“You could have identified yourself.”
That made her pause.
She looked at him steadily.
“You asked my rank as a joke, sir.
You did not ask for my authorization.”
The words were quiet.
They carried farther than shouting would have.
Nobody behind Kane moved.
Brooks stared at the gravel.
The woman continued, “Range Master Ellis checked my credentials when I arrived.
I was cleared to be here.
That should have been the end of it.”
Kane’s face tightened.
“You said you had no rank to report.”
“No rank to report under the access protocol I was given.”
She nodded toward the sheet in Ellis’s hand.
“My instructions were to qualify without displaying unit or assignment information.
Ellis followed them.”
Now Kane understood why the form had been sparse.
She had not lied.
He had filled the silence with assumptions.
Brooks cleared his throat.
“Commander, about what I said—”
She looked at him.
He stopped.
The same dusty glove hung at his side.
“You reached for another shooter’s weapon without permission,” she said.
“That concerns me more than the joke.”
Brooks’s mouth closed.
Ellis gave a small nod.
On a working range, rank mattered.
Procedure mattered more.
Kane shifted his weight.
“Lieutenant Brooks was out of line.”
The woman studied him for half a second.
“So were you, sir.”
Several people suddenly found the target berm fascinating.
Kane was not accustomed to being corrected in public.
His shoulders stiffened.
But the facts around him offered nowhere to hide.
He had called her sweetheart.
He had laughed while his officers questioned whether she could load a rifle.
He had allowed a subordinate to reach toward her equipment.
And he had done all of it before checking the document that had been sitting less than thirty feet away.
His rank could not rewrite the sequence.
“What exactly does that tattoo signify?” the young lieutenant blurted.
Kane turned toward him sharply.
The lieutenant immediately regretted speaking.
But the woman only pulled her sleeve down over the ink.
“It signifies something that is not part of your qualification today.”
Ellis almost smiled.
The lieutenant nodded.
“Yes, Commander.”
Kane looked at Ellis.
“You said you had seen it before.”
“Twice.”
