Last Flight of the Acheron

By Rick Partlow

Copyright 2017

By Rick Partlow

Also by Rick Partlow:

The Duty, Honor, Planet Trilogy:  https://www.amazon.com/Duty-Honor-Planet-Complete-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B00LDZFS3U

Glory Boy:  https://www.amazon.com/Glory-Boy-Birthright-Book-0-ebook/dp/B01N6DXM8C

The Birthright Trilogy:  https://www.amazon.com/Birthright-Complete-Trilogy-Rick-Partlow-ebook/dp/B01LY3T1YT

The Recon Series:  https://www.amazon.com/Recon-Complete-Rick-Partlow-ebook/dp/B074RHVF3R

Tales of the Acheron Book 1:  Prodigal:  https://www.amazon.com/Prodigal-Tales-Acheron-Book-1-ebook/dp/B077NZ3TPF

Tales of the Acheron Book 2: Hybrid:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078SMRCTH

Chapter One

“Sandrine Hollande,” the Commandant intoned, the same affected pride in his voice that he’d had for every other surname from A through G.

I stepped briskly across the stage, the way we’d rehearsed it a dozen times, the brand new Space Fleet dress uniform tugging at my hips and armpits and too tight across my breasts.  God willing, I’d never have to wear the damn thing again.

Commandant Burkhardt pressed the plaque into my hands, turning me towards the audience in the auditorium for just a moment before warmly shaking my hand and sending me on my way.  With the lights in my eyes, they looked like faceless, formless ghosts.  It had been a waste of time anyway; there was no one in the audience looking for me.  The one person who should have been there was missing, just like always.  I stalked away down the stairs and barely heard the plastic-faced asshole announce “Roberto Hooten” before I was back at my seat a few rows from the front.

Ash was there beside me.  I didn’t ask how Ashton Carpenter had managed to switch places with Melanie Hogan, even though the C’s were two rows in front of me; Ash always found a way.  He looked like a recruiting poster, with his square jaw and honest, beaming smile, and he cradled his graduation certificate with all the pride and affection of a new parent.  I looked down at mine and wondered when I’d get a chance to toss it in the recycler without being yelled at.

“My mother isn’t here, either,” he reminded me quietly.

I scowled at him, half because it was a bit tone-deaf under the circumstances, and half because he was right.

“It’s not the same,” I hissed in his ear.  “Your family wouldn’t leave their housing block even if the Tahni aimed a nuke at it.”  They’d also told him not to bother coming back when he left to attend the Academy, but that wouldn’t help make my point.

“Your mom would be here if she could,” he said, “and you know it.”

“All I know,” I shot back, getting a bit too loud but not caring, “is that I wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t pushed me into it.  The least she could do is pretend I mean a damn thing to her.”

I felt an irrational flare of anger and knew I had to get out of there before I said something to Ash that I’d regret.  There were stares and embarrassed mumbles as I pushed my way to the end of the row of chairs and fast-walked down the aisle, past row after row of proud parents and siblings and aunts and uncles and family friends.  Their faces blurred into one, then blurred more from the tears I had to blink away.  I hated them.  I hated them all.

When I could see clearly again, I realized I was standing out in the entrance hall to the auditorium.  This building was new compared to the rest of the campus, built less than a century ago, but they’d tried to make its architecture fit in with the rest of what used to be the United States Air Force Academy, so the ceilings were high and majestic and what had passed for futuristic three centuries ago, and there was a lot of glass.

Through the three-meters-high windows that lined the front of the place, I could see the night sky above the Rockies.  Back in the day, back when the men and women who’d left this place had flown atmospheric jets, the graduation ceremony had been conducted during the daytime, out in the athletic field.  They’d shown us videos of it, of the blue and white uniforms and the newly-minted officers tossing their caps in the air.

There wasn’t a United States Air Force anymore, and there wasn’t really a United States in the sense there used to be, not since the Commonwealth government formed after the Sino-Russian War and the Crisis.  And this school was for all branches of service:  Space Fleet, Marines and Scouts.  But I wished they’d kept things the way they used to be, with the cadets walking across the stage in the football stadium.  If it had been on the field, everyone would have been farther away and I could have pretended she was in the stands.

I heard people beginning to file out of the exits to the auditorium, and I started looking around to see if there was someplace I could stand in a corner, in the shadows, out of the way.  People wanted to make a big deal about thanking anyone in uniform since the war started midway through our junior year, and it irritated the shit out of me.  It wasn’t like I wanted to die for them, or for the idea of the Commonwealth, and we hadn’t even been at war when I’d started here.

“Have you checked your ‘link?”

I nearly jumped out of my skin, and I didn’t know how Ash had managed to sneak up on me.

“Jesus, wear a damned bell or something,” I told him.  “No, I haven’t checked it and I don’t give a damn if Mom has left a million messages, she shouldn’t be bothering you to…”

“Our assignments are up,” he interrupted, grinning.

I shut up and pulled my ‘link out of my back pocket.  I’d had the notifications silenced and I hadn’t been wearing my ear bud during the ceremony, but the message was there, labelled “Commonwealth Space Fleet Military Personnel Center, Notice of Station.”  My fingers were awkward on the screen as I pulled up the text and scrolled through the extraneous military bullshit till I got to the good part.  The words stood out like they’d been handed down from on high by an archangel.

“Pilot, Assault Shuttle.”

“CSF Jutland.”

“Holy shit,” I breathed, the first smile of the day passing over my face almost against my will.  “I got it, Ash, I got the Jutland.  I report to the Training and Indoctrination Center on Inferno in three weeks to get my ‘face jacks implanted and start flight training.”

I glanced up at him suspiciously, noticing his grin widening.  Ash had a terrible poker-face.  “What?  What did you get?”

He didn’t say anything, just held up the display of his own ‘link, already zoomed in on the interesting part.  It was identical to mine.  All the misery and hate I’d been wallowing through was suddenly gone and I was laughing like an idiot as I hugged him, nearly knocking the ‘link out of his hand.

“I’m so glad you’re going to be there with me,” I said into his ear.  I could suddenly feel his hands on my back and the warmth of his body against mine, and I slowly pulled away, smoothing down the front of my uniform.

“I, um…,” he stuttered and I tried not to laugh.  We’d been friends since our freshman year and he still didn’t think I knew he was attracted to me.  “By the time we’re done with training, the Jutland should be finished.  I wonder if we’ll report to it at the Martian shipyards or it’ll come to us at Inferno?”

“You even think the war will still be going on by then?”

The voice had come from behind us and I didn’t have to turn to recognize the slight but ever-present plaintive whine.

“What, Warren?”  I rounded on her, feeling the annoyance levels rising already.  “Do you have some special line to the Office of the Joint Chiefs that the rest of us don’t?”

“Everyone knows this isn’t going to last,” Bethany Warren said, waving a hand dismissively.  Her mouth had this permanent pinch to it that made her look like she’d bitten into something sour.  “The Tahni don’t want another war any more than we do.”

“They have a funny way of showing it,” Ash told her, scowling.  “They killed half a million people on the disputed colonies.”

“And we’ve launched a couple attacks on their outposts,” Warren said with a shrug.  “And what else has happened?  Nothing.  It’s all going to blow over.”

“What did you draw, Bethany?”  Ash asked her, with one of those surprising flares of perception that sometimes seemed to hit him out of the blue.

There was the slightest twitch, the barest hesitation before she answered.

“Third Brigade, Second Marine Drop Battalion,” she said, trying to sound proud but coming off as scared instead.  Suddenly, I felt less annoyed at her and more sorry for her.  She was going to be crammed into a battlesuit and dropped out of orbit onto enemy-occupied worlds.

“Maybe you’re right, Warren,” I conceded, lying easily, with years of practice.  “Maybe it’ll all blow over before we even get out of training.”

***

It didn’t.

Looking out from the Observation Bubble at Deimos Station six months later, staring at the twinkling lights that were the Martian shipyards, I remembered that conversation.

“How do you think 2nd Lt. Warren is doing?”  I asked Ash, glancing over at him.  He looked rakish with the sides of his head shaved for the ‘face jacks.  I had them too, but I’d let the hair grow back over mine while he’d kept his bare.

“I checked on her status on the Mil-Web before we left Inferno,” he said, still watching Mars pass by beneath us.  “She’s…adapting.”

I sniffed noncommittally, then checked the local time on my ‘link.

“The shuttle down to Lowell leaves in an hour,” I reminded him.  “We should get to the port.  We only have fifty hours of leave and I’d rather not waste it here when I could be hitting the clubs.”

“Sure, okay,” Ash said, stepping back from the window but still taking in the planet as Deimos raced towards the terminator.

We wore ship-boots with sticky plates, since the gravity on Deimos was light enough for a single, normal step to send you bounding off for the ceiling, and I felt ridiculous in them, having to pull up my foot purposefully and place it down again with each step, like a cat.  We squeezed past a line of other military transients, mostly young Ensigns like us along with a few enlisted, all waiting their turn to look at Mars.

I felt my ‘link vibrate and checked the message, hoping it wasn’t orders to report to the Jutland early.  I was eager to see the ship, but not at the expense of giving up my last leave planetside for the next six months.  I read the words and swore loud enough for a passing Lieutenant to glare at me in disapproval.

“What?”  Ash asked, stopping beside me.

“Read it,” I said, feeling the heat gathering under my scalp.  I shoved the ‘link at him.

“’Report immediately to Admiral Gannett on the CSF Yorktown,’” he read off the screen, and I saw his wince.  “Well crap.  There goes Lowell.”

“You’ll come with me?”  I asked him.

“Ah, shit,” he said, half a groan, squeezing his eyes shut.  “I really don’t want to step into the middle of…”

“I don’t want to go alone,” I insisted, putting a pleading tone into my voice and a puppy-dog look into my eyes that I knew he wouldn’t be able to deny.  Yeah, it wasn’t fair, but I was desperate.

“Okay,” he sighed.  “Let’s go before I change my mind.”

There was a small, automated orbital transfer vehicle waiting for us at the port, programmed to leave the dock when it sensed my ID implant boarding.  It didn’t object to Ash being there, and we didn’t wait more than two minutes for traffic control.  I guess there were perks to being an Admiral…other than being a total shit to everyone with impunity.

The boat was small and didn’t seem like it could carry much fuel, but it didn’t spare the acceleration and it took us less than two hours to match orbits with the Midway.  I could see her on the display screen in the shuttle’s cabin, a monolith a kilometer long, layered with armor and bristling with weaponry.  She was a mountain floating in orbit, the newest and largest warship in the Commonwealth fleet, surrounded at the moment by the glowing spider-web of a temporary repair dock, loading her up with missiles, topping off reaction mass, recalibrating external sensors and putting the finishing touches on the Fleet Engineering Division’s latest masterpiece.

Her hangar bay swallowed up the orbital transfer vehicle like a bug, the loud and startling bangs of the maneuvering thrusters pushing us this way and that until a shuddering vibration signaled that we’d docked with one of the service airlocks.  I flinched with each noise, each jolt, suddenly feeling like an abused animal waiting for the next kick, and I despised myself for it.

The docking bay was a flurry of activity, and I realized that the Midway must be about as close to deploying as the Jutland.  The two of us dodged maintenance crews, cargo sleds and frantic technicians, flying by in the zero gravity with only a notional sense of who had the right of way.  I followed the directions my ‘link was feeding me over my earbud and Ash followed me and, somehow, we still managed to find our way to the flag cabin by the required time.

Deep inside the administrative section of the ship, the flag cabin was past the Admiral’s office, and we had to pass through a gauntlet of functionaries and handlers along the way.  The final gatekeeper was a clerk harnessed into a data station, scrolling through personnel files in a haptic hologram that surrounded him like a curtain.  I saw a Lieutenant’s rank on his shoulder, and was surprised it wasn’t a job for an NCO.  We cat-footed across the deck on our sticky-plates until we stood just the other side of the multicolored barrier of light.

“Ensign Hollande to see Admiral Gannett,” I said with sharp precision, both because it would be expected and because I wanted to get his attention.  “And friend,” I added hastily, glancing at Ash.

The Lieutenant swiped the array of holograms downward out of the way with a wave of his hand, revealing a skeptically tilted eyebrow and a frown that was about to turn into a denial.

“Send them in, D’Agostino,” a clear and carrying voice seem to come from the air around us.  I knew there was some sort of concealed public address system, but I had to admit that the effect was impressive.

The door slid aside and I could still feel Lt. D’Agostino’s eyes on my back as I moved through it.  Inside was a combination apartment suite and command office that was probably three times as large as the quarters the rest of the ship’s officers were apportioned, with furniture designed for use in a variety of gravity conditions and upholstered with vat-grown leather.  Hand-painted artwork was fastened to the bulkheads and the whole ambience of the place seemed more Corporate Council executive than Fleet flag officer.

Admiral Helene Gannett was tucked behind a sturdy-looking faux wood desk, belted into a swiveling chair with not a thing arrayed on the displays in front of her, as if she’d cleared her schedule in advance for this meeting.  Her uniform was normal shipboard utilities, but she always seemed as if she’d be more at home in formal dress blues, with maybe an 18th-Century fore-and-aft European naval hat to compliment it.

She certainly had the face for European nobility; her nose was perfect patrician, her cheekbones high and sharp and her mouth downturned and disapproving.  Her brown hair was cut just shorter than regulation and the eyes that matched it seemed to scan us both like a security sensor.

We both snapped to attention as the door shut behind us, hands bisecting our right eyebrows in matching salutes.  Sometimes I think that’s the only reason the Fleet pays for the sticky plates in our ship boots is so we can come to attention in zero gravity.

“Ensign Hollande reports, ma’am!”  I barked with my best parade-field voice, trying to use the military formality as a shield, as armor.

She returned the salute without rising, her eyes still dark and unreadable.

“At ease.”  She looked us both up and down for a moment in silence as we relaxed, hands clasped behind our backs.  Finally, her expression softened and she smiled thinly.  “Hello, Sandi,” she said.

I wanted to say something smart back to her, but I thought of Ash and reconsidered.  Instead, I settled on something more neutral.

“Hi, Mom.”

Chapter Two

“You must be Ensign Carpenter,” Mother said to Ash.  “I’ve heard great things about you from Sandi’s instructors.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Ash confirmed with a precision and respect in his tone that bordered on fear.  I wanted to resent him for that, but I couldn’t really blame him.  There weren’t too many people who didn’t fear Mother, at least a little.  “Thank you, ma’am.”

Mom didn’t tell him to relax, maybe because it was a lost cause or maybe because she enjoyed it, I wasn’t sure which.

“It must have taken some serious intestinal fortitude to make it out of the Kibera and into the Academy.”

Ash didn’t react visibly, but I could tell he was having to fight the wince that usually came whenever he talked about home.  I’d never been to Trans-Angeles, but everyone had heard of the Kibera; it was the most notorious of the Free Housing Blocks in any of the hyper-cities, known for gangs, crime and the insular nature of the people who lived there.

“I had plenty of incentive to leave, ma’am,” was the only response he gave.  Including his own brother vowing to kill him, but I knew he didn’t want to talk about that.

“Thank you for being such a good friend to my daughter in the Academy,” Mother told him.  “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to speak to her in private for a few minutes.  Lt. D’Agostino will show you where you can wait for her.”

Ash came to attention and saluted his way out, gratefully, I thought.

Oh well, he’d come with me, which was more than I’d had a right to expect.

When the door closed again, Mom unbuckled from her seat and fastened her ship-boots to the deck, rising to her full height, which matched my own.  She was a tall woman, and I suppose that’s where I got it.  People said I looked just like her.  Which pissed me off.

“You’re still angry,” she deduced.

“Are we speaking as Admiral to Ensign?”  I asked her tightly.  “Or mother to daughter?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Sandi…”  She broke off with a sigh.  “I didn’t come to your graduation for the same reason I didn’t visit the Academy while you were there.  I didn’t want people thinking you were only accepted there because of who your mother is.”

“Yes, much better for them to think my mother doesn’t give a shit about me,” I responded, hearing the venom in my tone and surprised at the strength of it.  “You know, I wonder all the time why you made me take Dad’s last name, especially after you did your best to make sure he’ll never want anything to do with either of us again.  Was it because I’m that big of a disappointment to you?”

“I’ve never been disappointed in you, Sandi,” she insisted, and I heard something in her words that might have been pain, but it was buried so deep beneath decades of hard-ass bravado that I couldn’t be sure.  “The situation with your father is complicated…”

“Mother,” I interrupted her, taking advantage of the fact that I could get away with it for the moment, “I’m sure you didn’t call me here to talk about Dad.  I have to report to my ship in less than forty-eight hours, and after that I’m not going to see a gravity well for six months unless I have to make an emergency landing on one.  So why did you send for me?”

“The war isn’t going well,” she said bluntly, never one to beat around the bush with idle conversation.  “And it’s only going to get worse.”

That set me back, and I felt a frown tugging my face downward.

“I thought all we’d done was raid a few outposts.”  I shook my head.  “Everyone says nothing has really happened yet.”

“Everything is classified.”  She stepped around the desk, closer to me.  I had the sense she wanted to touch me, but she didn’t.  “The attacks haven’t gone well.  We haven’t lost any capital ships yet, but the attrition rate among assault shuttle pilots has been…”  I could see her swallow hard.  “…alarming.”

The climate control shipboard was always set at almost-too-cold, but I still felt a thin trickle of sweat running down my back.

“Are we going to lose?”  The question wrenched itself out of my mouth.

“Not as long as we have ships like the Midway and the Jutland and the Yorktown to defend the core systems,” she said with an air of confidence that would have sounded more at home in a staff briefing.  Then the bluster faltered for a moment.  “It’s going to be ugly.  We both leave on combat patrol in a few days…I just wanted…”

She trailed off.

“You wanted absolution,” I finished for her.  I don’t know how I should have reacted to what she was saying, but I know how I did.  I was furious, anger burning inside my stomach, the heat twisting my innards.  “You wanted to bring me here and try to make everything that’s been wrong the last ten years right all of a sudden, so when I get killed, you won’t feel guilty.”

Some part of me, some tiny part that was still coherent and still thinking straight, was screaming in vain, telling me I was making a mistake.  But she was trapped in a sound-proof room deep inside me, and I didn’t listen.  It was too late anyway.

“God damn it, you self-centered little bitch!”  Mother had thrown her hands up and turned away and I braced myself for the storm, feeling a perverse sense of gratification that I’d gotten under her skin for once.

But then she stopped and seemed to sag, despite the lack of gravity.

“Sandi,” she said, her voice quavering with an obvious effort to control herself, “I don’t want what might be our last time together to be an argument.”

“Why should this time be different from any other?”  I wondered, the cynicism dripping off the words.  “Can I be dismissed?”

“Get out.”

Her voice was hoarse, whether with fury or regret I couldn’t tell and didn’t care.

I found Ash waiting by D’Agostino’s desk, apparently not interested in whatever diversion they’d found for him.

“Let’s go,” I told him, wishing it was possible to stride angrily wearing those damned stupid sticky plates.  “I want to get drunk.”

“I don’t think we have time to get down to Mars,” he protested, hurriedly following me.

“They have bars on Deimos, don’t they?”  I demanded, eyes fixed straight ahead as I traced a path back towards the docking bay.

“I’m pretty sure, yeah,” he admitted from somewhere behind me.

“Good.  Then I want to get drunk.”

***

I woke up to the unfamiliar sensation of warm skin against mine, of a strong, male arm cradling my shoulders, and I nearly bolted upright in bed before everything rushed back over me like a wave.  For a second, I’d thought I’d dreamed it, or, given how much I’d had to drink, hallucinated it.  Slowly and carefully, I shifted my position, turning over on the cushioning bicep, and saw Ash sleeping beside me.  Snoring beside me, loud as a horse, actually.

No, it was no dream, no hallucination.  The orbital transfer pod had deposited us back in the docking bay on Deimos less than two hours after we’d left the Midway, and I remembered pausing there just outside the service lock where we’d disembarked, looking through the thick, transplas shielding down at the rest of the bay carved into the rock of the Martian moon.  There were a half dozen Fleet assault shuttles docked there as well, cold grey daggers of BiPhase Carbide armor, looking deadly and dangerous and suddenly, to me, so very vulnerable.

There were exactly three bars on Deimos Station including the Officers’ Club and NCO Club, which left us with the third, a lame, kitschy place decorated in a fashion about fifty years old as a style choice.  It was called “Good Times,” which showed a lack of both imagination and taste, and it served the cheapest sort of fabricated booze.  But there weren’t any superior officers around to get in trouble with, so “Good Times” was it.

At least they had live bartenders and not some touch screen with an automated dispenser.

“Tequila,” I told the woman.  “Two shots and keep them coming.”

She was impossibly tall and I thought she must have been a Martian native.  She nodded down to me and went to retrieve a pair of glasses.

“You drinking two at a time?”  Ash asked, eyes wide as he watched the tall woman set down two full shot glasses of what was probably incredibly cheap tequila.

I almost laughed.  He was cute and clueless, like a puppy.  It was enough to make me forget how furious I was at Mother, and at myself.

“You’re drinking with me, Ensign Carpenter.”  I grabbed one of the two shots and set it in front of him on the fake-wood bar.  It thumped with a hollow, plastic sound.

“Sandi,” he protested, holding up his hands, palms-out, “I’m not much of a drinker…”

“I know exactly how much of a drinker you’re not, Ash,” I reminded him, cocking an eyebrow.

He laughed softly, self-deprecatingly, and I knew he was thinking about last summer break.  Neither of us had a home to return to for time off school, so we always volunteered for off-season training and work-study programs, which meant we’d spent very little time unsupervised.  Last summer, though, we’d wound up with a whole day to ourselves waiting for a flight out of the Sydney spaceport and we’d found a bar.  Well, honestly, it was Sydney so it didn’t take that much effort.

It hadn’t ended well for either of us; I’d gotten into a fight with some skank and he’d thrown up all over the bathroom.

“What happened in there with your mom?”  he asked me, picking up the glass and eyeing the amber liquid doubtfully.

“What always happens with Mom?”  I shrugged.  I tossed back the shot, feeling a sour burning down my throat and into my gut.  I set the glass down and gestured to him.

He sighed and took a deep breath, then downed the shot.  He made a face, but kept it down and smacked the glass on the bar defiantly.

“Shit,” he said, gasping like his breath was on fire.  “That’s fuckin’ horrible.”

“Yeah, it’s not the best,” I agreed.  “Fill ‘em up,” I waved at the bartender.  There was one other person at the bar, a civilian who might have been a contractor, but he was cradling a tall glass of beer and looked half asleep, so we were pretty much the only customers demanding attention.

The Martian grabbed a dispenser nozzle and poured more of the alcohol into the glasses, eyeing our ranks.

“Early for a couple of new Ensigns to be hitting it this hard,” she murmured.

“Well, according to my mother, who happens to be an Admiral,” I told her, pausing in the middle of a sentence to down the new shot, “assault shuttle pilots have a life expectancy of somewhere between zero and five seconds in combat.”  I motioned for Ash to take his second shot.  “So what difference does it make?”

“Your mom said that?”  Ash demanded, gulping down the drink reflexively, as if he didn’t realize he was doing it until the fire hit his gut.

“No shit she did,” I spat.  “She brought me here to try to make everything right because I’m going to go off somewhere and get my ass killed fighting the Tahni and she didn’t want to have to feel guilty about not speaking to me more than half a dozen times the last four years.”

“I can see where that might upset you,” the bartender acknowledged, refilling the glasses.  Her voice reminded me of my second therapist.

“She thinks we’re gonna’ die?”  Ash’s voice squeaked a little at the tail end of the sentence, and I understood why.  It’s one thing to know that you’re flying into combat, it’s another to have someone who should know tell you that you’re probably already dead.

“Yeah, so drink up.”  Shot number three.  It tasted much smoother this time, and I had the slurred thought that maybe she’d switched to higher-quality tequila.

“Eat, drink and be merry,” the Martian bartender quoted while Ash drank, “for tomorrow we die.”

“Not tomorrow,” Ash corrected her, his voice not quite slurred but quieter than usual.  “Probably in a couple weeks, though.”

I found myself staring at him, noticing maybe for the first time the strong cut of his jaw.  Everything seemed to have a thin film of unreality over it, and for just a moment, I let myself forget that Ash and I had been friends for four years.  Suddenly, he was just a man, and an attractive, strong, sensitive one at that.

There was a full glass in front of me.  I drained it, then I grabbed Ash by the shoulder, turned him around and kissed him.  It felt good.  I knew he hadn’t had a girlfriend since he started the Academy, and I hadn’t had time for boys the last four years, but it felt natural.  He seemed a bit shocked at first, but he was a guy; he rolled with it, and in a second, his hands were around my hips.

“We got a room here, right?”  I asked, breaking off and whispering it in his ear, then giving into an impulse to nibble his earlobe.

“Two,” he confirmed breathlessly, his eyes wide.  “Through tomorrow anyway.”

I kissed him again, then grabbed his hand and started tugging him away from the bar.

“We’ll only need one.”

And the rest, as they say, was history.

If I was being honest, it was very enjoyable history and for someone who was out of practice and probably buzzing pretty hard, Ash acquitted himself very well.  I closed my eyes and stifled a moan.  What the hell was I doing?  He was my best friend, pretty close to my only friend, and I’d fucked things up by…well, by fucking things up.

Did I really have to sabotage every good thing in my life?  What if he got all possessive now and started treating me like his girlfriend and not his friend?  Or even worse, what if he decided I was too screwed in the head to be his girlfriend or his friend?

Should I wake him up and ask him?  Maybe he was still drunk.  Would he even remember this?  Maybe I could sneak out, go to the room I had reserved for me and pretend it didn’t happen, and maybe Ash would do the same thing.

I did groan then, in misery.  No, this was Ash.  He’d want to talk about it, because that’s the kind of guy he was.  He always wanted to talk about things, to figure them out.  I just liked to let them go and not think so much, but damn it, he always wanted to talk.  He’d sure as hell want to talk about this.

Just wake him up then, I reasoned.  Get it over with, find out now whether things were really bad.

“Fuck it,” I mumbled.  I rolled over and shook his shoulder.

He moaned incoherently, his eyes not opening.  I shook again.

“Ash,” I said insistently.

He blinked hesitantly awake, then saw me in the dim glow of the chemical ghostlights that lined the floor.  He smiled and I felt something melt inside me and suddenly I couldn’t remember what I’d intended to say.

“Hey,” he murmured and leaned over to kiss me, a hand going to my left breast.

I felt his body moving against me and I was about to just forget about everything else and go with the moment…and then the light panels in the Guest Officers’ Quarters room flashed red and the alarm klaxons sounded from the speakers in the ceiling and the ones in the hall and everywhere within earshot of our room, insistent and blaring and I tumbled off the bed, grabbing for my clothes by instinct as my head whipped around, looking instinctively for a threat.

“This is not a drill!” A live voice echoed in the speakers and in the hallway and in my ear bud, a voice near to panic.  “All personnel to combat stations!  This is not a drill!  All personnel to combat stations!  There are multiple enemy incursions in Martian orbit!”

Then there was a shudder, a vibration that went through the whole station, one that could only be made by a multi-megaton fusion warhead.  And if we could feel it all the way in here…

The alarm klaxon continued warbling, but the voice had ceased.  I grabbed my ‘link off the nightstand beside the bed, but there was no signal from the base’s local net.

“Shit!”  Ash was beside me, dressing frantically, though I hadn’t even noticed him getting up.

His eyes were wide, his face pale, and I felt as if mine had to be a reflection of it.

“It’s the Tahni,” I said, my voice a hoarse rasp, unable to draw a full breath.  “They’re here.”

We both headed for the door, into a corridor full of men and women running awkwardly in the low gravity, most following the holographic display on the wall pointing towards the emergency shelters.  Ash took the lead, imposing his larger form like a battering ram to clear the way, and in seconds we were at a crossroads, where the corridor to the left went deeper into the station, towards the shelter, while the one to the right led to the hangar bay.

Ash looked a question at me, and I knew exactly what he was thinking.

“The assault shuttles,” I said, nodding.  “Let’s go.”

Eat, drink and be merry, that bartender had said, for tomorrow we die.

It was tomorrow.

Chapter Three

I wasn’t sure if the elevators were working, and there was a line of about twenty people waiting for them anyway, so Ash and I bypassed them for the transit tubes.  They were what passed for a staircase in low-gravity places like this, and I used to play in them when Mom was stationed here…and get into all kinds of trouble sticking my nose into places I didn’t belong.  On ships, they were vertical, padded and outfitted with straps to pull yourself along in zero gravity.  On low-grav moons and asteroids like Deimos, they were slanted at about a forty-five-degree angle, the surface roughened to help the sticky-plates, and right now they were nearly abandoned, since most of the personnel on board Deimos were heading for the shelters and the ones who’d been on duty were either at combat stations or maybe stuck…or dead.

Going down the slope was kind of like cross-country skiing without the skis.  I had a lot of experience at it and I still had to shut out everything else and concentrate on keeping my balance; Ash almost busted his ass twice on the way down from the Guest Officers’ Quarters.  I felt like it was getting harder to breathe, and I wondered if it was my imagination or if the air circulators weren’t working right.  When we emerged out of the transit tube hub on its last level, and could finally see the damage the blast we’d felt had done, I was pretty sure it was the circulators.

The hangar on Deimos was huge on both sides of the airlocks, the largest I’d ever seen except for Luna, stretching out nearly two kilometers wide and two hundred meters deep in front of us, dug right out of the regolith.  Half of it was devoted to twenty cargo locks, each ten meters wide and a hundred meters apart, that could match right up to the bays of heavy lift shuttles, with loading tracks that led back to freight elevators, while the other half was reserved for dozens of smaller personnel locks serving orbital transfer vehicles, landers, and those six assault shuttles.

I stopped in my tracks, the breath going out of me when I saw it.  The whole left side of the hangar, the side that serviced cargo craft, was buried under thousands of tons of regolith just in front of the cargo handling tracks.  The emergency seals had slammed down where the pressure hull had been breached, but even from back at the transit tube hub, I could tell that some of the seals had been blocked by the wreckage and the fallen debris.  Alarms were blaring and dust and flecks of buildfoam were twisting around in crazy, horizontal tornados as breathable air made a break for the insatiable vacuum, and I could see workers scrambling around in pressure suits trying frantically to clear the wreckage to seal off the breaches.

I thought about the people who’d been in those ships, or unloading cargo and I wanted to curse, but I couldn’t get it past the lump in my throat.

“The assault shuttles are still there,” Ash said, his voice grim and a look of resolve on his face.  He pointed down the row of airlocks to a section of cracked and splintering transplas.  “Let’s get to them before the Tahni finish this place off.”

The shuttles were lined up one after another in a tight formation, serviced by a consecutive series of airlocks connected by extendable docking umbilicals, and as we made our way through the emergency workers running from one disaster to another, I saw that Ash’s pronouncement about the shuttles might have been overly optimistic.  The ships were there, but they were not all intact.  Two of them, the ones arrayed closest to the cargo side of the bay, had large chunks taken out of their portside hulls all the way through to the interior of the cabins.  They were likely unflyable, since the sections of hull that had been damaged had, I knew from our training, contained power conduits to the cockpits and control leads to the weapons pods.

The next pair in line had some surface scoring near the cockpit and pitting and gouging on the portside wings; they wouldn’t be safe to land in an atmosphere, but they might be good to go in vacuum, assuming the maneuvering thrusters were still operable.  But the last two had barely been touched and it was those I headed for, with Ash following in an awkward ice-skating step.

There was a large man in a pressure suit punching an access code into the airlock security pad when we arrived, and I thought for a second that one of the assigned pilots had made it; I wasn’t sure whether I was disappointed or relieved about that.  But when he turned at our approach, I saw the insignia on his issued vacuum suit and noted that it read “Farrier, Allan, Chief Petty Officer, Crew Chief.”  Not a pilot then, but still useful.

“Who are you two?”  He demanded over his helmet’s external speakers.  Through the visor, I could see a craggy, weathered face with piercing blue eyes.  “Why aren’t you in the damned shelters?”

“Ensigns Hollande and Carpenter,” I told him breathlessly, both from the rush to get here and the thinning atmosphere.  “Assault shuttle pilots.  We thought we might be able to get a couple of the birds out of here before another missile strike blows the shit out of this place.”

“Fresh meat from the Academy, huh?”  He grunted skeptically.  “Well, I doubt the assigned pilots are going to make it, so you might as well give it a shot.”

He opened the outer hatch for the boarding umbilical and waved at us impatiently.

“One of you in here,” he told us.  “The other one with me.”

I grabbed Ash by the arm and impulsively pulled him into a quick kiss, then jogged down through the narrow walkway of the docking tunnel and into the open side hatch of the assault shuttle.  I thought he said something behind me, but it was lost in the acoustics of the umbilical, and then I was closing the lock and I was incredibly alone.

The interior layout of the shuttle was identical to the mockups I’d sweated and sworn in for endless hours in the simulator, and to the trainer birds I wished I’d had more time to fly.  A small utility bay just inside the airlock held a set of lockers for pressure suits, and I yanked one open, quickly pulling on a flight suit and tightening the adjustment straps down before I grabbed a helmet and carried it with me up toward the cockpit.  There were a half-dozen passenger seats arrayed on either side of the central aisle, only half as many as you’d find on a dedicated lander that could hold two full infantry squads.  I jogged between them and squeezed into the cockpit, pulling myself into the pilot’s seat, securing the safety harness with rote motions.

I set the helmet in my lap and unspooled the four interface connection cords from inside then carefully plugged them into my implant jacks, two on either side of my head just back of my temples.  It was ingrained habit by now, and didn’t freak me out nearly as much as it had the first time, just after the surgery.  I still didn’t like them, but they were the price you had to pay to be a combat pilot.  The fraction of a second they saved over an interface halo was frequently the difference between life or death; and without some sort of neural interface, you couldn’t control a ship at high-g acceleration.  I settled the helmet on my neck yoke and sealed it, then played out the exterior jack cables and plugged them into the receptacles on the pilot’s station.

I’ve seen in the movies and ViRdramas how they try to show what it looks like when someone jacks in, but they never get it right.  It’s not a Heads-Up Display projecting data; if it were, what would the point be of getting the implants?  You could have a HUD in your flight helmet or a contact lens or even the front view-screen.  It’s nothing visual at all, nothing you can really put into words accurately.

It’s like another sense, like you’re smelling or tasting or touching something, but in a way you can’t describe because no one else has that sense.  But that sense told me everything I needed to know about this boat, from the reaction mass tank level to ammunition stores, and as I sensed it, the ship’s computer sensed me back.  It knew that I wanted the docking umbilical detached and retracted, and the reactor warmed up and the targeting systems activated and the weapons systems armed and it did all that without me having to touch a control.

I tried to connect with the station’s traffic control computer system, but either it had been destroyed or the blast had taken out the signal repeaters.  I was on my own.

“Assault One, this is Assault Two, over.”  The voice was Ash’s.

“Reading you five by five, Assault Two,” I replied, grinning.  Not totally on my own, then.  “Systems up and ready for launch.  Over.”

“Go, Assault One.”  That was CPO Farrier and his tone was impatient.  “Unless you’d rather wait for another missile.”

I fed the belly jets a slow, gentle burst of power that pushed me off the polished regolith of the docking bay floor, swinging the boat around with maneuvering thrusters, sharp bangs against the dull roar of the lifters.  The images from the exterior cameras merged with lidar and radar and formed a 360-degree image that I could see without turning my head, sense in a way that I could sense the position of my own body, and I suddenly knew every detail of the wreckage of the bay.

The entrance to the hangar was half its usual size, reduced by mounds of collapsed regolith, molten and re-solidified in the wake of the fusion blast.  Of the ships that had once occupied that half of the hangar, there was nothing left.  The hit had to have come against the surface of the entrance instead of deep inside, or there’d be nothing left of the bay at all.  A haze of dust still hung swirling across the mouth of the hangar, and it, along with residual radiation and thermal blooming, obscured what was outside.  There was only one way to find out.

I activated the main drive, far too close for normal traffic procedures here, and felt the acceleration push me back into my cushioned seat.  The shuttle rocketed through the cloud of dust and debris and into all hell.

The bulk of Deimos, even as damaged and battered as it was, had been a security blanket, a cave I could hide in.  Outside, Mars hung like a blood-red backdrop to utter disaster.  The Martian shipyards were a loosely-connected series of orbital construction and maintenance frameworks that could be used to build or refurbish a ship or to provide routine maintenance, and between the Fleet, the Patrol and the Scouts, they were busy more or less constantly.  Hundreds of the dry-docks were spread out in a loose pattern more or less in the orbit of Deimos, with a steady stream of automated supply barges coming in from the asteroid belt and the Jovian atmosphere mines with processed ore, water and reaction mass.

I didn’t know what ships had been in for repair and maintenance other than my mother’s new ship, the Midway, and our first assignment, the Jutland, and the military communications net was down so I couldn’t look it up.  What I did know from my sensors was that the huge, glowing spheres of ionized gas that filled up a good part of the arc of the forward cameras were all that was left of at least ten of the dry-docks and the ships they were servicing.

I felt a cold, empty pit in my stomach as I thought of Mom.

She’s okay, I assured myself.  She’s a survivor.

Smaller balls of gas marked the deaths of orbital transfer vehicles and in-system gunboats, and for a long moment, I thought maybe we’d missed the fight entirely and the enemy was gone.  Then I saw the ship burning in towards Deimos on a flare of plasma, probably just minutes out of Transition space.  The shuttle’s files identified her, but I didn’t need their help; I’d seen her like in enemy warship identification briefings in the Academy and pilot training.  Her design was different from anything human in subtle ways, choices of aesthetics rather than function, but the basics were universal in their utility:  fusion drive bell in the rear, armor at the rounded nose, weapons pods jutting out menacingly from the flanks.  We called her a corvette after a class of ancient ocean-going vessels, a name that was inexact and ill-fitting, but you had to call them something and it sounded better than “generic alien warship.”

