Chapter 4

Journal #508

Having been ordered to keep confidential the details of the company's impending reassignment, my employer was at some disadvantage in preventing rumors from spreading. While he could put a stop to specific misconceptions and errors of fact, only announcing specific details of the mission could have prevented some of the speculations and outright fabrications that began to spread among the legionnaires of Omega Company.

And, of course, certain questions were bound to pop up, no matter how much accurate information the troops had been given.

"Sergeant Brandy, may I ask a question?"

Brandy looked wearily up from her clipboard. When Omega Company had gotten its first batch of new recruits back on Lorelei, she had been assigned to run them through basic training. Despite her initial misgivings, they'd turned into a pretty good group-good enough that she'd decided to keep working with them, even after they'd reached the point where they could take regular duty assignments. It gave her a sense of day-to-day accomplishment, despite the unique frustrations that were sometimes part and parcel of working with this group.

This particular pattern of events had become almost a ritual. Sometime during the morning formation, Mahatma would ask a question, usually some innocent query that, upon closer examination, opened up a devastating reappraisal of the Legion way of life, exactly the kind of thing basic training was supposed to make recruits forget about. But there was no stopping Mahatma, and Phule had made it clear that simply stomping the impertinent questioner into the ground (as Brandy sometimes felt like doing) was incompatible with his philosophy of command. Brandy sighed. "What do you want now, Mahatma?" she asked wearily.

"I want to ask a question, Sergeant," Mahatma said earnestly-or was there a hint of humor behind that surface? She'd never been able to prove it, but she had a strong suspicion that Mahatma enjoyed pulling her leg, although it was always so subtle that she never detected it until it was too late to call him on it. She also wondered if she'd ever get used to Mahatma's ability to take each and every statement absolutely literally and find meanings in it nobody else had ever suspected of being there. She wondered if he did it all the time or just to sergeants.

"Yeah, you told me you had a question," said Brandy. After an uncomfortably long silence, which anybody else would have taken as an opportunity to ask the question, she sighed inwardly and said, "Go ahead and ask it, Mahatma."

"Thank you Sergeant," said the smiling legionnaire. "What I wanted to know was, why are we being transferred out? Does it mean we've done a bad job here?"

"No, it means we've done a good job," said Brandy. "Landoor is prosperous and looks like it's going to remain peaceful, so they don't need us anymore."

Mahatma smiled and nodded. That meant Big Trouble, in Brandy's experience. Sure enough, the little legionnaire followed up by asking, "Then shouldn't they reward us by keeping us here so we can enjoy the peace and prosperity?"

"That's not how the Legion works, Mahatma," said Brandy. "We're in the business of taking care of trouble, so we go where there's trouble brewing. That's our job, and we're pretty damn good at it." She hoped this answer would give the rest of the squad a feeling of pride in their job, deflecting the subversive implications she suspected-no, knew-Mahatma would somehow make out of whatever she said.

Mahatma looked up at her over his round glasses. "What happens if we do our job poorly, Sergeant Brandy?" he said beatifically.

She answered him solemnly-there was no other way to answer this kind of question-"We could get in a lot of trouble, Mahatma."

"So if we do our job well, we are sent to a place where there is trouble, and if we do it poorly, trouble comes to us," said Mahatma sweetly. "Please, Sarge, how does this system encourage virtuous conduct and constructive effort?"

As usual after Mahatma had asked one of his follow-up questions, Brandy could hear the other trainees muttering among themselves as they tried to puzzle out what their comrade was getting at. "Quiet!" she barked. She didn't particularly mind their talking, but the order would distract the squad from thinking about Mahatma's question while she came up with an answer.

She was sure she'd be able to come up with one...

"I don't want to leave Landoor with this scandal hanging over us, but I don't know how to refute it, either," said Phule, pacing from one side of his office to the other. Beeker, Rev, and Rembrandt sat along the couch, their heads swiveling like spectators at a tennis match.

Beeker raised a hand and said, "Sir, if I may make a suggestion: Why don't you simply repay the complainant the amount he was robbed plus the damages to his restaurant? If you added on a bit more to demonstrate good will, I have no doubt that he'd drop the complaint."

"That would make him go away," said Phule. "And I do mean to see that he doesn't suffer financially, whatever else happens in this case. But giving him money to go away wouldn't clear my people's reputation. People on Landoor would always be able to say that we just bought our way out of trouble. If one of my people has robbed Mr. Takamine, I want him to own up to it and pay an appropriate penalty."

This response was greeted with shocked silence. At one time, buying his way out would have been Phule's natural response to trouble. Now, that didn't seem to be enough. Rev finally spoke. "I reckon it's pretty clear that the culprit in this case is a follower of the King, though I doubt anybody who'd do that is still a true believer. And I don't think he's one of my own flock, Captain. Like I said, there are lots of members of the Church of the King on Landoor. Could'a been any one of 'em. A black jumpsuit don't necessarily mean Legion. It ain't that uncommon a garment among the faithful."

"That's true," said Phule, standing still for a moment to look the chaplain in the eye. "But we can't hide behind that, because Mr. Takamine believes it's one of us. We've got to prove he's wrong about that, and we've got to do that before we leave the planet. I'm open to ideas. Anybody have one?"

Rev spoke again. "I can get a record of the King's followers on this planet who've had their faces remade. That'll be a start, I reckon."

"Yes, that's a start," said Phule, pacing again. "But how do we sort out which one it was? If we can eliminate our people, fine-but it has to be beyond question. I don't want anybody claiming that I cooked the evidence. Better yet, we have to identify the actual culprit, whoever it is."

"I've checked our duty rosters for the time involved," said Rembrandt. "If all our people were where they were supposed to be-which isn't necessarily so, knowing this outfit-we can eliminate six of our people right away. We're checking to verify that they were actually on duty."

"That's over half," said Phule. "That's good, but it leaves five unaccounted for. Any way to establish their whereabouts at the time?"

"We're working on it," said Rembrandt. "The problem is, not everybody who saw one of the suspects can say for sure which one it was. When they all have the same face, it complicates things. Which brings us back to where we started."

"Out of curiosity, am I in the clear or not?" asked Rev, with the slight smirk that seemed to be an unavoidable result of the face-remodeling process.

"For robbing the citizen, yes," said Rembrandt, turning a cool stare toward the chaplain. "You aren't the type who'd do that. Besides, the restaurant owner said you were too fat to be the one who did it. For getting us into this fix to begin with..."