König | Against a Wall

The Bastion had been built to keep armies out, and it did that very well. Nobody had built it to keep heat in, and the heating system had adopted this as a personal philosophy. By late afternoon the east corridor of the administrative wing was cold enough that König could see his breath ghosting through the mesh of his mask, which was how he knew he was breathing harder than a man delivering a calm, measured reprimand ought to be.

It was a calm, measured reprimand. He had drafted it in his head over the course of the day, the way other men draft their wills.

The first draft began at 0700 in the briefing room, when {{user}} asked whether the extraction timeline accounted for the river crossing. It did. König said so. {{user}} then asked, very politely, which river crossing, since there were two, and the second was on page four of the map packet König had personally signed. Horangi, without looking up from his folder, slid a coin across the table to Nikto. Nikto pocketed it and clicked his tongue in a rhythm König chose to interpret as neutral. König moved on to logistics with the dignity of a man stepping over a puddle he had already stepped in.

The second draft began at 1100 on the range, when he gave an instruction and {{user}} carried it out with the slow, scrupulous precision of a person who wanted the record to show exactly what they thought of it.

König preferred to file lunch under classified.

By 1600 he had abandoned drafts and was simply carrying the whole thing around inside his chest, compressed and dense, like a grenade with the pin held in by spite. Somewhere in the Kennel, Horangi was almost certainly updating the odds on the betting board. König had confiscated that board three times. He was beginning to understand why it kept coming back.

So here they were. The corridor was empty, because everyone with any sense had retreated to the one radiator in the building that worked, and the only witness was a fire extinguisher whose inspection tag had expired eleven months ago. König noted it. He would write someone up. He had a great deal of writing up to do.

"This unit," he said, low and even, "is not a democracy."

That was a good opening. He had tested it on Krueger twice. Krueger had responded by replacing the nameplate on his desk, but that was a failure of the audience, not the material.

"When I give an order in a briefing, it is not an opening offer. It is not a draft for your comments. It is not," and here he leaned in, because leaning in worked, because six feet and ten inches of Colonel bent toward a person tended to rearrange their priorities, "an invitation to improve upon my work in front of my men. Verstanden?"

He had more. He had chain of command. He had operational cohesion. He had a genuinely excellent passage about trust, and what happens to a unit when people stop listening to the man responsible for bringing them home, and he was proud of it. He had been polishing it since the river crossing.

He got as far as cohesion and lost the thread.

The sentence about trust was right there. He could feel its general shape, the way you can feel a step in the dark. But he was standing close enough to read the stitching on {{user}}'s name tape, which was a good deal closer than any lecture required, and the knowledge of it had shoved everything else out of his head like a dropped magazine. He had a strong, unwelcome awareness of exactly how warm the space in front of him was, in a building that was otherwise ten degrees above a meat locker.

He tugged the edge of his hood lower with his left hand. It had been perfectly fine. He tugged it again, for thoroughness.

Then he noticed his right hand.

It was flat against the concrete beside {{user}}'s head, fingers spread, his weight settled into it as if it had been there for hours. König regarded it with the deep suspicion he normally reserved for unattended luggage. It had arrived there on its own initiative, sometime between cohesion and trust, and it appeared to be settling in.

His thumb moved against the concrete. Once. A small, restless motion, absurdly intimate for a hand that had no business being there in the first place.

"Ach," he said quietly, to the hand, or to {{user}}, or to the situation in general.

He drew a breath to resume the lecture. It came out lower and rougher than he meant, with the edges worn off.

"Where was I."

He knew where he was, and that was the trouble. He was in an empty corridor with a dead fire extinguisher, a lecture with a hole in the middle, and absolutely no plausible explanation for why he had not stepped back, and every second he went on not stepping back, the explanation was getting worse.

Somewhere in the Kennel, Horangi was going to make a great deal of money.

König's office was the only room in the Bastion that stayed warm, and he had achieved this through sheer force of will and a space heater he had requisitioned under the line item "communications equipment." It hummed under the desk like a contented animal. The room smelled of good coffee, the kind that came from a tin in his second drawer and not from the machine in the hallway, which had been broken since August and had outlived three work orders and one attempted exorcism by Horangi. Everything else was squared, labeled, and filed at right angles. The only object on the desk that sat crooked was the nameplate, which read KINDERGARTEN DIRECTOR, and which König had decided some time ago to treat as an honest assessment.

He was writing the reprimand in triplicate. One copy for the file, one for KorTac administration, and one for {{user}}, who would read it, annotate it, and very likely return it with corrections.

The door opened at 1750. König had predicted 1800. Horangi had bet on 1730, so at least nobody had made money off it.

König kept his eyes on the form and his pen moving. This was a tactic. A man who looks up has agreed that the conversation has begun, and König had a firm policy of beginning conversations on his own schedule, preferably after the paperwork was signed and filed and beyond the reach of anyone's opinion. He let the voice across the desk wash over him the way the Alps let weather wash over them. He dotted an i. He crossed a t with what he felt was considerable restraint.

"Insubordination," he told the form, in the reasonable tone of a man reading a weather report, "is not a matter of perspective."

He signed the second copy. He had a lovely signature. He had practiced it at fourteen, with the specific intent of one day signing things that would ruin someone's afternoon.

Then two hands landed flat on his desk, one on either side of the reprimand, hard enough to make the pen skip and leave a small, ugly comet trailing off the end of his surname.

König looked at the comet for a while.

Then he looked up.

He stood the way he did everything else, all at once and on purpose, and the desk lamp threw his shadow up the wall and halfway across the ceiling. He came around the desk. The office had been built for a man of ordinary dimensions and had never forgiven König for being otherwise; two strides took him around the corner of the desk, and there was nowhere at all for a third stride to go. The duty roster on the corkboard rustled faintly in the air he displaced. He was close now, close enough that the space heater's warmth had competition.

"You want to discuss the reprimand," he said. "Gut. We will discuss it." His voice stayed low and very cold, which was how his men knew to start updating their wills. "We will discuss the briefing. We will discuss the range. We will discuss the fact that you walked into my office and put your hands on my desk as though it belongs to you, which," and here he bent his head, because bending his head usually ended arguments, "it does not."

That was the plan. It was a good plan. He had the rest of it lined up behind his teeth, sorted by severity.

Somewhere around desk, he became aware of a crackling sound, and it took him an embarrassingly long time to identify it as paper. He looked down. The reprimand was in his right hand. He had picked it up when he stood, apparently, and it was now crushed into a tight, furious ball in his fist, signature and comet and all.

Three copies. He had done three copies.

He adjusted his hood with his free hand. It needed no adjusting. He adjusted it anyway, and kept the hand there a moment, as if the hood might be persuaded to cover a little more of him.

His eyes went to the visitor's chair, which was a perfectly reasonable place to direct a subordinate during a disciplinary conversation, and which was also behind him now, on the wrong side of his own body, in the five square feet of floor he had personally made unreachable.

"Sit," he said.

The chair stayed where it was. So did he.

"No. Stand." He heard himself, and a muscle in his jaw went tight under the mask. "Ach, do whatever you want. You always do."

The space heater hummed on beneath the desk, doing its job far too well.

He should step back. The thought arrived with the calm certainty of an order he would have expected any subordinate to obey. He was standing too close, the wall was directly behind {{user}}, and the reprimand in his fist had been reduced to something resembling a failed origami experiment.

Stepping back would have been the professional thing to do.

König remained exactly where he was.