She was less than a hundred kilometers from my boat and closing, and I thought I knew her intentions.  The corvettes were fairly small attack boats, as small as the Tahni built their starships, and each could probably only hold one or two missiles large enough to do the damage that I’d seen in the hangar bay.  One had started the job and now the next was coming in to apply the coup de grace.

“Take that fucker out!”  I yelled to Ash, but didn’t wait for him.

I reached out through the interface, feeling the shuttle’s weapons as if I were wriggling my fingers and then making a fist.  There was no time for missiles; by the time they arrived, he would have already launched his and the damage would be done.  I thought a command and the proton cannon that ran the length of the assault shuttle’s belly sucked the charge of the ship’s main capacitor out in one giant pull of energy.  Man-made lightning crossed the kilometers between me and the corvette and her electromagnetic deflectors lit up like a Christmas-tree ornament, dispersing some of the hit but not all of it.

There was a flash of incandescent vapor as layers of her hull armor sublimated violently, and the ship went into a slow roll in the direction the jet of gas had propelled her, but corrected with a burst of maneuvering thrusters and spun end for end, aligning her primary weapons port with my shuttle.  She was trying to use her Gauss cannon instead of launching missiles, which told me I’d been right about her weapons load; she probably had one or two Ship-Busters in her external pods.

The rail gun ran the length of the corvette’s hull and she had to turn completely around to line it up with me, which took time…unfortunately, re-charging the main capacitor bank took a few seconds, too.  I cut the main drive and sent the belly jets a burst just as the corvette fired.  The ship groaned in protest and I wondered if I was pushing it too far, but I was more worried about the tungsten slug heading my way than the stress load.  It passed only meters beneath the belly of the shuttle and I reignited the drives, trying to get closer before he could fire the mass-driver again.

At twenty kilometers away, I saw a green flash out of the corner of my perception that told me the capacitors were charged and I triggered the proton cannon.  At this range, the deflectors couldn’t shunt enough of the blast to make a difference; the corvette’s portside weapons pod separated with a flare of plasma and a glowing cloud of burning oxygen where the explosion had pierced the hull.  She went out of control again, and this time she didn’t have the chance to re-correct:  a missile took her just behind the nose and she disappeared in a glowing ball of nuclear fire.

I shifted my course away from the explosion, seeing Ash’s boat coming up on my starboard flank, his drive bell glowing as he boosted.

“That was a little close for a fusion missile,” I said clinically, knowing I was far enough away to avoid radiation damage but still not liking it.

“We don’t have time to fuck around,” Farrier chided me.  “I just picked up a signal from the Midway…she’s in trouble.  Form up on our port wing and follow us in.”

“Roger,” I replied, relaying the navigational data to the flight computer.

The Midway…it was in trouble, but at least it was still around.

Damn it, Mom.  You’re going to make me rescue you, aren’t you?

Ash and Farrier were pushing it to four g’s, pushing me into my acceleration couch like an elephant sitting on my chest, but the discomfort didn’t bother me as much as the knowledge that neither of us was carrying enough fuel to keep that up for more than a few minutes, not if we wanted to have anything left to fight with when we got there.  Of course, that wouldn’t much matter if there was no there there when we got there.  I breathed easier when we dialed the burn back to one gravity, though I felt no relief.

But the Midway was only a few thousand kilometers away, and it was only a matter of minutes before I could see what was happening to her.  She hadn’t been ready yet; her drives were inoperable and she couldn’t maneuver.  She was heavily armed and heavily armored, but she was a stationary target.  Even as sensor range turned into visual range, I could see the Tahni corvettes winking into existence just outside the point where the Martian gravity would keep a wormhole from stabilizing, then launching their Ship-buster missiles and jumping back out.  The flares from the missiles’ fusion drives were torches in the night as our orbit slid into the night side of the planet, too many of them and coming in way too steadily.

The Commonwealth flagship was taking them out, two and three at a time with point defense turrets and missiles and even the proton batteries at one point, and it seemed as if they wouldn’t be able to land a hit.  But then more corvettes poured in, not launching Ship-busters, not trying for a quick kill; these were targeting the point defense systems, firing volley after volley with their railguns or their lasers, and frequently dying as those turrets took them out…but not quickly enough.

We didn’t have to talk; there was nothing to say, we knew what we had to do.  I launched every missile the bird was carrying, each programmed in flight to target the Tahni corvettes’ drive signatures, then forgot about them.  From this point on, the shuttle was a fighter as primitive in its method of attack as the ones flown by the graduates of the old Air Force Academy hundreds of years ago.  I was down to the spinal proton cannon and a dorsal Gatling laser turret, both comparatively short-ranged and only one useful against the corvettes or the Ship-Busters.

I decided to let the Midway deal with the missiles; I had a better chance of distracting the corvettes.  One of the bulbous, ungainly starships flashed across the bow of my shuttle only ten kilometers away, heading for an attack run on the cruiser and seemingly not even noticing me.  I blasted her with the proton cannon and the particle beam penetrated just aft of her armored fuel tanks, spearing through the feed line to the drive bell.  She disappeared in a globe of star-fire that kept moving with her previous momentum, headed for a descent into the thin Martian atmosphere.

And that was it.  That was the first time I ever killed anyone.  I knew from our intelligence briefings that the corvettes had a crew of ten, and I’d just killed them all.  I didn’t think about it much at the time, didn’t dwell on it, just felt a slight flush of heat in my chest that might have been satisfaction or might have been anger or fear or a dozen other things I didn’t have time to process.

I saw on my sensor feed that there were other assault shuttles out there besides Ash and me, at least three of them.  I could tell by their Identification Friend-or-Foe transponders that they were part of the twelve assigned as the Midway’s complement.  I wondered if the rest had already been destroyed.  Missiles were crisscrossing between the cruiser and the shuttles and the corvettes, twisting and turning and maneuvering as they sought out their targets and tried to avoid countermeasures.  It reminded me of the time Mom had dragged me to a zero-gravity ballet at McAuliffe Station, except it wasn’t nearly as boring.

Explosions rippled like a wave that washed up and down along the length of the cruiser, the flares lighting up the armored hull where the shadows of night had swallowed it up.  Most of them had conventional warheads, packed with a hundred kilograms of hyperexplosives behind an armor piercing warhead that sent a spear of plasma into the hull when it detonated.  Here and there, though, a fusion blast lit up the sky briefly like a secondary star, and when those weapons touched off, a corvette or a Planet-Buster missile would vanish into a cloud of ionized gas.

I waded into the middle of it, putting the ship into a random evasive course between specific targeting points where the ship’s tactical routines had calculated that I’d have both a shot and the capacitor charge to take it.  Acceleration battered at me from one angle or another and the flight helmet dosed me with anti-nausea drugs and muscle relaxants to compensate, but the ‘face link to the computer was the only thing that kept me focused when the ship locked onto a target.

I whispered the word and mystic lightning lashed out from the half-human, half-machine thing that I’d become and a Tahni ship already damaged by a missile strike took the hit from the proton cannon right through its weakened nose armor.  Atmosphere vented and caught fire as it did, and bodies tumbled out into the vacuum. I imagined I could see their faces from kilometers distant, the ridged brows and the flattened noses and the shovel-like jaws so close to human and yet ever so far away.

More buffeting, more nausea and then another shot, never missing because they weren’t even trying to evade, totally focused on destroying the cruiser.  This one cut the fuel feed to a main drive and the Tahni ship kept going on its course, already with enough velocity to escape orbit and head into interplanetary space.  She could use her Transition Drive there and escape the battle, and that didn’t seem fair; I wanted to change course and chase her down, finish her off, but I couldn’t.

Another shot, this one partially diffused by the corvette’s deflectors but still sublimating a ton of armor and sending the enemy ship into a spin, and then a missile took it through the nose and killed the bridge and the spin turned into an uncontrolled descent out of orbit that would end somewhere on the surface of the planet.

An IFF transponder went black; one of the Midway’s birds, just gone like it had never been.  I didn’t even see what got it, and didn’t have the time to check the sensor recordings.  I kept the pattern going, the jinking and the deking and the shooting, but a small part of me was facing certain stark realities:  the shuttle was very nearly out of fuel, there were too many of the enemy left, and we weren’t going to win this fight.

Shit.  I figured I’d go out fighting, but I thought I’d at least make it to my first deployment.

I giggled out loud at the thought that, just a couple hours ago, my biggest concern had been that I’d screwed up by having sex with Ash.  I was glad of it now.  One of those things you didn’t want to die leaving undone.

I’d just fired again when the first Ship-Buster made it through.

It hit near the fusion drive bell and my bird was about fifty kilometers fore of the bow or else the fireball would have swallowed me up with it.  The Midway was big enough and solid enough that the blast didn’t consume the whole ship, but ripples of shock twisted the BiPhase Carbide of its hull, traveling forward and tearing the rest of the ship apart and sending a shotgun blast of shrapnel across a swathe of space that included me.

I felt the first half-second of the six-g burn I’d initiated when something slammed into me like the fist of an angry god and everything went dark.

Chapter Four

It took me nearly a full minute to figure out that I wasn’t dead.  The data feed from my ‘face jacks had gone out in a surge of incoherent static, and the feedback hadn’t quite knocked me unconscious, but it had been a lot like pulling a rubber band until it snapped, only I was the rubber band.  I wanted to rub my eyes clear but my hand hit the visor of my helmet and I abruptly remembered what had happened.

The helmet’s external lights popped on automatically and I saw that I was exactly where I had been, strapped into the pilot’s seat of the assault shuttle, but the cockpit displays had gone dead.  I twisted around in my seat and looked back over my shoulder and I immediately saw why:  about three meters aft of the cockpit, there was nothing left but ragged strips of torn metal and I was staring into the hard vacuum.  Stars were streaking by just past the last row of ripped and shredded passenger seats, and then a brief flash of the battle still raging across the darkened face of Mars, and then more stars as what was left of the shuttle spun lazily along its new course.

I tried to remember, tried to figure which direction the ship had been facing when I’d hit the drive to try to escape the debris from the Midway, but it wouldn’t come to me.  All I could picture was the way the big cruiser had rippled with destruction, coming apart like a cheap firework.  All I could think about was Mom, somewhere inside all of it, staying at her post, directing the fight and then going down with her ship like an ocean-going Captain of old, because how else would Mom die?

Mom is dead.  Mom’s dead…

My gut cramped up and my breath caught in my throat and I felt like I was going to throw up despite the anti-nausea drugs the helmet had pumped into me.  Mom couldn’t be dead.  She could be a pain in the ass, a worthless excuse for a mother, but she couldn’t be dead…

I shook my head violently, trying to shake my thoughts clear, and felt the ‘face jacks tugging at my temples.

Shit.  Forgot.

I reached down to the pilot’s control console and yanked the jacks out of the dead connections there, letting them retract back to the external spools in my helmet.  With the connection broken, the Heads-Up Display in my helmet flickered to life and I could see the readouts from the suit’s life support system and external sensors.

The good news was, my suit was intact and I was uninjured.  The bad news was, I had about two hours’ worth of on-board air.  That could have been supplemented by an exterior EVA pack from the equipment locker, if it weren’t for the inconvenient fact that the equipment locker was gone, along with the rest of the rear half of the shuttle.

I touched a control on my wrist to activate the helmet’s communications link.

“Mayday, mayday,” I broadcast.  “This is Assault One out of Deimos Base declaring an emergency.  My shuttle has taken major structural damage and has no propulsion systems.  I am stranded in the cockpit on an unknown heading with limited oxygen supply, and I need immediate assistance.  Over.”

I repeated the transmission, knowing I was probably wasting my time.  Without the shuttle’s transmission antenna, my call was only going out short-range over the suit radio, and anyone around here would be too busy fighting the Tahni to help me out.  By the time they got around to it…well, two hours wasn’t very long.

Of course, there was always the possibility the Tahni might find me.  I cursed aloud inside my helmet, realizing I hadn’t taken the time to grab a gun from the equipment locker when I’d suited up.  I didn’t have any illusions that I could have done much with it, since the only time I’d ever fired one had been on the qualification range at flight school, but I didn’t want the Tahni to take me alive.

I unstrapped from the pilot’s seat and swung out of it, keeping my right hand tangled up in the harness out of an unreasoning fear of being thrown free of the ship by its rotation, even though I knew that wasn’t how the physics worked.  What was left of the ship wasn’t much protection, and I wouldn’t be much worse outside of it than in, but it was the only security blanket I had, and I wasn’t ready to let go of it.

Remembering the one lesson we’d had in flight school about emergency procedures when adrift in space, I activated my suit’s beacon and saw the visible-light portion of it flashing green against the overhead of the cockpit.  The more important half was the radio signal it was sending out, though neither was going to attract much attention with me hunkered inside the wreckage.

You need to get outside, I thought at myself, trying to overcome the panic I was feeling every time I looked out at the eternal blackness passing by outside the shuttle.  No one’s going to see your beacon through the damned hull.

I pried my hand off the harness to the seat, then realized that the spin of the wreckage was turning the nose of the shuttle into “down” for me and I was going to have to actually climb up the fuselage of the shuttle to get out of it.

“Are we sure this is a good idea?”  I murmured aloud in the privacy of my helmet.  But no other, better plans came to mind, and Mom had always told me that doing something was better than doing nothing, so I did it.

I used the back of my acceleration couch as a platform, standing on it and stretching out to catch my balance on the first row of seats behind the cockpit.  The centripetal force back towards the nose was minimal, but that somehow made me feel less stable instead of more.  It was like rock-climbing, but rock-climbing on Deimos or Ceres, and in a vacuum.  And blindfolded.  I hadn’t heard of anyone doing that for recreation, but I was sure someone had tried it, because people are stupid.

I nearly put a hand out on the ragged edge of the hull, then hesitated when I saw the razor-sharp surface I was about to touch.  I winced and put a palm flat against the interior bulkhead, steadying myself as I got both feet beneath me on the back of the passengers’ seat.  I stood there for a long moment, taking in and letting out several deep breaths, trying to get my heart-rate and respiration under control.  You didn’t want to be hyperventilating inside a space suit, particularly not when you had less than two hours of air left.

The hull vibrated against my palm, violently enough that I knew it would have rung like a bell if there’d been any air to carry the noise.  I drew my hand back instinctively and nearly slipped off the back of the seat.  For a panicked moment, I was sure the Tahni had found me and were coming to get me, to haul me back to their homeworld and experiment on me.  Then I had an equally ludicrous but also elated second where I was sure that my own people were about to rescue me.

Another, smaller vibration, then a third, smaller yet, gave me a more realistic idea of what was happening:  the shuttle was passing through a cloud of debris.  There must have been hundreds of them floating around out here from destroyed ships and intercepted missiles, travelling in every direction.  If I’d been outside when this one had passed, I’d likely have taken a piece of steel shrapnel right through my suit.

Shit, shit, shit.

I waited, my palm on the side of the bulkhead, waiting for more impacts, but there was nothing.  I looked around at the fuselage, torn with indecision.  Staying inside meant less chance of detection.  Leaving meant nothing to protect me from the debris…but did that really matter when I had so little air?

A burst of static answered my question.  I glanced around like I could see its origin, but I knew what it meant: someone was transmitting from close by.  I crept closer to the edge of the hull, waiting, and then the static repeated, but this time with words interspersed in it, barely intelligible.

“…you there?  Sandi?”

Without thinking, I pushed myself up and out of the fuselage, into open space.  Mars stretched out in a barely-visible arc of darkness, the terminator just over the curve of the planet, lit up from the sun on the other side of the arc.  The aftermath of the battle glowed a dim red in the darkness, even more threatening and foreboding since I knew the invisible danger it held.  Behind it all, making me almost forget the death and the loss and the hazards, was a backdrop of millions of stars, breathtakingly magnificent.

But more magnificent still was the silhouette that stood out against them only a few hundred meters away, swept wing and curved, dagger nose.  A maneuvering thruster lit up the matte-gray hull along the port side and I saw carbon scoring from a near miss.  The black shape grew larger as it drifted towards me.

“Jesus Christ, Sandi, is that you?”

“Ash,” I breathed the word out in a sigh, “you are one beautiful son of a bitch.  Get me the hell out of here.”

“Take it easy, Ensign.”  That was Farrier, sounding gruff and fatherly.  At least I assumed he was trying to sound fatherly; I’d never had much of a father to compare him to.  “We’re as close as we can get without overshooting you, but I’m coming out to get you.”

“Take your time, Chief,” I muttered, not caring whether he heard the sarcasm in my voice or not.  “I’m just enjoying the view.”

I heard his chuckle about the same time that I saw a sliver of light as the utility airlock slid open on the port side of the shuttle’s hull.  I was glad someone appreciated my sense of humor.

A maneuvering thruster spoke again as they tried to match my orbit more exactly, which couldn’t have been easy, and then Chief Farrier was floating sedately out of the open lock, trailing the reflective tail of an anchor cable, a portable maneuvering unit grasped in his right hand.  It was basically a gas gun, fed by twin tanks of reactive chemicals.  It wasn’t as powerful as an EVA pack, but it was a lot smaller and you could grab it quick in an emergency without taking fifteen minutes to get someone else to help you pull on a jet pack.  At the moment, I appreciated quick.

“Hang on,” he said inanely as he triggered a puff of coldgas and began drifting slowly my way, the headlamps of his helmet bobbing slightly with the acceleration.

What the hell else do you expect me to do?  I thought but didn’t say.  No use antagonizing him.

He was less than a hundred meters away, and I looked away instinctively as his headlamps shined in my eyes, my gaze drifting over to the wicked lines of the assault shuttle.  I wondered how close she was to bingo fuel; I know mine had been damn close near the end.

Farrier was maybe thirty meters away.  I thought I saw something on the shuttle’s hull, something like a pockmark in the armor where there hadn’t been one before, and I felt the hair standing up on the back of my neck.  There, another one…I knew it hadn’t been there before!

“Get back inside!”  Ash was yelling over my headphones.  “It’s a debris field!”

Farrier squeezed another burst out of the gas gun, going faster now, almost to me.  I could see the outline of his face through his visor, even with the lights reflecting off it.  Then the visor just wasn’t there anymore.

I didn’t see the micrometeorite that hit it; it was going too fast.  I didn’t even see it shatter; one second it was there, and the next it was ragged and broken bits of transplas and there was black blood crystallizing out of where Farrier’s face used to be.  He was still heading right for me and I grabbed him instinctively, clutching at his right arm, and then having to force myself not to let it go in revulsion.  His skull had been crushed, the insides liquefied, and it was bubbling out of his helmet, boiling into a vapor.

The anchor line had played out its full length, and Farrier’s body jerked to a halt and nearly shook me off, but I held fast.  He was dead, beyond resuscitation, but that cable represented life, and it was attached to him.  I used him for a brace and lunged for it, catching it just beyond the spool attached to his harness.  It vibrated wildly and my fingers clutched it so hard they began to cramp, but I wouldn’t let go.

“Sandi!”  Ash called, the beginnings of panic in his voice.  “Chief Farrier!  What’s going on?”

I wondered if he’d been monitoring Farrier’s vitals from the suit telemetry; if he had, he knew what had happened.  Either way, I couldn’t spare the breath to tell him; I was still holding on to Farrier’s body with one hand and the cable with the other, trying to pull myself and what was left of him towards the airlock.  It was only about thirty meters from me, so close I imagined I could feel the warmth inside the ship.  I tried not to think what would happen if one of the micrometeorites hit me before I could get inside…

…and I sure as hell hadn’t thought about what would happen if one of the flying pieces of shrapnel hit the cable.  It parted ten meters from the attachment inside the lock, sliced as neatly as if it had been cut by a laser, just as I was yanking myself forward.  The motion sent me tumbling and I cursed loudly and heatedly, ignoring Ash’s repeated transmissions.

The gas gun, I thought, and the idea cut through my desperation.

I pulled myself along Farrier’s shoulder and down his right arm, clawing at the maneuvering unit.  Thank God his fingers hadn’t spasmed when he’d died, or we would have wound up flying off into nothing.  I pried it out of his hand, wincing when I felt the bones in his fingers crack as I bent them away from the handle, but not stopping.  The shuttle was getting farther away, fifty meters now at least.

Then the gas gun was free and I aimed it behind me and held on with both hands as I squeezed the trigger.  The thrust began slowly, but built up in seconds and I felt the muscles in my forearms straining to keep control of it.  I was coming up fast on the shuttle and I adjusted the angle of the thrust to keep in line with the airlock.  I knew, somewhere in the rational part of my brain, that I should have been trying to decelerate, that I was coming in too fast, but that part also realized that the longer I was outside, the better the chance I had of getting nailed by a debris field.

The airlock was rushing up on me now and I let the gas gun go and curled up into a ball.  When I hit the inner bulkhead, I heard a snap and felt intense pain all up through my right arm and shoulder and a scream escaped through clenched teeth.  I went limp, in shock, and I saw through a haze of agony that I had bounced off the lock and was about to head back out into space again. I forced myself to move, catching each side of the lock with the magnetic soles of my boots and shuddering as I finally came to a halt.

I was fading in and out of consciousness, and I didn’t realize that the outer door had shut, or that the lock had cycled until I felt Ash’s hands around my waist, pulling me inside.  I think I screamed again from the feeling of the broken, jagged edges of the bones of my upper arm and shoulder scraping around against my muscles and tendons, but then something sharp pricked my left arm and I began to feel a warmth spreading outward through my body, displacing the agony.

It was hard to keep my eyes open, but I thought I saw Ash putting the injector back into the medical kit before he pulled me along into the cockpit.  He was saying something; I could see his mouth moving inside the visor of his helmet, but the words seemed garbled and unclear.

“You’re going to be okay, Sandi,” he said and I finally understood it, his tone soothing and much calmer than I would have been without the drugs.  “You’re okay, it’s going to be okay.”

He was strapping me into the copilot’s seat, being ever so careful yet I still felt the tug in my shoulder as he slipped the harness over my arm and I think I blacked out this time.  When I opened my eyes again, everything was hazy, but there was a weight pressing against my chest.

Acceleration, I thought.  We’re moving.

“Mayday, mayday, mayday!”  Ash’s voice was insistent and just a centimeter shy of desperate.  “This is Assault Shuttle Two out of Deimos.  We are inserting into Martian orbit, but we don’t have enough fuel to land on Mars and the Deimos docking bay is unusable.  Any available ship with intact docking facilities, please respond.”

I don’t know if he repeated the transmission or if I was just imagining I heard it again, but I had the sense that some amount of time had passed before the response came.

“Assault Two,” a woman’s contralto answered, “this is the Jutland.  You’re cleared to dock with us, please follow the beacon in.  And watch for debris.”

“Wilco, Jutland, Assault Two out.”

I swallowed hard and forced myself to speak.

“The Jutland,” I said, hearing the slur in my words from the painkillers.  “She’s still there.”

“She’s still around,” he agreed, his voice ragged with exhaustion.  “I wonder how many others are.”  He sighed, flexing his fingers and starting to reach up like he was going to run a hand over his face, but stopping when he realized he still had his helmet on.  “I wonder if it’s over.”

I laughed.  I couldn’t stop myself, I giggled helplessly, feeling the pain it caused in my shoulder like it was happening to someone else, someone far away.  I could see Ash staring at me, could just make out his eyes through the visor of his helmet and saw their confusion.

“Of course it’s not over,” I told him, trying to explain.  I laughed again, then coughed and winced.

“It’s just beginning.”

Chapter Five

TCN Instell NewsNet Report, 12 August, 2263

As reports continue to be declassified, a tale begins to grow of selfless heroism in the face of a terrifying and unexpected enemy surprise attack.  Though several ships and thousands of lives were tragically lost in the Battle for Mars, individual devotion to duty above safety led Space Fleet personnel stationed at Deimos and the Martian shipyards to launch a valiant counter-attack which saved the cruiser Jutland and several others from destruction.

Shown here is footage of the award ceremony for Ensigns Sandrine Hollande and Ashton Carpenter, both awarded the Commonwealth Medal of Valor, the highest military award.  Straight out of training and waiting on Deimos for their first assignment, they nevertheless boarded a pair of assault shuttles which had survived the initial attack on the moon base there and…

“Turn that shit off,” I snapped, not looking up from my drink.

It was vodka instead of tequila.  For some reason, tequila was in short supply in the bars in Lowell, so I’d nurtured a taste in vodka for the three weeks Ash and I had been stuck here.  At this point, I didn’t know why I’d ever wanted to visit Mars in the first place.  Life inside the domes felt even more claustrophobic than the caves on Deimos, and everyone down here was too tall and too skinny and had a huge stick up their ass.

Their dance clubs were generic and boring, their bars were cheap imitations of Earth and I was bored out of my skull.  The Jutland had left for patrol while they’d been putting on that dog and pony show with Ash and me, giving us medals for the incredible job we’d done failing to keep the Tahni from destroying Mom’s ship.  The two of us were stuck here, told that our assignments were “pending,” and I was about ready to shoot someone.

“Don’t you think you’ve had enough for tonight, Lieutenant?”  The bartender’s tone was mild and friendly, but the “Lieutenant” part was a reminder that, even though I was wearing civilian clothes, he knew who I was and who to report me to if I got out of hand.  To say that the bartender was a tall, gangly man would have been redundant; all of the damn Martians were tall and gangly, the ones born here anyway.  They could have reversed that with a little genetic surgery, but it was like an ethnic pride thing now.

It felt weird, being called “Lieutenant.”  Ash and I had both been bumped up to Lieutenant-junior grade with the medals, months ahead of schedule, which also seemed like part of the show.

“No,” I answered the bartender’s question, then knocked back the rest of the glass demonstratively.  “Turn off the news and get me another drink.”

The tall man shook his head disapprovingly, but he switched the holotank’s feed to entertainment, then went to get a bottle.  At least they poured the booze out of real glass here in Lowell.  If there was anything that was cheap on Mars, it was silicon.

“You’re the girl in that story,” the guy next to me at the bar said.

I glanced over at him.  He was a civilian, with the look of an engineer or a technician, someone who didn’t care much about his looks or presentation and didn’t have much in the way of people skills.  From the way he was squinting in the dim light of the bar, he either had an eye injury or his blood alcohol level was somewhere north of mine.  He hunched over his drink, leaning forward onto the polished rock of the bar, fingers splayed out around the shot glass.

“You’re the one who got the medal,” he elaborated.

“What about it?”  I demanded.  I usually denied it, but we were nearly the only ones in the place tonight, so what the hell?

“Congratulations,” he said, with a grudging politeness, like he thought it was the right thing to say, but didn’t really mean it.

“Yeah,” I responded without enthusiasm, determined to ignore him.

For a second, I thought he was through and I could go back to the business of getting drunk, but then he spoke again, this time with less self-conscious politeness.

“They make it sound like we won.”  He snorted like that was hilarious.  “We got our asses kicked.”

“What do you know about it?”  I wondered, curious because I knew he was right.

“I was a contractor, helping to finish off the Midway,” he explained.  “I was on the dry-dock when the Tahni attacked.”  He grimaced, his pale, doughy face getting even paler.  “I was lucky, managed to get on one of the life-pods.”  He shook himself, as if he could get rid of the memory.

“It was a disaster,” he whispered huskily.  He looked at me and I saw the fear turn to sympathy.  “I heard in the story that your mom was on the Midway.  Sorry.”

I nodded, not wanting to talk about it.  There’d been a lot of people saying they were sorry in the last few weeks, and I’d gotten tired of hearing it.

“I been thinking about dying, since, you know…what happened,” he went on.  “I’m older than I look, you know?  I’m like a hundred and ten.”  He laughed again, with a little bitterness.  “I think.  I don’t feel like looking it up.”

I blinked, reassessing the man.  That was much older than I’d thought.

“I can remember when everyone died of old age, basically,” he said, eyes clouding over.  “My grandpa died when he was just a little older than what I am now.  His father died when he was ninety.  Now…”  He trailed off, smiling wanly.  “Now, no one dies of anything unless something kills them.  But y’see, I don’t think most people realize it yet.  We all still think our lives are short.  Someday though, maybe fifty years, maybe a hundred years down the road…someday we’re all gonna’ realize it.”

He turned and looked at me and suddenly his eyes were blue and clear and sober.

“What’s gonna’ happen then?  Who’s gonna’ want to go take the risk of colonizing a new planet, or scouting an unexplored system or,” he waved up at where the news had been playing in the holotank a minute ago, “fighting a damned war, when they know they can just sit around on their ass and live a thousand years?”

“I don’t think it’ll come to that,” I said, drinking down a swallow from a fresh glass of vodka.  “We’ll fuck it up, somehow.  It’s what we do.”

“And what about kids?”  He went on as if he hadn’t heard me respond.  He was staring straight ahead now, lost in his own head.  “I got three, and they’re all in their sixties or seventies now, with kids and grandkids and…hell, I don’t even know them anymore.  Who’s gonna’ want to have kids if you can live forever?”

“Sandi!”

I turned at Ash’s voice, ready to yell at him for trying to scold me out of drinking too much or into seeing a grief counsellor, but then I realized he sounded excited.  He was grinning as he stepped in through the bar’s swinging door.

“Got news,” he announced, sliding onto the stool next to me.

He didn’t ask if I’d heard it already, because he knew I wasn’t reading, watching or listening to anything.

“Admiral Shan got shit-canned,” he told me, waving for the bartender’s attention.

I felt a dull sense of surprise that quickly faded.  We’d been caught with our pants around our ankles, and someone had to pay the price.  President Jameson wasn’t going to resign, so that left the head of Space Fleet.

“What dumb shit did they get to replace him?”  I wondered.

“Admiral Sato.”  He was grinning again, like the cat that ate the canary.  This time I was actually taken aback.  “Give me whatever beer you have on tap,” Ash told the bartender.

“Sato,” I repeated.  “He’s the one who’s been making all that noise about how we’re not taking full advantage of the Transition Drive, how we’re still fighting the war like everything has to go through the wormhole Jumpgates.”

The Jumpgates had given us the stars, back when we’d stumbled on the gate in the Belt that led to Proxima, to the habitable planet Hermes that orbited it, and to the map carved into a slab of metal in the Edge Mountains there.  The Jumpgates had been left behind by a race we called the Predecessors, but they’d vanished at least ten or twenty thousand years ago, and the map on Hermes was the only artifact we’d ever been able to find to prove they existed.

That had been the cause of the first war with the Tahni, the fact that there were only so many habitable systems you could reach through the Jumpgates, and they’d been there first and claimed all of them, even ones where they’d never established any sort of presence.  To bust through the defenses around a gate, you needed huge, over-armored cruisers and lots of them.

Just a few decades ago, Teller and Fox had invented their warp unit, and everything had been turned on its ear.  Now, you could make your own wormhole into the otherness of Transition Space, connected by the gravito-inertial lines between stellar masses.  You could come out almost anywhere in a system, not just at a fixed Jumpgate, and you could access systems that didn’t have Jumpgates.  That had opened up a lot of habitable worlds, and people hadn’t been willing to wait for the Commonwealth government to approve them, so they’d set up squatter colonies without clearance.  And some of those colonies were in systems already claimed by the Tahni.

That’s how the long Cold War had suddenly gotten very hot again.  The Tahni had fusion bombed those colonies and killed half a million humans.  President Jameson hadn’t wanted to be the man to get us back into a shooting war, but 500,000 dead people were more than even a political hack like him could ignore.

“That’s the other news.”  Ash took a swallow of the dark ale the Martian had placed in front of him.  “The shipyards are going to get rebuilt, but they’re being retooled.  Instead of turning out more cruisers, Sato has an idea for something he calls a ‘missile cutter.’  It’s about the size of an assault shuttle, but it’s got a Transition drive, and a weapons bay big enough to carry a couple Ship-Busters.”  He took another drink, longer this time, and let out a breath at the end of it.  “We’re going to do unto them the way they just did unto us, but we’re going to do it faster and better.”

“Anyone got a mock-up of what these things are supposed to look like?”  I wondered, very curious now.

He pulled out his ‘link and after scrolling through a couple screens, turned it around to show me.  My eyes widened.  The ship in the video didn’t look like a mock-up, it looked like a production model.  It was about a hundred meters long and half that wide, a bit larger in overall measurements than an assault shuttle, but much bulkier and more massive.  Where an assault shuttle was sleek and built for fighting in an atmosphere, this was a starship.  It was a solid, wedge-shaped, delta-winged craft that looked like it might fly in an atmosphere by the grace of the fusion reactor in its guts but not by aerodynamics.

The plasma drive coils were the smallest I’d ever seen on a ship, and I imagined she couldn’t do much in the way of acceleration, but then she wouldn’t have to; that was what the Teller-Fox warp unit was for.  I was in awe.  She looked like a blunt instrument compared to the dagger of an assault shuttle, but a blunt instrument that I wanted very much to wield.

“They’re organizing strike wings into something that Sato’s calling the ‘Attack Command,’” Ash went on.  “They’re looking for volunteers.”  He cocked an eyebrow.  “And assault shuttle pilots get priority assignment.”

“No shit?”  I blurted, jumping up from the stool abruptly.  “Can we do it now?  Do we have to do it in person?  Who do we contact?”  A small part of me realized I was volunteering him for it too, in my head and with my assumptions.

“Relax, Sandi,” he told me, spreading his hands, palms towards me in a quelling motion.  “It’s taken care of.”  He smirked.  “Being a Medal of Valor winner does have some perks, after all.  We are both assigned as pilots in First Squadron, Strike Wing Alpha, First Attack Command Group, the very first one in the history of the Fleet.  We report to the Fleet Training Center on Inferno in 300 hours.”

I jumped into his arms and kissed him so hard I almost knocked him off his feet.  I was laughing, excited, forgetting everything I’d been ruminating over for the last three weeks and the last few minutes.

“Ash, you’re a damned genius!”  I crowed, earning an amused look from the bartender.

“We have to catch a shuttle to our transport in twenty hours,” Ash told me, arms around my waist, hands edging lower than that.

“Twenty hours is a long time,” I acknowledged in what almost felt like a purr, running my tongue over my teeth.  I kissed him again, slower this time and full of promise, and I could feel the heat inside my stomach as something stirred for the first time in weeks.

We hadn’t been together since Deimos, and Ash hadn’t complained or said anything, and I guess he thought it was because of my mother.  Maybe it was, but it was also partly because I’d been so conflicted about it last time.  Now…for some reason, I didn’t feel any hesitation at all.  This seemed right, like everything was coming together, like this was how things were supposed to be.

I almost didn’t notice the old guy, the engineer.  He was still looking at me, and there was something in his face, in the pale shadows of it, that reminded me of a skull.  Then he tried to smile and waved a polite goodbye and the illusion faded.

“Good luck,” he said.

I attempted a smile back as Ash and I headed out the door, but it didn’t quite make it to the rest of my face.  I felt a slight chill on the back of my neck at the sight of him.  He was just a sad, old man I knew, just dealing with loss and pain the way we all were, except he had a century of it built up.

But to me, he looked like death.

Chapter Six

I stood at attention and tried to stare at Captain Damian Keating without moving my eyes.  He stalked between the rows of pilots formed up on the genetically engineered grass in the quad of Attack Command, Strike Wing Alpha.  It sounded grand, but it was just a cluster of ugly, hastily-constructed buildings, still grey and drab with their bare buildfoam walls baking in the afternoon heat of 82 Eridani.

In that respect, it was just like Captain Keating.  He was a grey, drab man who sounded much grander than he was.  His blue Fleet utility fatigues were limp and baggy, like the flesh under his black, fish-like eyes.  He wasn’t what I’d expected…but then, none of this had been so far, starting with the course we’d gone through at Training Command over the last three months.

It had been nearly ninety straight days of Virtual Reality simulations, and not once the whole time had we as much as been in the same hangar as one of the missile cutters we were assigned to fly.  It had been explained to us that the spacecraft were still in the process of final testing and would be there when we reported to our units.  There’d also been supplemental physics training to teach us as much as they knew about the Transition Drive.  Most of it had been more detailed versions of what we’d learned in our Academy science classes, but I suppose everyone needed a refresher.

At least it had been less restrictive and structured than Flight School had been, and no one had seemed to care that Ash and I shared a room.  It wasn’t against regulations, not technically, since we were both the same rank and not in each other’s chain of command.  I still wasn’t sure if it had been a good decision to get involved with him, but it was made now.  Maybe it would work out and maybe it wouldn’t, but you couldn’t un-screw that pooch…and since Mars, I didn’t like thinking about the long term anyway.  We could all be dead in a week, or tomorrow.

“I know,” Keating said, still keeping all of us at attention as he spoke, “that all of you think you’re here because you’re hot-shot pilots, the best of the best.”  His voice was grating, like metal scraping on metal.  I’d already decided he was an asshole.  Anyone who kept a full wing of officers at attention outside, on a summer afternoon on Inferno while he lectured them was an asshole.

“Let me be the first to disabuse you of that notion.  You’re here because we’re desperate and you’re what was available.”  Well, at least he was honest.  I had to give him that.

“Do not think you’re invulnerable, despite what you’ve survived before.  Do not think your shit doesn’t stink because someone pinned a medal on your chest.”

Oof.  That was aimed at Ash and I, right between the eyes.  We hadn’t even met the guy yet and he was already taking shots at us.

Keating stepped back out in front of the formation, hands dramatically placed on his hips.

“Our boats will be armed, fueled and prepped on the South Landing Field at the Tartarus Spaceport in twelve hours.  Your crew chiefs will be waiting with the boats; you’ll meet them then.  You’ll have in your ‘links the details of our first mission; I suggest you get with your squadron leaders, get in the simulators and start going over it.  Don’t worry about sleeping, you’ll have time for that in Transition space.”

Only long-engrained habit kept my mouth from dropping open in shock.

Twelve fucking hours?  We’d just got out of the Training Center yesterday!  I hadn’t even had time to unpack!

