Lois Bujold - Weatherman

On the bright side, he had his two helpers back again. This particular civil engineering task had apparently never fallen on Olney or Pattas before either, so they had no edge of superior knowledge with which to trip Miles. They had to stop and read the manuals first, too. Miles swotted procedures and directed operations with a good cheer that edged toward manic as his helpers became glummer.

There was, after all, a certain fascination to the clever drain-cleaning devices. And excitement. Flushing pipes with high pressure could produce some surprising effects. There were chemical compounds that had some quite military properties, such as the ability to dissolve anything instantly, including human flesh. In the following three days Miles learned more about the infrastructure of Lazkowski Base than he’d ever imagined wanting to know. He’d even calculated the point where one well-placed charge could bring the entire system down, if he ever decided he wanted to destroy the place.

On the sixth day, Miles and his team were sent to clear a blocked culvert out by the grubs’ practice fields. It was easy to spot. A silver sheet of water lapped the raised roadway on one side; on the other only a feeble trickle emerged to creep away down the bottom of a deep ditch.

Miles took a long telescoping pole from the back of their scat-cat, and probed down into the water’s opaque surface. Nothing seemed to be blocking the flooded end of the culvert. Whatever it was must be jammed farther in. Joy. He handed the pole back to Pattas and wandered over to the other side of the road, staring down into the ditch. The culvert, he noted, was something over half a meter in diameter. “Give me a light,” he said to Olney.

He shucked his parka and tossed it into the scat-cat, and scrambled down into the ditch. He aimed his light into the aperture. The culvert evidently curved slightly; he couldn’t see a damned thing. He sighed, considering the relative width of Olney’s shoulders, Pattas’s, and his own.

Could there be anything further from ship duty than this? The closest he’d come to anything of the sort was spelunking in the Dendarii Mountains. Earth and water, versus fire and air. He seemed to be building up a helluva supply of yin; the balancing yang to come had better be stupendous.

He gripped the light tighter, dropped to hands and knees, and shinnied into the drain.

The icy water soaked the trouser knees of his black fatigues. The effect was numbing. Water leaked around the top of one of his gloves, feeling like a knife blade on his wrist.

Miles meditated briefly on Olney and Pattas. They had developed a cool, reasonably efficient working relationship over the last few days, based, Miles had no illusions, on a fear of God instilled in the two men by Miles’s good angel Lieutenant Bonn. How did Bonn accomplish that quiet authority, anyway? He had to figure that one out. Bonn was good at his job, for starters, but what else?

Miles scraped around the curve, shone his light on the clot, and recoiled, swearing. He paused a moment to regain control of his breath, examined the blockage more closely, and backed out.

He stood up in the bottom of the ditch, straightening his spine vertebra by creaking vertebra. Corporal Olney stuck his head over the road’s railing, above. “What’s in there, Ensign?”

Miles grinned up at him, still catching his breath. “Pair of boots.”

“That’s all?” said Olney.

“Their owner is still wearing ’em.”

Miles called the base surgeon on the scat-cat’s comlink, urgently requesting his presence with forensic kit, body bag, and medical transport. Miles and his crew then blocked the upper end of the drain with a plastic signboard forcibly borrowed from the empty practice field beyond. Now so thoroughly wet and cold that it made no difference, Miles crawled back into the culvert to attach a rope to the anonymous booted ankles. When he emerged, the surgeon and his corpsman had arrived.

The surgeon, a big, balding man, peered dubiously into the drainpipe. “What could you see in there, Ensign? What happened?”

“I can’t see anything from this end but legs, sir,” Miles reported. “He’s got himself wedged in there but good. Drain crud up above him, I’d guess. We’ll have to see what spills out with him.”

“What the hell was he doing in there?” The surgeon scratched his freckled scalp.

Miles spread his hands. “Seems a peculiar way to commit suicide. Slow and chancy, as far as drowning yourself goes.”

The surgeon raised his eyebrows in agreement. Miles and the surgeon had to lend their weight on the rope to Olney, Pattas, and the corpsman before the stiff form wedged in the culvert began to scrape free.

“He’s stuck, ” observed the corpsman, grunting. The body jerked out at last with a gush of dirty water. Pattas and Olney stared from a distance; Miles glued himself to the surgeon’s shoulder. The corpse, dressed in sodden black fatigues, was waxy and blue. His collar tabs and the contents of his pockets identified him as a private from Supply. His body bore no obvious wounds, but for bruised shoulders and scraped hands.

The surgeon spoke clipped, negative preliminaries into his recorder. No broken bones, no nerve disruptor blisters. Preliminary hypothesis, death from drowning or hypothermia or both, within the last twelve hours. He flipped off his recorder and added over his shoulder, “I’ll be able to tell for sure when we get him laid out back at the infirmary.”

“Does this sort of thing happen often around here?” Miles inquired mildly.

The surgeon shot him a sour look. “I slab a few idiots every year. What d’you expect, when you put five thousand kids between the ages of eighteen and twenty together on an island and tell ’em to go play war? I admit, this one seems to have discovered a completely new method of slabbing himself. I guess you never see it all.”

“You think he did it to himself, then?” True, it would be real tricky to kill a man and then stuff him in there.

The surgeon wandered over to the culvert and squatted, staring into it. “So it would seem. Ah, would you take one more look in there, Ensign, just in case?”

“Very well, sir.” Miles hoped it was the last trip. He’d never have guessed drain cleaning would turn out to be so . . . thrilling. He slithered all the way under the road to the leaky board, checking every centimeter, but found only the dead man’s dropped hand light. So. The private had evidently entered the pipe on purpose. With intent. What intent? Why go culvert-crawling in the middle of the night in the middle of a heavy rainstorm? Miles skinned back out and turned the light over to the surgeon.

Miles helped the corpsman and surgeon bag and load the body, then had Olney and Pattas raise the blocking board and return it to its original location. Brown water gushed, roaring, from the bottom end of the culvert and roiled away down the ditch. The surgeon paused with Miles, leaning on the road railing and watching the water level drop in the little lake.

“Think there might be another one at the bottom?” Miles inquired morbidly.

“This guy was the only one listed as missing on the morning report,” the surgeon replied, “so probably not.” He didn’t look as if he was willing to bet on it, though.

The only thing that did turn up, as the water level fell, was the private’s soggy parka. He’d clearly tossed it over the railing before entering the culvert, from which it had fallen or blown into the water. The surgeon took it away with him.

“You’re pretty cool about that,” Pattas noted, as Miles turned away from the back of the medical transport and the surgeon and corpsman drove off.

Pattas was not that much older than Miles himself. “Haven’t you ever had to handle a corpse?”