Lodestone TLR-99

The opposite of "back of the line"

It seemed like a smaller building on the outside.

Several weeks had gone by, with Mehr Sherazi not hearing a thing from her strange visitor since the other day. She had remembered signing a couple of completely normal transferral forms, and then the next few days had consisted of Drill Instructor Travers pointedly ignoring her during morning muster, and never assigning her any more duties. She felt like she should have been relieved not to be experiencing any more of the disciplinary hell that her fellow Reservists had been seeing, but at the same time, it bothered her to be so blatantly un-personed by the only authority figure nearby. She was still struggling with whether she preferred that, or the weird advances that Niemeyer had made on her. They both sucked. It was just a matter of which one sucked more.

Minutes after muster had been dismissed this morning, though, a man in a driver's uniform stood in the doorway to the barracks, and called out for Mehr by her full name, rank, and serial. She was told to bring all of her belongings and handily escorted to a plain-looking car - well, a car outfitted with off-road tires and extra-strong air conditioning. An hour later, she was here, at a nondescript little laboratory base, well outside of Mimisbrunnr city limits. She only noticed two floors to the building, and apart from a detached radar and the wire fence surrounding it, there was hardly anything else out here that indicated this was in any way military-related.

The driver escorted Mehr into an elevator, authenticated with two or three different pieces of identification, and pressed a button to bring her down to basement level four, the entire time not saying a damned thing. Only when she found herself in a perhaps-oversized briefing auditorium did it occur to her, that this was probably not the quiet little back-of-the-line posting that Niemeyer had led her to believe. A tall, stern-looking woman with her dark hair cinched up into a tidy tail approached the two of them, but immediately dismissed the driver before he could leave the elevator, and gestured for Mehr to exit. As the doors shut, she introduced herself. "Captain Alyona Zelenko, 12th Mechanized Research Detachment." She extended a hand, that Mehr shook as firmly as she could. "I was told to expect you today, Reservist First Class."

"Excuse me, Captain, but you've got it wrong. I'm just a Reservist."

"Not anymore," she remarked as she took a little wooden case out of her uniform's pocket, containing a little brass pip, that she applied to Mehr's uniform shoulder, right beneath the single braided chevron. "Congratulations on your promotion. Do your job around here and there will be more."

"What have I done to earn this?"

"By special recommendation of Staff Sergeant Niemeyer. I understand she's the one who applied to have you transferred here. You must be worth something if she's the one sticking up for you."

Mehr hoped to hell that it wasn't just because Niemeyer thought she was cute.

Zelenko proceeded to lead Mehr on a whirlwind tour of the base, going up, down, down some more, through so many rooms and wings and subsections that Mehr was convinced they would run out of building to walk through. She had lost track of which parts of the base were restricted and which she was allowed into with an escort. It'd probably be simpler for her to never try to enter anywhere. Recent promotion aside, she definitely lacked the clearance to even be told about half of this place.

The tour unceremoniously ended in the sixth-floor basement, labeled "Officers' Quarters." Mehr remembered what she'd been told weeks ago - she was going to be in a double room with Niemeyer. The whole tour had gone by like a disorienting breeze, and only now was Mehr feeling nervous. She would just have to be on guard for whatever might--

"It's you!"

A dirty-blonde figure in a white uniform darted out of room 616 and wrapped itself around Mehr with some degree of heavy impact. "I'd been wondering when they'd process your papers!" came the voice of Staff Sgt. Niemeyer, through Mehr's chest.

Captain Zelenko was firm, but polite. "Kath? Let go of her, please. She's had a long day."

Katherine Niemeyer reluctantly let go of her charge and put her hands in her pants-pockets. "You know how long I've been waiting, Captain?"

"As military bureaucracy goes, not very long at all. Now I need to go have a briefing with the Colonel, so I trust you two will get along well enough." Zelenko locked eyes with Niemeyer in particular. "Don't disappoint me."

"Alright, alright," Niemeyer responded, perhaps a bit glibly. She gestured into the doorway to her quarters. "This way, if you please. Let's get you unpacked and set up."

Mehr followed, with her shields raised as high as she could get them. The Staff Sergeant's behavior from a few weeks ago could very well be a known quantity in this unit, but more than anything, she needed to be on her guard.

The door to the quarters closed behind both of them, as Mehr placed her rucksack on the emptier-looking one of the two beds in the room.

"So, I have some stuff I wanna say to you," Niemeyer began. "Kind of important. Have a seat."

Mehr carefully sat on the bed, holding the rucksack close to her like a stuffed toy.

"Firstly, I should apologize to you for my general impulsiveness. I get kinda touchy-touchy with people and I want you to know it's just how I am. I don't usually mean anything deeper by it, and if I touch you somewhere you don't like, I give you full permission to remove me however you have to."

Well, that's a step in the right direction, though I don't like what it implies about you. "Yes, ma'am."

"Second, please understand that my motive for you coming here was to make you comfortable. If you are ever not comfortable, I will go out of my way to make sure you are."

"Permission to speak freely?"

"Just fuckin' say it."

"I'm not sure I deserve that kind of treatment from a superior officer."

Niemeyer ran a hand through her messy-but-short hair and sighed as she glanced at the door, making sure it was still shut. "Look... just because I have rank on you doesn't mean I'm gonna treat you like dirt beneath my heel. I just got lucky taking the officer's exam." To look at her again, it did seem strange that this five-foot-nothing girl would have any power over Mehr's five-foot-ten and countless hours of wrestling with the 98th Reserve. But Niemeyer continued. "I don't want our relationship to be stiff and formal. I want you to be able to relax when you're in this room, alright? I know how hard it is keeping up the charade 24-7."

"Yes, ma'am."

"I feel like you weren't listening."

"I was, ma'am. I'm just not ready for that yet."

"And enough with the ma'am stuff. I've seen your profile; you're older than I am. If anything, you should be the superior officer here."

"I barely feel like I earned my promotion as it is," said Mehr, glancing at the brass pip on her shoulder one more time.

Niemeyer sighed one more time, feeling as if she was just not getting anywhere with her new recruit. "You know, one more thing. In here? Call me Kath. That's my name and I want people to use it."

"Aren't you worried that that's a little too casual for the military, ma'am?" It was halfway between a force of habit and a way for Mehr to indicate her lack of interest in breaking down the social barrier between them.

"We'll work on it." Kath slumped onto the bed on her side of the room, resigning herself to her lack of progress today. "Some day we'll be proper equals. I guess it's just gonna take some time."

Mehr, saying nothing, opened her rucksack and began unloading its contents into the locker next to her bed. Her shields would remain up for now.