Keating came to attention.

“Squadron leaders, take charge of your people.”

He did a sloppy about-face and stomped off towards the Headquarters Building and I shot an expression of disbelief at Ash, who was beside me in the formation, then came back to attention as our Squadron Leader stepped in front of us.

“At ease,” she said immediately and I breathed an involuntary sigh of relief, finally able to move my shoulders again.  Commander Anjelica Gomez was a small woman, petit to the point of being elfin, with dark hair that fell to the bottom of her neck and nearly hid her ‘face jacks, and features that hinted at Asian ancestry despite her name.

I heard a gabble of attempted command voices from the five other squadron leaders, but tuned them out with practiced ease.  I concentrated on the woman in front of us and the ten other pilots lined up around me…and on not getting heat stroke.  82 Eridani has two habitable planets, and there’s a reason this one was named Inferno and the other one was named Eden.  There was also a reason the military owns Inferno:  no one else wanted it.

“I know none of us have even had a chance to meet yet, much less train together,” Gomez said.  She was right…I only knew her name at all because I’d studied the roster on my ‘link last night when they’d uploaded our assignment details.  “But we’re going out anyway, because this mission is important and we’re the only ones who can do it.”

She had a good speaking voice, I thought, particularly for someone so tiny.

“We’re going to be…,” she began, then stopped abruptly, squinting up at the glare of 82 Eridani and wiping sweat from her forehead.  “Fuck it, we’re going inside.  Follow me.”

There were grins and a couple of laughs at that, and we ambled in a big shambolic cluster into the headquarters building.  I felt a rush of relief as we hit the air conditioning, all the sweat running down the back of my fatigues suddenly drying.  We passed through a half-finished central reception area and past a netdiver plugged into a holographic computer system who wasn’t looking at anything in our world.  There were signs leading to our Squadron area, and we walked by a couple of offices before we entered a small break room stocked with a couple of cheap, plastic couches, two tables and maybe six chairs.

“Have a seat,” Gomez invited, leaning back against a shelf that held a coffee-maker, a food processor and half a dozen containers of spirulina powder and soy paste for it.

There was a general mumbling and shuffling and Ash and I wound up seated at the table closest to her, while she stayed standing.

“Okay,” she went on, taking a deep breath and letting it out in a sigh.  “We’re mounting a raid on a Tahni refueling station in the atmosphere of a gas giant in a system they used for support when they launched the attack on the Martian shipyards,” she explained.  “I hope I don’t have to explain why this is vital and time-sensitive; if we give them time and don’t take these support stations out, they’ll launch another attack, this time maybe on Luna, or even Earth.”

“That kind of target,” one of the other pilots, a tall, slender man with skin the color of old teak, said a bit hesitantly, “they could hit it with conventional forces, like a cruiser.”

“They could,” Gomez admitted, nodding to the man…I think his name was Modi.  “But we don’t have as many cruisers as we did a few months ago,” she reminded us darkly.  “And the brass is very worried about a possible strike on Earth, so the ones we do have are staying close to home.  As of right now, and for the foreseeable future, the Attack Command is it as far as the Commonwealth military projecting its power on an interstellar level.”

I saw Ash swallow hard at that, but it made sense.

“How many Strike Wings is the Attack Command going to have?”  A mousy, brown-haired, nondescript-looking woman asked.  Her name was Weisz.

“As many as they can crank out, as fast as they can produce them.”  Gomez’ words were grim, and we all knew why.  They wouldn’t be producing that many if they didn’t expect to lose a lot of them.

“Do we have any guidance on tactics?”  I asked, finally feeling safe asking the question.  “The training course was a bit…light on that subject.”

“It’s all on-the-job training,” our squadron leader admitted.  “No one’s ever fought with this sort of craft before.  For now, they’re going to go with what I honestly think is a move-for-move imitation of the Tahni tactics at Mars:  serial missile-launch swarms, coming out of T-space at about five-minute intervals, launching and then jumping out.  Meanwhile, we’ll have maybe a half a squadron tying up their point defenses as a distraction.”

“Shit,” I muttered, remembering how well that had gone for the crews of those corvettes.

“We don’t meet our crew chiefs till tomorrow?”  Ash wondered plaintively.  “Isn’t there any way we could get them involved in the simulator runs?”

“Not possible,” Gomez said bluntly.  “They’re needed to get the birds ready for launch in time.”

“How do we decide on wingmen?”  Weisz wanted to know.

“I’ll let you decide on that.”  Gomez waved a hand dismissively.  “You’re all adults and officers and you all have flight experience.  Get it done.”

I nudged Ash and he grinned slightly in response.  At least there was some good news.

“Okay, we’ve spent enough time jawing,” she decided, clapping her hands together enthusiastically.  “Get to the training bays, jack in and start logging simulator time.  Everyone concentrate on coordination with your wingman, run missile launch scenarios for an hour, then point defense distraction for an hour.  Then I’ll hand out assignments for the mission.”  She looked around at us, then made shooing motions.  “Go, now, get going.”

“Glad we already had lunch,” Ash muttered next to me as we made our way out of the break room.  “I don’t think we’re going to have much time for dinner.”

***

My eyes were stinging and tungsten weights were dragging my shoulders down and I felt my head bobbing with the motion of the open utility sled over the heat-twisted pavement.  Sunrise was hours away and the stars were invisible behind layers of clouds and haze, but I could see the lights of the spaceport shining on its high, white walls a few kilometers away.

The port was for transports and couriers and VIP shuttles.  Us garden-variety pilots got to park our rides out here on the open tarmac of the landing fields.  And there they were, lit up by the glare of the security floodlights, row upon row of the delta-winged monsters, lined up wingtip to wingtip in a square a kilometer on a side.  They’d appeared as if by magic; they hadn’t been there the day before when we’d passed through.  The maintenance crews were retreating as the flight crews moved in, taking their tractors and cargo trucks and running back to their hangars and sheds and warehouses.

I made myself look at the other three pilots on the sled.  There was Ash, of course, leaning against me, offering a supporting shoulder, always solid and dependable whether as a friend or a lover.  On the other side of him was a broad-shouldered, square-headed blond who looked like he spent every off hour in the base gym; his arm barely fit into the sleeves of his blue Fleet fatigue top.  His name was Warner, and he had probably the thickest Australian accent I’d ever heard.  I figured he must be able to regulate it over the comms or they wouldn’t have let him into flight training.

Then there was Weisz, looking even more unkempt and haggard than she had before we’d spent the last twelve hours hooked into a ViR simulator.  She was good…on the simulator.  If she could do the same thing in a real bird…dammit, boat, now.  I’d never get that straight.  If she could do the same thing in a real boat, maybe she’d be handy to have on the distraction team.

I shook my head.  I don’t know if I’d realized that the reward for doing especially well on the simulator was to be made a sacrificial lamb.  The four of us, along with Commander Gomez, would be sitting on the target for the whole attack sequence, keeping the defenses busy to make it easier for the missiles to get through.

And yippee, we’d get to sit around in a cramped box for nearly a week with someone we’d never met before and think about it.  As the sled began to slow, I could see them waiting at the bottom of the belly ramps of the cutters, the crew chiefs.  It was an inapt job title for what they were doing, but this was a new ship design and the nomenclature would have to be worked out.  They weren’t really a crew chief, because they and the pilot were the whole crew, and they were enlisted, so they weren’t chief of anything.

They would be the repair technician, the gunner at need, the medical specialist, basically everything except the pilot and navigator, because we were both of those rolled into one.  I stepped off the sled before it stopped, right in front of my boat, and Ash jumped off a second behind me, closer to his own.  He caught my eye and grinned.

“See you on the other side,” he said, with confidence and bravado I knew him well enough to know he didn’t feel.

I tried to think of something to say back, something that would sound badass or uplifting or that would tell him how I felt about him.  But I was dead tired and scared and had no idea how I felt, so I just waved and smiled, then walked up to the belly ramp of my ship.

The woman waiting for me there looked as tired as I felt, her hands in the pockets of her sweat-stained fatigue pants as she leaned against the ramp stanchion.  Her hair was close-cropped and tightly-curled and her eyes gleamed darkly in the light from inside the ship.  Her ebony face was ageless, but the lines around her eyes from squinting into different suns hinted she was older than me by at least ten years.  She reluctantly pushed away from the stanchion and sketched a salute.  I returned it, then offered her a hand and she shook it with a dry, firm grip.

“You must be Lt. Hollande,” the Crew Chief said, her voice harsh and gravelly, maybe because she’d been working on the ship for hours back into the previous afternoon, or maybe that was just how she talked.  “I’m Master Chief Burke.”

“Nice to meet you, Chief,” I told her.  I nodded up the ramp.  “Want to show me our ride?”

“Aye, ma’am,” Burke said, waving for me to follow her.

The ramp took us into a utility bay, a lot like the ones in an assault shuttle except larger and with twice as many equipment lockers.  A service airlock was off to one side for use when docking or for Extra-Vehicular Activity.  It all seemed very new, newer and shinier and cleaner than any spacecraft I’d ever been on.

“You got your flight suits here,” Chief Burke rapped a knuckle on the door of the nearest locker.  “EVA gear in here,” the next door received the muted knock.  “And personal weapons here.”  That was the last one on the port side.  The Chief grinned crookedly.  “I don’t know about you, ma’am, but I hope to hell we never need that one.”

“Your lips to God’s ears, Chief,” I agreed.

“Missile bays are on either side of us,” she pointed downwards at the deck, “but those are serviced externally.  There’s a small hatch we can get into them through in case of emergency, but again, I’d rather not.  They can take up to a Ship-Buster each, but today we’re loaded with Anti-Radiation Missiles, lucky us.”

She kept her finger pointed at the deck, but swiped it back and forth from stem to stern.

“The proton cannon is a spinal mount, emitter is just portside of the nose, again serviced externally.  We also have a Gatling laser turret that’s wing-mounted, you can slave it to the targeting computer for autonomous point defense use or I can control it manually from my station.”

She chuckled.  “And that’s the full extent of our armament, unless you want to pull a carbine out of the locker and lean out the airlock.”

She led me up a narrow passageway, pointing at a series of doors along the way.

“Your cabin.”  She indicated the one to port.  “My cabin.”  This time it was starboard.  “The head, with the smallest shower you’ve ever seen in your life.”  That one was just past her cabin on the starboard side.

Then we were just outside the cockpit and on the portside there was a tiny, U-shaped couch jammed in around a small table.  Above it was a food processor built into the center of a series of cabinets.

“Shitty food is there,” Burke said, nodding at the shelf.  “Standard military soy and spirulina with a machine that tries to dress it up as something edible.”  The other side of the passage had a fold-down gurney and medical scanners stacked to the overhead.  “That’s our half-assed med bay, just in case either of us gets an owie along the way.  We don’t have an auto-doc or anything fancy, so I hope neither of us needs it.”

She ducked through the cockpit hatch and fell into what would have been the copilot’s seat on an assault shuttle, and I slid past her to the left-hand position, my spot.  I buckled the harness, then powered the acceleration couch around to face forward, instantly finding the interface cables and plugging them into my implant jacks with rote motions.

I was bombarded with data, so much more than I’d been used to with an assault shuttle; it would have been overwhelming if I hadn’t had so much time on the simulator.

“I’m assuming you were given the specifics about the reactor, the capacitor banks, the Teller-Fox warp unit, and all that crap.”  Chief Burke’s voice sounded far away, like an echo from another room, and I had to force myself to concentrate enough on it to comprehend what she was saying.

“Roger that, Chief,” I said absently, parroting them from the learning packet I’d audited over and over.  “Two hundred Mega-Watt fusion reactor, standard plasma drive coil.  Two superconductive capacitor banks, so we can keep one charged up to jump and the other as a sink for the warp field.”  I thought of something and withdrew my focus slightly from the process of warming up the reactor and spinning up the turbines for the atmospheric jets.

“Does she have a name?”  I asked Burke.  The older woman chuckled, as if she’d expected the question.

“Officially, she’s ATC1011345678211,” she rattled the designation off as if it were her own serial number, “but a name…”  She shook her head.  “You’re her first pilot, so you get to name her.”  She waved a hand around to indicate all the birds…dammit, all the boats…warming up around us, getting ready for takeoff.  “They all do.”

I started feeding power from the reactor to the turbines, sucking in air through vents in the front of the wings and running it through the reactor to heat it up before expelling it from the belly jets.

“ATC1011345678211,” I heard the automated tones of the military traffic control system echoing in my head over the interface, “you are cleared for takeoff.”

The ship rumbled with power as she lifted off the tarmac, the landing treads folding gracefully into her belly.  I’d done this thousands of times in a simulator, but reality still felt so totally different.  The belly jets roared their defiance of gravity and carried us fifty meters up before I began bleeding power from them to the rear engines and we moved forward and upward with three dozen other ships in formation around us.

I felt a rush of warmth at the power of the ship, of all of them moving together with one purpose like the pride of lions I’d seen on the hunt in the Great Plains Wildlife Preserve when I was a kid.  Mom had taken me there for my twelfth birthday.

“Any ideas, ma’am?”  Burke asked casually, seemingly unaffected by the experience.  “For a name, I mean.”

“Yeah,” I murmured, just before I let the interface swallow me up again.  “I’m calling her Huntress.”

Chapter Seven

The Teller-Fox warp unit ripped a hole around us in the fabric of Transition space and spat the Huntress out like a watermelon seed back into the mundane realms of our native universe.  I felt the gut-punch disorientation of Transition travel through my body and even up the interface jacks, passing over me like a wave of nausea.  But then it was gone and I was part of the ship again, and the ship was part of a larger web of the Squadron.

Well, part of the Squadron.  Commander Gomez, Weisz, Warner, Ash and I had come out of T-space together, the way we’d entered, with the others a minute or so behind us.  Reality hammered at me from the ship’s external cameras as the absolute nothingness of T-space gave way to the sullen, ashen face of the gas giant, a monster as large as Jupiter and only about half the distance from its primary star as Earth was from the sun.  It dominated the system, with no other intact planets for competition, just an asteroid belt farther out, and it lacked even a single moon large enough to support an atmosphere.  It was a Tahni system, but they’d never had a major colony here before the war because of the lack of habitables.

Now, though, I could already detect the thermal signature of the gas mining complex skimming the upper atmosphere of the giant from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away…and I could also detect the missile launches from the surface of one of the captured asteroids that was the largest of the thing’s moons and was much, much closer.

“Evasion course,” Gomez ordered tersely.  “Launch ARMs.”

I could feel the jolt as the Anti-Radiation Missiles separated from us, kicking out of the launch bays on puffs of inert coldgas before their main engines ignited, then rocketing away to seek out the source of the targeting radars and lidars trying to spot us.  Before they were more than a few kilometers away, I’d fed power to the plasma drive and felt it push me back into my crash couch with three gravities’ worth of acceleration.  We could manage up to six g’s or maybe a smidge more in an emergency, but this fight was going to last a while and there was no use running out of reactor fuel early.

I slaved the Gatling laser turret to the computers and set it to free-fire when the incoming missiles got within range, powered up the proton cannon and headed in towards the anti-spacecraft batteries.  I could sense Ash’s cutter accelerating to match my course, only a few thousand meters off my port side, pinging on lidar as well as with his IFF transponder.  The other paired ships would be a few thousand kilometers more to our starboard, while Gomez would hang back and direct us from behind our formation.

Our missiles could afford to accelerate a lot harder than us, and they were nearly at the moon already, the input from their nose cameras just another piece of data added to the collage the computer was painting in my mind over the interface.  Point-defense batteries had opened up on them, but they were small and fast-moving and aimed at stationary targets and some of them got through.  Thermal blooms flared in the sensors as hyperexplosive charges detonated and radar dishes and lidar projectors were blown to fragments…and then it was their turn.

Their missiles, unlike our ARMs, were radar-guided.  Nothing in their arsenal was unguided, and no weapon was autonomous.  According to the intelligence briefings we’d received in the Academy, it was part of their religion:  they saw themselves as the divine hand of their god-emperor, and taking a life was something only to be done by the will of a living mind.  That didn’t mean that, after a century of fighting us, they hadn’t developed some kick-ass electronic warfare techniques, which was why we didn’t use armed drones ourselves, aside from the legalities of it.

Being guided, though, meant that destroying their radar and lidar gear left the missiles with nothing to home in on but thermal emissions.  At nearly the same time, in a move ingrained in all our pilots by doctrine and training, all of our ships cut their drives and launched countermeasures.  The flares spread out around us, burning at tens of thousands of degrees and drawing the Tahni weapons towards their thermal signatures while we maneuvered as wide as we could on maneuvering thrusters.

The fusion explosions were white Christmas tree ornaments hanging in space, lacking in the dramatics they would have had in an atmosphere with no air around them to cause a shock wave, and none was close enough to be a radiation danger.  I counted the IFF transponders and breathed a sigh of relief that we were all still there.

We had one other advantage here, and that was the fact that the Tahni wouldn’t use Gauss cannons against us.  They had the power and the raw materials to pretty much fire endlessly if they’d cared to, but this was their supply depot and their freighters would have to navigate it, and the thing about solid kinetic-energy rounds was, they just kept going at really high speeds, and they were just as likely to hit your own ship coming in a month from now as they were the enemy.

“Where the hell are the other squadrons?”  That was Weisz, breaking communications protocols, but it was a damn good question.  We’d been at this for several minutes; they should have been here.

“Transition lag,” Gomez responded, not bothering to chew Weisz out.

I cursed under my breath, remembering that part of our physics refresher course.  Time didn’t work quite the same in Transition space as it did in realspace and unless you left simultaneously with another ship and from the same entry point into T-space, there would be slippage.  The rest of the boats had left a couple minutes after us, but they might be as much as a half hour late Transitioning into the system or they might even conceivably have arrived before us, though that hadn’t happened.

Basically, it meant we were on our own and at the mercies of hyperdimensional physics.

“Shit,” I said aloud.

The word barely had time to echo in the cockpit before I had a new reason to say it.  Sensors showed a flight of four Tahni corvettes leaving orbit around the small moon and heading our way.  I wanted to curse again, but I didn’t want to repeat myself.

“I assume everyone sees those,” Ash drawled in dry understatement.

It wasn’t a shock, exactly.  We hadn’t known if they’d have space assets, but the corvettes were cheap and easy to manufacture and it wouldn’t be a burden for the Tahni to leave a few here, just in case.

“Split wide with your wingmen,” Gomez instructed us, still close enough that there wasn’t any lightspeed lag.  “I’ll try to draw one to me, but if they gang up on two of you, I’ll head over and pitch in.”

“Stay on my wing, Ash,” I said, using the belly jets and the maneuvering thrusters to kick the Huntress onto a new heading before I re-ignited the plasma drive.

“Always,” he replied simply, yet with enough meaning that I smiled.

Two g’s kicked me in the pants and I sensed him following, then saw that the squadron of corvettes was splitting up to come after us.

“You might want to release the Gatling laser to my control,” Chief Burke said quietly from beside me and I nearly jumped at the unexpected declaration.

Honestly, I had almost forgotten she was there.  I’d thought that we’d get to know each other better on the days-long trip through T-space, for good or ill, but she’d made it clear from minute one that we were splitting watches so we’d both get some sleep.  In the few minutes per sleep cycle that we’d both been awake, she’d been absorbed in auditing a virtual tech class and I hadn’t gotten more than a half-dozen words out of her the whole flight.

“Not just yet, Chief,” I said, focusing the ship’s sensors on the corvettes and waiting.  “I’m thinking that they’re going to…”

“We have missile launch,” Ash announced at about the same time as I saw the thermal signature of the weapons separating from the pods on the corvettes who’d split off to follow us.

“I noticed,” I replied, trying not to snap the words.  We were both seeing the same data, but Ash liked to talk.  “I think now would be a good time to launch the rest of our own.  Set for intercept and hope for the best.”

It was kind of a desperation move, throwing out all our remaining missiles to try to stop theirs, but I knew I’d used up most of my countermeasures already, and the Gatling laser only had a few thousand rounds in its reservoir.  I gave the command and the ship seemed to leap ahead as the rest of the missiles fell away from the launch bay, spinning with their maneuvering jets before they ignited and rocketed back towards the incoming fire.

“Sorry, Chief,” I added to Burke.  “Just want to keep the Gatling in reserve in case any of them make it through.”

“Don’t apologize, ma’am,” she chided me.  “It’s your ship.”

The corvettes were really cutting loose, the two chasing us riding a six-g burn that was going to put them within effective gun range in minutes.  Our missiles were already catching up to theirs and I saw the first of them blow, the white globes of their detonation much smaller than the fusion blasts from earlier.  They were effective though; my scans showed half of the incoming weapons drifting off course and not trying to correct.  That meant that the maneuvering thrusters or the guidance circuits had been knocked out, or both.

Of course, that was only half.  I counted at least ten still accelerating, and five of those had my name on them.  The Gatling opened fire on its own when the first of them came in range.  I could just barely sense the vibration through the hull of the hyperexplosive cartridges in the ignition chamber, pulsing their heat energy through the multiple lasing tubes, and the laser pulses themselves were, of course, invisible in a vacuum.  The tactical systems helpfully simulated the line of pressure pulses spraying out from the turret, connecting the underside of the wing with one of the incoming missiles for just a half a second.

There was a flare of heat energy from just behind the missile’s warhead and it began to shift slightly off course from the jet of vaporized metal the laser had created.  That was one down, but they were getting closer and I didn’t think the Gatling could take them all out.

“Ash, we need to do an Immelman,” I decided.

“We’re in a vacuum,” he pointed out reasonably.  An Immelman was an aerobatic maneuver for reversing direction that we’d both learned how to do in assault shuttles in training, and it wouldn’t work without an atmosphere, and probably wouldn’t work too well in a missile cutter either way.

“Modified Immelman,” I said, grinning.  “Just follow my lead.”

I had very limited experience with this boat, and no idea whatsoever if she was structurally designed to take what I was about to do to her.  I hoped Chief Burke wouldn’t shoot me.  I cut the fusion drive and felt my stomach flip as the apparent gravity of acceleration fell away, then I hit the maneuvering thrusters and spun the ship end for end to face our pursuers before I fed a jolt of power and a squirt of reaction mass to the belly jets.

The Huntress shot upward relative to the corvettes, although it was more complicated than that because of the orbital mechanics---we were orbiting both the gas giant and its moon at this point, but I left the math to the ship’s computer, and then I triggered a six-g burn on the fusion drive.  Deceleration slammed Burke and I into our couches and the approaching Tahni warships seemed to get very close very fast.

Their missiles were following, but eventually, we were going to get close enough that…yes, they began to veer off, their drives shutting down, as the Tahni gunners realized we were getting within a few kilometers and it might not be that smart to set a fusion warhead off up their own asses.  That only left one problem:  the corvette nearest to me was rolling on its axis with a flash of maneuvering thrusters, bringing its laser emitter around.

I cut the drive back to one gravity and an elephant slowly rolled off my chest.

“Gatling is yours, Chief,” I said.  Then I triggered the proton cannon, draining one of the ship’s twin capacitors.

The alignment wasn’t perfect; you couldn’t aim the proton emitter without “aiming” the whole ship, and our nose was pointed too far aft on the corvette, but those lasers weren’t going to wait for me to change our attitude.  The blast from our spinal mount hit somewhere back around the corvette’s drive bell and the Tahni ship’s deflectors lit up as they tried feverishly to dissipate the energy.

Their laser fired anyway, right through their electromagnetic deflectors, but I was already spinning the Huntress end-for-end and the high-energy pulse passed through where our nose had been only a fraction of a second before.  I hit the drives again and a wave of plasma lit up the Tahni’s deflector shield, enclosing their whole ship in a blinding, white globe for just a moment as we accelerated away from them.  I could “feel” Chief Burke firing tight, controlled bursts from the Gatling laser at them as we pulled away, for just a few seconds until we were out of its effective range.

I saw that the capacitor banks were both charged up and I cut thrust again and spun us around.  Doctrine, if you can call something thrown together in a few weeks’ time without the benefit of any practical experience “doctrine,” was to always keep one capacitor charged in case you needed to make a jump to T-space.  But we were too close to the gas giant’s gravity well to do that now, anyway.  Instead, I double-charged the shot, draining both capacitors and risking an overload, and taking a shot from their laser to do it.

The forward optics washed out before our proton cannon shot hit, and I began to receive multiple damage alarms from the ship’s systems.  I spun us around again, and when the rear cameras came into line, they showed the corvette venting burning atmosphere from the center of its hull, just behind the nose.  The enemy ship was nearly sliced in two and her drive was dark and dead.

“Auxiliary optical feeds online,” Burke reported, her voice nearly mechanical in its precision.  “We have an outer hull breach on the portside wing.  Port missile bay is damaged, but it was empty anyway.  Nothing that affects atmospheric seals.”  Which was good in the long run, since I didn’t want to spend a week wearing a pressure suit and helmet, but irrelevant right now.

I dialed back the plasma drive and maneuvered the Huntress around again, searching urgently for Ash and his ship.  I hadn’t been able to keep track of him with all the electromagnetic interference from the corvette’s deflector, but now I could see his IFF transponder still lit up in my sensor feed.  Ash was about a thousand kilometers away, already turning to decelerate, and the Tahni corvette he’d been up against was a glowing cloud of ionized gas spreading across thousands of kilometers of space and still moving forward with the momentum the ship had acquired before it exploded.

“You still in one piece?”  I asked him, trying to keep the concern I’d been feeling out of my voice.

“Mostly,” he answered after a second’s hesitation.  “What about the others?”

I did a quick scan of the sensor data picture being painted inside my head by the ship’s systems and saw Warner’s IFF transponder lighting up several light seconds away, in a higher orbit.  I ran a search for Weisz and Gomez’ signals but didn’t immediately see them; they might be out of range.  I also didn’t pick up anything from the other two Tahni corvettes.

What the hell?

“Warner,” I transmitted, “gimme’ a sit-rep.”

Nothing.  I tried again.

“Warner, I need a situation report.  Where are Gomez and Weisz?  What’s the status of the enemy vessels?”

“They’re…,” he began, then trailed off, as if his mouth had gone dry and he’d had to start again.  “They’re gone.  That is…,” I could hear his accent getting stronger than usual. “My cutter is damaged.  All my portside maneuvering thrusters are out.  Both Tahni ships went after Weisz, and Commander Gomez was trying to help her, but she was too late.  I couldn’t see what happened, but there was a fusion explosion a few hundred kilometers towards the moon and then…”

The words seemed to come from farther away than a half a million kilometers; they seemed to come down a black tunnel light-years long.  Gomez and Weisz.  I’d only known them for half a day, but Weisz was competent and Gomez seemed to really give a shit about her pilots, and now they were dead, just like that.

“Damn.”  The voice was Burke’s.  She’d been listening in on the transmission.

I pulled my concentration out of the interface and looked over at her.  Through the visor, I could see her eyes narrow, her face pinched.  I wondered what she was seeing in my eyes…

“First Squadron, do you read?  This is Captain Keating, do you copy?”

The transmission jolted me out of the fugue I was slipping into, bringing me back into the interface.  There were a dozen missile cutters just there, suddenly, at the Transition point where we’d entered the system.  They’d finally arrived, after what had to have been at least a half hour of time slippage.  I wanted to yell at Keating, to demand where the hell he’d been, but Ash was already answering, his voice subdued but still professional.

“This is Lt. Carpenter,” he replied.  “We’ve lost Commander Gomez and Lt. Weisz, but the enemy defenses are down.”

“How the hell…?”  Keating’s tone was disbelieving, and I wondered just how much jump physics the man actually knew.

“Transition lag,” I cut in.  “We’ve been in-system over thirty minutes.”  I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice.  It shouldn’t have happened this way.  “You can launch your missiles now.”

I cut off my transmission before I said something that might get me court-martialed.  Some tiny part of my consciousness was aware of the multiple Ship-Busters boosting away from the formation of missile cutters, heading for the gas mine.  It was overkill; they’d only needed one.

“Let’s get to the Transition point,” Ash said in my ear, his tone sullen.  “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

I took the Huntress to one gravity and followed his ship from a thousand kilometers out, his drive a miniature sun on the screens.  Somewhere far behind us, a pinpoint of light glowed in the atmosphere of the gas giant.  A huge mining facility that probably took years and the equivalent of billions of Commonwealth dollars to construct was turned to atoms in seconds.

Mom had warned me, I thought as I stared at that tiny speck of light, that driving assault shuttles would get me killed.  I wondered what she would have thought about this.

“Ash,” I said, my mouth feeling dry.  I took a drink from my helmet reservoir while I waited for him to respond.

“Yeah?”  We weren’t following communications protocol, but it was a private, ship-to-ship frequency and, at the moment, I didn’t give a shit.

“Have you named your boat?”  I wondered inanely.  I wanted to say something deep, something meaningful, but those thoughts wouldn’t come.

He was silent for a long time, and I thought maybe he was ignoring me, that he thought it was a stupid question.  Then he answered.

“Yeah, I think I have,” he said softly.  “I’m going to call her the Acheron.”

“Acheron?  What does that mean?”  I felt my brows furling as I wracked my memory, thinking I’d heard the name before.

“It’s from Greek myth.  It’s one of the rivers leading to Hades.”  He laughed humorlessly.  “It carries the dead to Hell.”

Chapter Eight

I picked at the pita bread sandwich with little enthusiasm.  The “bread” was processed algae, the “meat” processed soy, and none of it had been processed well enough to make me forget it.  I stared at the empty chair across from Ash and me in the break room, remembering that Commander Gomez had been sitting in it just a couple weeks ago, giving us our briefing.

I wasn’t the only one thinking it.  There were nine of us in the break room, and six were squeezed onto the two couches; none of us wanted to sit in her chair.  I didn’t want to be there at all.  We’d landed at the Tartarus spaceport late last night and I’d wanted to go get a drink and a nice steak and then to take Ash to bed, but Keating had ordered us all to get to our quarters, get some sleep and report to the Headquarters building first thing in the morning.  So I’d slept alone and now I was forcing down this shitty breakfast and waiting for Keating to call us one by one into his office.  Warner had been first and he’d been in with the Captain for ten minutes.  God knew how long it would take.

I saw several of the others staring at Ash and me and I looked back down at my sandwich, forcing myself to take a bite.

“You guys were with Commander Gomez, right?”  He was a painfully skinny little guy, too short to have the excuse of being raised in low gravity, pale and unhealthy looking and I wondered if he was from one of the outer colonies where pre-birth genetic engineering wasn’t as widespread.  “Carpenter and Hollande?”

“Yeah,” Ash replied, which was good because I hadn’t been planning on it.  “I’m Ash and this is Sandi.  You’re Collazo?”

“Vinnie,” the little man volunteered.  “What happened out there?”  The question was plaintive, almost whining.  “None of us have seen the recordings, Captain Keating had them compartmentalized, his eyes only.”

“Of course he did,” I murmured.  I took a sip from the bottle of water on the table, trying to wash the taste of the soy product out of my mouth.  I finally looked up at Vinnie, and at the others.  “We got there thirty-three minutes before you did, because someone forgot about the possibility of Transition lag.”  Between the two of us, Ash and I sketched out what had happened.

“We were too far away to see what happened to Weisz or Commander Gomez,” Ash said, shaking his head.  “Warner would know, I guess.  That’s probably why he went in first.”

“Shit,” the woman next to Vinnie spat, rubbing at her eyes.

There was a knock on the door frame of the break room and I looked over and saw Chief Burke and a broad-shouldered NCO with a face that could have been carved out of a granite cliff.  I recognized him as Ash’s Crew Chief, a man named Ngata.

“Mind if we come in?”  Burke asked.

“Please,” Ash assented, waving them both into the room.  “Did Captain Keating call you two in for an interview?”

“Not exactly,” Ngata said.  His voice was surprisingly mild for such a big man.  He and Burke moved in front of us and I fought a wince as Burke sat down in the empty chair.  “We wanted to run a couple things by you officers.”

“Normally,” Burke clarified, “we would talk about this with Command Master Chief Sherman, but she doesn’t fly anymore, and I don’t know that she’d grasp the situation like you will.”

“It’s about our…tactics, if you can call them that.”  Ngata’s face twisted in a deep frown.  “I understand this was our first mission using a new spacecraft and some adjustments will undoubtedly be made, but we were hoping you might be able to present some ideas to Captain Keating, maybe kickstart things until official doctrine filters down from the brass.”

“What kind of ideas?”  I asked, looking at Burke.  She’d struck me as a no-nonsense type, by the book and traditional; so if she was here, then this mission must have really bothered her.

“We need to stop imitating enemy tactics and come up with our own,” Burke insisted, leaning forward over the table, thumping it with her palm hard enough to make the plate with what was left of my breakfast jump.  “Their corvettes are not the equivalent of our missile cutters, they’re much more basic and limited.”

“Like how?”  That had been Coronado, a smooth-talking, handsome young officer who seemed like he considered himself God’s gift to whichever sex he favored.  I did know the answer to his question, though.

“Our cutters carry dual capacitor banks,” I told him.  “Theoretically, we could pull off multiple Transitions in a fairly short period of time.”

“We could use the Transition drive tactically,” Ash mused, eyes unfocused in thought, “not just strategically.”

“What about the Transition lag?”  Vinnie asked.

“Not relevant for a jump that short,” I corrected him.

“And speaking of Transition lag,” Ash put in, pointing at Vinnie, “we need to stage out of the edge of whatever our target system is, set up there and then jump in.  That would give us more time to get an idea of what we’re facing and it would eliminate the time slippage when we do head farther into the system.”

“These are the sorts of things we’ve been talking about.”  Burke sounded encouraged.  “If you could get Captain Keating to adopt them…”

I looked at Ash and he shrugged.  I could tell what the forlorn tilt to his eyes meant, though.

“I’ll suggest it,” I told Burke and Ngata, shaking my head.  “But he’s a Captain and I’m a Lieutenant Junior Grade, and from only meeting the man once, I already have some idea how it’s going to go.”

***

And I was right.

I was the third pilot hauled into Keating’s office, after Ash.  Keating’s XO, Commander Ekeke came to the break room and told me in a tone that brooked no argument and wasn’t asking for discussion, to follow her and keep my mouth shut.  I made faces at her back as she led me to the office; she was a severe woman with a grim frown that could have been weaponized and declared a war crime with little effort.

Ash was leaving as I was heading in and I saw a barely-controlled anger in the set of his face that I hadn’t seen more than once or twice before in the four years-plus I’d known him.  One of those times, he wound up beating the shit out of a Senior Technician who’d tried to assault one of our classmates during a summer survival course.  I think he only did it to keep me from getting to the guy, because he knew I’d kill him.

Ash shook his head at me ever-so-slightly as we passed, and I took it as a warning not to push things with Keating.  Then he was gone and I was in the Captain’s office.  It was the normal sort of office for senior brass, with the rotating holograms of the current President, Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the holotank; an “I love me” wall full of plaques and certificates and photos and looped videos of Keating with important people; and a small display beside his desk with a photo stream of what I took to be his family.  The woman with him in most of the photos was of indeterminate age and could have been his wife, mother or sister for all I knew.  I didn’t see any children.

The only unexpected thing in the room was a photo, a print-out of a photo, fastened to the wall with adhesives.  It was of a Tahni male, a warrior.  I don’t know where he got it, but it was jarring in its incongruity.  The Tahni were at once too human and too inhuman.  They were much like us:  warm-blooded bipedal vertebrates, stereoscopic vision and hearing, bilateral symmetry…  Hell, on a dark night, from a good distance, you could mistake one of them for human.  Not that I ever wanted to meet one on a dark night.

But closer up, you could see that their faces were flat, their jaws shovel-like and their joints differently arranged than ours.  They’d evolved in a similar fashion in a similar ecosystem and it had produced similar results.  That’s what most scientists thought.  Others had crazy ideas that involved the Tahni being genetically engineered by the Predecessors, but that seemed too far-fetched to me.

However they’d come to be, they were the enemy and had been for a hundred years.  Maybe Keating kept the photo there as a reminder.

I’d taken all the surroundings in during the half-second it took me to enter the room and close the door behind me.  Once that was done, I snapped to attention and gave him a parade-ground salute because I knew he’d expect it.

“Lt. Hollande reports, sir.”

Keating let me stay there at “present arms” for about ten seconds, cementing my conviction that he was a huge asshole.  He tried to stare at me with a hard, intense glare, but his face was saggy and dour and reminded me of an old hound dog my father had kept out at his ranch.  Finally, he returned the salute and I was able to release it.

“At ease,” he said grudgingly.  He nodded at the chair across his desk.  “Sit down.”

I sat stiff-backed, like I was in the Commandant’s office back at the Academy getting dressed down for talking back to an upperclassman, just because I didn’t want to give this prick an excuse.

“Lt. Hollande,” Keating began, “I’ve gone over the recordings from your ship’s logs and I’ve decided that, although you violated official procedures, I will not make a note in your record this time, considering the circumstances.”

I have to admit; I blanked on that one.

“Sir?”  I asked, confused.

He frowned, seemingly displeased that I didn’t already know what he was talking about.

“You channeled both capacitor banks into a single shot from your proton cannon, Lieutenant,” he reminded me sternly.  “Not only did this violate doctrine as it left you without a charge to enter Transition space, it also risked destroying or damaging your only remaining weapon.”

“Oh, yes, sir,” I acknowledged.  I had forgotten about that.  It hadn’t seemed important in the wake of the deaths of Weisz and Gomez.  “Thank you, sir,” I added because I knew he’d expect that, too.

I kept myself calm by imagining how satisfying it would be to punch him in his stupid face.

“But I’m afraid we will have to go over the events of the battle in some detail, because there were obviously mistakes; people died and an accounting has to be made.”

“Yes, sir,” I said cautiously.  It sounded suspiciously like he was going to take responsibility for the poor tactical decisions, but I knew in my heart that was an unlikely scenario.  “It seemed to me that the time slippage was a big problem for the mission.  We were out there alone for a good while.”

