rolling away, every motion swift and sure until the gun was lying in orderly pieces, the ref said "Good!" and she snicked and snapped it back together without a wasted movement. She lost by one second—I had barely been watching her opponent, but the ref said "Good!" and the guardsmen cheered and her last piece snapped into place a second too late. That man won his next two rounds by a bigger margin and took the whole contest, which made Verity, Gwen, and me insist that Tara had earned second place. But there wasn't a prize for second, so it didn't really matter.

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Gustav asked me afterwards if I would talk with him in his office. I was tired and not thinking well, and a bottle of 100-proof amasec had made its way around a few times. I asked him if it couldn't wait until morning. For a second, he looked hurt, but it was gone so fast I could have been mistaken. The next day he didn't bring it up, and when I asked, he said it didn't matter, it was a stupid idea he had dismissed later that night.

A company scale airborne operation cruised past overhead that morning. We passed around binoculars until they were out of sight: three Starhawk bombers and six Arvus squad transports. They were over the horizon when we heard the bombs, like a ripple of thunder that went on and on for almost twenty minutes. We all agreed that they must have found where our Orks had come from. An hour later, all nine ships flew back.

We were with the observation post for another three weeks. Tara joined our patrols. Everyone was more serious about the patrols, but we never encountered Orks, their tracks, or their spore-growths again.

We were ordered away without any more notice than we when we were shipped out. One day we were part of the squad, a separate but united whole, bonded by a shared battle. The next morning we were packed into the Aquila Shuttle, flying away with barely time for a salute.

I wonder what would have happened if I went with Gustav to his office that night.

I wonder what they did with Tara's bugs.

I'd like to see them all again. The men, I mean, not the bugs.