Phule's Company Boxed Set 1-6 by Robert Asprin

Author:Robert Asprin [Asprin, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WordFire Press
Published: 2018-09-08T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

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

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