Steelhands - Jaida Jones [2]
Across from me, Royston took a neat little sip of his coffee. Then he reached up to smooth the two, maybe three, gray hairs growing at his left temple—the ones no one would notice if he wasn’t so damn self-conscious about them. After all, he was considerably less advanced into his forties than myself. In fact, I thought it was downright rude of him to remind me.
“Well, it is a conundrum,” he said finally.
He was doing it to needle me, I told myself, but years of getting used to the behavior never quite meant you became master at dealing with it. I snorted, just giving him the rise he wanted, not to mention buying him extra time to think up a more clever response, then handed it over.
“Well,” I said, filling up the air. I hated to watch people read things, and Roy knew it.
“Reading,” Roy replied quietly, with that distant air he only got when he was putting his mind to something complicated or talking about his boy.
Now that was a mess of worms, I told myself—a can of them that’d already been opened—and to avoid hurting certain feelings I had to throw myself into the task of teasing Roy every chance I got, just so he’d know how I felt about the matter. But it’d probably take a few years before I’d be comfortable sitting in the same room with the two of them. Pointing out that a man was still a baby was no fun when that man was in the room, if only because teasing babies just wasn’t right no matter who you were doing it for.
Those thoughts seemed to occupy enough time that Roy finally cleared his throat, tossing the letter down between our coffee cups. I eyed it unhappily, this simple-enough-looking thing that I knew wasn’t going to prove simple for me—at least not now that I knew about it.
I wasn’t the sort of man who could just sit on information. I’d been bred to act, and all this sitting around and hemming and hawing was starting to chafe at my very last nerve. Wouldn’t’ve expected it to be the quiet that got me in the end either, but the world was a strange place.
“I’ll look into it,” Roy said.
“Somehow, I knew that’d be your answer.” I sighed. “But with a nose that large, I suppose you can’t help poking it into things.”
“Dark-mooded as you are, it isn’t anything yet,” Roy continued, too distracted by his thoughts to let the teasing get to him. This wasn’t a normal coffee we were having, and for whatever reasons, that made me even more clench-jawed. There was no way I wasn’t going to tear into some poor, hopeful tactician in my afternoon lecture that day and be hearing about it from the wealthy parents a few days afterward. Couldn’t I please be easier on their precious offspring? The lecture room wasn’t part of the Airman, as far as they could tell.
And, the worst one: This isn’t wartime anymore, you know.
Not that I was against the war being over—not even when it was all I’d ever known, which meant I knew a whole lot more about it than the sap-eyed creatures who shuffled into the room and daydreamed about their ponies back in the country while I tried to impress upon them the importance of strategy, or coax some milk of inspiration out of them in return for all the milk they’d sucked from the world, probably right up until the moment they were sent away to ’Versity. Maybe they missed it now. Maybe if I bottled some and gave them all nap times and dollies, they’d be more inclined to think about what the differences would be between an airstrike and a land strike.
And Brothers and Sisters of Regina help them if one of them ever questioned the real importance of discussing airstrikes again, since wasn’t that a moot point these days anyway?
Nothing in war or the possibility of war—and definitely not during the preparation for war—was a moot point. I’d drum it into their skulls yet, and if not me, then some future generation of real war drums. Not exactly comforting, but it was a salary and I hadn’t been fired yet—no matter how much some parents objected to the shouting.
“Oh, it’s something,” I muttered. “You mind hanging on to it?”
“You