“The Transition lag is unavoidable, unfortunately.”  He waved a hand dismissively.  “We just have to live with it and make do.  My question is, were the losses on this mission solely Lt. Warner’s fault or does Commander Gomez bare some portion of the blame?”

This time I just know my mouth must have dropped open.

“Umm…,” I stuttered.  “Lt. Warner?  I don’t understand, sir.”

“That’s right, you weren’t in a position to see what occurred with that part of the battle,” he said, smiling slightly as if he were being merciful somehow by granting me that ignorance.  “Lt. Warner was in the same position as you and Lt. Carpenter, one-on-one with a single Tahni corvette, but his response was slow and ineffectual and one of their missiles went off close enough to damage his ship.  I am of the opinion that it was not damaged badly enough to completely put him out of the fight, but remove himself from the fight he did, nonetheless.”

He steepled his fingers, leaning back in his chair.  “His poor decision-making allowed the enemy,” he jerked a thumb at the picture of the Tahni warrior, “to gang up on Lt. Weisz, which brought Commander Gomez in to aid her and led to both of their deaths.”

“I…wasn’t aware of that,” I admitted, a bit more subdued than when I’d walked in.  Damn.  He was an asshole, but even an asshole is right sometimes.

“The question is,” he went on, “should Commander Gomez have sat back and waited to join the fight, or should she have committed sooner?”

“We’re all new to this, sir,” I said carefully, trying to think how Ash would put it.  Shit, Ash just told me not to say anything.  “And none of us had much time to train together, so maybe she hadn’t been able to get a feel for who was going to need help.”

“A fair point, Lieutenant,” he conceded.  Why was it every time he said something reasonable, I felt disappointed?

“Sir, with regard to us all being new to this kind of warfare…I was wondering if there might be room for a small adjustment in our tactics?”  I didn’t wait for permission, just pressed on. “I think we could do away with the Transition lag problem if we all entered the system together, maybe at the edge of the safe zone for a wormhole to form.  Then we could send the attack elements in separately and not have to worry about time slippage.”

“That would remove the element of surprise, Lieutenant,” he snapped, and from his tone and the way his face clouded over, I knew Ash had to have brought up the same thing.  “The enemy would have time to organize their resistance!”

“That’s possible, sir,” I admitted, “but if we could time it so that our system entry was disguised by one of the outer planets, like an ice giant, we could still come in unseen…”

“You and Lt. Carpenter think you’re pretty hot shit, don’t you?”  He interrupted and I was left with my mouth hanging open again.  His face had gone from pale to florid in about a tenth of a second, and his dark eyes seemed to have sunk into their sockets.

“Sir?”  Was all I could come up with.

“You both think since you got those damned medals, you’re suddenly experts on fighting the Tahni.”  His voice was a snarl and he was leaning towards me across the desk like he wanted to hit me and was barely restraining himself, though perhaps that was projection on my part.  “Your fucking medals don’t mean shit to me, Hollande, and neither does your mother.  I am your commanding officer, and I will tell you what tactics you’re going to use, Lieutenant, and what doctrine you’re going to follow and how you’re going to wipe your ass when you take a shit!”

His voice seemed to be rising in volume with each word, and by the end, he was nearly shouting.

“And your next words had better be ‘clear, sir,’ or you’ll be flying bulk food shipments between here and the moon base for the rest of your fucking career!”

I stared at him, carefully keeping my face neutral.  I don’t think I ever wanted to kill anyone, even the Tahni, as much as I wanted to kill him at that moment.

“Clear, sir,” I said, enunciating the words very carefully.

“Do you know what you are, Lieutenant?”  He stood up and walked around the desk, staring down at me.  At first, I thought what I saw in his eyes was fury, but after a moment, I decided it might have been desperation.  “Do you know what all of us here are?”

“No, sir,” I rasped.

“We’re fucking expendable.”  His face seemed to fall at that, and I wondered how much of what I’d seen was him being an asshole, and how much was him just being desperately afraid.  He slumped back into his chair and stared at the wall.

“Get the hell out of my office.”

I stood to attention, did an about-face and walked out.  Commander Ekeke was waiting there with Vinnie and wearing a disapproving scowl.  Apparently, the Captain’s office door wasn’t soundproofed.  I stalked back to the break room and found the others still gathered there, except Burke and Ngata, who had made themselves scarce.  Every eye turned to look at me.  Ash seemed worried, and he jumped up when he saw me.

“How’d it go?”

I breathed out a sigh and leaned into him, feeling incredibly tired.

“We’re so fucked.”

Chapter Nine

For reasons that I’d never really been able to understand on an intuitive level, despite the attempts of multiple physics instructors to explain them, the Teller-Fox warp field can be used to create artificial gravity, but only in T-space.  There’s something about the interaction between the field and whatever Transition space is that makes it possible, and if I can’t understand it, I can at least appreciate the hell out of it because I hate zero gravity.  My head is always stuffed up, my stomach is always churning and the food never tastes right.

The only good thing about zero g is that it’s easy to sleep, and I could have used some of that.  I was tossing and turning in the tiny, fold-down cot in my dollhouse-sized cabin on the Huntress, too keyed up to sleep and too bored to get up.

“Jesus,” I moaned, finally giving up and throwing off the covers.

I checked my ‘link and saw that we were scheduled to Transition in about an hour anyway.  The cot folded neatly into the bulkhead, making the cabin seem about twice as large, but also making it nearly useless.  I grabbed a towel from the cabinet built into the bulkhead above the cot and pulled open the hatch.

Chief Burke was sitting at the galley table, already in her flight suit, minus the helmet, sipping sedately at a steaming cup of tea.  She didn’t drink coffee, which I thought was idiosyncratic for a career NCO.  Mom once said that the military runs on coffee on-duty and beer off-duty.

“Good morning, Lieutenant,” Burke said.  “Sleep good?”

“Slept like a baby,” I muttered.  “By which I mean I was up every three hours crying and pissing myself.”

She surprised me by laughing at that.

“When you’ve been in the military as long as I have,” she said, “you learn to look at the bright side of things.  For instance, we only have seventy hours in T-space this time.”

I grunted noncommittally, pushing open the hatch to the head and hanging my towel on the hook just inside.

“And they did change things a little,” she reminded me.  “We’re all Transitioning together, at least.”

“Right on top of the target,” I agreed.  “But yeah, at least we won’t be leaving the suppression squadron with their bare asses hanging in the wind again.”

Which was nice since Ash and me were in the suppression squadron again.  It was a full squadron this time, and we had a new squadron leader, Lt. Commander Hideyo, who’d been transferred in from another wing to take over.  I’d talked to him once, for a grand total of ten minutes, before we’d had to leave on our next mission.  He’d seemed pleasant and nervous and totally unprepared mentally to deal with the situation.

This one was another of the staging systems the Tahni had used for the attack on Mars, a Transition-line hub with a habitable moon where they’d established both an orbital station and a ground base for growing food and shipping water.  Intelligence indicated they’d left a small contingent of corvettes behind to secure the system, which meant that they intended to use it again.  We couldn’t let them do that, of course, so we were going to stop them in the least competent way possible.

Our primary target was the orbital station, and the strategy was to overload their defenses by launching one missile strike after another.  As each ship launched, they’d theoretically Transition back out to the edge of the system, and the suppression squadron would, again, try to keep them too busy to shoot down the missiles.  Once the orbital station was destroyed, our secondary objective was to take out any ships stationed there and, to that end, the ships that had launched their missiles were supposed to Transition back closer and re-engage.

To me, it seemed at once needlessly complicated and overly simplistic.

I pushed the hatch shut behind me and began stripping off my shipware shorts and T-shirt, trying to ignore the mirror on the wall opposite the shower closet.  It drew my eye against my will, and I noticed that my hair was getting longer; I needed to have it trimmed around the ‘face jacks again.  Maybe I could do it on the way back, if we didn’t die.  With it getting near shoulder length, I looked more like Mom than I was comfortable with.  She’d given me the brown hair, and the chin and the cheekbones, but I’d got the blue eyes and short nose from my father.  That and a lifetime’s worth of neuroses, according to my last therapist.

I was getting skinny.  I needed to make some time to hit the gym.  I’d been spending too much time in simulators or on board this boat lately, and I was beginning to look like a half-starved teenager.  I snorted at my own thoughts as I turned the water on in the shower stall.

It's not like I was in the Recon Marines or anything; I didn’t need to arm-wrestle the Tahni, just fly rings around them. But I didn’t like being weak.  I felt like I’d spent too much of my youth being weak.

The water was warm and the pressure was good, which sort of made up for the fact that the shower was about the size of a footlocker.  I battled a tinge of claustrophobia and stayed in longer than usual, and still felt like I couldn’t get all my nooks and crannies clean.  The head was full of steam and the fan couldn’t keep up with it, so I yanked the hatch open and sucked in a lungful of cool air as I wrapped the towel around myself.

Burke was already in the cockpit, so I walked back to the utility bay and pulled my flight suit out of the locker.  We didn’t bother with them in T-space, since if you had a catastrophic failure here, you wouldn’t have to worry about surviving a vacuum; you’d simply cease to exist.  I took my time, making sure the suit was tight in the right places and not pinching anything painful, then I pulled the gloves on, grabbed my helmet and headed back up the passageway.

Burke sat silent, waiting for me to strap into the pilot’s seat.  I powered the acceleration couch around to face front, then began unspooling the interface cable from my helmet, carefully brushing aside my hair before I plugged into the jacks.

“You and Lt. Carpenter,” she said to me, just as I was getting ready to put my helmet on, “you two are…involved?”

I eyed her sidelong.  I didn’t exactly have anything to hide, since I wasn’t breaking any rules, but it bothered me that she’d spotted it.  I thought we’d been discreet.

“That doesn’t seem like an appropriate question for an NCO to be asking an officer,” I pointed out.

She rolled her eyes at that.  “Do you think you two can make it work?”

“Would it surprise you to know I haven’t thought that far ahead, Chief?”  I asked her, slipping on my helmet.

“Not a bit, ma’am,” she assured me, her voice muffled.

I laughed inside the hollow stillness as I sealed the neck yoke, then plugged the exterior cables into the control console.  Knowledge assailed my consciousness and I made an effort to hold it back, to not get lost inside it yet.  I didn’t want to be fully engaged with the interface during the Transition this time.

“This might be worse than last time,” I warned Chief Burke over the helmet comms.  “This is a habitable, and the Tahni have always been more possessive about those.  The Intelligence types think it’s a religious thing.”

“I’ve kept up on the reports, ma’am,” she said, as politely as an NCO can when they’re telling an officer to stick it.  Then she added, “That’s probably why they reacted so violently to the squatter colonies to begin with, I suppose.  They don’t really need them, but if God Himself says all the living worlds belong to you, then that would make anyone who says different a blasphemer.”

“How the hell did a society that primitive ever last this long?”  I muttered, shaking my head.

“Cause we’re experts going off our grand total of two examples of intelligent species.”  Burke’s tone was sardonic and I glanced at her, grinning.

“Touché, Chief,” I acknowledged.

“Still, I get where you’re coming from, ma’am. Some people think they got a little help from the Predecessors.”

“And some people see the damned Predecessors behind every rock,” I countered.  “Don’t get me started on that.”

“Thirty seconds to Transition,” Burke said, abruptly turning serious now that we were on the clock.  “Good luck, ma’am.”

She sounded pretty fatalistic about the whole thing, which didn’t raise my spirits any.

We were suddenly somewhere else, and I immersed myself in the interface and let it all wash over me, not focusing on any one detail but letting the big picture piece itself together.  The first piece was us:  the Strike Wing, winking into existence almost as one, falling back into the globular formation we’d occupied when we’d left the 82 Eridani system.  My squadron was near the forward edge of the globe and ready to split off at the order from Keating.

The next layer of data was the system itself.  The star was small, and white, and hot; and the terrestrial planet closer in was a cinder, burned black and useless.  The next world out was similar to Venus, both in size and character, a sizzling wasteland with an acidic, crushing atmosphere.

We’d Transitioned just outside the orbit of a gas giant about the mass of Saturn, with a similar orange and brown and red coloring, though lacking the elaborate ring system.  It had seven moons in all, but five of them were captured asteroids and one was so close that the gravitational pressure had turned it into an unstable, volcanic hellscape.  The last one was larger than Ganymede, the largest moon in the Solar System, nearly the size of Mars, and it showed the unmistakable greens and blues of a living world.  It also showed the unmistakable thermal signatures of habitation.  The base was visible through the ship’s optical telescope on the day side of the moon, but I couldn’t see the space station yet.

What I could see, barely visible on sensors and scanners in a high, synchronous orbit around the moon, was something oblong and irregular and five hundred meters long and two hundred across, bulging with armor and bristling with weapons and looking a lot like one, gigantic death sentence.  I felt my gut clench and wanted very badly to panic.

“Alpha One actual,” I transmitted to Captain Keating, who was near the center of the formation, “we have a Tahni destroyer in orbit.”

There was a long pause that my imagination filled with images of Keating dithering and asking his Crew Chief what he should do.  After ten seconds, I was fairly certain he was going to order us to retreat.  I wish I’d been right.

“Strike Wing Alpha, this is Alpha One,” Captain Keating’s voice came over the unit frequency, loud and with an undertone of fear that he couldn’t disguise by the volume.  “We’re going to…ah, go ahead with the operation, but we’re going to make that destroyer our primary target.  We’re not changing the pattern.  Strike squadrons, fly in by wingmen and launch one missile, then jump back out beyond the asteroid belt, while the suppression squadron ties up the point defenses on the ship.  Then, ah…then, when it’s destroyed, we’ll shift to the orbital station and do another missile run.  Is everyone clear on that?”

“Clear sir,” I echoed with everyone else, biting the words off.

“Oh, goodness,” Burke mumbled on a private line between us, “I don’t know that I like this plan.”

“No use arguing now,” I pointed out, though I agreed wholeheartedly.  Unfortunately, it was also the only practical alternative to retreating at this point.

“First Squadron,” Commander Hideyo called.  “We’re heading in.  Form up with your wingmen and follow me.”

“He’s seen us.”  That was Ash, broadcasting on the wide band.  “He’s launching fighters.”

He was right, I could see the sensor blips separating from the mass of the big ship, solidifying into the parasite craft we loosely called “fighters.”  The Tahni carried them on their larger ships and at some space stations and they carried out part of the role we assigned to assault shuttles, but were incapable of atmospheric flight.

I couldn’t see any details yet, but I knew what they looked like from intelligence briefings:  an oval shaped armored pod that held the pilot at its center, surrounded by cylindrical fuel tanks, separated by a radiation shield from the on-board reactor and the drives.  Weapons pods were arrayed all around the fuel tanks and the thing looked like nothing so much as a pop-art conception of a pine cone, but a pine cone fifty meters long and thirty meters across.  Thermal blooms lit up on the sensor display as their drives ignited and they began boosting toward us.

Hideyo and his wingman were already leading us in, so there was nothing to do but fall into formation.  Ash moved beside me in the Acheron like he’d practiced a thousand times in simulators and in assault shuttles, and we took our place behind the first two boats, accelerating at three gravities toward the destroyer.  Behind us, the others were arraying themselves and starting their own run for missile launch.  Technically, they could have launched them already; the Ship-Busters had enough fuel to reach the enemy ship and could accelerate a lot faster than we could, since we’d wind up passing out somewhere around ten g’s even with the flight suits.  But the more fuel they used up getting there would mean less that they had to maneuver when they got there, and the destroyer wasn’t going to sit still for them.

“First squadron,” Hideyo ordered, sounding remarkably calm for someone I’d pegged as the nervous type, “target the fighters and launch missiles.”

Ours weren’t Ship-Busters; they lacked any sort of armor and the smaller warheads they carried wouldn’t be large enough to disable a destroyer, but they’d do nasty things to those fighters, and we carried a lot of them.  I felt the ship shudder slightly as our missiles dropped out of the weapons bays and shot away from the Huntress at near twenty g’s, one after another until they were expended.

They rushed ahead of us, silent ambassadors, practicing the only sort of diplomacy that had ever worked with the Tahni.  And the Tahni fighters sent the same sort of diplomacy back at us, smaller and lighter and not as fast, but still deadly; they’d reach us before we reached the fighters.

“Re-task one third of missiles to interdiction,” Hideyo instructed us, but a second too late, since I’d already started.  I’d have gone with half, but he was the boss.

In the near distance, I could see the fighters now in the optical scopes, more than thirty of them, matte-grey smudges against the whites and yellows and oranges of the face of the gas giant.  I could see their missiles as well, black pinpricks against the halo of their engine exhaust.  And farther back, lounging like a giant watching ants go to war, the destroyer was lurching into motion, its antiproton drives boosting it out of lunar orbit on a screaming tail of pure, white annihilation.

The enemy missiles were much closer, but that destroyer scared the shit out of me.  I had to wrench my attention away from it, focusing it on the nearer threat.  The missiles I’d redirected to interdiction reached the enemy projectiles in less than a minute, their fusion warheads expanding in globes of self-destruction and took swathes of incoming Tahni weapons with them.  A field of white spheres erupted all across the starscape ahead of us, as the other ships in the squadron erected a wall of fusion fire to shield us, and one alien missile after another disappeared in a fury of star-like flame.

When the white glare cleared, only a few of the Tahni missiles still kept their course, and the ship’s Gatling laser opened up on the ones closest to us once they came within range, moving with reflexes faster than ours.  The computer was more reserved and frugal than I would have been, firing short, controlled bursts, as if the per-round costs were being taken out of its personal account.  The smaller missiles were almost unarmored, though, and the laser pulses penetrated their warheads easily; I could see the flashes of vaporized metal as it hit each one.  They kept boosting, but their communications circuits to the fighters were destroyed and they would simply go straight ahead until their fuel was expended and they fell into whatever orbit their course had taken them.

Now it was our turn.  I couldn’t see them from this far away, but I knew their own anti-missile defenses would be fighting their war of attrition on our warheads as they closed.  They had respectable Electronic Counter-Measures and a pod full of short-ranged rockets that would spread filaments of charged superconductive threads like a spider-web to intercept incoming missiles and short out their guidance systems.  Some of our missiles were taken out; I couldn’t tell for sure how many, but it wasn’t all of them.  White spheres of destruction began to sprout where Tahni parasite fighters had been a moment before, our own private fireworks show, like it was Establishment Day in Capital City.

Now there were fourteen fighters, and they were spread out between the twelve of us in First Squadron.  They were our problem and it was our job to keep them that way until the others started launching their Ship-Busters.

Which you can start anytime, you miserable bastards, I yelled at them mentally.

They were still nearly a hundred thousand kilometers away from the destroyer though, even after…Jesus, had it already been almost an hour and a half?  Forty minutes of that at six g’s, and whatever acceleration the destroyer was putting on to come to us.  Time started to lose coherence when I was jacked in, and I don’t think I’d fully appreciated that until now.  I guess it was a good thing, since I figured Chief Burke must be bored out of her skull.  In the Academy, one of our instructors had said that combat was hours of boredom punctuated by seconds of sheer terror, but to me it seemed like the hours and the minutes ran together into a long “now.”

The fighters were closer though, close enough that they were already beginning to turn around and decelerate to give themselves more time-on-target.  I knew they had lasers and coil-guns, but I also knew they figured the rounds from the coil-guns would be diverted by our electromagnetic deflectors so I expected laser fire at extreme range.  And the extreme range of their lasers was still farther than we could manage with our proton cannons; we’d just have to ride that out.

And there it was; over the interface, I could feel the heat of the laser like it was physically burning my skin, and when I flinched away, I took the ship with me, jinking with the maneuvering thrusters and then putting the ship into a spin to keep the laser from focusing on one point for any length of time.  The spin didn’t affect me much, plugged in as I was, but I hoped Burke had a strong stomach.  The laser had shifted and I gave a burst to the belly jets to kick us slightly aside, forcing them to re-align it every few seconds and the damned computer was making me feel like I’d gone out to the beach with no sun protection.

Then something nudged me, more a feeling than a light or a sound, and I knew we were at the maximum effective range of the proton cannons.  When I fired, it was with the sensation of swatting at a mosquito, and with much the same effect; the annoying buzz of the laser went away, and with it both weapons pods on the port side of the fighter, their struts vaporizing in a flash of sublimated metal that kicked the pods free and sent them drifting off lazily.  The fighter spun around on its axis to bring the starboard pods to bear, and I broke regulations again and used my second capacitor bank to fire a second time immediately.

Decelerating as he was, the cockpit was facing away from me and his drive bell would take a lot of damage before it failed, so I had targeted the other weapons pod.  This one exploded in a spectacular corona of burning gas that sent the fighter spinning on its axis.  There was a puff of maneuvering jets as he tried to stop the spin, and I could see the flare of his drive wink out.  I knew he was going to turn end-for-end and try to accelerate after us, but I put him out of my mind immediately.  He still had a drive but I’d defanged him, and I knew he didn’t have the fuel or the power to use the drive or the ship as a weapon on any of us; there was no way he could accelerate fast enough.

The next one was in range now, and he’d focused his laser on Ash’s boat.  We fired within seconds of each other, both of our shots hitting just forward of his drive bell.  There was a globular burst of light and I figured we must have penetrated far enough to rupture his fuel feed, because when the explosion died away, his drive was dark and he was headed out into deep space, unable to decelerate.

Something teased at the corner of my awareness and with a slight shift of concentration I knew what it was:  the first of our boats had launched at the destroyer.  The Ship-Buster was huge, nearly the length of the cutter that carried it, and it had a fusion drive of its own that ignited a miniature sun in the darkness and leapt across the space at twenty gravities.  The cutter jumped forward itself for just a fraction of a second before the drive compensated for the lack of mass…and then a hole opened up in the fabric of spacetime and swallowed the boat up into the otherness of Transition space.

She was back at the edge of the system now, a spectator watching us fight, and while the part of me that was terrified of dying envied her crew, another, less savory part wanted to blow up some more Tahni ships.  The rest of the Strike Wing launched one at a time, a solid stream of massive Ship-Busters swarming towards the destroyer, and each of the boats vanished into T-space in turn, their cargo delivered.  And we stayed.

“Deceleration at nine g’s on my mark,” Hideyo told us and I spun the ship and obeyed, trying not to think about how much it was going to hurt.  “Ignition.”

The crash couch flattened beneath my sudden, oppressive mass and I could feel every molecule of my flight suit cutting into my skin like microscopic knives, could feel my breasts crushed against my ribs and my arms immobile at my sides.  This was when you had to have the interface, when you had to have the jacks, because there was no way to physically control the ship, no way to even speak.  Only the drugs our flight suits were feeding us were keeping me conscious, and I couldn’t have sworn that Burke wasn’t passed out already.

There were stray bits of data, things that I sensed and knew but didn’t quite register because all my concentration was focused on staying conscious.  I saw the flare of the destroyer’s main laser batteries firing and a fragment of my mind that could still pay attention considered that if that weapon scored a direct hit on any of us, we were dead.  But it wasn’t aiming at us, and I realized that it must be using its main weaponry to target the Ship-Busters.

The minutes crawled by and I couldn’t be sure I wasn’t hallucinating when I saw the Tahni destroyer in a braking burn as well.  But no, it was real…we were all spending a shitload of energy and enduring a lot of pain just to be in a better position to try to kill each other.

There was a soundless signal from the Squadron Leader’s boat and I gratefully cut the drive and spun us back around to face front.  We were only a few thousand kilometers away from the destroyer now, its monolithic bulk filling the view of every sensor display.  I checked for the Ship-Busters and saw only four of them still inbound, the four farthest out; the destroyer’s lasers had taken out the rest.

“First Squadron,” Commander Hideyo transmitted, his words grave and weighted, as if he were handing down a sentence, “form on me and engage.”

Chapter Ten

It felt like shooting at a mountain, except the mountain could shoot back.

The squadron had shaped up into an arrowhead formation and our proton cannons volleyed nearly as one, all of us targeting the portside dorsal point-defense batteries on the monstrous starship.  Proton fire hammered into the deflectors there and charge bled away in a scintillating yellow halo that spread in an arc around the width of the ship, except for a pinpoint line of crackling energy that overloaded the field and sliced into the skin of the ship.  A line of rocket launch pods erupted in flame as the propellant exploded, and charred fragments of hull fountained outward.

I wanted to cheer, but a sober reality reined that impulse in:  we were a distraction, to let the Ship-Busters get through.  That meant, to keep the destroyer from firing on them, we’d have to make it fire on us instead.  There were multiple flares of rocket engines igniting along one of the ship’s weapons bays and sixteen missiles shot out, splaying like fingers and heading toward our formation.

“Evasive maneuvers,” Hideyo snapped.  “Split up and spread wide.”

Ash and I banked to starboard, firing off long bursts from our belly jets and then cutting off on a new course that ran parallel to the hull of the destroyer, just a bit more than two hundred kilometers away now and burning at three gravities.  The closest of the Ship-Busters was running a line perpendicular to ours, heading straight for the section of hull we’d left undefended, only a hundred kilometers from ending this.  The aft end of the destroyer began to swing around, probably seeming painfully slow to the crew on board but far too fast for me.

“Shit,” I hissed, knowing she was trying to bring around her laser emitter ports.

The weapon was fed directly from the destroyer’s fusion reactor, and all the optics were buried deep and safe inside the armored hull, directed by a series of internal mirrors through ports that ringed the ship’s bow.

“Ash, target the emitters!”  I called to him, opening up before I’d finished the sentence.

The proton cannon couldn’t damage the actual laser, but it might put metal slag in the way that could attenuate the beam…oh, hell, I doubted it, but it was worth a try.  The computer simulated the proton beams since they were pretty close to invisible without any atmosphere to react against, and when the virtual lightning struck the bow of the Tahni destroyer, there was a crackling corona of light that didn’t need to be simulated when they hit the deflectors.

We may as well not have bothered.  If we created any blockage, the laser burned right through it in less than an eyeblink, and then the Ship-Buster that had been closing disappeared into a cloud of expanding plasma that kept coming anyway, dispersing against the destroyer’s deflectors.  Almost lost among the real and CGI fireworks in the display inside my head was a line of laser pulses from the Gatling, firing automatically at one of the destroyer’s missiles that had manage to track us down.

But this missile was more heavily armored than the ones from the fighter, shrugging off the long, spendthrift burst the computer afforded it, and I could see two of them closing on the Acheron just a few kilometers off my port wing.  They were accelerating at close to twenty g’s and there was no way we were going to shake them…

“Ash, Transition!”  I yelled, feeling an empty pit in my stomach.  “Short as possible!”

If I’d taken a second to think about it before I did it, I probably wouldn’t have.  I didn’t know if we were at minimum safe distance yet, didn’t know if being this close to the destroyer or the moon or the gas giant’s gravity well would even allow the wormhole to form.  I just fed the Teller-Fox warp unit a burst of energy from the capacitor bank and smashed a hole in the universe.

Reality, gravity and my stomach were all wrenched out from underneath me and I barely had time to take a breath before it happened again just a second or two later.  Suddenly I was back in realspace and a good ten light-seconds away from the destroyer and the gas giant, though still on the ecliptic, and Ash was coasting beside me, all of our pre-jump momentum stolen away.

“Jesus,” I heard Ash gasping in my ear.  “Did we actually just do that?”

I couldn’t help myself; I laughed.

“I remember the first time you said that to me.”  I hit the maneuvering thrusters and turned my nose back around towards the battle.  “Come on, get ready, we’re going back in.  Keep a capacitor charged and if we need to, we can jump back out again.”

“And if we wind up spread over two universes like a damned fog instead?”  Chief Burke grumbled.  I pulled back into my body and glanced over at her.

Her baleful glare was barely visible through splotches of what had to be vomit decorating the inside of her faceplate and I winced.

“There’s a reason you’re not supposed to jump that close to a planet, ma’am,” she scolded.

“There’s a lot of things I’m not supposed to do, Chief.”  I shrugged.  “I usually wind up doing them anyway.”

A lurch and a shift and we were only a kilometer from the hull of the destroyer.  Grey, pitted metal crawled by beneath us and my heart climbed up into my throat as I realized how close we’d come to colliding with the enemy ship…or simply opening the wormhole inside it.  I checked the threat display frantically, looking for the three Ship-Busters that had still been closing when we’d jumped out, but two of them were gone, probably taken out by the ship’s laser.  The third was maneuvering off to the starboard, maybe fifty kilometers away, and I could see the black scoring across the armor on its wedge-shaped nose where it had taken a hit.

I thought about radioing Keating to launch the second strike, but it would take a half hour for the signal to reach him and hopefully, he would already have seen the situation by then and made the decision himself.  I realized I was counting on Keating to make a good decision, but either way, a call from me probably wouldn’t change anything.

“Son of a bitch,” I heard Burke swear softly, and I immediately knew why.

When we’d jumped out, there’d been a dozen of us; now there were nine.  The missing IFF transponders were like a blank space in my display, but I knew who was gone:  Rivera, Coronado and Quraishi.  Of the three, I’d only really talked to Coronado and hadn’t liked him much, but I still felt a kick in the belly.  I’d been gone less than five minutes, and three of us were down.

Of the rest, I could see four of them still trying to shake the missiles, and two of them clearly weren’t going to make it.  I recognized the IFFs as Vinnie Collazo, the little guy I’d talked to in the break room, and our Squadron Leader Commander Hideya.  Their wingmen were both already gone and they were only seconds from being overtaken themselves.

“Vinnie!”  Ash broadcast before I had a chance.  “Commander Hideya!  Transition out and back, get them off your tail.”

“That’s insane,” Hideya snapped, his voice muffled by the pressures of the g-forces, and I could see his Gatling still firing burst after burst at the incoming warhead even as he accelerated away from it at close to ten gravities.

Vinnie jumped immediately, and the two missiles on his track kept going through the space where he’d been.  They were too far away from anyone else and carried too little fuel to be a threat anymore.  I couldn’t see where he came out, and I hoped Ash and I hadn’t just sent him to his death.

“Do it, sir!”  I urged our Squadron Leader, calculating the distance from him with the help of the ship’s systems and realizing there was no way to get in range in time to help, not even if I accelerated fast enough to kill Burke and me both.

He didn’t respond, just cranked his acceleration up to twelve g’s and I realized he had to have passed out, probably programming the computer to Transition when it got to the minimum safe distance.  That didn’t happen.  The Tahni weapon hunted his ship down with shark-like single-mindedness and consumed him in a searing flash of fusing atoms and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it.

I wanted to scream and I wanted to curse, but more than anything else, I wanted to make someone pay.  The IFF transponders flickered like stars in my inner eye.

“First Squadron,” I snapped, my voice sounding strange in my ears, “get this thing’s attention.  If you get in trouble, jump out the minimum possible distance and then get your ass back into the fight.  Ash, follow me; we’re going to escort this fucking missile home.”

“Aye-aye, ma’am,” he said, without irony.

The Tahni destroyer was spinning on its axis, trying to bring its laser to bear on the Ship-Buster, and Ash and I were racing to put ourselves between that laser and the missile.  Nearly five hundred kilograms of me was pushing me back into my acceleration couch and I was biting down on the mouthpiece built into my helmet and trying to lose the sensation of being crushed by retreating into the interface.

Inside its virtual confines, I could see that the four other cutters that had been in range were making a run on the stern portside weapons pods of the destroyer, firing volley after volley at the missile launch rails there, the one vulnerable spot in the armor.  The Tahni had already launched another spread of missiles from its starboard rails and they were curving around the hull to stab outward at the cutters harassing it.  But all that was a side-show to the main event, keeping that Ship-Buster intact and on course.

I reached out to its control systems, feeding it my access codes and instructing it to use Ash and I as cover for the approach.  It replied in machine language and it took me a moment to wrap my mind around the communication; I was getting close to the limit of what the drugs and the suit could do.  I was pretty sure Burke had lost consciousness, and I hoped I wasn’t doing her any damage that couldn’t be fixed, but our cutters were finally moving into position.

The destroyer fired her laser again, targeting the missile, but the Ship-Buster was spinning rapidly enough that the blast only melted off a few centimeters of armor before it shifted course out of the beam.  Ash and I were just aft of the firing arc of the laser ports and I signaled to him over the interface to fire in conjunction with me.  Our proton cannons lashed out at the same firing port we’d targeted before and this time, there was a reaction.  The deflectors overloaded just above the port and chain lightning flashed down into it with an explosion of burning metal.

The Ship-Buster shifted course, drifting to the side with the damaged port, only ten kilometers away now and still boosting, though I thought it couldn’t have much fuel left at this point.  I was too far out of it to follow the physics involved and the orbits and the angles of attack; I was going by instinct and feel and what the computer was telling me over the interface and making me think were my own instinct and feelings.  It was as if I just knew what was going to happen, the same way you know that when you move your body a certain way, you’re going to move this far and at this speed.

I didn’t really see the destroyer hitting her maneuvering thrusters or increasing her acceleration, but I knew on a gut level that she was doing a skew flip, and that her intent was to roast the Ship-Buster with her anti-proton drive.  I also knew that the Ship-Buster was close…maybe close enough.  And I knew we were all way too damned close.

I cut the drives just so I could yell it out of my mouth and make sure they all paid attention.

“Transition now!”

And I told the missile to detonate, just before I stroked the control with a thought and we winked out of existence.

For the longest moment, maybe the longest of my short life, I believed with all my heart that I was dead.  I’d just realized that if I were dead, there wouldn’t be anything to do the believing when light burst around me and I found myself only a few thousand kilometers from a fusion explosion that outshone the system’s star.

“Ash…,”  I whispered the name, trying to clear my head enough to look for his IFF.

“I’m here,” he said, as the transponder blinked insistently from just a hundred kilometers away.  “Always.”

“I’d say you two were so cute you make me want to throw up,” Burke commented dryly from beside me, “but it’s clearly too late for that.”  I saw her hand go towards her visor like she wanted to wipe it clean, then drop as she realized that was impossible.  “Did we get the damned thing?”

I couldn’t tell; the sphere of white fire was as big as a small moon and blocked everything behind it, including electromagnetic signals.  What I did see was a series of IFF transponders behind me, one flickering into existence right after another as the rest of the squadron jumped back into realspace.  The closest was only fifty kilometers past Ash and his Acheron, while the farthest was at nearly ten thousand…and in-between was only one.

I tried to pull up the ship’s recordings of the data before we jumped, feeling a sick twisting in my guts at the thought that two of our ships, four people, had died because I told them to jump, or because I’d set the warhead off early…and then I stopped.  What would it matter if they’d died because of that or in an attack I’d told them to make?  Either way, they were dead and it was my doing.

I still hadn’t seen Vinnie again, either, I realized.  Had he never made it to T-space?  Had he simply ceased to exist?  Or had he just not stopped running?

“There she is!”  I heard Ash say and I tried to focus again, tried to pull my head out of my ass.

It was the destroyer.  She was still in one piece, more or less, but her nose had been stripped of armor; it had mostly sublimated, and what had been left had peeled away like bark from a diseased tree.  She was open to the vacuum at the bow, and there were flashes of fire as atmosphere mixed with electrical sparks on its way out.  Her drive was dark, though I didn’t see damage on her aft end.  Maybe a stray signal had shut it down from the damage the fusion warhead had done to her, or maybe her helm officer had shut it down for the skew flip and never had the chance to re-ignite it.  Either way, she was tumbling end over end, still in the continued motion for that flip, heading outward from the gas giant but with not quite enough velocity to escape its gravitational pull.

I stared at her mauled and torn form, suddenly silent, weighted down with an inertia of my own, unwilling to say another word or make another decision.  I don’t know how long I sat there, drifting both in the space outside and the space in my head, before a swarm of IFF transponders surrounded me, the cavalry arriving just a bit too fucking late.

Vinnie was among them, I noticed, and my lip curled both in relief and maybe a little contempt.  He’d run to the edge of the system, abandoned us.  I knew I shouldn’t have blamed him for it, but I did.

“Lt. Hollande, do you read?”  Keating.  Where the hell had his useless ass been?

“Hollande here,” I answered brusquely.

“What the hell happened?”  He demanded.  Like he had the right to demand a damn thing after sitting out there while we did all the work.  “Where’s Commander Hideyo?”

“Commander Hideyo is dead.”  I felt as if I was speaking to a child.  What the hell did he think had happened to him?  To all of them?  “He was killed by an enemy missile.”

I forced myself to review the ship’s log and watch the sensor feeds, to find out what had happened to the other two ships.  And there it was.  One of them, the Palomino, had been destroyed by the Tahni warship’s last missile launch.  Her pilot was a woman named Besson, I remembered.  Nothing prepossessing about her; I don’t think I’d heard her say two words the whole time we’d been in the squadron together.  The other, the Harbinger, had been piloted by Lindsey.  He was a competent, soft-spoken officer, older than Ash or me; he always wore his hair barely regulation, just as long as he could get away with.  I could tell by the gravimetic readings that he’d tried to jump into T-space, but the wormhole hadn’t formed before the Huntress had Transitioned, so I didn’t know if he’d made it.

“We have six ships known destroyed, one missing,” I reported, my voice businesslike but bile in the back of my throat.  “The enemy destroyer is disabled; any further defenses are unknown.”  I opened my mouth to say something, but clamped down on it and tried again.  “All of our missiles are exhausted and my own fuel is barely going to cover the return flight.  I’m sure the rest of the squadron isn’t much better off.”

“Understood, Hollande.”  He seemed quiet, as if the losses were sinking in for him.  Well, he wasn’t a monster, just an idiot.

I expected the next transmission from him to be him telling us we were pulling out, cutting our losses and getting the hell away from here before he fucked up even worse and got more of us killed.  Who the hell knew what else the Tahni had in this system?

“Second Squadron,” he said instead, transmitting on the general net, “Proceed to optimal launch distance and engage the orbital station with your remaining missiles.  Third Squadron, I want you to deploy in ground attack formation and execute strafing runs on the ground base.  Don’t leave anything standing.”

