That being so, he sneered at everything pertaining to Lamar. The town was dirtier than it had been when he and his force sallied against Lakin. It smelled of horse manure. Normally, that smell bothered him not in the least: he was a cavalryman, after all. There wasn’t a town in the United States that didn’t smell of horse manure nowadays, either. Auerbach was determined not to let facts get between him and his anger.
One thing Lamar did boast was a goodly number of watering holes. What they served these days was moonshine, liquor so raw it would have made better disinfectant than booze. No one who drank it complained, not with nothing better available.
Auerbach would not have imagined a small town like Lamar could hold surprises, but he was proved wrong about that. Coming out of one of the local watering holes was a cavalry trooper who filled a uniform in ways the Quartermaster General’s Office never would have imagined before the Lizards landed.
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.