The avatars in my display began boosting inward towards the habitable moon, moving away until the remains of our squadron were left drifting in the darkness with Captain Keating and his wingman, Commander Cochran.  I hung slack against the restraints of the acceleration couch and began to feel each and every ache and pain of each and every bruised muscle.  My back hurt, my breasts hurt, my shoulders were on fire; it seemed like it would be easier to list what didn’t hurt.

I was wet everywhere; sweat had matted my hair to my scalp, trickled down my back, filled my ship boots.  And I’d pissed myself, I was fairly sure.  The flight suit would absorb it and process it and get rid of it, but it was cold and clammy on my skin, disgusting and suddenly intolerable.

Everything was intolerable.

“Why did you wait so long, sir?”  I asked Keating, using a private net.  “We were down to the last Ship-Buster.  We lost two ships making sure it could take out that destroyer.”

“Lt. Hollande,” his voice was severe and reproving, “I understand you’re upset, but you’d best watch your tone unless you’d like to be reported for insubordination.”

My tone…my tone had been flat and numb, like my thoughts, like my conscience.  I should have shut up, but I had never really known what was good for me, and at the moment, I didn’t give a damn.

“Why did you wait so long, Captain?”  I asked him again, quieter but still insistent.

“I had to assess the situation,” he told me, and the fact he actually answered spoke volumes.  If he’d really thought I was out of line, if he hadn’t already felt guilty, he wouldn’t have told me a damned thing.  “I couldn’t send our people back there blind.  As soon as Lt. Collazo reported back…”

I tuned him out.  I’d heard what I needed to hear.  He’d waited until Vinnie got there and told him we were dying, one by one.  He’d ignored it until he couldn’t ignore it anymore without someone calling him out for it.

Keating was a coward, and he was going to get us all killed.

Chapter Eleven

I think I knew something was wrong when they directed First Squadron to land on a separate section of the field from the rest of the Strike Wing.

“It’s probably because some of us need service and repair,” Ash told me when I brought it up to him while we were deorbiting Inferno.  He didn’t sound confident.

“First Squadron please maintain radio silence.”

I turned, wide-eyed, to look at Chief Burke.  The transmission had come from Orbital Traffic Control, but they never bothered to monitor private, ship-to-ship communications inside a unit.  The Chief reached over and hit a control that muted the ship’s log recording.

“I don’t like the smell of this, ma’am,” she admitted.  “Smells like someone trying to find a good place to bury the blame.”

The brown and green and blue curve of Inferno’s day side in the main view screens seemed suddenly less inviting and more threatening.  I could feel the Huntress shudder as she sank deeper into the atmosphere, the turbojets screaming in their struggle against gravity.  It was all out of my control; computer systems downstairs were conspiring with computer systems on the boat to bring us down where and when and how they wanted.

“What should I do, Chief?”  I asked her.  I wasn’t even angry anymore.  Nearly three days in T-space had burned it all out of me.  Now, I was just tired and ready to be out of this boat.

I should have been scared, I should have been paranoid, but I couldn’t seem to muster the energy for it.

“I’ve seen a lot of shit in the Fleet, ma’am,” she told me, shaking her head, “but that wasn’t during a real, shooting war.  Things are different now, and I don’t know that my experience is going to do you any good.”

“Don’t go all barracks lawyer on me, Chief,” I said with a sigh.  “Just tell me what you think.”

“Keep your cool,” she said, almost before the last syllable was out of my mouth.  At first, I thought she was speaking about what I’d just said, but she went on.  “Don’t get rattled.  Don’t get defensive.  Just be honest, tell them exactly what happened and what you were thinking.  They’re going to have the logs, so they’ll know the facts; lying or trying to spin things your way won’t work.  Just let them know why you made the decisions you did, tell them how the situation filtered through to you.”

I guess I must have looked as skeptical as I felt because she laughed softly at my expression.

“Honestly, ma’am, the brass can fuck things up, but they’re not going to be looking to screw you over.  You’re a Medal of Valor winner, and you and your boyfriend are basically the face of the war effort at this point, especially with what happened to your mother.”  I wanted to be pissed off at her mentioning it, but I’d asked her to give it to me straight.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” I muttered.

“Whatever, ma’am.  Just don’t be afraid to use what you got.”

She turned the log recorder back on with a wave of her hand through the haptic control hologram.

“I’m sure everything will be fine and Captain Keating has our best interests at heart,” she added for its benefit with a subtle roll of her eyes.

The MP’s who met us upon landing told a different story.

I’d seen them waiting for us as we descended, particularly conspicuous because there was nothing else on this remote landing field; we were a good twenty kilometers from the spaceport and the bulk of Tartarus base, at the edge of an old and seldom-used training area.  The humidity stole my breath away as I stepped down the ramp with Burke two steps behind, into the mild cloud of dust thrown up by the idling fans of the two hoppers sitting in the middle of the access road.  It was mid-afternoon and I barely noticed the flashing of the strobes on the sides of the ducted-fan helicopters against the glare of too-close 82 Eridani, but the matte gray body armor the security troops wore and the sonic stunners they carried were unmistakable.

“Lt. Hollande?”  The man leading the contingent was an officer, a Lt. Commander McAvoy by the markings on his chest armor.  The primary star reflected off his helmet’s visor and I couldn’t make out his face, but his voice was grave and professional.

“Aye, sir,” I responded, snapping to attention.  You didn’t salute on the flight-line.

“I’m going to need you both to come with us,” McAvoy told me, gesturing back at the nearer of the two hoppers, its passenger door yawning open.  I could see other Military Police escorting the crews of the remaining boats into the second aircraft, except Ash and Ngata, who were being led to ours.

I followed McAvoy into the rear compartment of the hopper, ducking down and sliding across the bench seating to make room for Chief Burke.  Ash and Ngata moved in across from us, with McAvoy next to them and another MP seated beside us.

“I guess they must think we’re awfully dangerous,” I commented drily, eyeing the two armored and armed men as the passenger doors swung downward and the rotors spun up for takeoff.

“Sorry, Lieutenant,” McAvoy said, and he honestly did sound sorry.  “Orders.”

I nodded noncommittally, then met Ash’s eyes.   His face was a battleground of conflicting emotions, and I’d known him long enough to sort one from another.  He was worried, angry and scared, all in equal doses, with a bit of confusion thrown in to fill out the edges.  He hadn’t figured out why we were here, but then I guess he was always a bit more naïve---he’d probably call it “idealistic,” if I asked for his opinion.  And I think he was more worried about me than himself, which might also have been naïve, though I appreciated it.

But this was on me.  He’d gone along with my call, followed my tactical decision, and afterwards, I had been the one to call Keating out on it instead of keeping my head down and my mouth shut.  I’d be the one to fall on my sword if it came to that.  I wanted to tell him that, to let him know it would be okay, but I thought it would just make him get all noble and want to sacrifice himself for me, and honestly, I wasn’t sure they’d let us talk anyway.

The flight took us back into Tartarus and over the city, which was the same as saying the base.  Inferno was military, the whole planet, and Tartarus was all the headquarters and personnel centers for all the military units on the planet.  If you’d asked me to imagine a city built by and for the military, Tartarus would have been it.  Unimaginative, ugly, blocky and drab, the buildings had been constructed with speed and utility in mind and not a damn thing more.

I let the drab grey domes and the tan boxes slide off my eyes, not paying attention until we began to descend.  The building was impressively large for all that it was just as ugly and plain as anything else we’d built.  It was centrally located, the streets of the city centered geometrically on it like a spider’s web, and traffic snarled at its massive front and rear entrances as Generals and Admirals and bureaucrats climbed into or out of vehicles driven by a human chauffeur instead of a computerized guidance system as a sign of their rank.

I couldn’t see the street signs or read the physical engraving across the arch of its front entrance, but I knew it by heart; I’d passed by it over and over walking down that street, first during assault shuttle flight school and then again when we’d reported back for training in the missile cutters.  It was the Fleet Headquarters Building, loved by the brass and hated by anyone else ever forced to wander within its walls.  Its roof stretched below us, a slate-grey plain with yellow circles to guide hoppers to their landing zones for high-ranking officers or VIPs---which, in our case, meant Very Important Prisoners, I suppose.

“What the hell are we doing here?”  Ash blurted, eyes wide.  “Shouldn’t we be at the JAG offices or something?”

“This command is Admiral Sato’s brainchild,” I answered him.  “Lots of people with Admiral and Commodore in front of their name are going to want to know why we lost seven crews on our second mission out.”

“No talking, please,” McAvoy said.  From the tone of his remonstration, I knew he was just following orders again.

It didn’t matter; we were here.  The landing gear of the hopper scraped fitfully against the surface of the pad before it settled in with a shudder and the whine of the fans slowed to a deep hum.  McAvoy hit a control and the rear doors began to swing upward on both sides, letting in the oven-like heat of the primary star baking the surface of the rooftop and us with it.  I made a face as I followed the MP’s out onto the landing pad, shading my eyes with a hand and squinting against the glare as heat mirages rose up around us and turned the roof into a slate-grey river.

The elevator we boarded was, thank God, air conditioned, but I hated walking into this already sweating.  I also hated walking in under guard, like I was some sort of damned fugitive.  That was a head game, though, a way for Keating to make us look guilty before we got to say a word.  I suddenly wanted, more than anything else, more than I wanted to kill Tahni, to put my fist right through his doughy, pasty, fat face.

The elevator dumped us on a level I’d never been to, somewhere close to the top floor I guessed, given how short the ride was.  The hallway was decorated in typical military bland, with paintings of battles from Earth history and a couple from the first war with the Tahni, plus the usual assortment of “chain of command” photos starting at the top of the pyramid with the Commonwealth President and not going that much further down here in Brassville.  Functionaries zipped down the corridor with the speed and purpose of toadies anywhere in the military, only these were Captains and Commanders rather than your usual Ensigns and Lieutenants-junior grade.

Doors lined the hallway and, as we marched down it at a brisk pace, I looked at the brass nameplates beside each one and saw more Admirals and Generals and Commodores than I think I’d ever seen in one place before.  If my mother hadn’t been who she was, I might have been intimidated by that, and perhaps that was the point.

I blocked it out and concentrated on clearing my head, trying to make myself a blank slate; that was from another therapist, my favorite one.  Mom loved therapists.  They were expensive, but they were so much easier than being a parent.

After what seemed like a kilometer of walking through hallways and dodging gophers and clerks and ignoring curious stares, we finally turned a corner into an anteroom of some kind, a waiting area with a half a dozen chairs against the military-beige walls.  The double doors it guarded didn’t seem like an office; I guessed it was some sort of conference room.

There was an officer there waiting for us, his utility fatigues surprisingly Spartan in this land of dress blues and decorated chests.  He had the look of youth, but I could tell he was older than his appearance by the way he held himself.  He was strikingly handsome, but played it down with a regulation haircut and a soft-eyed expression that would have been at home on a schoolteacher.  You had to look close to see the Admiral’s rank in subdued grey on his shoulder.  McAvoy came up short when he saw the man, stiffening to attention.

“Sir,” he said smartly over his helmet’s external speakers.  “I’ve brought the prisoners, as ordered.”

“Thank you, Commander,” the flag officer said with a nod.  His voice wasn’t deep, but it was sonorous, like a professional speaker’s, and I found it captivating despite the circumstances.  “But they’re not prisoners, and they have yet to be charged with anything.  I’ll take care of it from here; you can return to your station.”

“Umm…yes, sir,” the MP officer responded uncertainly.  “I, umm…I had orders to…”

“You have orders from a Captain, Commander.”  The professional speaker’s tone turned slightly, almost imperceptibly harder, not brooking any argument.  “Last time I checked, I’m an Admiral.  Am I clear?”

“Clear, sir!”  McAvoy said.

“Dismissed, Commander.”

The MP’s turned on their heels as if they were on a parade ground and headed back down the hallway.  The Admiral turned toward us and I snapped to attention and I didn’t need to look back to see that the others had as well.

“Lt. Hollande, Lt. Carpenter,” the flag officer said genially.  “Chief Burke, Ngata.  I’m Jason Aviles; I work for Admiral Sato’s office.”

“Sir!”  I felt more respect and deference in my voice than I had in four years in the Academy.  “Is this…”  I hesitated.  “Is this an official Board of Inquiry?”

“It’s a bit ad-hoc,” he admitted, almost as if he were embarrassed, “but it’s something we kind of threw together at the last minute after we received the report from Captain Keating when you Transitioned into the system.  Fortunately, it was during the workday, and there were enough Admirals handy…”  The last was delivered drily and I had to fight not to laugh.

“Thank you, sir,” I said.  It was like I’d figured:  the Attack Command was the Next Big Thing and everyone was watching it carefully.

He nodded, as if he was following my thoughts.

“We went over the logs from the mission about three minutes ago,” he told me.  Then he grinned, a predatory expression that didn’t at all fit his demeanor or his voice.  “It was at that point that our attitude began to shift.  But please, come in, meet everyone.”

Shit.  I didn’t want to meet everyone…

The conference room was huge, perhaps the largest I’d ever seen, even in the Academy, with ten-meter high ceilings and a gallery of seats, each with a data center.  Which made the ten men and women gathered at its center around a small, oblong table seem even smaller in perspective.  I recognized some of them from the chain-of-command posters in the hallways, and a couple from auditing military current events at school, and they were a collection of the most powerful military officers outside the Solar System.  Admiral Sato wasn’t around, or the Commanding General of the Fleet Marine Corps, but everyone else who might be mentioned in the same breath was.

They were an odd bunch, I thought irreverently.  All looked fairly young save for one woman who had to have voluntarily and purposefully elected out of anti-aging treatments, which was such an outlandish concept that it shocked me.  Everyone got them at birth nowadays, at least on Earth and the inner colonies.  This woman hadn’t.  She had the unmistakable lines and wrinkles and grey hair of someone who’d aged naturally and who didn’t give a damn.  She wore the tailored black uniform of Fleet Intelligence and a Lieutenant Colonel’s rank; Intelligence ran their rank system like the Marines for some odd, arcane reason.

The other individual who stood out from the group was a tall, handsome-looking man in civilian clothes.  He had an oily, too-smooth vibe about him and I just knew he was a spook; Department of Security and Intelligence, the civilian counterpart to Fleet Intell.  I disliked him immediately, with the military’s innate bias against the DSI.  We hadn’t worked and played well together, historically.

“Have a seat,” Admiral Aviles invited us, dispensing with the formalities of reporting, and motioning the four of us toward four pre-positioned chairs set back from the table, facing the gathered luminaries.

I let Chief Burke move in first, down to the furthest seat, then I took the one beside her.  Ash sat on my left, with Ngata at the end.  I felt better with Ash beside me, though I was careful not to touch him or even lean against him; there was no use giving anyone ammunition to use against us.

“We are here,” the old woman spoke first, despite the fact that she was only the equivalent of a Commander in the Fleet rank system, “to determine what recommendations to make to Admiral Sato about the future of the Attack Command, based on the missions run by Strike Wing Alpha thus far.”

Wow.  That was even a bit more far-reaching than I’d originally thought.

“So, we’re not…,” Ash blurted, then fumbled his words.  I looked over and saw his face reddening as he realized who he was interrupting.  “Begging your pardon, ma’am,” he tried again, “but we’re,” he indicated the four of us, “not…under arrest?”

There was an exchange of glances between several of the officers, including Aviles.  Embarrassed?  Guilty?  Amused?  I couldn’t tell.  These people were hard to read.

“The orders to take you into custody were given through the Provost Marshall’s office,” Aviles explained, “based on the statements of your commanding officer, Captain Keating.  When you came out of Transition Space for your mission brief, he stated that you two, Lieutenants Hollande and Carpenter, had violated standing orders and Fleet doctrine, and had been responsible for the deaths of seven flight crews.”

“He also threw insubordination, dereliction of duty and illegal fraternization into the report,” the old woman added with the ghost of a smile.

I felt a nuclear reaction reaching critical mass inside my head.  It was standard procedure for any longer mission to stop in the first system with a wormhole jumpgate and transmit a report through it just in case.  I hadn’t understood why we’d done it this time, since it was only a three-day ride in T-space, but now it was obvious:  Keating had wanted his ducks in a row when we got back to Inferno.

“You’re about to blow a gasket, Lieutenant Hollande,” the Intelligence officer observed, and my ears warmed with embarrassment at my inability to conceal my anger.  She sounded as if she found it hilarious.  “I would be, too,” she admitted.  “Particularly after what we just saw in the ship’s logs uploaded when your squadron Transitioned into the system.”  She cocked an eyebrow.  “I’m not certain Captain Keating is completely aware of the reporting systems built into your ships.  I wonder if he thought he could alter the records before we saw them, or if he even planned ahead that far.”

“As of now,” Admiral Aviles informed us, “Captain Keating has been relieved of command of Strike Wing Alpha.  His XO will assume temporary duties as the CO, but we’ll find a permanent replacement before you go out on your next mission.”

I noticed Chief Burke shape a silent whistle and on the other side of me, Ash’s eyes went wide.  Chief Ngata made no reaction at all; his face could have been carved into the side of a granite cliff.  I don’t know what my face looked like because it was numb.

“If you’ll pardon me, then,” I said slowly, “but if we’re not under arrest, then why are we here?  That is,” I clarified, “why us and not the squadron leaders?  The living ones.”

“Lt. Hollande,” Aviles answered, again seeming amused, “Lt. Carpenter, you are both recipients of the Medal of Valor.”  He leaned casually against the table with one hand, waving the other dismissively.  “So maybe that was political, maybe the high command needed some heroes to deflect the bad press of getting blindsided by the Tahni.”  I almost nodded.  I’d had that thought myself.  “Or maybe it was just luck.  Maybe you just blindly charged in without thinking.  It’s happened before.  Maybe you were young and brave and stupid.”

He pushed away from the table and hovered over where we sat.

“However, since winning it, you’ve gone on two missions for the new Attack Command, and in both of them, the two of you have played crucial roles in the accomplishment of the stated objectives, despite losing two separate squadron leaders, and despite unimaginative and overly restrictive tactics and strategies mandated by your former commander.”

His eyes went between the two of us.

“I’m going to be straight with you, we’re running on the ragged edge right now.  It’s going to take us another six months to finish reconstruction work on the shipyards, and another three to six months after that to get the first new cruisers off the line.  While we’re trying to get our shit together, the Tahni have been invading and occupying any colony they can get their hands on.  They took Demeter last week.”  I swallowed hard at that.  Demeter wasn’t that large of a colony, more of an ecological park than anything else, but it was one of our oldest.  The thought of all those people being at the mercy of the Tahni was sobering.

“If the missile cutter concept doesn’t work, there is no plan B.  We’re bringing two more Strike Wings online next week, and Admiral Sato has authorized me to make whatever changes I consider necessary, up to and including wholesale tactical and strategic reassessments.  To answer your question, I can look at recordings all day long and I can get ideas that are mostly armchair quarterbacking.  I’ve never flown anything but a desk.”  He pointed to a slender, dark-complexioned Captain seated beside the DSI agent.  “Captain Chacko here has logged more hours in a ground support fighter than I’ve spent filling out travel vouchers, but he’s never fought the Tahni.  He’s never flown a missile cutter.”  He was starting to remind me of old videos I’d seen of blood-and-thunder evangelical preachers.

“Tell me,” he said, his voice softer now, his eyes darkly intense, “what we need to do to beat them.”

Chapter Twelve

“Do you think they listened?”  Ash whispered the words into my hair.

I didn’t answer for a moment, drowsy and satisfied and breathing in the smell of his sweat.  His chest was muscled and smooth and comfortable.  I tried to look up into his eyes, but the room was too dark to see him.  It wasn’t much as quarters went, small and cluttered and bare white when there was light enough to see it, but I was happy to be back.  I was happy to be alive, happy to not be in a cell somewhere awaiting court-martial.  It was so much more than I’d expected yesterday when I’d come out of T-space in the Huntress.

“I think they did.  A little, anyway.”

We’d been in that conference room for hours yesterday.  They hadn’t been satisfied with verbal recommendations, either; they’d had the four of us break down every second of the mission from the logs of every ship that had survived.  By the end, I’d felt wrung out and exhausted and I’d imagined I was going straight back to my quarters and passing out; but when we’d arrived at my door, Ash had kissed me and I’d found myself suddenly interested in other things beside sleep.

“Hell, even if they don’t change anything else,” I reflected, “it was worth it to get rid of Keating.”

“Amen.” Ash kissed me on the forehead, and I could feel his smile even if I couldn’t see it.  “How did that bastard ever get put in charge of anything bigger than a mess hall?”

“That’s how the military is, sometimes,” I told him, remembering what Mom had said to me, once.  “He knows someone, maybe they owe him a favor; and when the position came up, it sounded like a quick route to a promotion, so they pushed him for it.”

“Sounds more like how things worked back in the Kibera,” he muttered.  “Favors and patronage.  I didn’t think the Fleet would let shit like that happen.”

“We’re all still human,” I reminded him.  “Most people have to learn things the hard way.”  I turned over and tried to look at him through the gloom.  “Do you ever think about it, anymore?  Home?  Your family?  You haven’t talked about them in a long time.”

“My family?”  He mused.  “No, not really.  There wasn’t much to miss.  My brothers were in the Reformery on and off for as long as I could remember, and when they were home, all they did was slap me around and try to make me run messages to their drug dealers.  And Mom…well, she wasn’t happy at all when I told her I wanted to go to the Academy.  I had to spend the next two weeks in a public shelter because she told me she’d kill me if she saw me again.”

I hissed out a breath.

Yeah, okay, you win; your family is more fucked up than mine.

“I guess,” he admitted, “that I think about Carmen sometimes.”

“She was that girl you liked?”  I struggled to remember the name.  He hadn’t mentioned her more than once or twice, and never for long.

“Carmen Aguilar.  We were in school together.  We used to walk home and talk about how we’d get out of there someday, volunteer for the colonies or something, and be somewhere we could see the sky.”

“Did she not want to wait for you when you decided to go to the Academy?”  I guessed.

He didn’t say anything for a second.  When he did speak, there was a depth of pain in his voice I’d never heard before, even when he was talking about his mother.

“She decided she was with the wrong Carpenter.  I walked in on her with my older brother.  Apparently, being able to get good drugs in the here and now was a better deal than working on a farm in the colonies at some nebulous point in the future.”

“Shit, I’m sorry,” I told him, burying my head in his shoulder.  I could feel his breathing rising and falling steady against my cheek.  “You want a drink?”

He grabbed my hand in his, not tight but firm.  “Can I ask you something, Sandi?”

There was a long silence, and I thought it might not be a rhetorical question and he was waiting for me to say it was okay, but then he went on.

“Are we friends?”

“What the hell kind of question is that?”  I demanded, sitting up.  “Of course we’re friends!”

“I mean,” he clarified with a shrug I could feel through the bed, “are we friends who also do this?”  His hand moved to my hip demonstratively.  “Or are we, you know, something else now?”

Oh.  That kind of question.

Shit.

Why do guys always have to ask those kinds of questions?

I didn’t want to have to think about this.  That was one of the great things about Ash, we could have fun and I didn’t have to think about things.  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to answer him, I just didn’t want to have to know the answer.

“Ash,” I began, and I could hear the reluctance in my voice even though I’d tried to conceal it, “we…”

“No,” he interrupted abruptly, sitting up in bed.  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything.”

Damn it.  He knew I didn’t want to answer him, and like the martyr he’d always been, he was assuming he knew what that meant.

“Ash, you just caught me off guard,” I said, scooting up beside him, leaning against the headboard.  The cheap plastic of it felt cold against the bare skin of my back.  “Honestly, I haven’t thought about…existential stuff like that lately.  Everything’s been one constant shit-storm for months, and it feels like you and I are the only sane thing I can hold onto.”

“Yeah,” he sighed.  “I know.  I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to get all needy.  Maybe I’ll have that drink, after all.”

“Sure,” I said, rolling over and switching on the bedside light.  The shadows from the panel built into the wall beside the headboard fell across Ash’s face, and I wondered if he’d actually dropped it or just decided to stop talking about it.

I found the bottle I’d smuggled into the room after our last mission and poured two plastic cups full on the small, round table in the corner.  I’d just picked them up to head back to bed when I heard my ‘link chirping at me.

No, I realized, it was both of our ‘links chirping, lying beside each other on my dresser.  I shot a concerned look at Ash, then set the cups down and grabbed both the datalinks, tossing his over to him.  I looked down at my screen and saw that it was a message, not a call.

“Admiral Aviles?”  Ash asked me, looking up from his ‘link.

“Yeah.”  I touched a control and cast the feed over to the room’s entertainment center.

Aviles’s chiseled, handsome face popped up in the holotank, looking a bit more haggard than when I’d last seen him.  He’d obviously been strategizing with the other brass long after the four of us had left.

“Lt. Hollande, Lt. Carpenter,” he said with a nod.  “If you were asleep, I apologize in advance, but I assumed you’d want to know our findings.”

“Is it just me,” Ash muttered, “or did he know we’d be sleeping together?”

“The man’s not stupid,” I pointed out.  I wasn’t complaining.  Not being stupid was a rare and precious quality.  From Ash’s frown, it didn’t seem he was too happy about it, but I blew it off.

“There’s going to be a new training doctrine as of first thing tomorrow morning.”  He rolled his eyes tiredly.  “Sorry, later this morning.  The details are attached to this message.  Learn them now, because you’re both going to be the training officers for Strike Wing Alpha, and you’re going to be training the trainers for the other wings coming on-line.”

“Shit,” I muttered, half in shock.  That was a pretty high-responsibility position for a couple of Lieutenants-junior grade…

“Incidentally,” he went on, as if he’d heard me, “you’re both promoted to full Lieutenants, retroactive to the beginning of this pay period.  You’re also both now Squadron Leaders as well, First Squadron for you, Hollande, and Third for Carpenter.”

This time I couldn’t even swear.  My mouth just hung open, slack-jawed.  I looked at Ash and saw a mirror of my own face.

“I know this is a massive load of work I’ve dumped on your doorstep,” Aviles said, not even a little apologetic.  “I have every confidence you can handle it.”  He shrugged.  “If you can’t, you’ll get replaced by someone who can.”  He smiled tightly.  “Good luck.”

Then his image was gone and an indicator flashed, showing the attached data file with the new training doctrine.  It was an alarmingly large file, and it was depressingly late.  I looked between the holotank and the cups of tequila and sighed.  Ash was already pulling on a pair of sweat pants and I reached for a shirt.

“Coffee?”  I asked him.

“And lots of it,” he said with a nod, grinning despite the work ahead of us.  I couldn’t help but match the smile.

Squadron leader.

***

Commander Ekeke was waiting for us at the door, her hands planted on her hips and a perpetually stern expression on her face, when we walked into the Strike Wing headquarters building early the next morning.  I was completely exhausted, working on about a half an hour’s worth of sleep grabbed almost accidentally when I’d dozed off in the middle of annotating training routines and constructing simulator scenarios.  All the data was stored on the base net, on our personal ‘links and on two separate dataspikes just because we were paranoid about losing that much work to network corruption.

We both came to attention and saluted, and Ekeke did the same, not making us wait the way her old boss would have.  The offices were deserted except for the three of us; we’d come in early to get the simulators programmed before the other pilots and crews showed up.

“Good morning, Hollande, Carpenter,” she said gravely.

“Good morning, ma’am,” Ash responded with a hell of a lot more energy than I had left.  I mumbled an echo that I hoped his response would drown out.  I really just wanted to sit down before I fell down.

“So, a lot has changed in a short time.”  Ekeke sounded awkward, embarrassed even, but she soldiered on and said her piece.  “I just want you to know, I was not aware of what Captain Keating tried to do to you.  I would not have gone along with it, had I been.”

And I could believe that as much as I wanted.

“Yes, ma’am,” Ash responded for both of us, which was good because I wasn’t going to.  “Thank you, ma’am.”

“Commander Murray is being transferred to lead of the new Strike Wings as of next week,” she said, addressing Ash now, “so there will be no issues and no hurt feelings with you replacing him as Third Squadron Leader.”  She turned to look me in the eyes and I struggled to pry mine open so I didn’t look as if I was about to fall asleep on my feet.  “With Lt. Carpenter taking over Third and the losses during the last mission, it was decided to transfer out the remaining members of First Squadron to the new Strike Wings as well, so you’ll be getting an entirely new crew of pilots starting next week.”

“I understand, ma’am,” I told her, nodding.  I fought to keep a smirk off my face.  I still hadn’t forgiven that little shit Vinnie for running out on us, so I was glad I wouldn’t have to deal with him.  “We’ll have the training simulations programmed and ready to run by the time the new crews report.”

“I’ll let you get to work, then,” she said.  She started to step out of our way, but hesitated.  “I know there’s not much chance that I’ll be made the permanent replacement for Captain Keating, but if they happen to ask for your recommendation…”

“I doubt they will,” Ash admitted, always the diplomat.  “But if they do, we’ll definitely let them know what a good job you’ve done.”

That seemed to satisfy her and she finally got out of the damned way and let us through.  The hallways lit up as we passed through them, the sensors picking up our body heat and turning on the lights for the day.

“Jesus Christ,” I muttered when I was sure she was out of hearing.  “That wasn’t desperate or anything…”

“She probably is desperate,” he reminded me.  We nearly passed by the Squadron Leaders’ office suite, and I did a double-take before I realized those were our offices now.  “She’s worried she’ll be dragged down along with Keating.  Something like that could kill her career.”

Ash pushed the door open and the lights came on.  Each SL had their own cubicle in the office suite and I found the one for First and fell into the chair.  It was cheap and plastic and uncomfortable, but it felt like Heaven.

“Am I the only one who sees a problem with so many people being obsessed with their fucking career when we’re getting our asses kicked by the Tahni?”  I asked him, bringing the data console at the small desk online.

“Weren’t you the one who told me that we’re still human?”  He reminded me drily.

“Yeah, yeah,” I acknowledged, rolling my eyes.  “But do so many humans have to be assholes?”

“Oh, I think you know the answer to that…,” he was saying when there was a knock at the open door.

I looked around and saw Captain Damian Keating standing in the doorway.  He was a shell of a man, slumped in on himself, even his uniform seeming too large on his sunken frame.  I could smell the alcohol on him from three meters away and his eyes were mapped in traces of red, and for just a beat I tensed up, thinking he might actually be here to start a fight, or might even have a weapon.

“Christine…Commander Ekeke told me you’d be here,” he said quietly, not slurring his words but their precise pronunciation telling me he was making a conscious effort to avoid it.

Ash had already been standing.  I slowly came to my feet and faced him.

“What can we do for you, sir?”  Ash asked him, his tone cautious, respectful out of habit.

“I’m just here to pick up a few things from my office,” Keating explained, jerking a thumb back down the hallway.  “I…I suppose I’m being reassigned.”

Someplace shitty, I thought hopefully.

“I just wanted to apologize,” he blurted out, like ripping off a stuck bandage.  “There’s no excuse for what I did.  Whether I think it was right or wrong for you to break from tactical doctrine, the situation you were in was my fault.  The responsibility for the deaths was mine.  I was slow, hesitant, and I was afraid to act, because I didn’t want to get any more people killed.”

Because you didn’t want to get yourself killed, you mean, I thought.  But maybe I was being too harsh.  Maybe he was telling the truth.

“Thank you, sir,” Ash said.  “I know it couldn’t have been easy to come here.”

Keating looked at me, but I said nothing.  I was trying to be nice, because the only thing I could think to say was to suggest he emulate the Japanese samurai if he really wanted to apologize.

He nodded, as if he could read my thoughts on my face…and maybe he could.

“It’s a hard thing holding the lives of other men and women in your hand,” he told me, a slight break in his voice interrupting the sentence.  “A hard thing to send them to their death and know there wasn’t any other choice.”

He wiped a sleeve across his nose, sniffing, and I thought I saw tears in his eyes as he turned.

“You’ll find out.”

He left without saying another word; Ash stared after him, his expression troubled.

“Don’t let him get to you,” I chided him, punching him on the shoulder.  “He’s an asshole.”

“Maybe he’s right, though,” Ash mused, not looking at me.  “Do we really want this job?”

“If we don’t do it,” I pointed out, “then we have a really good chance of someone just as incompetent as he is being in charge of us.”

That seemed to bring him out of his funk.  He nodded and walked back to his station.

“Lots to do,” he said.  “Let’s get to work.”

Chapter Thirteen

“Squadron leaders, deploy by pairs and engage.”

Captain Caroline Osceola, the new commander of Strike Wing Alpha, projected a steady calm in her voice that I wished I felt.  I was nervous as hell and just certain I was going to screw things up, but I tried to imitate her tone when I gave my first combat order as a squadron leader.

“First,” I transmitted, “pair up by wingmen and start your missile run.”  I switched to a different frequency and said to my own wingman, “Shayk, you’re with me, stay on my wing.”  Back to the Squadron net.  “Keep a capacitor bank charged, jump if you get in trouble.  Remember your training!”

I was telling them things they already knew, but I thought maybe that was half the job of being a leader, reminding people of things they’d learned.

I immersed myself in the interface and watched the ships under my command boost inward from our jump point, just one squadron of one wing of a whole group, dozens of missile cutters, some still Transitioning into the system.  This was the biggest operation the Attack Command had attempted so far, and it was different from the first two in nature as well as scale…and it was all based on tactics and strategies that Ash and I had pulled out of our asses.

I felt my gut clench at the idea, but forced the doubt and fear down, concentrating on the facts, the data.  The data was fearless, clean, incorruptible.  We were near the Goldilocks Zone of a G-type star, just outside the gravity well of a terrestrial planet just a hair larger than Earth but with a lighter composition that gave it a slightly lower gravity.  It shone in the light of the primary, green and blue and brown and white and inviting, a crown jewel in the collection of Tahni colony worlds.

This wasn’t a military target.  It wasn’t a base, it wasn’t a shipyard or a refueling station or a staging area or even a Transition Line hub.  It was a psychological target, a morale target, and I didn’t know if I was totally comfortable with that, but at this point we needed a clear-cut win.  Two more colonies had fallen to the Tahni in just the few weeks we’d spent training and equipping the rest of Attack Command First Group, and unless we made that too expensive for them, they’d just roll us up until our heels were back against the Solar System.

Just because it wasn’t a military target didn’t mean it was undefended, though.  The Tahni had a heavily armed base on the planet’s moon, and regularly rotated destroyers through the system on established patrol runs.  The moon base was our primary target this time, with the secondary targets being any spacecraft that happened to be in-system at the time.  I searched the sensor scans from my ship and the others within communications range and thought for a second that we’d caught them between patrols…until I saw the unmistakable signal of a Tahni destroyer coming around from the night-side of the planet.

“First Squadron,” Osceola said in my ear, “shift target to the destroyer.”

“Aye, ma’am,” I acknowledged before shifting to the squadron net.  “We’re going after the destroyer, boys and girls.  Standard ship-to-ship engagement formation.  Priority targets are the engines and weapons pods, launch at a hundred thousand kilometers and lead the weapons in.”

There was a chorus of “Aye, ma’am,” and it took me the barest of seconds to realize they were talking to me.  It felt strange to let someone else lead the formation, but that was part of being in command, a part I wasn’t crazy about.  And it felt even stranger to go into battle without Ash at my wing.  He always had my back, but now he had his own squadron to command, and they’d be attacking the lunar base.

“You brooding over the loneliness of command, ma’am?”  Chief Burke asked me, amusement rich in her voice.  At least she was still around.

“Maybe,” I admitted in a distracted tone, most of my attention still on the data feed.  “You’d better start thinking more about our acceleration than my brooding, Chief.  Six g’s in ten seconds.”

The first of my squadron’s wingmen pairs were boosting toward the destroyer, and my turn would be coming.

“Oh, marvelous,” Burke muttered.  “Nothing I love better than a damned elephant sitting on my chest.”

She’d barely got the words out before I ignited the Huntress’ fusion drive; I could see the computer-generated image that represented my ship lurch forward to take its spot near the center of our globular formation.  On the corners of the display, I saw Ash’s squadron heading for the planet’s moon, their formation slightly different as they prepared for their part in the assault on the base there.  Most of the Group would head there; the defenses would take a lot to overwhelm, and losses weren’t a possibility but a certainty.  I wasn’t sure what bothered me more, the idea of Ash dying today or the thought that it could happen without me there, fighting beside him.

The acceleration went on for unbearably long minutes, but the destroyer was helping out by heading our way, doing her duty and putting herself between us and the colony, advancing on the raw power of mutually annihilating matter and antimatter.  We could have matched those drives, at least in our larger ships, but producing antimatter was a power-intensive affair and required a huge infrastructure…which was inherently vulnerable.  Eventually, I thought, that could be their downfall.  Fusion was less efficient, but the fuel was a hell of a lot easier to get, and more importantly, a hell of a lot safer to store in bulk.

Not that I would have minded an antiproton drive in my own ship about then, but they’d designed the missile cutter because it was cheap and easy to build quickly.  I sighed with resignation and cut the drive, sucking in my first full breath in way too long, and maneuvered us into a skew flip.

“Decelerating,” I announced, just to give Burke the time for one last lungful before the drive kicked in once again, braking us to a practical velocity from which to engage.

The destroyer was doing the same, but she wasn’t as patient.  Missiles streaked out of her weapons pods and headed for us and I clucked my tongue in disapproval.  That was a waste of resources; the captain of the ship probably wasn’t a combat veteran, then.  That wasn’t surprising; there’d been few large-scale space battles between the Tahni and us so far, and there probably weren’t any of their military commanders alive from the last war.  From the intelligence reports, the Tahni had a religious prohibition against the sort of anti-aging treatments and genetic adjustments that had become a matter of course for more developed human worlds.  They lived eighty or ninety years, on average, before dying from organ failures that an Earth lab would have prevented with the work of an afternoon.

The reason I could tell the master of this ship wasn’t a veteran was that he’d launched before he’d decelerated.  Now, the missiles would have to use their own engines and on-board fuel supply to decelerate to match our velocity if they missed on their first pass.  True, they could decelerate much more rapidly than we could on a crewed vessel, but these weren’t their version of our Ship-Busters, with a shitload of fuel and armor; they were smaller, lightly armored and carrying simple fusion warheads with yields of a megaton or so.  They wouldn’t be able to maneuver much once they’d used most of their fuel for deceleration.

I didn’t have to give orders on how to respond to the missiles; we’d practiced it often enough.  We let them come, wave by wave, dozens of them all closing with us, multiple missiles for each member of our squadron.  We let them get within a hundred kilometers, some of us pushing it to a few dozen---I’d have to have a little talk with those pilots, I decided, noting the names---and then we all Transitioned.

The wrenching displacement didn’t make me quite as disoriented or nauseous as it used to; that seemed to fade with experience and repeated exposure.  But there was still a slight lag between the time I found myself back in realspace, hanging only ten thousand kilometers off the portside of the still-decelerating destroyer, and the time I was able to force my mind to react to it and launch both of the Huntress’ Ship-Buster missiles.

The whole boat seemed to shudder violently as the huge weapons separated themselves from our missile bays, emptying us of hundreds of tons of mass in seconds.  Their fusion drives ignited like miniature stars and they streaked off towards the Tahni warship at an acceleration that would have killed a human.  They joined twenty-two others, two from each cutter in my squadron, and the dance began in earnest.

Anti-missile defenses poured out of the destroyer in a gush that made the ship seem like she was in the process of exploding, and in the midst of the flares of hundreds of launches and the flash of lasers, the enemy vessel was doing a skew flip.  She had decelerated enough to engage us and now that lack of momentum was going to hurt her, because it gave the Ship-Busters more maneuvering room to engage her, so she was going for another burn, moving out towards open space.

“Target the missile defenses,” I ordered tightly, probably redundantly but there was always someone who forgot the training when the real bullets were flying.  “Get in close and avoid her lasers.”

We were boosting again, squeezing my sinuses, my temples, my chest, sweat and urine pooling inside my flight suit.  Sometimes I dreamed about being trapped on a ship accelerating out of control, with a fuel supply that couldn’t run out, unable to shut down the engines, nightmares that lasted forever and left me exhausted and in sore need of a drink.

Unlike the ones in my nightmares, this boost didn’t last forever; we had to decelerate again and then we were facing the enemy and finally in range.  He launched his parasite fighters then, later than I thought but it was the next step in the checklist and even an inexperienced captain knew it.  The thermal signatures of the little ships separating from their armored cradles in the hull were nearly lost in the psychedelic collage of lights and colors and vectors and angles that squeezed through the interface and into my conscious thought.

“Fighters out,” I cautioned my people.  “Prepare for evasive and engage as close as possible.”

I targeted the missile launch rail on the destroyer’s starboard bow weapons pod and fired, trying to get in a few shots before I became tangled with the fighters.  The blast hit just as another flight was launching, penetrating the deflectors just enough to pierce the skin of one of those missiles; and while the warheads weren’t going to blow just from being shot, the rocket fuel sure as hell did.  A dome of red flame erupted from the weapons pod and the bulbous, armored shell around it fractured from within, jets of hot gas blowing outward from each fissure.

I’d barely had time to enjoy the explosion before I received the warning from the sensors that a flight of missiles was heading our way from one of the parasite fighters.  I checked the charge on the capacitors and debated whether I could get off another shot from the proton cannon, but decided against it.

“Transitioning,” I warned Burke just before I sent the burst of energy to the Teller-Fox warp unit.

Then we were two hundred thousand kilometers away and the battle was the twinkling of a distant star barely visible in the glare of the light reflecting off the planet.  I fought back against a whiplash effect that left my mind reeling, plugging in the coordinates for the return jump and waiting for the capacitors to recharge.  By the time we were back in range, the enemy missiles would have either been redirected by the fighter crew or self-destructed.

I saw my wingman, Lt. Shayk, pop out of a warp corona a hundred kilometers away, maneuvering around to face back the way we’d come.

“Everything good, ma’am?”  He asked me, sounding almost doting.  I felt a flare of resentment; he was less than six months younger than me, the little shit.

“Stay close, youngster,” I snapped.  “Jump when I jump.”

This was our tactic, Ash and me, our main contribution to the new doctrine.  Previous gospel on Transitions had built-in safety buffers, based on the idea that you didn’t want to lose a multibillion-dollar cruiser with 300 people on board because some hotshot captain cut it too close and tried to jump too near to a gravity well.  In typical military fashion, safe+1000 kilometers became safe+10,000 kilometers and then safe+100,000 kilometers.

In reality, the boundary area where a wormhole would safely form was fluid and shifted constantly with the orbits of not only the planets around the sun but the moons around the planets.  In one system at one time, you could safely jump only a hundred thousand kilometers from a planetary gravity well, where in another system with three gas giants instead of two and all of them on the same side of the sun, you might not be able to safely Transition even 200,000 kilometers away.  I had my own theory that you could even make a safe jump from a LaGrangian point, where the gravity of the moon and the planet cancelled each other out, but they wouldn’t let me test it; something about how I was a pilot, not a physicist.

“Dibs on the Gatling when we jump back in,” Burke said, a grin in her voice.

She was leaning against her safety harness, like a sprinter at the chocks, ready to head back into the fight.  I hadn’t known her long, but Burke seemed like a new woman since Keating had been relieved.  I didn’t think it was because she thought things would be safer without him as much as the fact that his incompetence had offended her sensibilities as a career NCO.

“It’s all yours, Chief,” I assured her.  I saw the charge indicator and shot her a thumbs-up.  “Hold onto your lunch.  Shayk, on my six.  Let’s go.”

And then the destroyer was there, just a few hundred kilometers off of our starboard, and we were back in a web of corkscrewing missiles and proton beams and lasers and point defense turrets launching charged superconducting filaments.  The tracks of IFF transponders led me to where my boats were engaging the fighters or strafing the destroyer’s weapons pods, and even as I watched, two of them winked out.  I felt my stomach clench at the thought that they’d been blown away, but then they popped back onto the screen on the far side of the destroyer, three hundred thousand kilometers away.

I let out the breath I’d been holding, spreading my awareness out across the breadth of my sensor display and firing the Huntress’ proton cannon almost as an afterthought.  The Tahni parasite fighter that had been trying to latch onto the tail of one of my boats spewed a stream of burning gas as its port maneuvering thruster ruptured and sent it spiraling away off its course.  It might have brought itself back under control, but a second shot from another cutter in my squadron penetrated the nose of the fighter and it ceased all attempts at correcting its course, its crew vaporized.

Fifteen of the Ship-Busters were still inbound and still taking up the destroyer’s attention and the bulk of her fire.  Another absorbed a hit from the laser as I watched and blew apart, the pieces still heading for the enemy ship but unlikely to do much damage.  Fourteen.  Damn it.

I fired again at a fighter, wishing to hell we could get rid of them and get back to targeting the destroyer.  The shot penetrated one of the fighter’s weapons pods and it blew apart with an explosion of missile propellant, sending the little ship spinning wildly.  Two more cutters jumped out and the missiles chasing them headed off into open space, lacking the fuel to decelerate and reverse course.  Another Ship-Buster disappeared in a globe of fire.  Thirteen.

It was a landscape of chaos, of dozens of individual battles, and my limited human mind struggled to arrange it in some sort of understandable pattern.  The ship’s computer helped, simplifying what it could, but there was just too much raw data coming in to sort through it all.  Chief Burke was shooting at something with the Gatling, but I couldn’t tell what.  Off in the distance, so far away that I could only follow it through the Group telemetry network, dozens of cutters were engaging the moon base and some were dying, and I couldn’t even take the time to try to figure out if Ash was still alive. I wanted to scream and rage, but I didn’t have that luxury.

Lt. Shayk jumped, seconds ahead of a trio of missiles, and I jumped with him because even Squadron Leaders have to stick by their wingmen, no matter how inconvenient it was.  And the missiles jumped with us, because the little dumbass waited two seconds too long and they were inside his warp bubble…

I knew it immediately, but the fog of the Transition kept me from forming a coherent enough thought to do anything about it before one of them hit his cutter and blew it straight to hell.  Every display I was hooked into went white and then a jolt of agony went through my head and I blacked out.

Chapter Fourteen

I woke up to someone shaking me and calling my name; at first, I thought it was Ash, but the voice was wrong.  I forced my eyes open and saw the lined, weathered face of Chief Burke through the visor of her flight helmet, a concerned set to her eyes.

“Are you okay, ma’am?”  She asked me again, but this time it sank in.

“Are we alive?”  I responded, gritting my teeth against the blinding pain in my temples.

“Near as I can tell,” she answered, “we caught debris from Shayk’s cutter when the missiles took him out.”  She grimaced.  “I think it penetrated pretty far and took out the power feed to the ship’s computer core…didn’t just cut it, though.  It caused a major surge and fried the interface.”

“Fuck,” I hissed, straightening in my acceleration couch.

We were in zero g and only my harness was holding me down, and nothing was holding my stomach down.  I reached out and yanked out the interface cables, letting them retract into my suit.  Once they were disconnected, the manual displays lit up with an announcement that the system had rebooted, so we still had control over the Huntress, and her computer core was intact and powered, apparently; it was just the neural interface that was down.

Just the system that lets one person fly the damn boat, I amended to myself.

“Can you fix it, Chief?”  I asked her, trying not to get my hopes up.

“Sure,” she said, turning her palms up.  “But I’ll have to crawl into the maintenance bay and physically reroute the feeds.  That’s going to take hours, not minutes.”

“We don’t have hours,” I mused.  I shook my head without thinking, then winced at the pain that hadn’t quite receded yet.  “We might not have minutes.”

I’d been complaining about the mass of data overwhelming me, but now the data was gone; or, rather, the data was a step farther away.  I reached into the haptic hologram projected over the control board and plotted a jump back to the battle.

“Chief,” I said, “this is gonna’ be a stone bitch, but I’m going to have to fly her manual, so I’ll need to let the computer control the Gatling and you’re going to have to be my gunner on the proton cannon, which means you also have override on the maneuvering thrusters.  Can you handle that?”

I heard the hiss of breath as the reality of what we were about to try hit her, but she closed her eyes and nodded.

“Got you covered, ma’am,” she promised, trying to sound confident as she pulled up the targeting controls at her station.

I thought about transmitting my situation to the rest of the squadron, but shook it off.  There was nothing they could do about it anyway; they had their hands full with their own shit.

“Transitioning,” I announced, and swiped the control.

Without the interface, the jump was even more jarring than usual and I felt sorry for Burke having to go through that every time.  We were back in the thick of the fight and it was a hundred times harder to keep track of it without the neural display.  We were down to eight Ship-Busters, and I could see in the HUD of my helmet that we were missing two cutters from the IFF display.  There were still three of the parasite fighters, but their missiles were still swarming around, looking for an opening.

Damn it, it was supposed to work this time.  That’s why they put us in charge of training, to make sure it worked without getting our pilots killed…

“Francona, Ellerbe, on me!”  I ordered the wingmen.  The names were on the IFF display and I could put faces to them, barely, but I couldn’t have told you one thing about them other than that.  Every spare second had been spent training.  “We’re taking out that laser!”

It spoke again before I’d finished saying the words, and another Ship-Buster flashed into vapors at the touch of the focused energy of the destroyer’s fusion reactor.  He was boosting now, and we struggled to keep up, three gravities pushing us down and making it even harder for me to manually fly the boat.  The remaining Ship-Busters circled patiently, their AI guidance doing their best to bring them in on vectors that avoided the laser.  The destroyer spun on her axis, waving her laser like a man waving a torch at a pack of wolves to keep them at bay, desperate to keep them orbiting and prevent one from lunging into range and triggering its multi-megaton warhead.

“Firing in three,” Burke announced over the squadron net.  “Two, one…”

The proton cannon splashed a glowing halo over the nose of the destroyer as the deflectors struggled to disperse the energy, and two more blasts followed almost simultaneously.  The three shots nearly at once at the same spot overloaded the deflectors and sent a surge of energy into the laser port.  I couldn’t tell how much damage it did, but the destroyer began spinning faster on her axis, her maneuvering rockets flaring wildly, and I thought the rotation was fast enough now that it had to be making them sick, if their inner ears were designed anything like ours.

The laser fired out of one of the other ports clustered around the nose, and alarms sounded in my helmet speakers as BiPhase Carbide armor melted off the bow of the Huntress, but the spin was too fast and the weapon was being fired manually because that’s the only way Tahni were allowed to fire them.  I saw damage reports scrolling across my HUD but I ignored them; the boat was still operational and we were still breathing…and two of the Ship-Busters were creeping up on the ass-end of the destroyer, and there was a red, flashing indicator across the top of the view screen that told me they were both about to blow.

“Transition!”  I yelled.  “First Squadron, jump now!”

My arm weighed about three kilograms and it seemed to take an incredible amount of effort to move it precisely enough to activate the warp unit.  With a sickening jolt we were weightless, and I was grabbing for the controls again, bringing us back out.  Nothingness was shredded by star-strung black and we were drifting far from where we had been; somewhere far behind us a new star shone in harsh white, just one more among the thousands and millions.  It would burn itself out quickly, and what remained would drift in interplanetary space, maybe for thousands of years.

A poetic way to go, but not the one I’d prefer.

I looked for transponders, and almost panicked when I didn’t see them…until I shifted the field of view in my HUD and saw that they were right where they should have been, about three hundred thousand kilometers outward from the destroyer.  I was not.  I’d misjumped somehow.  Maybe it was my fault, maybe I’d been hampered by the lack of the interface and the drag of the acceleration.  Or maybe it was the damage we’d taken from the laser, a possibility I found much less comforting.  I wasn’t sure of the reason, but I was sure that I was over a million kilometers on the opposite side of the destroyer from the rest of my squadron, back towards the planet.

“Shit,” I muttered.  “Chief, we’ve got a problem.  Run a diagnostic on the Teller-Fox unit and the navigational systems.”

“Yeah, I see it, ma’am,” she acknowledged, switching the display at her station and running through the maintenance subroutines.

“First Squadron,” I called over our net.  “Do you read?”

I waited; we were a few light seconds away now, so there would be a lag.  I was about to repeat the call when Burke interrupted me.

“Our long-range antenna is fried,” she said with a sort of casual fatalism.  “Laser got it.  Short-range gear can’t get through the electromagnetic interference from the destroyer explosion.”  A pause as she scrolled through the list of damages.  “We aren’t going to be landing in an atmosphere anytime soon, either; we have major structural damage to the turbine intakes and the belly jets.”

“What about the warp unit?”  I demanded.  “Is it damaged or did I just fuck up?”

“I don’t see any systemic problems…”  She trailed off and then grunted.  “Oh, shit, here it is.  That surge that took out the interface has the manual controls buggered too.  I can’t guarantee it’ll even respond if you try to jump again; and if it does, it could spit you out anywhere.”  A hesitation and I saw a grim look in her eyes through her faceplate.  “Or just not let us exit at all.”

“So, we can’t call for help and we can’t Transition.  We still have the fusion drive, right?”  I heard a pleading note in my voice that I hadn’t intended to put there.

“I’m not seeing any problems with the conventional drive or the reactor,” she confirmed and I sighed with the first relief I’d felt since the Ship-Busters had done their job.

I thought about the problem for a moment.

“There’re more of our people hitting the moon base than there are out here,” I reasoned.  “The other alternative is waiting here and hoping our guys stumble across us.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to get left behind.  Let’s head in.”

“Sounds like a plan, ma’am.  Not one I would have liked to have heard a few minutes ago, but as good a one as we’re going to get.”

***

The planet stretched across the breadth of the view screen’s display in the colors of a living world, a classroom globe spinning on hubs of white ice caps.  Jahn-Skyyiah they called it, but during planning we’d taken to calling it “Johnny.”  It seemed peaceful and almost idyllic, with no trace of our brutal battle scarring the deep blue of its oceans or the lush, verdant chains of islands that dotted them.

It was a false face, I knew.  The other side of the planet was home to its largest continent and the three cities the Tahni had built there, probably glowing wastefully with artificial light open to the sky, as was their habit.  The moon was on that side as well; and out of my sight, men and women and Tahni warriors were fighting and dying…Ash was fighting, and maybe dying.

The one gravity of acceleration seemed almost restful after the severe boosts we’d endured during the battle with the destroyer, but we didn’t have an unlimited supply of fuel and I already felt beat to shit.  I flexed sore fingers and wished I could get away with taking off my helmet, even for a few minutes.  I looked over to where Burke should have been sitting and chewed on my lip nervously.

I’d wanted to wait until we got help before she attempted any repair, but she’d convinced me that it would be even easier in one gravity than it would be in free fall, and she was the tech.  I just flew the boat.  She’d been squeezed into the maintenance tunnel back beneath the utility bay for two hours now; I’d learned quickly that asking her how she was doing was just going to distract her and piss her off, so I stewed in my juices and watched the sensors for any sign of Commonwealth ships, and worried about Ash.

I should have been worrying about being spotted by Tahni satellites.  I knew fairly quickly that was what had happened when the two Tahni dual-environment fighters rose up from the atmosphere on columns of fire, heading out of orbit at maximum acceleration, heading straight for us.

“Chief, we have bogies inbound from the planet,” I snapped.  “Get your ass up here.”

“Ma’am,” her voice was tight but determined, “I’m minutes from having the control systems for the warp unit back up.  I’ll do better for us here, if you can hold them off.”

“Chief,” I tried to keep my voice under control despite the surge of impatience I felt, “I may have to boost hard…you can’t take that kind of acceleration in there!”

“I’m squeezed in pretty tight, I’m not gonna’ get thrown around,” she insisted, stubborn in that way that only a senior NCO can be.  “It’ll hurt without the acceleration couch, but I’d rather take the chance.”

I checked the sensor readout.  The fighters would be within missile range---for the tiny missiles they could carry, anyway---in twenty minutes if I kept this course and this acceleration.

“You have twenty minutes, Chief,” I told her, trying to make my tone firm and unyielding.  “Then I want your old, wrinkled ass strapped into this acceleration couch and that’s a fucking order.”

I heard her chuckle at that.

“Aye-aye, ma’am.  I’ll be there.”

I concentrated on the fighters, calling up the specs for them on my station’s display even though I knew them by heart.  They were akin to our assault shuttles, but more specialized.  Assault shuttles occupied the same role on our side that both the parasite fighter and the dual-environment fighter did for the Tahni.  Their DE fighter was more of a land-based, atmospheric response interceptor, and its fuel capacity for orbital operations was limited.  I could outrun them if I had to, although it might mean heading away from where I wanted to go.

They were armed with lidar-guided missiles and a spinal-mounted electron beamer, and neither were a huge worry for me, though if I let them swarm the missiles even the computer might not be able to shoot them down in time.  If I’d been armed with conventional anti-spacecraft missiles, they’d already be vapors; but it would be nearly a half hour before they came into gun range.

How the hell did I wind up in a job where I always have to be so damned patient?

I guess I was lucky though; the fighters were probably all they had in reserve after they launched everything to protect the moon base.

I was still thinking that at the moment the tactical display began flashing and I saw the warp signature of the Tahni corvette coming out of T-space just outside the planet’s gravity well, only ten thousand kilometers away, then another alarm as the enemy ship immediately launched a spread of missiles.  Where she’d come from I had zero clue.  Maybe she was on the run from a missile and had heard the warning call from the fighters, or maybe she’d been kept in orbit as part of a patrol to guard the cities.

“Chief!  We have a Tahni corvette danger-close!  She’s launched!  Get out now!”  There was more panic in my voice than authority this time.

I didn’t wait for a response, just slaved the Gatling to the targeting computer and used the thrusters to line up a shot from the proton cannon.  I took out one of the missiles with my first shot, and I could see the tactical display’s simulation of the Gatling laser-fire slashing outward in streaks of incandescent red that wouldn’t actually be visible in a vacuum.

Why don’t they provide some nice pew-pew sounds too? I wondered inanely.  Then it’d be just like a bad war movie.

The corvette wasn’t sporting about this at all; while I was engaging his missiles, he opened fire on us with his laser.  Our nose armor started to melt and I cursed and hit the maneuvering thrusters, putting the boat into a spin that kept the laser from focusing on one target point.

“Chief!”  I yelled again.  “We have to jump!”

“No!”  The older woman’s voice was louder than the ship’s warning klaxons.  “You Transition now, with the navigation off-line, we could wind up just about anywhere!  Give me two minutes!”

“I’ll give you all the time in the fucking world,” I shot back at her verbally as I shot back at the corvette with the proton cannon.  “The enemy may have other plans!”

The blast from the main gun took the Tahni ship dead in the nose and, from this range, their deflectors couldn’t disperse all the energy.  The spinal laser emitter took a direct hit and ceased firing and I felt a relieved breath hiss out of me.  But there were still four missiles heading our way.  I goosed the Huntress, bringing her up to three gravities despite the pained squawk in my headphones from Chief Burke, heading straight at the missiles instead of away from them.  They had limited range; if I could get past them fast enough, they’d never be able to decelerate in time to maneuver around and chase me.

Unless they managed to get in range to kill me before I got past them.  That was the downside.  And we weren’t as maneuverable without the belly jets…

The Gatling took out another missile, but the other three were so close and the corvette was near enough that I could see her without the computer simulation, a dull, grey silhouette lit from behind by her own drive flare.  I couldn’t line her up for another shot, though, not without cutting my acceleration, which would have been suicide with the missiles closing in.

“Ma’am,” Burke’s voice was choked and strained by the acceleration, but she sounded happy.  “I think I’ve got…”

I never found out what she thought she had.  Apparently, my shot had not taken out the corvette’s laser for good, because he fired it again as I boosted past him, exposing the Huntress’ belly for just a fraction of a second.  I had a heartbeat’s warning from the tactical computer, just another warning flash among so many I couldn’t keep them all separate in my vision, just enough to make my stomach cramp in anticipation of what was to come.

There was a wash of heat that felt like standing on the black tarmac at the landing field on Inferno in the middle of the afternoon during the Dog Days of summer, and a scream of vaporizing metal and plastic and then the ship’s acceleration cut out and I was floating against my harness.  The holographic displays at my station and on the main viewscreen flickered and died along with the cockpit lights, leaving only the chemical ghostlights along the bulkhead corners to give any illumination.

All I could hear was my own breath inside my helmet, not a damn thing outside it, and my HUD was warning me that the rest of the ship was in a vacuum, but I had a more immediate worry.  Fighting to make my mind work, I remembered the brief, almost throw-away lesson we’d had about emergency procedures in case of main power trunk failure.  I found the recessed button on the bulkhead by the dead holoprojector at my station and jammed my thumb into it.  A two-dimensional flat-screen display folded upward from the console and snapped to life, running on internal batteries and connected to the optical and thermal sensors.

I could see the corvette in the view from the rear cameras, turning and boosting after us; it would be a hard burn, but she’d be back in laser range in less than half an hour, and then we’d be dead.  There was a small control panel built into the recess for the screen and I tested it out.  There was no response from any of the ship’s propulsion systems, not even the maneuvering thrusters, but I still had the Gatling laser.

My mouth twisted in something less than a smile.  At least I could shoot back at him before I died.

I had a half an hour.  I unstrapped and wormed my way out of the cockpit, heading back to the utility bay.  The Huntress had seemed like a living thing to me once, but now it was unmistakably dead.  There was no sound, no warmth, no motion.

“Chief,” I said.  “Where are you?”

I thought she might be unconscious; the 3g boost might have kicked her around pretty hard back here.  I stopped thinking that when I saw the hole burned through the utility bay.  It was almost three meters across and cauterized like a wound, the edges charred and blackened.  It had spent itself in the overhead, melting away the interior bulkhead but not penetrating the upper hull above it.  Nothing inside the utility bay had survived the hit: lockers were blown apart or melted, vacuum suits vaporized or twisted into uselessness with the intense heat.  I could still feel the heat radiating off the metal of the hull, off the bubbling and scorched bulkhead as I floated forward, coming up against the far end of the bay.

Through the hole in the deck I could see open space.  A small cloud of debris orbited the ship like a ring, but there was nothing left of Chief Petty Officer Burke, not so much as a scrap of a flight suit.

The breath went out of me in a low moan and I squeezed my eyes shut.  I don’t know if I would have called us friends; she was an NCO with a twenty-year career and I was an officer fresh out of the Academy.  But we’d shared the same ship and fought the same battles and I knew I could count on her.  There hadn’t been many people I could say that about my whole life, and now there was one less.

She’d had a family; she’d told me about them once.  Her parents lived on Hermes, and she had a brother there too, with a couple kids.  She’d showed me their pictures once, and I remembered the broad smile on her face when she’d talked about them.  They were young teenagers now, but they still loved hearing from their Aunt CiCi.

I couldn’t stop it.  I was crying, the sobs wracking my body hard enough that I nearly floated away from the bulkhead.  I hadn’t cried for my mother, not then, but I did now.  I cried for her and for Burke and for all the men and women who’d died beside me in…Jesus, how long had it been since Mars?  It felt like a lifetime.  I had to fasten the sticky-plate on the sole of my ship boot to the bulkhead and the practicality of the action broke me out of the paroxysm of grief that had gripped me.  The tears beaded away from my eyes and were sucked in by the vents of my helmet.

I pushed away from the wall purposefully.  One last thing I had to do.  I wasn’t going to dishonor Chief Burke’s memory by not going down shooting.  The ship was dark and lifeless, the cockpit a tomb, but I was going to wring one last fight out of her.  I strapped into my seat loosely, just tight enough to keep myself from floating away, and settled in on the controls for the Gatling laser.

Five more minutes until the corvette was in range.  Out of curiosity, I checked the position of the two dual-environment fighters; they were hopelessly distant now, a half hour from gun range, maybe half that from missile range.  It would all be over before they got here.

I glanced at the range counter and had the thought that two minutes could stretch out into forever; but forever, as it turned out, would have to wait.  The corvette abruptly converted into a ball of incandescent gas, ceasing to exist just as suddenly as it had popped into being on my scope minutes ago.  I stared at the expanding ball of ionized gas, not quite sure what I was looking at.  Had I hit something vital when I shot it earlier?

The ‘link in my helmet crackled with a transmission.  I blinked.  It was a very short ranged communicator, basically line of sight.

I switched camera views and then I saw them, six of them, wedge shaped and matte grey and beautiful.  My first thought was that it was my squadron, that they’d found me, until I heard the voice in my helmet.

“Sandi!”  Ash called, a bit of desperation in his tone that told me it wasn’t the first time he’d made the transmission.  “Sandi, are you there?”

I tried to answer him, but my voice caught in my throat and I found that I was sobbing again.  It took me a few seconds to bring it under control enough to try to talk.

“I’m here,” I said, my words still wavering.  “I’m all right.  How did you find me?”

“We saw the corvette Transition.  I figured he wouldn’t be coming out way over here without a reason.”  A pause.  “Can your boat fly?”

“No.  She’s not going anywhere without a major overhaul.”

“I’ll bring you and Burke over to the Acheron,” he said.  “Captain Osceola wants us out of here in ten mikes.  I was pushing it coming out here looking for you.  We’re going to have to blow the Huntress in place.”

I felt a body blow at the thought, but not as much as I would have otherwise.  It was just a boat.  Not nearly the most important thing I’d lost today.

“It’s just me, Ash,” I told him.  “It’s just me.”

Chapter Fifteen

I sat in a corner of the Officer’s Club and stared at my fifth shot of vodka, wondering if I should drink it or just head back to my quarters.  It was early, or maybe it was late.  I wasn’t sure.  I was still on ship time and that was all fucked up from Tartarus time.  We’d got back from Johnny yesterday late, and then spent all that night and into the next morning being debriefed.

Captain Osceola had been very pleased with our performance.  When she’d told me that, I’d felt like punching her, but somewhere inside I understood that this was different than Keating.  The handsome, striking woman with high cheekbones and close-cropped, curly hair wasn’t a martinet and she wasn’t a coward.  And I was sure she did care about the people who’d died, beyond the platitudes she’d spouted at me about how Chief Burke had been an outstanding NCO and we’d all miss her.

But her job was wins and losses, and this was an unadulterated win.  We’d taken out a destroyer, ten corvettes, an orbital staging area and the moon base.  Ship-Busters had turned the whole base into radioactive vapors and the loss of ten ships and twenty-two men and women didn’t take away from the fact that the Attack Command concept was working.

Then she’d told me that she was putting Burke in for a posthumous Silver Star and putting me in for a Bronze Star and I’d suggested as politely as I was capable of that she should give the medal to Burke and skip mine.

I remembered the knowing look in her dark, discerning gaze when she told me that it didn’t work that way; we’d both been part of the same mission and if one of us deserved recognition, then we both did.  I didn’t buy that for a minute, but I also knew that arguing wouldn’t get me anything.

“I’ll have what she’s having.”

I glanced aside, annoyed immediately that someone had skipped all the empty seats at the O-club bar and pulled out the stool next to mine.  I was even more annoyed when I saw the self-assured grin on his face.  He was good-looking and he knew it, and that bugged the shit out of me.  Neither of us was wearing a uniform, but I pegged him as a Lieutenant Commander, the rank when all too many officers began the assent to Captain and the descent to being a cast-iron asshole.  His chin was cleft, his hair was just long enough to be wavy without being past regulation length and his eyes were gunmetal grey.

“I’m having some alone time,” I muttered, staring daggers at him and hoping he was smart enough to take the hint.

“Yeah, I noticed,” he said, laughing as the bartender brought him the tequila shot.  “You always drink alone?”

“I am right now,” I ground out, looking straight ahead.  Unfortunately, straight ahead was the mirror behind the bar, so I could still see his smug, self-assured face.

“It’s not healthy,” he commented, oblivious to the signals I was sending, or maybe just not caring.  “I’m Conrad Esparza,” he told me, holding out a hand.  I stared at it until he let it drop.  “I’m CO of the Search and Rescue unit attached to the Attack Command.”

“I didn’t know we had one.”

“We just reported before this last mission you guys went on.  Just got back myself early this morning.  You’re Hollande, right?”

I stared at him with hostile curiosity.

“Have we met?”

“No, but you won the Medal of Valor for Mars, so it’s not like I haven’t seen your face in the news.”

Oh, joy.  A fan.

“Look, sir,” I began, figuring he had to be at least a Lt. Commander to be a CO.

“Just call me Conrad,” he insisted, waving a hand.  “We’re not that formal in S&R.”

“Okay, Conrad,” I pushed on impatiently.

“You’re Sandrine, right?”

“What I am, Conrad,” I insisted, “is drinking alone.  And I don’t especially want company right now.”

“Why?”  He asked, and I was millimeters from punching him.  “What’s wrong?”

I considered his face and decided, to my amazement, that he was seriously interested.  I shrugged and told him.

“There’re no memorials,” I said, drinking the shot and waving at the bartender for another.  “There’s no ceremony.  They died and someone’s going to notify their families, but we just go on like they were never here.”

He nodded at that, taking a sip of his own drink.  It was a knowing nod, like he’d had the thought himself.  I guessed he might have, given his line of work.

“We do something, the Search and Rescue Battalions,” he said.  “We all get together in the ready room, and we get a bottle of whatever, and we pass it around and everyone takes a drink.  And when they do, they tell a story about the one who died.”

“That’s not bad,” I admitted.  “But I’m the only one left in my squadron who knew her.”

“Then you tell the story,” he prompted.

I rubbed a hand across my face.  Maybe it was the liquor, but he was making sense.

“Okay.”  I thought about it for a long time, trying to find something that crystallized everything I knew about Cecilia Burke.

“I asked her once how she wound up in the military,” I related, awkwardly, hesitantly.  “She was from Hermes, from Sanctuary.  It’s small compared to Earth cities, but it’s a pretty large town for the colonies.  Her parents still live there, and she said when she was young, like thirty years ago, they were big in the city government.”  I smiled as I thought about her drawling, amused tone when she related the story.

“She was always in trouble, always getting picked up by the constabulary for one thing or another: petty theft, trespassing, vandalism.  Only her parents kept her from getting thrown in the Reformery.  They tried psychological counselling, work programs, everything, but she was your classic rebellious child.  So, the day after she graduated high school, they drove her down to the Fleet recruiting station and told her she could either sign up or they’d kick her out of the house and she’d have to stay in a government shelter and recycle garbage.”

Conrad chuckled in appreciation.

“I have some guys who started out that way.”

“She was so pissed at her parents.  She wanted to show them that she didn’t need their help, that she could make it on her own.  She hated Basic Training, but she hated her parents more.  Until, at some point, she found herself applying for the NCO course and she realized that she didn’t hate them anymore.”

I trailed off, not wanting to share the rest with him, how I’d been envious when I heard her story, how I wished I’d had the chance to stop resenting Mom.  I raised my glass.

“To Chief Cecilia Burke,” I said.  Conrad touched his glass to mine and we both drank.

“I have to go,” he said, pushing up from the stool.  “I have to head back to the office and finish a report before I can hit the sack.  Nice meeting you, Lt. Hollande.”  He stuck the hand out again, and this time I shook it.

“Sandi,” I corrected him.

“Sandi.”

Then he was gone.  I sat there, bemused, for a few minutes.  I felt better.  Maybe Mr. God’s-gift-to-women wasn’t such a dick after all.  I ordered another drink almost automatically, but when it came, I hesitated.  Maybe he was right about drinking alone, too.

I was still considering the question when Ash walked into the club, still in his utility fatigues.  I hopped up and stepped over to him, hugging him tightly, wordlessly, for a long moment.

“I tried to call you,” I told him.  “It just went straight to your message system.”

“I’ve been in one debrief after another,” he explained, dark lines under his eyes telling a tale of high stress and no sleep.

He followed me back to the bar and slumped onto a stool, resting his elbows on the bar and his head in his hands.

“Is everything okay?”  I asked, my hand on his shoulder.  “You look like hell.”

“I came about a millimeter from getting relieved as Squadron Leader,” he admitted.

“What?”  I blurted.  “Why?  Osceola was practically gushing all over herself about how well she thought the mission went.”

“That’s why I got away with an off-the-record warning,” he explained.  “Osceola and the Group Commander, Captain Frasier, said I endangered my squadron and the whole Strike Wing by taking the time to search for the Huntress.”  He raised his head and met my eyes.  “They said they knew about our relationship and they felt it was ‘detrimental to the good order of the unit,’ which is fancy regulation-talk for them transferring me out of here to another Strike Wing.”

“Shit,” I said in a low hiss, sitting down beside him.  “But you said almost…so they’re not transferring you?”

“No,” he replied, his voice so forlorn that you’d have thought it was a death sentence.  “But to get them to let me stay…” He grabbed my untouched vodka and drank it down, grimacing at the bite of it.  “You and I can’t be involved and stay in the same Strike Wing.  If we want to keep…”  He shrugged, trying to find an adequate term.  “…seeing each other, then one of us has to go.”

“They can’t be fucking serious,” I said, getting some disapproving stares that I wouldn’t have noticed if Ash hadn’t made shushing motions.  “Our ‘relationship’ is none of their damn business!”

“They’re making it their business,” he informed me in a tone that was way too fatalistic to be coming from Ash.  “And since I’m the one that screwed up, I’m the one they gave the ultimatum to.”

“I’m not going to let you give up your squadron,” I told him firmly.  “I’ll transfer out.  Hell, I barely know these guys yet anyway.”

“They didn’t give you the option.  This is on me.  And I…”  He shook his head.  “I think maybe we should…take a break from all that for a while.”

My eyes narrowed as I debated whether or not I’d heard him correctly.

“What the hell are you saying, Ash?”  I asked him, trying to keep my voice low but hearing a dangerous edge to it that I hadn’t meant to include.

“Sandi,” he said, a pleading note to his voice that sparked an inexplicable anger in me, “we were always better as friends.  Everything else has just made things more complicated, and made me ask questions you don’t want to answer.”

“Are you trying to tell me,” I asked slowly and carefully, with an emphasis on each word, “that you’re going to let some stuffed-shirt senior officer dictate who you can and can’t have a relationship with?”

The words were awkward, I thought.  “Have a relationship with.”  “Seeing each other.”  Why didn’t I come out and say what I meant?  But maybe that was it:  I didn’t know what I meant.  Did I mean loving or did I mean fucking?  Once, I might have thought there wasn’t any difference.  Now I understood there was, but which one was this?

“It’s not that,” Ash insisted.  “It’s that they’re right, Sandi.  I was willing to risk the lives of the people under me to get you back safe.  What kind of a person does that make me?”

I should have tried to be sympathetic.  I should have tried to commiserate.  I should have done a lot of things.

“Hold on,” I raised a hand, trying not to clench it into a fist.  “If that’s what’s bothering you, why not just take their offer and transfer to another Strike Wing?  You’re using this as an excuse.”

“Sandi, it’s just that…,” he tried to say, but between Burke and the vodka, I wasn’t in the mood to listen.

“It’s just that you never wanted to be with me to begin with,” I accused, something building momentum inside me that I couldn’t stop, slashing at him with my words like they were straight razors.  “You were never comfortable with us being together.”

“I’ve always wanted us to be together,” he shot back, his face flushing red with anger at my accusations.  “I just wanted to be more than your fuck-buddy.”  He’d hissed the last two words in a low voice to avoid drawing attention to us.

“Well, now you won’t have to worry about it anymore, asshole,” I snarled, pushing past him and stalking out of the darkness of the club, out into the streets of Tartarus.

A red haze had fallen across my vision, and the glare from the late-afternoon sun didn’t help.  I had no conscious destination in mind, nothing in my mind but thoughtless, simmering, alcohol-fueled rage as I stalked the sidewalks, eyes on the ground, ignoring everything around me.  Mom had abandoned me, Burke had abandoned me, Ash was abandoning me…

It wasn’t rational, it wasn’t fair, but it was what I was thinking, if you could call it thinking.  It was more like a gut-level reaction: fight-or-flight, but I’d done both.  I could blame exhaustion, or grief, or the vodka, but I couldn’t honestly say I would have reacted any differently stone-cold sober and with a good night’s sleep.

When I looked up again, I realized I’d walked all the way to the Headquarters section.  The Search and Rescue contingent was up on the second floor, according to the sign on the wall.

Had I meant to come here?  Was it subconscious, or had I known the whole time where I was going?  I hesitated at the bottom of the stairs that ran up the outside of the building.  Men and women in uniform and many in civilian clothes were shuffling in the steamy, drenching heat, but none spared me a look.  I probably smelled of alcohol, but I didn’t give a shit; I was off duty.

I took the stairs carefully, their rough surface scraping under the soles of my sandals.  The tops of my feet felt sunburned, and it was a relief when I stepped back into the shadows of the upper floor.  Air conditioning dried my sweat and the chill felt refreshing on my bare legs.  I found the Search and Rescue office; it had the look of being thrown together, with unadorned walls and plastic furniture and technicians still installing workstations.  One of them, a young enlisted man about five years my junior, looked up from the spaghetti tangle of fiber-optics lines in front of him and did a double-take at me.

“Can I help you, ma’am?”  He asked.  He had a sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of his nose and looked like he’d just graduated high school about a week ago.

“I’m looking for Commander…”  I trailed off, drawing a blank.  I couldn’t tell him I was looking for “Conrad.”  He wouldn’t know what the hell I was talking about.  What was his last name again?  “…Esparza,” I finished, fishing the name out of my vodka-sodden memory.

“His office is down that way,” the younger man waved at a hallway to my right.

I nodded my thanks and followed the gesture.  There were a couple smaller offices along the way, but he’d said he was the CO, so I kept going to the large one at the end.  The door was open, and inside, I could see that this room was as unfinished as the others.  The walls were the color of raw buildfoam, and the antiseptic-white plastic desk was cluttered with dataspikes, foldable tablets, and various personal items.

Conrad was sitting behind the desk, typing steadily on its built-in keyboard, the details of the report unfolding beneath his fingers and on the small, holographic display projected above the holotank.  He had a look of concentration on his face as he typed the last few words, then grabbed a video recording file inside the hologram and dragged into the report.

He looked up at me and smiled, and it lit the drab room up.  Damn, he was good looking.

“Hi,” he said, getting up from what looked like an uncomfortable chair.  He was still in his civvies, a tan pullover and white pants.  “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

I sat on the edge of his desk and looked up into his grey eyes.

“I just wanted to ask you a couple questions,” I said.

“Yeah?  Like what?”

“Are you married?”  The question seemed to catch him by surprise and his eyebrows shot up.  At least, he did a good job of looking surprised.  That might have been a put-on.  I didn’t for one minute believe he’d accidentally told me where he was going to be.

“No,” he said, the smile growing wider.  “I’ve been too busy with the military.”

He stepped closer, and I could smell the faint scent of dried sweat and maybe just a hint of cologne.  I liked the sweat better; I’d never cared for cologne.

“What’s the other question?”  He prompted.

“You wanna’ go back to my quarters and have another drink?”

I wasn’t sure how smooth or seductive I sounded, but I was a decent looking female and he was a man, and I was confident that would be enough.

“No,” he told me, and the confidence level began to fall.

“No?”  I repeated stupidly, feeling my eyes go wide.  He leaned across the desk and kissed me, his right hand cupping my cheek.  The hand was rough and calloused and full of potential strength.  The kiss was dry and expertly done and left me short on breath.

“No,” he said again, still smiling.  “I don’t want another drink.”

Well, that would work, too.

***

“There’s someone at your door.”

It took me a moment to place the voice.  I squeezed my eyes shut against a hangover headache, then opened them and saw Conrad’s face staring at me intently.  He was propped up on one elbow on my bed, and his grey-eyed gaze scanned me like the sensor suite on a missile boat.  It was dim in my bedroom, but not totally dark; I’d left the light on in the living room, apparently, though I didn’t remember it.  There was enough light to see the interplay of the muscles in his arms and chest; the S&R guys were all gym rats, even their commander.

Then I heard the faint knock and tried to shake my head clear.

“What time is it?”  I wondered, glancing around on the nightstand for my ‘link.

“Past midnight,” he supplied.  Then he grinned.  “Glad I have tomorrow off.”

I rolled out of bed and grabbed a T-shirt and shorts off the chair up against the wall by my closet, pulling them on blindly and hoping they weren’t backwards and inside out.  Who the hell would be coming by this time of night?  I hoped it wasn’t a mission; I’d been wiped out already, and Conrad had proven extremely energetic and durable.

I slitted my eyes against the glare of the light in the living room, noting that the clothes I’d been wearing were still on the floor by the couch, and the little decorative sculpture of a lioness I kept on the coffee table was knocked over.  I grinned and felt a tingle in my stomach.  That I remembered.

I opened the door and my grin faded.  It was Ash.  He was in civilian clothes now, but he still didn’t look like he’d slept; the circles under his eyes had deepened and the stress lines on his face made him look older.

“Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to wake you, but I want to talk to you.”

“You already did enough talking,” I snapped.

“Come on Sandi,” he pleaded, reaching out a hand to touch my shoulder, but I shrugged away from it.  “I don’t want things to end like this…”

“Then you shouldn’t have ended them.”  I wasn’t feeling merciful at all.  In fact, if anything, getting laid had been liberating, palate-cleansing.  “Don’t act like I’m being unfair to you, somehow.  You already made your choice about what was more important to you, and you didn’t choose me, that’s for damn sure.”

He looked around him at the harsh light of the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters hallway, conscious of the other doors close by.  “Can I come inside?”

“No,” I said flatly.  “Just go back to your room and get some sleep.”

“Just for a minute?”  There was a puppy-dog begging turn to his eyes and finally, I felt bad for him.

“You can’t, Ash,” I said, my tone softer, almost apologetic despite the anger still burning in my chest.  “I’m not alone.”

His mouth shaped a silent “oh,” as understanding finally came into his expression…and hurt.  A deep, deep hurt.

“I’m…sorry to disturb you.”  His tone had turned flat and hard, purposefully emotionless.  He stepped back from the door.  “I won’t bother you again.”

I almost called out to him as he turned and walked off, his motions stiff as he tried to hold himself together.  But I didn’t.  It was too late for that.  I let him go.

Chapter Sixteen

I don’t know why we still had mass briefings.  We could have done the same thing with a ViR briefing faster, easier and cheaper; but there was something visceral and human about being together physically in the same room, and the military never seemed ready to get rid of them.  There were fifty of us jammed into one of the Fleet’s smaller auditoriums in Tartarus, clustered around a large holotank that stretched from the floor to the ceiling.  Around the edges, more officers were filtering in, trying to find open seats with a view of the projection.

A short, muscular woman with skin the color of charcoal nodded to me as she took the chair beside me.

“Morning, Sandi,” she said genially.

“Felicia,” I responded.  She was the Second Squadron Leader, and a damned good pilot.

The rest of the squadron leaders from Strike Wing Alpha were already present, except for Ash.  I hadn’t seen him since three nights ago; we’d been off for two of those days, and yesterday I’d been busy breaking in three new pilots on the simulator.  Honestly, I’d been glad we hadn’t run into each other; I had no idea what to say to him, and I cringed at the thought of what he might say to me.

I checked my ‘link.  Five minutes until the briefing started, which meant that, according to the unwritten military rules of etiquette, Ash was late.  I glanced back over my shoulder at the rear entrance and saw him slipping through the door, shuffling up the aisles between the empty outer seats.  His shoulders were slumped, his eyes down, and I felt a twinge of pain in my chest.  He’d hurt me, and I’d wanted to hurt him, but I still hated to see him like this.

“Group!”  A voice that I recognized as Captain Osceola’s barked loudly and I stood in reflex.  “A-ten-shun!”

I stiffened to attention, letting my eyes follow Captain Frasier as he strode across the stage at the center of the auditorium.  He was a tall man, born on a world with lower gravity, towering above Osceola but as skinny as a skeleton and with a head that looked too small for his body.  He had a flat-top cut to his blond hair and a scrunched-up face that only helped to reinforce that image, and I always found it hard not to laugh at him when I saw him.  But I didn’t laugh, because that would be a mistake with a Captain senior enough that he was maybe a year from being promoted to Admiral.

“Take your seats,” he said, regarding us with a critical eye.

I thought I saw that eye follow Ash as he squeezed down the row of chairs where I was sitting, not looking at me as he passed.  He slumped into a seat a second behind everyone else, staring studiously up at the stage.

“Good morning,” he said, hands behind his back, as straight and stiff and stern as a recruiting poster.  “Our first operation as a Flight Group was successful, and you all performed very well.  But things are about to change, and I’m going to have to ask you all to show some adaptability.”

“Oh, great,” I heard someone mutter off to my right.  Frasier’s dark eyes darted towards the sound and I thought he might have heard it too, despite the fact it had been so soft I couldn’t even make out who had said it.

“We have been tasked,” Frasier went on, “with striking deeper into enemy territory than before, past the point where our supply lines can support you.  A vessel the size of our missile cutters can only spend so much time in T-space, can only carry so much ordnance, can only maneuver for so long without refueling.  We need to extend that range; but we do not, as of yet, have the means to defend a fixed base from which to do so.  That’s why we’ve been building these.”

An image snapped to life in the huge holotank, of something odd and awkward and ugly, with the air of practical utility to it.  I leaned forward in my seat, suddenly intent on the thing.

It seemed to be half space station and half starship, and I had the feeling that was the general idea.  My brain initially rebelled at any effort to describe it, but then I decided that it looked like someone had taken a pair of breakfast biscuits and jammed half a dozen straws into them to connect them to each other.  Only the straws were kilometers long and the biscuits were two hundred meters across, and dozens of missile cutters were docked along the straws and the whole thing was rotating slowly for gravity.

“This is the Implacable, the first of a new line of ships,” Frasier told us.  “She’s what we’re calling a carrier platform.  She’s not built to fight; she’s not heavily armored, her only armament is a few point defense turrets, and her reaction drives are mostly for use as short-range maneuvering thrusters.  If she’s attacked, her first defense is to retreat to Transition Space.  What she’s good for is carrying a whole Flight Group close enough to their target system that they can reach it with only a few hours of Transition, then return to re-arm if necessary.  She’s going to take this Flight Group deep into enemy space, and we’re going to hit them where it hurts.”

He used a small pointer to project a red dot over the huge, metallic “biscuit” sections.

“She also rotates for artificial gravity when she’s not in Transition, and has enough deck space for use as an R&R area for pilots between missions.  The idea here is that we can operate away from Inferno or other Fleet bases for extended periods of time.”

Which I guess made sense, but also didn’t exactly fill me with anticipation.  Inferno might be a humid, sunbaked hellhole, but at least you could go outside and look at the sky once in a while.  There were a few murmurings around the room, prompting a barked “At ease!” from Captain Osceola.  She had the least time in grade among the Captains who commanded the Strike Wings, so she got to be the one to ride herd over the Squadron Leaders.

“The Implacable will be meeting us in orbit in 150 hours,” Frasier went on as if Osceola hadn’t spoken.  “Bring whatever you think you’re going to need for the foreseeable future, because we won’t be coming back here for a minimum of three months.  You’ll all be sent a new set of training parameters and I want you to have all your pilots and crews running it twelve hours on, twelve off, until we leave.

“Our first target is going to be the Tahni shipyards.”

That caused a buzz, and I looked over at Felicia, meeting her wide-eyed stare.  Beyond her, I could see Ash stirring from his funk and straightening in his chair, his expression intent.  We’d been hunting for the location of the Tahni shipyards for years.  They hadn’t been as obvious as to build theirs in their home system the way we had, maybe because they weren’t as blindly confident as we were, but probably for some reason I couldn’t even hope to understand based on their screwy religious beliefs.

“After years of diligent work, our intelligence analysts have finally located them, but the shipyards are deep inside their core systems and we’re going to face some heavy opposition, the heaviest we’ve seen yet.”  He shrugged expressively.  “I know that some of you are probably thinking you’d like to have some support from a cruiser or two.  To be honest, I would as well, but that isn’t going to happen.  The new cruisers are just off the production line and the President and the Joint Chiefs have decided they’re needed for defending the Solar System, and that’s that.  But it’s my opinion, and that of Admiral Sato, that the element of surprise will be with us because of the extended range provided to us by the Implacable.”

He regarded us with a look that might have been trying for compassionate or parental or something, but just seemed more patronizing than anything else.

“And we both have faith in you, the best and the bravest that humanity has to offer.”

Oh, please…  I slitted my eyes, trying not to roll them.

“I know this appears to be a sudden shift in strategy; but I assure you, it was in the works from the beginning.  The Fleet started construction on this ship before the first missile cutter came off the line.  This is the next step in the maximization of the missile cutter concept, and it’s going to change the way this war is fought.  I’m damned excited to be a part of it.”

“Yeah,” Felicia murmured next to me, her lips barely moving, “you look excited.  Get your ass out there in a cutter and we’ll see how excited you are.”

I suppressed a snort of laughter, turning it into a cough and covering my mouth to disguise the grin.  I started to craft my own snide remark but paused, my grin fading as I realized that it wasn’t Ash sitting next to me.  Felicia was a laid-back sort with a good sense of humor, but I didn’t know her well enough to trust her that intimately.

I didn’t have anyone I could trust like that anymore.  I slumped back in my chair and glanced over to where Ash was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, staring intently into nothing.  I wondered if I should do what he wanted, try to just be friends.  Anything was better than this.

“Group!”  Osceola bellowed and I realized that I’d been woolgathering right through Frasier’s closing words.  “Attention!”

We stood motionless as Captain Frasier lumbered off the stage, leaving the image of the carrier platform to loom over us like a sword of Damocles.

“Dismissed!”  Osceola told us after her superior had disappeared through the side door.

I said something politely inane to Felicia and began shuffling down towards the end of the row of seats, trying to keep an eye on which way Ash was heading.  I almost ran directly into the chest of Conrad Esparza.  He was in uniform, and wore it quite well.

“Three months shipboard,” he mused, cocking an eyebrow.  “Could get pretty damned boring, I suppose.”

I felt my lip curl into a cross between a grin and a sneer.  Jesus, had I really thought this guy was smooth?  How drunk had I been?

“I liked you better when you were playing the sensitive man of action, Commander.”

“I wasn’t playing,” he protested with a shrug.  “I’m a man of many parts.”

“Which part are you thinking with right now, sir?”

He mimed an injury, hand going to his chest.

“Commander?”  A younger officer said from behind Conrad, getting his attention.  “What time do you want to schedule the team meeting?”

“Just a second, Carver,” Conrad said to the man, trying to turn back to me and continue the conversation.

“Go ahead, Commander,” I waved at him.  “I have my own people to brief and I have to get the new training program in place.  We’ll talk later…like you said, three months shipboard.”

I headed out the rear exit, keeping an eye open for Ash, but not seeing him.

Oh well, I thought.  I’ll catch him on board.

We were going to be busy as hell till we launched, anyway.  There’d be plenty of time.

***

I rubbed at my eyes and cursed under my breath as I realized I’d lost concentration again and needed to go over the results from Stanhope’s simulator run for a third time.  I tried a sip of the coffee from the plastic cup on my desk and made a face; it had gone cold while I was jacked into the interface.

“Fuck it,” I mumbled, yanking the interface cables out of my jacks and letting them spool back into the console.

It was nearly Midnight and I had to be up in six hours.  The flight crews might have twelve hours on and twelve off but the Squadron Leaders had more like eighteen hours on and six off.  I didn’t want to think what sort of hours the Wing Commanders were putting in.  Still two more days of this shit to go…

I dumped the cup into the recycler and stumbled out into the hallway.  The lights were dimmed at this time of night and I didn’t recognize the shadowed figure coming towards the Squadron Leaders’ office suite until I almost ran into him.  It was Ash, and he looked as surprised to see me as I was to see him.

“Sorry,” he said, stone-faced as he moved out of my way.  “I didn’t think anyone would be here so late.”

I almost brushed past him; he obviously wanted to avoid me, and I was dead tired.  But this thing had been nagging at me for a week and I couldn’t ignore it anymore.

“Hey.”  I held up a hand, blocking his way.  “I’ve been wanting to find the time to talk to you.”

“Didn’t you get to say enough last time?”  My eyes narrowed at his harsh tone and I made myself count to ten before I answered.

“I was drunk,” I told him honestly, “and hurting, and you blindsided me.  How did you expect me to react?”

He looked like he was about to snap back, but he bit his lip and nodded, instead.

“That’s fair,” he acknowledged.  “I should…I should have waited to talk to you about it until later.  I guess I was blindsided myself, when they called me in.  I figured it was a regular debrief…”  He trailed off, leaning against the wall.

“How long had you felt that way?”  I wondered.  “That we shouldn’t be…involved?”

“I was worried right from the beginning,” he confessed, “that if anything went wrong, it would ruin our friendship.  But I didn’t say anything because, you know, it was fun and I thought maybe we could be something more.”

“I guess maybe you were right about that.”  I opened my mouth, closed it again.  No, I had to say it; I couldn’t leave things like this.  “Maybe we could try to go back to the way it was.”

“I’d really like that,” he said, and I felt a surge of hope.  “But I don’t think I can do it.”

I frowned in confusion.

“Why not?”

“I told you about Carmen,” he explained, and there was a catch in his voice.  “About how I found her and my brother together…”

“Wait,” I interrupted, shaking my head.  “This wasn’t like that…”

“No, it wasn’t,” he admitted readily.  “I’m not saying it was.  But whenever I see you, that’s all I can think about.  I keep seeing her with him, except it’s not her, it’s you.  Maybe after a while, after I get that out of my head, we can try.  But for right now, I think it would be better if we just keep everything professional.”

“But you’re my friend, Ash,” I insisted, pleading and hating myself for it.  “You’ve always been there for me.  I need you to be my friend.”

“And I want to be.”  He sounded sad and he started to put a hand on my arm, but thought better of it and withdrew it.  “But I can’t do it right now.”  He nodded toward the office.  “I got to get to work.”

I stepped out of his way, feeling numb inside, and he headed past me.

I’d done it, I’d swallowed my pride and tried to make things right.  How could it not have worked?

I wanted to say it out loud, but there was no one left to ask.  I was alone.

Chapter Seventeen

The Implacable was simultaneously too large and far too small.

She was too small to handle berthing for all the pilots on top of the ship’s own crew, Search and Rescue, maintenance and support, so we all got to sleep in the tiny cabins of our own cutters.  Which meant that any time you wanted to go anywhere, you had to take the very small and very slow lift car down the tube you were docked against to one of the saucers.  In zero gravity, it would have been faster and more efficient to zip down the tube manually, but the Implacable spent most of her time in T-space with manufactured gravity, and there wasn’t room for both zero-g access tubes and lifts, too, so…

Yet despite the length of all the tubes and all the space inside the two saucers, it seemed there were people you just couldn’t avoid.  I’d spent as much time on the Artemis, my new cutter, as I could.  The food shipboard was no different than what I could make in the galley of my boat, the entertainment was accessible remotely through my ‘face jacks if I felt like joining other crewmembers in a ViR multiplayer game, and the training simulations were available the same way, so it wasn’t as if there were a lot of things I was missing out on.

But I couldn’t avoid briefings, both the ones I was getting and the ones I was giving, and I had to use the Implacable’s gym if I wanted to get any exercise at all.  That was where he found me.  I was beating the shit out of a heavy bag, trying to take out my frustrations and yet, after over an hour, still not able to get rid of them all.

“How do you like our new secret weapon?”  Conrad asked, hands hanging off the towel draped around his neck.  He’d just finished running laps on the perimeter track that went all the way around the saucer while I’d pretended not to notice when he’d passed.  He was dressed in running shorts and a tank top and was drenched with sweat in a way that was making it hard to concentrate on the bag.

“Are you referring to yourself or the Implacable?”  I asked, pausing long enough to raise an eyebrow before I fed the heavy bag a combination jab-hook-roundhouse kick, the pad over my instep smacking into it at head-level with a loud pop.

“I am but a humble servant,” he assured me, placing a palm against his chest and bowing his head, “whose job it is to ensure the safety of true warriors such as yourself.”

“You are so full of shit,” I told him, unleashing a flurry of body shots.  “Sir.”

“Is that any way to treat a superior officer who was just about to invite you to his room for a drink?”

“You have a room?”  I asked him, pausing in the bag workout to regard him skeptically.  “And alcohol?”

“We Search and Rescue team members,” he informed me, “don’t have cabins on our ships, so they had to put us up.  And, as a Commander…”

“Lieutenant Commander,” I reminded him archly.  Only one rank above me, despite being in the military years longer.

“As a Lieutenant Commander,” he went on, smiling hugely, “I do get a certain weight allowance for personal goods that no one checks too carefully for contraband.”

I looked at him carefully and blurted out what I was thinking before I could consider whether that was a good idea or not.

“You’re a really good-looking guy,” I said frankly, “with an exciting job and a pretty good personality…why the hell are you so intent on getting with me?  Honestly, Conrad, I have issues.  My issues have issues.  You can’t be that hard up, even on a ship this size.”

He leaned against the heavy bag, draping an arm over it as he met my eyes.

“You don’t know me that well,” he confided, “or you’d know I have issues of my own.  You don’t do this job for as long as I have without having a few bad logic gates.  You just learn to get better at pretending you’re normal.”

I considered that for a moment, then I hauled off and slugged the bag at head level, hard enough to jolt him.

“I have a Squadron meeting at eighteen hundred hours ship-time,” I told him.  “Message me the directions to your quarters and I’ll be there at eighteen thirty.”

“Roger that,” he said.  He tossed me an off-handed salute and headed out of the gym.

I tried to get my mind back on my workout, but a thought kept nagging at me:  was I getting with Conrad just to get even with Ash?  Finally, I stopped working the bag long enough to decide that Conrad likely wouldn’t care, so why should I?  Life, as events kept reminding me, was too short.

***

A quick shower and a change of clothes later, I was headed for my Squadron meeting and running through everyone’s names in my head.  It was hard enough to remember my new Crew Chief’s name, and thank God, he wasn’t going to be at the meeting because he was a huge buzz-kill.  Most of the time I’d spent with the other pilots was over the interface in the simulator, and I needed to connect names to faces.

I wasn’t sure why I wanted to know them better when some of them wouldn’t be coming back from this mission; it would be easier for me if I didn’t know them.  For some reason, I felt like that made it even more important that I did it, like it was one of the duties that I’d signed on for when I became their Squadron Leader.

They were already there when I arrived, which was the plan.  A commander had to show up late enough that the others had a chance to be early, but early enough to keep them on their toes.  They’d taught us that in the Academy, and unlike a lot of the other bullshit they’d told us, I could see the point of this one.

“On your feet!”  Grimaldi snapped sharply as I entered the room.

“As you were,” I said before most of them could even get out of their chairs.  I took the seat at the head of the table and looked over the eleven of them.

All of them were young, at least as young as me, and all of them Lieutenants-junior grade except for Grimaldi, who was the same rank as me and was my wingman.  He was five years older than I was, and had been enlisted as a Marine before he’d attended the Academy.  He had a face like the blade of a hatchet and a thin-lipped line of a mouth and was perhaps one of the ugliest men I’d ever met, but he was also one of the most daring and competent pilots I’d served with.  Since he was guarding my ass, I was happy about that.

“Okay, people,” I addressed them, “we’ve gone over the simulations until we could do them in our sleep, and I know you all have the mission parameters memorized backwards and forwards.  Let’s get down to the meat of this.  What do you want to ask that you’ve been afraid to bring up?”

There were looks of doubt and hesitation.  They were all young and ballsy and combat pilots, which meant not one of them wanted anyone to think they were afraid of anything.  But we’d been out here for a couple weeks and still had a couple more to go and I thought it was a good idea to clear the air.  Finally, a tall, spindly woman with blond hair tied into a complex knot raised her hand.

“This isn’t the Academy,” I reminded her---Goddard was her name, I recalled.  “Just ask.”

“This installation seems like it’s going to be very heavily defended,” she said.  “Do they really think we can pull this off, or are we just being thrown at it because they don’t have anything else?”

“You mean because they won’t commit the cruisers to this?”  I prompted and she nodded.  “I’ve never met Admiral Sato,” I admitted, “but everything I’ve read and heard about him is that he’s not reckless, but he is willing to take a risk when the reward’s high enough.  So, if you’re asking me if he’d sacrifice us all just to look like he’s doing something proactive, then no, I don’t believe that.”  I shrugged.  “But if you’re asking if he’d be willing to risk us on something that wasn’t a sure bet because he thought we might do enough damage to make it worthwhile, then hell, yes.  He doesn’t want to throw us away, but he’s not afraid to lose us, either.  Does that answer your question?”

“Yes, ma’am.”  She nodded, looking a bit troubled but less confused.  I guess that was an improvement.

“Anyone else?”

This time it was a man, a nondescript, average-looking pilot with one of those faces I couldn’t have picked out of a crowd.

“Yes, Wolczk?”  I prompted him.

“Is this mission military or political, ma’am?”  He wondered in a tone that indicated which option he’d already chosen.  “The Tahni hit our shipyards,” he continued, “and it didn’t win the war for them.  We’ve just built more ships somewhere else.  Is this really going to accomplish anything?”

“You’re making the mistake of assuming the Tahni think like humans.  When we got our asses kicked at Mars, we figured we’d been fighting the war wrong and we changed our tactics and strategies.  But the Tahni don’t second-guess their leaders the way we do.  They follow an Emperor they think is the living embodiment of their god, immortal and occupying one body after another.  You don’t accuse god of making a mistake, so when things go bad, it’s because you failed, not the one who created the strategy.”

“I get you, ma’am.”  Wolczk nodded after a moment.  “They won’t change the way they do things, they’ll just double down.”

“Right.  If we can find a weakness we can exploit, they’ll crack like an egg.  We just have to find the right spot to hit.”

Of course, I was taking for granted that our intelligence about their psychology was correct.  But you have to work with what you’ve got, I suppose.

“On the other side of that coin,” I reflected, “every military operation is also political.  Everything we do is to try to get the Tahni to stop fighting, and since their government is not run by their military, that’s a political decision.”

God, now I was sounding just like my Academy instructors.  I might have lifted that directly from one of the intensely boring political science lectures Colonel Mabrey had given, actually.  I was shocked; I thought I’d slept through every one of his classes.  Was this how all officers did it?  Just bullshitting and copying someone else’s words?

“Why aren’t we jumping in closer to the target?”  Steinhart said in what seemed closer to a demand than a question.  “I know it would be cutting it close as far as the wormhole formation near a gravity well; but I did the figures and we could come in at least a hundred thousand kilometers closer, which would let us drop the missiles right in their laps.  The way they got us jumping in this far from the objective…”  He shook his head.  “It’s just gonna’ give them more time to shoot at us.”

My first inclination was to bite his head off, but I clenched my jaw shut to give it a moment to pass.  Then I had the thought that I probably would have asked that question myself, and not in as well-mannered a tone, back before I had this job.

“Yes,” I said with exaggerated patience, because that was the only kind I had, “technically, we could come in a light-second or so closer than the plan calls for.  But there’s two problems with that.”  I stopped, forcing myself not to lecture at him.  “Anyone have a guess what they are?”

“It’s the orbital mechanics,” Wandrey said confidently.  He looked like a gym rat, blocky and muscular, but he talked like a science geek.  “With that many moons and moonlets in so many orbits around the gas giant, it’s constantly changing the closest possible distance for stable wormhole formation.  We’re coming out with enough of a fudge factor to make sure we can all Transition without anyone overshooting and winding up on the other side of the planet.”

“And that’s problem number one,” I confirmed.  “Number two?”

This time, there were no takers.

“Coordination,” I gave them the answer.  “We have different wings and different squadrons hitting different targets.  If we don’t want the enemy defenses to all be able to concentrate on one of those attacks, they all have to occur simultaneously.  Now, what happens if we have three different wings jumping in and out at three different times and three different locations?”

“Transition lag,” Wandrey supplied, smacking the heel of his hand against his forehead like he was an idiot for not remembering it.

“Transition lag,” I repeated in confirmation.  Wandrey was smart; much smarter than I was about the physics side of things.  I memorized enough of it to pass the Academy classes, but a real expert is able to look at the math and see the picture unfold in front of them, like it’s a language.  I looked at it and saw hieroglyphics.

“It might only be for a few minutes, but when you’re talking about thousands of missiles, that’s long enough to get a single Strike Wing wiped out.”

I looked around, meeting each of their eyes.

“So, we all good or are there any other questions, problems, issues?”

“Ventnor cheats at poker,” Wolczk cracked, nudging the arm of the woman next to him.

“You being a bad player doesn’t make me a cheater,” she replied archly.

“In that case,” I said, standing---which prompted the others to jump to their feet and come to attention, “take care of yourselves in the next few days.  Get real sleep and cut the workouts down to warmups at least three days before the mission.”  I sobered.  “And make sure you update your messages for loved ones.”

It took an effort to remember that one, since I didn’t have to worry about it.

What message would I leave for Mom if she were still alive?  Would I bother?  She’d already resigned herself that I was going to die, and if my life expectancy as an assault shuttle pilot had been low, the numbers had to be in the negative range as a missile cutter commander.

I shook the thought off.

“Dismissed.  I’ll see you all at the simulators.”

I waited until they’d filed out before I let out the sigh I’d been holding, then walked out behind them, the bag workout dragging at me like lead weights.

Ash was coming down the passage as I came out the door.  He paused, awkwardly gesturing towards the conference room.

“I guess I’m up next,” he said.  “How’d yours go?”

“Who the hell decided to make me responsible for twenty-three other people?”  I grumbled, forgetting our personal situation for a moment.  “I feel ten years older than I did a few months ago.”

“Yeah, me too,” he admitted, leaning against the bulkhead with the same exhaustion I felt.  “You…,” he trailed off.  “You doing anything?”

“Yeah, I am,” I said, maybe a little too quickly.  “In fact, I have to get going.”

He nodded, sagging a little…or maybe that was my imagination.

“That Search and Rescue guy?”  He asked, and I raised an eyebrow, wondering how he knew.

“Conrad,” I confirmed, reluctantly.

“He seems like a stand-up guy,” Ash said, with what might have been grudging respect.

“Good luck with your squadron,” I said pointedly.  He shrugged, accepting that I wasn’t going to talk about it any further.

“They’re good pilots.  I hope I can get them through this.”

“You’re a good leader,” I assured him.  “You’ll do fine, and so will they.”

“Thanks,” he said, then went into the conference room.

I cursed under my breath.

This ship, I thought again, is too damned small.

Chapter Eighteen

“Ten seconds till Transition,” a voice said in my ear.  “Please acknowledge.”

“First Squadron, aye,” I responded automatically, just the way I’d done in the simulators.

It still felt odd, hearing someone outside my ship tell me that we were Transitioning.  It felt odd riding the rails of the carrier platform like one of the Tahni parasite fighters hanging on their destroyers.  It felt very odd not being in the Huntress; the Artemis was nearly identical, but she was from the next generation of cutters and I could tell the little differences.

But perhaps the oddest thing was the man sitting next to me.  Chief Petty Officer Nguyen Ngoc Ngan was competent and professional and as serious as a Victorian portrait, and being on the ship with him I constantly felt as if I was being graded.  I hadn’t been asked my opinion, just assigned a new boat and a new crew chief and told to get the damn job done.

“Transitioning.”

I don’t know why, but it didn’t seem as bad going through the warp attached to the carrier.  There was probably some physics reason for it, but all I knew was, I was back to my senses in about a second and I didn’t feel as if I was about to puke.  My view screen activated and I was looking into a sea of stars, the primary of the system we’d jumped into so far away that I couldn’t even tell it from any of the other glimmering lights.

“All squadrons prepare for separation,” Captain Osceola directed.

“First squadron,” I relayed, “fire it up and get ready to kick off.”

I was already jacked in, and it was the matter of a thought to activate the ship’s reactor and order the docking collar to separate and withdraw into the Implacable’s recesses.  The big ship’s post-jump momentum was minimal, and the Artemis hung motionless where she’d been anchored, like a well-trained warhorse waiting for the touch of my heels.

“Separate.”

The maneuvering thrusters pushed at us with bangs of harsh insistence and we floated away from the body of the carrier like bees swarming off of a hive, dozens of us up and down the length of her.

“Strike Wing Alpha, form on me,” Osceola ordered.

“First Squadron, form up,” I echoed and fed power to the fusion drive for just a moment, feeling the raw energy like a kick in the pants.

More bangs and shoves from the maneuvering jets set me in the center of one of a series of globes, formed up on the center sphere of the Group Headquarters Squadron.  Missile cutters were spread out over hundreds of kilometers, matching velocity and orientation with each other as we drifted slowly away from the carrier.

“Alpha,” Osceola broadcast again, passing down the word she was getting from Group Commander Frasier, “we make the Transition into the target area in seventy seconds.  Each squadron knows your assignment.  The Implacable will be waiting here unless she’s engaged.  If your ship is damaged or you need refitting and rearming and return and she is not here, she’s jumped back to Rally Point Alpha.  If she’s not there, well…it’s a long flight home, hope you brought a change of clothes.”

I snorted a laugh.  Nguyen didn’t make a sound, and I was sure if I could see his face inside his helmet, it would be as expressionless as a statue’s.

“First Squadron,” I said to my boys and girls, forcing an upbeat and confident demeanor into my voice, “you’ve trained for this, you know what to do.  Make me proud.”

Shit, I thought ruefully, I sound like Frasier now.

Then we jumped.

The Fleet shipyards at Mars had been constructed there mostly for political reasons; the Martian colony had been pushing for independence from Earth, and putting the Fleet construction base there had both created a shitload of income for Mars and made sure there was a sizable Commonwealth military presence there just to keep anyone from getting ideas.  The Tahni shipyards had been built more with practicality in mind.  Everything was grouped together in one, easy-to-access spot:  construction shells, living space for work crews, power, raw materials and, perhaps most importantly, fuel.

The tattered edges of Transition Space flapped around me like a ragged flag in the wind before the nothingness closed up, sealing itself against the reality that couldn’t coexist with it.  On this side of the warp was a gas giant, a huge one, maybe even a little bigger than Jupiter; and clustered around it were the finely meshing gears of the Tahni military industrial complex.

I let the interface piece the picture together for me: closest were the twinkling reflections of the system’s class B primary, only two Astronomical Units away, off of the construction shells orbiting the largest moon; the mining installations on that moon digging up raw materials and sending them to orbit with a mass driver while other mineral resources were brought in via automated freighters hauling in whole asteroids.  With the optical scopes magnification turned up to the maximum, I could actually see the outline of the deuterium/tritium mining facilities floating in the upper atmosphere of the gas giant, rotating slowly across the red and orange face.

And then there was the holy grail, the goose that kept producing their golden eggs, stretching kilometers long and kilometers wide.  It was a massive particle accelerator powered by an equally massive fusion reactor, fed a steady stream of deuterium and tritium from the atmosphere mines in its tireless task of producing the lifeblood of the Tahni space fleet, antimatter.  It powered their ships, it powered their giant mecha---the anthropomorphic tanks they used for ground combat, and it gave them a distinct advantage over us.  If we took this production facility out, we’d cripple them.

Which explained the heavily-fortified defense base floating in high orbit above the gas giant, a nightmare covered in meters of nickel-iron armor and bristling with weapons and fighter bays.  The last link in the logistics chain was currently visible, and I barely gave it a thought even though the interface showed it to me on the display:  the one habitable moon of the gas giant, where the work crews and maintenance staff for all the different bases rotated in and out of dirtside quarters.  It was hot and humid and thick with jungle, from the intelligence reports, but it wasn’t a target and I doubted I’d even see it.

Honestly, I doubted I’d live long enough to see it; this was looking like a suicide mission.

“Squadrons deploy,” Osceola ordered calmly, not sounding at all like she was about to shit her pants.  Was it just me that felt this way?

“First Squadron, follow me,” I said, imitating her tone.  “Six-gravity burn, initiate now.”

At least the acceleration made it too uncomfortable to concentrate on worrying.  And there was plenty to worry about; they’d detected us.  The launches were flares of thermal energy on the scopes, thousands of them, missiles and fighters and corvettes curving outward from the Tahni defense station, all sent out to meet us and all pissed off.  The missiles were a frightening mass of fusion, but they didn’t worry me as much; they wouldn’t be able to decelerate, so they’d only have one pass at us before they ran out of fuel.  Fuel wouldn’t be a problem for us, because we weren’t going to be firing a deceleration burn.  That was part of the plan.

I was feeling grateful that the dozen destroyers under construction in the shipyard weren’t battle-ready yet, and that the huge amount of Tahni traffic in the area meant they wouldn’t be using kinetic energy weapons, and that they probably wouldn’t be using ground-based lasers for the same reason.  And mostly I was grateful that dealing with the damned defense base wasn’t our part of the mission, because not even a Ship-Buster would take that thing out, if you were lucky enough to penetrate its missile defenses in the first place.  No, our target was the antimatter factory, and it was looming ahead in the sensor display, three hundred thousand kilometers away and in a higher orbit than the defense station or the shipyards.

I could see the IFF markers of First and Second Squadrons of Strike Wing Alpha splitting off from the others and making course for the factory, and I could also see a good number of the missiles and enemy ships heading our way to try to intercept us.  The missiles would make their pass first, in about twenty minutes at the rate we were barreling towards each other.  We’d have to run that gauntlet before we launched the Ship-Busters; otherwise, they’d target our missiles instead and we’d lose too many.  As absurd as it sounded, we needed them shooting at us.

I buried myself in the interface to make the time go by faster, trying to absorb every detail.  There was Ash, in the center of Third Squadron, in formation with us and the rest of the Strike Wing, wheels within wheels.  There was Strike Wing Charlie, bearing down on the shipyards, and then Delta running straight at the atmosphere mines, while poor Bravo had to take on the defense base.  All of us seemed to hang there in space, us on one side, them on the other, like waves about to crash on the beach, like one last moment of pregnant silence before the storm hit.

And when it did, the data came in a deluge and washed over me so fiercely that I could barely keep track of anything beyond the globular cluster of my own squadron formation.  Gatling lasers stuttered out interlocking fields of anti-missile fire and enemy boosters exploded in blasts of igniting propellant or spiraled off out of control or simply kept going blindly, their guidance hardware destroyed.  Others simply missed, the living controllers attempting to guide them remotely from a distance unable to maintain the lock in the spaghetti-track of weaving signals and blinding thermal flares.

But some didn’t miss, and didn’t get intercepted.  Fusion explosions lit up their own little areas of space, tiny suns shining for just an instant, each a marker for two graves.  IFF transponders winked out and I grunted when I saw that one of them was Goddard’s ship.  Just like that, she was gone and her Crew Chief too, erased from the world in a ball of ionized gas.

And then the missiles were past, the ships that launched them still a light-second farther back, and I barely heard the order to end the burn, performing the action anyway out of instinct and training.  The oppressive hand of acceleration lifted off of me and breath gasped back into my lungs.  I didn’t hear the next order either, but I saw it flash across my vision via an alert from the interface:  weapons free.

“First Squadron,” I spoke, the first words I’d uttered in a half an hour, and they came in a dry rasp, “launch all missiles!”

I could feel the lurch of the weapons separating from the Artemis, the physical sensation drawing me out of the interface.  I was back in the cockpit, feeling the soreness from the high-g burn, seeing Nguyen still strapped into his seat, motionless and silent, a gargoyle monitoring the health of the systems from his helmet HUD and not deigning to become involved unless he was needed.

“Transferring control of the Gatling to you, Chief,” I offered, just to say something.

“Acknowledged, ma’am,” was his laconic response.

The Ship-Busters were roaring forward, hell-bent on destruction, and we trailed behind, still running headlong into the antimatter factory, with not nearly enough room or time to decelerate.  I wondered if the Tahni thought we were crazy or stupid, or if they already had an idea what we were going to do.  It had been done before, of course, by individual pilots, myself among them.  But as far as I knew, this was the first time a whole Strike Wing was going to try it as a mass maneuver.

“Alpha,” Osceola chimed in right on cue, “prepare for Transition, minimum possible duration.”

A long pause, and the corvettes behind us were closing faster now; they’d be in laser range soon.

“Execute.”

A familiar, almost welcome shredding of reality once, and then twice; and suddenly, all of us were drifting as near motionless as to make no matter, only a couple hundred thousand kilometers on the far side of the antimatter factory, towards the gas giant, its imposing bulk a silhouette against the stars.  Our momentum had been stolen and dumped into another dimension, and I felt a surge of pride that I’d been the one who’d suggested the tactic.  And we were also, abruptly, about twenty thousand kilometers behind the wave of Tahni corvettes.

“Four g burn.”  Captain Osceola’s tone was as calm and unflappable as always.  “Engage enemy ships.  Squadrons, you are free for individual maneuver.”

“First squadron,” I ordered, “split by wingmen and engage.”

The corvettes were turning end-for-end and decelerating; they had no choice, other than jumping, and they’d so far shown no inclination to do that when they were on the defense.  The intelligence types had a wild-ass guess that their commanders thought it would encourage running from the enemy, but I had my doubts about that.  The Tahni didn’t strike me as the type to run from a fight.

That put somewhere around two dozen of them caught between us and the factory they were defending, basically shielding us from the installations defense lasers, while the Ship-Busters were coming in hot behind us at twenty gravities.  We couldn’t have scripted that better.

“With me, Grimaldi,” I said to my second in command, the last words I spoke before I clenched my stomach muscles and hit the boost again.

Acceleration was abruptly having its way with me and it definitely liked to be on top.  I retreated away from the g-forces pushing me mercilessly into my crash couch and dove into the interface, cutting loose of exterior stimuli and seizing onto the data stream.  There they were, the enemy arrayed in a diamond formation straight ahead of us.  I targeted the closest corvette and fired the proton cannon, the energy from the beam dissipating across the enemy ship’s nose in a halo of iridescence; but Grimaldi followed my shot with his own at the same spot, close enough that it overloaded the deflectors and sliced through the crew compartment.

I was already jinking the ship starboard to avoid the return fire I’d expected, but I needn’t have bothered; the corvette’s engines had cut out, the emergency interlocks shutting down power since the computers that controlled them had been fried along with the crew.  I hoped the damned thing wound up smashing right into the factory, though I didn’t expect it would do that much damage to a structure so huge.

Two dozen other dogfights were unfolding around Grimaldi and me, and more flares from the drives of spaceships and missiles and the globular flash of fusion explosions twinkled in the dark silence, lives ending without a sound.  I couldn’t follow them all, couldn’t even follow my own squadron except for a vague sense of who lived and who died, so I concentrated on the battle I was fighting.  Not even the whole battle, just the flashes of it that were all I could keep up with consciously.

Another corvette, its laser slashing out at me; the vague nausea penetrating the interface as the Artemis spun to shed the focused energy.  Simulated flashes from our Gatling laser in the display, where Nguyen had managed to get off a long burst, and the Tahni laser cutting out with a spark of vaporized metal as the emitter fragmented from the hit.  Firing the proton cannon at where the computer predicted a corvette would be, seeing the yellow halo of its deflectors and firing off the other capacitor bank at the same spot and wanting to yell in triumph at the clouds of ionized gas billowing out of the gap in its hull.

Ash’s Acheron taking a hit from an enemy laser hard enough to cause a thermal flare that caught my sensors’ attention and my own.  I cursed out loud and my heart was in my throat for a moment as I watched his IFF transponder expectantly, but it didn’t fade and he stayed on course, and I let out a relieved breath…or as much of one as I could under four gravities of acceleration.

And then the Ship-Busters were past us, the ones that hadn’t been taken out by the factory’s own defense lasers, and I could see the parasite fighters coming within missile range and launching.  The weapons were tiny and pathetic compared to the dreadnought-destroyers we’d fired at the factory, but if one of them hit, we’d still be just as dead.  I let my attention swing back and forth between their approaching missiles and ours and was about to order my squadron to jump whether Osceola did first or not.

“Strike Wing Alpha,” she said as if she’d read my mind, “Transition, minimum distance.”

It was spotty; some of us had drained both capacitor banks in the fight and had to wait for one to recharge to make the jump.  Like a school of fish reacting a bit at a time to a threat, our cutters darted out of realspace and then back into it.  When the Artemis emerged, it was a light second towards the night side of the gas giant and I could see the habitable moon on the scope, edging towards the day side in its orbit, but never in total darkness from the glow of its godlike all-father.  Greens wreathed a huge swathe of the continent facing us, surrounded by the deep blues of oceans, and I knew from our briefing that the Tahni base was on the other side of the moon, on a large island.

Too bad, I thought.  They won’t see the show.

The Ship-Busters hit all along the length of the antimatter factory, fourteen of them, and wrapped the huge structure in cocoons of star-fire, absorbing it and transforming it into something made of pure energy.  Antimatter storage containers failed as the fusion reactors went offline and when the mirror image particles touched regular materials, fourteen smaller spheres were dwarfed by a globular burst of white larger than a moon, large enough to swallow the remaining corvettes and fighters and leave them as nothing more than their component atoms.

“Holy shit,” I heard Grimaldi mutter over our ship-to-ship net.  “That blowed up real good.”

I chuckled for a moment, until I noticed again the butcher’s bill:  I’d lost three ships, including Goddard.  Yount and Tuska hadn’t made it through the missiles, and try as I might, I couldn’t remember anything about either of them except their names and faces.

Damn it.

I had a sense something was wrong.  I don’t know if it was the interface whispering to me or just intuition, but I knew before I looked what I was going to find.  Ash.  I didn’t see Ash’s transponder in the formation.

“Wing Commander,” I called.  “Where’s Third Squadron Leader?”

She didn’t have to answer.  I got the transmission at the same time she did.  It was an emergency beacon, and the only time a cutter’s pilot would launch one was if they were going down in enemy-held territory and didn’t dare make a direct link.

“This is Lt. Carpenter,” Ash’s voice said from far away.  “The Acheron took damage and I had a power surge when I Transitioned…we misjumped.  The engines are down, Chief Ngata has been killed, and I’m in a decaying orbit around the Tahni colony moon.  I’m taking her down with the atmospheric jets here on the night side.  If I can get down safely, I’ll stay as close to the Acheron as I can for as long as I can.”

There was a long pause and I thought that was it.

“Sandi.”  The word startled me and I jerked against my seat harness.  “If you can hear this, I want you to know that I love you, and I’m sorry.”

And then there was nothing but silence and darkness.

“Strike Wing Alpha.”  Osceola’s voice was cold and robotic.  “Transition back to the Implacable to re-arm and re-fit.  This isn’t over yet.”

“Captain,” I blurted, my voice cracking helplessly, “let me take a couple boats and…”

“Negative, First Squadron Leader,” she cut me off, and I thought maybe this time I heard a hint of sympathy.  “Get your people back to the carrier.  This is Search and Rescue’s job.  And we still have a battle to fight.”  Then her voice hardened again.  “That’s an order.”

I didn’t say anything for a long moment, and I thought maybe I wouldn’t.  I thought maybe I’d just head off for that moon anyway, and to hell with everyone else.

“First Squadron,” I said instead.  “We’re jumping back to the carrier.  Follow me.”

I stroked a control with my mind and nothingness expanded to swallow me up.

Chapter Nineteen

I didn’t run through the corridors of the starboard saucer; that would have been unbecoming a Squadron Leader and counterproductive anyway, since there was a steady stream of pilots and maintenance crews going on and off duty to re-arm and refit the waves of incoming cutters.  I did walk briskly and used a generous combination of elbows and hip-checks to force my way through the crowd, ignoring pained exclamations and resentful glares and embarrassed apologies.  Their faces looked blank to me, like the faces of people you passed by in a dream, unfocussed, unreal.

None of this seemed real.

I reached the imaginatively named “Conference Room 4” and pushed the ID plate with my palm.  The door slid aside and I dodged through before it was fully open, finding Captain Osceola huddled over a holographic display with Commander Linton, her XO.  She looked up as I entered and said something quietly to Linton, who nodded and left the room.  I was practically fidgeting with impatience as I waited for the door to close behind him.

“Ma’am,” I said urgently, “do you have any…”

“Have a seat, Lieutenant,” she told me, gesturing at the chair beside her.

Goddamn it, I fumed inwardly, do we have to go through this piddly shit?

“Ma’am,” I pleaded, “just tell me.”

Her face was the definition of grim and I felt my stomach drop at the thought that Ash was dead and she knew it.

“Lt. Carpenter’s boat crash-landed somewhere on the unoccupied continent of the Tahni colony moon,” she said bluntly.  “We don’t know his current status, and we don’t have any communications with him.”

“When is the Search and Rescue boat going out, ma’am?”  I asked her.  “Does it need an escort?”

“That’s not my call,” she told me.  “Captain Frasier will determine the safest time to launch a recovery mission.  As for us, we’re slated to go back out in three hours and try again on the shipyards.”

“Charlie couldn’t take them out, ma’am?”  I wondered, surprised.  Maybe they’d run out of missiles.

“Charlie was forced to break off to cover Bravo’s withdrawal.”  She shook her head.  “The defense station is a tough nut.  Alpha and Delta are going to take it on together this next run.”

“Ma’am…”  I trailed off, realizing I was begging but not caring.  “Don’t let them leave him there.”

“He’s your friend,” she reminded me sternly, “but he’s my pilot.  I don’t leave people behind.”

“Aye, ma’am.  Thank you.”

“Get your people briefed for the mission, Hollande.”  The words were brusque, but I thought I saw pain somewhere behind those hard, dark eyes.

I came to attention and gave her a parade-ground salute before I left the room.

Then I started cursing.  I began silently, but the invective wouldn’t stay inside and my lips began moving as I muttered and spoke and eventually barked every obscenity and profanity I’d picked up over a military brat’s childhood.  The faceless legions around me were staring, and I didn’t care anymore.

I felt the touch on my arm and spun, ready to lash out at anyone foolish enough to scold me, no matter what their rank.

It was Conrad.

“I heard,” he said, and I thanked God that he hadn’t said something inane like “are you okay?” because I might have punched him.  “Come with me, I need to talk to you.”

“I can’t,” I snapped at him, too angry and agitated to appreciate any comfort he wanted to give.  “I have to get my squadron briefed and ready to head back out.”

“No,” he cut me off sharply, “I don’t think you do.”

I frowned, anger turning into something more akin to fear.

“What?”  I asked.

He looked around, seeing curious eyes still brushing across us.

“Not here.”  He waved at me.  “Come on.”

His eyes flickered left and right as we walked, like he didn’t have a destination in mind, but finally he grabbed my arm and guided me into a storage room.  Plastic bins of spirulina powder and soy paste were strapped into place on magnetic pallets and there was barely enough room for us to squeeze between them.

“Have you heard something about the rescue mission?”  I demanded, watching him push the door shut behind us.  “Is there any way I can get my squadron as your escort?”

“There isn’t going to be any escort and there isn’t going to be any rescue mission.”  The declaration was flat and filled with a certainty that made my stomach drop.

“How the hell can you know that?”

“Because it’s my fucking job to know it!”  He was angry, and I wanted to be angry back, but I could tell it wasn’t aimed at me.  He stalked back and forth as much as he could in the tiny space available to us in the storage room.  “I was bugging Captain Frasier about a retrieval before he even got back to the carrier.  I was on his ass the minute he got off the lift from the docking collar.  The fucker told me that there’s too much opposition from the defense station.”

“He’s not going to even try?”  My voice rose in what could have been a wail.  “What if we take out the damned station?”

“He doesn’t believe you can.  He hasn’t made an announcement yet, not even to the Strike Wing commanders, but I think he’s going to pull out.  Bravo got it bad.  Only six boats are left out of the whole wing.”

“Oh, Jesus,” I moaned, nearly stumbling, catching myself against the bulkhead.  Six fucking boats?  How could we lose that many?

But I knew, as quickly as I asked myself the question.  The defense station was too close to the gas giant; they wouldn’t have been able to Transition out if they were close enough to engage it.  They’d get mauled going in, and then again retreating.  It was a tiger trap, and we’d fallen into it.

“He’s going to die down there.”  For a second, I didn’t even realize that the words had come from me; it was as if someone were whispering them in my ear.  “We’re going to leave him and he’s going to die.”

He’d never let himself be captured; we’d talked about it once.  He’d go down shooting and he’d die alone.

I wasn’t going to let that happen to him.

I don’t know when I made the decision, but I knew that it was made.  Maybe there never really was a decision, maybe that’s just how it was going to be.  I felt the anger and the grief and the helplessness drift away and a strange sense of peace settle over me.

“You’re going to do something stupid,” Conrad said.

“What if I am?”  I asked him, challenging.  “Are you going to try to stop me?”

“Fuck that.”  There was a thin, twisted smile on a face that suddenly didn’t look at all smooth or handsome, and I remembered how he’d assured me he had his own issues.  “I’m going to help you.”

***

Wendig was the only Tactical Flight Controller I knew, and I was praying he was on duty.  I’d never seen the slimy, scheming little fuck when he wasn’t trying to con someone or cheat at cards or sell contraband, and I figured he was exactly what I needed right now.  I’d also never been that happy to cross paths with him, but I was glad to find him at his post just the same.

There were two other TFCs huddled in their corner of the Operations Center, comfortably far enough away from the ship’s Tactical Officer that I could sneak in without being noticed.  Everyone was watching the incoming signals from Charlie’s stragglers, and I had a sneaking suspicion that, once they arrived, the Implacable would be jumping out.

“Wendig,” I said quietly from a meter away, and he looked up from the holographic display that enveloped him.  He was a mousey, beady-eyed, rail-skinny little runt who managed to seem both underfed and soft at the same time.

“Lieutenant,” he grinned unpleasantly.  “What can I do for my favorite pilot?”

“Got a minute?”  I wondered.

He shrugged.  “Well, we were in the middle of one of the biggest battles since Mars, but currently we don’t seem to be doing much more than getting ready to run the hell out of here.  So, sure!”

He followed me out into the passageway just outside Ops and looked up at me eagerly.  He had a pretty obvious crush on me, which might have been cute coming from someone who didn’t act so damned obsessive about it.

“I need a favor,” I levelled with him, in too much of a hurry to do anything else.  “In about twenty minutes, I need you to give the Artemis clearance to un-dock.”

“Why the hell would I do that?”  He wondered, eyes widening.  “It sounds like a really good way to get court-martialed!”

“You’re a smart guy.  Make it look like a glitch, or blame me somehow.”  I shrugged.  “As for why…I have my mom’s retirement fund.  It all went to me when she died in the line of duty.  It’s not a fortune, but it’s yours if you do this.”

“You’ll sign it over to me, before?”  He asked, eyes widening.  Admirals weren’t exactly rich, but their salaries---and their retirement fund---were a hell of lot more than a Petty Officer, Third Class made.

“I’ll do it now,” I volunteered.  I hoped he wasn’t thinking about how it would look for him when they found out I’d transferred a couple hundred thousand dollars into his account right before he committed dereliction of duty for me.

“Petty Officer Wendig,” a voice said from behind me, “get back to your station.”

The air went out of me like a child’s balloon and I felt my shoulders sag.  It was Captain Osceola.  I turned toward her as Wendig scurried back into the Ops Center.

“Ma’am,” I stiffened.  “Has there been any change in our disposition?”  I’d gotten word from her ten minutes ago to prepare to stand by, that the mission was officially on hold.  Maybe I could bluff my way out of this.

“I know what you’re doing,” she said, putting an end to that idea.  “I knew you were thinking about it when you came into the conference room, and once our mission was delayed, I was fairly certain you’d think some more.”  She cocked an eyebrow.  “That’s why I was looking for you.  I heard what you were saying to Wendig.”

“Ma’am,” I stammered, “I…”

“It’s suicide, Hollande.”  The hard lines of her face had softened, and her voice was low and almost…conspiratorial.  “You know that, right?  There won’t be anyone to help.  The Implacable will be pulling out of here in hours.”  Her hands clenched into fists.  “Even if you managed to pull this off, even if you make it back, you’ll be court-martialed.  You’ll probably spend the rest of the war in a military prison.”

“Aye, ma’am.”  I thought the words would come out sad or desperate, but instead, I heard a resolve in my own voice that I hadn’t known I possessed.  “I won’t let him die alone.  I owe that to him.”

She closed her eyes and drew in a breath, like she was summoning strength.  When she opened them, she had the look of decision.  She glanced around, making sure no one was paying attention to us.

“I can keep them…distracted for a few minutes.  Long enough for you to make the jump in-system.”

“Captain,” I warned her, feeling like I had to say it despite the relief and gratitude flowing into me, “if they trace it back to you, it’s your career.”

“He’s my pilot,” she repeated to me.  “I don’t leave people behind.”  She grinned piratically.  “I’d come along with you, if I thought I could make it to your ship without anyone noticing.”  She waved a hand in the general direction of the lift banks.  “Twenty minutes.  Go.”

I started to turn, but paused and said: “Thank you, Captain.”

“Don’t thank me,” she insisted softly.  “I’m not doing it for you.”

Issues, I thought.  We all had our issues.

Conrad met me at the lift station for Docking Cylinder Three, carrying a duffel bag stuffed with something bulky and heavy that strained against the shoulder strap even in the half-g that the rotating saucer section produced.  I pushed the call button, fighting the need to fidget impatiently as we waited for the car.

“You get what we need?”  I asked him, nodding at the bag.

“Yeah,” he grunted as he cinched the duffel tighter across his shoulder.  You?”

“We’re covered,” I assured him.  “But we have to hurry.”

I shut my mouth as the car arrived and the door slid open, disgorging a large group of people, some of them pilots who I knew casually.  One of them was Gregor Varlamov, Ash’s wingman.  I bit off a curse, hoping he wouldn’t notice me, but he chose just the wrong second to glance upward.  His blue eyes widened when they met mine, and I could see the pain etched in the lines of his long, horsey face.

“I’m so sorry, Sandi,” he said, pushing through the crowd coming out of the lift and standing in front of me, practically wringing his hands in agony.  “I didn’t want to leave him there, but he’d already drifted into the gravity well; we couldn’t jump in and get him.”

“I understand, Gregor,” I said, putting a hand on his shoulder.  “It’s not your fault.”

I was making the right noises at him, but inside I was screaming at him to just go away.  Not just because we were pressed for time, but because I didn’t want to comfort him, I wanted someone to be comforting me.

“Look, I have to get going,” I told him, patting his shoulder before withdrawing my hand.  “Captain Osceola needs me to run an errand for her.  But we can talk later, if you want.  Maybe in the lounge.”

He looked like he wanted to say something else, but I ducked into the lift car beside Conrad just before the door hissed shut.  We were the only ones heading up in the car; everyone else was heading for the saucers, getting ready to Transition out.

“Everybody liked Ash,” Conrad began.

“Likes,” I corrected him sharply, snapping around to spear him with a glare.  “He’s not dead.”

“Likes,” he agreed, holding up a palm.  “Everybody likes Ash.  He’s a good guy, not an asshole or anything.  So, what happened between you two?  You never mentioned it.”

Gravity had disappeared as the car had moved inward from the rotating perimeter and then upward into the docking cylinders.  I grabbed at one of the nylon handles set in the overhead and used it to steady myself as I considered his question.  I knew the truth, but being honest with myself wasn’t something I was great at.

“What happened,” I answered, my voice dripping with bitterness, “is that I’m a self-absorbed, borderline-alcoholic who dragged my best friend into bed because it made me feel less alone.”

“And that didn’t end well, huh?”  He snorted.  “Who could have guessed?”

I stared at him, and if my eyes had been lasers he would have had twin holes through his chest.

“Sometimes I forget how young you are,” he went on, oblivious to my anger.  “You’ve been promoted fast because you’re a hell of a pilot and a tactician, but you’re still just a kid out of college…and the Academy, at that.”

“You’re only a few years older than me,” I reminded him hotly.  Ten.  Ten was a few.  Conrad had been prior enlisted before he’d gone to the Academy, a Marine like Grimaldi.  I’d honestly been a bit shocked when I found out how old he was.

“We’re going to get your friend back,” he said, still seeming amused at my little bout of self-loathing.  “I’m going to get you both back safe, because it’s my job, and I do my job even when some brasshat tells me not to do it.  And when I do, you’re going to have to learn a lesson that took me a while to get:  the world does not fucking revolve around you.  For good or bad.  Not every bad thing that happens is your fault or your responsibility.  Your friend is an adult…,” he shrugged.  “Well, as much of an adult as you are.  And he walked into this with both eyes open.  The fact he couldn’t handle it isn’t your fault.”

I said nothing, just listened to the hum of the motors as the car took us down the tube, what I still called a “straw” in my head.  The display said we had ten seconds to the stop at my boat.

“You’re going to wind up in a military prison a couple of cells down from me,” I warned him just before the doors opened.

“Maybe,” he admitted with a shrug.  “Maybe not.  I know some people.  Besides, who the hell else are they gonna’ get to do this job?”

I was going to say something about trained, genetically-enhanced monkeys, but there was a gaggle of technicians emerging from the open lock of the Artemis and I kept the comment to myself as I squeezed through them.

“Is she up and running?”  I asked the ranking NCO, making him turn and stop himself against the bulkhead beside the lift.

“Oh, yes, ma’am,” he replied, looking a bit confused.  “And she’s refueled, too.  But we didn’t reload the missile bays; we were told she wasn’t going out again.”

“She’s not,” I assured him, waving and following Conrad into the utility bay.  “Just like to know the status.”

Conrad had yanked open a locker and was stuffing the contents of the duffel bag into it while I hit the control to shut the inner and outer airlock doors.

“I hope that Petty Officer doesn’t start asking questions,” I said to him, pushing off the bulkhead and floating toward the lockers.

“Let’s get out of here before he does.”  He was pulling on a set of combat armor he’d brought with him; I had to stick with a flight suit, for now, since I’d need the ‘face jacks to fly, but he’d brought armor for me as well.

The control board lit up for me when I jacked in, but a sea of yellow, flashing warnings showed me immediately that the interlocks were in place to prevent exactly what I was trying to do.  Without clearance from Traffic Control, the computer systems on the boat wouldn’t allow me to release the docking collar or power up the boat.  There was an emergency override, of course; you had to give the boats a way off if the carrier was under attacked or damaged in an accident.  But if I activated it, the carrier Traffic Control center would see it and they could still shut me down, at least until I jumped.

This was where I had to trust Captain Osceola.  I checked the time; it was exactly twenty minutes.  I caressed the emergency override with a stroke of my thoughts and the yellow warnings flashed red, their alarm klaxons filling the cockpit, loud enough to nearly bring me out of the interface.  I silenced them with a firm command and started the reactor powering up.

“Moment of truth,” I murmured.

I ordered the docking collar to release, and a green indicator showed me that Osceola was a woman of her word.  Shuddering jolts of power pushed us away from the massive cylinder and I listened hard for shouted, angry orders to return to the dock; all it would take was a single transmission and the ship’s computer would be slaved to the carrier bridge and we’d both be thrown into the brig and that would be that.

The orders never came, and no one tried to stop us.

Neither of us said a word.  The bridges were burned, the Rubicon crossed.

I sent us into Transition Space with a thought and left my life behind.

Chapter Twenty

Tendrils of nonexistence clutched at us, but we wrenched free and the utter darkness of deep space transformed abruptly into the dazzling, mottled countenance of the gas giant.  It glared at us accusingly, the baleful gaze of the twin, red storms passing through its atmosphere telling us that we were trespassing.  And yet the god was merciful:  it didn’t raise an alarm, and its nearly star-size bulk shielded us from detection.

“We’re on the other side of that thing from the defense station, right?”  Conrad asked, staring nervously at the screen.

“I thought you were the big, bad Search and Rescue man,” I said distantly, still immersed in the interface.

“You get me on the ground, I’ll be your big, bad Search and Rescue man,” he countered sharply.  “This shit out here’s what they pay you maniacs for.”

I was worried about remote satellites detecting our thermal flare, but he was right about the station being on the other side of the gas giant; so were the shipyards and the gas scoops and the other terrestrial moon with the mining operation.  This place wasn’t a primary, or even a secondary target, and I had to hope it wasn’t well defended, especially since they had to have shifted all their resources to fighting for the construction yards.

I ignited the fusion drives and heard Conrad grunt hoarsely as six gravities pushed us back into our acceleration couches.  The moon’s uninhabited hemisphere was still facing the gas giant; its rotational period was the same length as its orbit, so it always presented the same face.  I took the Artemis between the two, slipping into a lower, faster orbit before I boosted another g and dipped into the moon’s atmosphere.

All these missions, and the only atmosphere I’d ever piloted a cutter into was Inferno’s.  Plenty of simulators, of course.  I’d landed on every human colony in the simulator.  There was a difference, no matter what they tell you.  Even the interface can’t duplicate the feeling, the knowing that it’s real, the knowing that one little slip when you switched over from the fusion drive to the atmospheric jets would mean going out of control.

The air thickened quickly as we dropped altitude, powering into as steep a dive as I thought the jets could pull us out of.  Clouds enveloped us and the cyclone winds of a hurricane-force storm battered at the Artemis’ ungainly, brick-like lines, and only the sheer power of the engines kept us in the air, and I longed for my brief career as an assault shuttle pilot.  An assault shuttle was a bird of prey in an atmosphere, as graceful as an eagle; the missile cutter was a fat, awkward water-fowl flapping its wings relentlessly to stay aloft.  The jets roared in their defiance of the storm, creating eddies in the clouds with their exhaust, and finally we were through.  Rolling hills swathed in green basked in the constant twilight of the reflected face of the gas giant, or huddled in the complete darkness where the storms shut out even that dim light.

“I’ve inputted the projected impact zone,” Conrad told me, and I could see the coordinates glowing like a beacon deep in the trackless green below us.

“We’re going in,” I warned him.  “Hold on, it may get a bit rough.”

We were on the edges of the storm and the wind still buffeted the boat, worse as we came down into the valley where the indicator glowed in muted reds over the muted greens, and even worse as I throttled back the jets and took us low over the clearing.

There it was, right where the projection had said it would be, the delta-winged wedge half-buried in the loam and moss with a trail of scorched black leading back from it where Ash had tried to hit the belly jets.  He’d almost made the clearing, but he’d wound up snagging the belly on a stand of what passed for trees here, and nosing in.  Doubt tried to claw its way out of my gut and I repressed a sudden image of Ash lying dead and broken in the cockpit of the Acheron, having ridden it into the netherworld like its namesake.

I swung the Artemis’ tail around to line her up with a stretch of bare ground just big enough for her to touch down, then cut the forward thrusters and fed power to the belly jets.  My chin went into my chest and four hundred kilograms of mass smashed me into my seat and my teeth clacked together and I bit the inside of my cheek as the landing gear sank into the fuselage on shock-absorbing hydraulic pistons.

“Shit!”  Conrad wheezed as the ship jolted to a halt, shuddering up and down on the landing treads before she settled in.  The only reason I didn’t curse was that I didn’t have the breath left for it, but I did have an urgent need to know.

I yanked the interface cables out of my suit and hit the quick-release on my seat harness, scrambling out of the cockpit ahead of Conrad, ignoring his plaintive call to wait.  The gravity was fairly light here, I realized in some tangential part of my brain that wasn’t obsessing over what was inside the Acheron; it felt about half Earth normal.  I stumbled awkwardly in the lower gravity and caught myself against the far aft bulkhead in the utility bay, slapping at the control to lower the belly ramp.

“At least take a fucking gun!”  Conrad was yelling at me, trying to catch up.

I didn’t acknowledge the warning, but I stopped and yanked open one of the lockers and pulled a pistol belt out of a drawer, buckling it on over my flight suit.  The pulse laser felt strange and bulky in my hand; I hadn’t fired one since Attack Command school, and then only on a closed range.  I remembered the safety and flicked it off with my thumb, keeping my forefinger away from the trigger pad, trying to keep it pointed in a safe direction as I jogged down the ramp.

The end of the belly ramp had barely touched the ground when I leaped off of it, the soles of my boots sinking into the mud.  They were ship boots, not made for this, and I slipped and slid across the twenty meters between the two boats, careful of the laser.  Shooting myself would be a damned silly way to die after all this.

This close, I could see the damage the Acheron had taken in the battle:  a scorched, jagged rent in the upper hull that went through into the cockpit and probably out the belly.  It had been a laser and it had come from nearly point-blank to penetrate that far.  That had to have been what killed Chief Ngata, I thought.  With the nose half-buried in the ground, there was no way to open the belly ramp; instead, I walked around the huge mound of dirt piled against the cockpit and went to the airlock.

That side of the ship was angled downwards, lost in the shadows, so I didn’t see until I was right up on it that the airlock was yawning open, the interior sheathed in darkness.  I paused beside the edge of it, sidling up to the hull, feeling the warmth of it through my suit, feeling the cold dampness of the mud through my thin boots.  I didn’t want to see what was inside the boat, but I had to.

I touched a control on my sleeve and the emergency light set in the side of my helmet snapped on.  Shining it up into the airlock revealed nothing except bare bulkhead; I couldn’t see the deck from this angle, couldn’t see any further into the utility bay.  I started to holster my pistol but paused and remembered to put the safety back on first, and then it took two tries to slide it into the plastic catches.

“Let me go in first,” Conrad said and I nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw that he was right next to me.  He was in full combat armor, camouflaged in grey and brown and black streaks, and I couldn’t see his eyes through the darkened visor of his helmet.  The barrel of his heavy Gauss rifle was pointed back the way we’d come, covering the approaches to the Acheron.

“Just keep watch out here,” I said, as if I were his superior officer and not the other way around.

“You damn pilots’ll be the death of me,” he muttered.

But he didn’t argue, just stayed out there, standing guard while I clambered up into the airlock.  The utility bay was as empty as it had looked from the ground.  Every locker was open and stripped bare, one of them with its door torn off the hinges.  I shined the light on it more carefully, frowning in confusion.  That didn’t look like crash damage

I moved through the passage, turning my head to the left and right to aim the light.  The hatches to both cabins were yawning wide, and the drawers had been yanked open, the clothes that had been stored inside strewn around the compartment.  The hatch to the head was ajar as well, but I ignored it and pressed on to the cockpit.

I could see the gaping wound in the hull even before I reached it, the edges smooth and polished and the interior bulkheads charred and blackened.  Half the Crew Chief’s station was burned away, and I turned aside as I realized I could see parts of Chief Ngata melted into the plastic of the acceleration couch.  Ash’s chair was intact, but unoccupied; he wasn’t on board.  But the command station…it had been cut open with something smaller and more precise than the battle laser that had disabled the Acheron.  Everything inside had been pulled out, the optical feeds cut.

“Sandi,” Conrad called quietly inside my helmet.  “Come here, you need to see this.”

I found him over at the edge of the clearing, on the portside of the Artemis, down on a knee, staring at the dirt.  I looked over his shoulder, the light on my helmet shining a bright circle at the impressions in the mud.  They were rounded and regular and I knew they weren’t natural.

“What is it?”  I asked him.

“Turn off your headlamp,” he snapped, and I did it automatically.  “It’s the landing gear of a Tahni troop carrier.”

“Shit,” I spat.  “They’ve been at the ship.  They’re the ones who stripped everything from it.”  I closed my eyes, squeezing them shut against the tears that suddenly threatened to come.  “They got Ash; we were too late.”

When I opened my eyes, Conrad wasn’t there; he was slowly walking across the clearing, head down.

“There’re a lot of prints from Tahni combat boots,” he mused, sounding as if he was talking to himself more than to me.  “But there’s some that look like they came from ship boots like yours, but a larger size.”

I jogged over to him, skidding to a halt behind him as he stepped slowly and methodically along the tracks, until he came to the edge of the clearing to the west of where the Acheron had crashed.  He paused there and looked back at me.

“The tracks head out this way, and there’re no Tahni prints around his.  He got away.”  He motioned back at the Artemis.  “Go get armored up, fast.  We need to get to him before they do.”

***

“How did they find him so fast?”  I wondered.  I worked my left shoulder; this combat armor didn’t seem to fit quite right, or maybe I just wasn’t used to carrying a rifle.  “I mean, they didn’t see us come in…”

“He didn’t have much control from what I saw of the ship,” Conrad murmured, eyes still on the game trail through the thick foliage.  “He probably had to orbit the moon once before he came down, passed right over the Tahni colony.  Now be quiet and let me concentrate, and keep your eyes open for the enemy.”

That was easy for him to say.  I’d never even worn a combat helmet before and the Heads-Up Display was busy and distracting and confusing.  But he was the tracker and I couldn’t even see the footprints he was following, so I kept my Gauss rifle up at my shoulder and I kept looking.

Most of what I saw was the strange local growth.  It grew to the height of Earth pine trees, but each of the things seemed more like a twisted cluster of hard, thorny vines than a tree, and they didn’t have leaves, just some sort of green fuzz more like a fungus except centimeters thick and slimy.  It also tended to grow together in huge clumps, what I’d thought was a stand of trees from the air, except there was a lot less room between the clusters in the clump than there was between trees in a forest.

Something large and dark and weird-looking popped out onto the trail just twenty meters ahead of us and I cursed out loud and swung the barrel of the Gauss rifle around at it, a surge of adrenalin making my heart pound.

“Don’t shoot,” Conrad said, putting a hand on my shoulder.  “It’s just an animal.”

But it was a big animal, and I suddenly knew what had made this trail.  I couldn’t make out too many details, but it had four legs and a head and I thought I could see eyes.  It made a sound like a snort and then it turned and headed down the trail away from us.  It was out of sight in seconds.

“That thing didn’t evolve here,” I guessed, trying to get my heartbeat and respiration back under control.

“It’s a Tahni herbivore,” he told me.  “They bring them out to all their colonies.”

“They eat those things?”

“No, but the animals are somehow part of the cultivation of the crop they eat, so they bring it along.  These tree-things are from the Tahni planets, too.”

They must have been here a long time, I thought, looking at thorny clusters twenty meters tall and shuddering as I noticed something that looked like a cross between an insect and a snake slithering through the higher reaches of one of them.  It was a good thing the combat helmets had a dead-reckoning navigation system built into them, because I don’t think I could have ever found my way back to the ship otherwise, through the twisted network of trails and the tree-things blocking out the sky.  And we’d only walked a couple kilometers.

“Hold up.”  Conrad had halted in mid-step and was turned slightly to the left, where another game trail crossed this one.

He went down on a knee again, and I automatically started scanning around, still trying to make heads or tails of the helmet’s sensors.  It was so much more complicated than jacking in, but I was finally getting a sense of where we were in the mapping display and what the thermal and sonic readings meant and…

“Conrad!”  I yelled, bringing up my rifle as panic surged through me.

The blob of green and red that had seemed like meaningless sensor noise a second ago had suddenly crystallized into eight separate, humanoid shapes coming down the crossing path from our right, maybe twenty meters away and walking single-file.  I could barely see them through the encroaching twisted clusters of foliage, but I knew what they were immediately:  Tahni soldiers.

I’d faced Tahni destroyers without flinching, but here, on the ground with a gun in my hand, naked fear rose inside me and I couldn’t hold the heavy rifle steady.  I touched the trigger pad anyway and nearly tumbled backwards as it kicked hard against my shoulder.  Two of the figures in my sensor display went down and the rest scattered to either side of the trail and I marveled at the fact I’d been able to hit even one of them, much less two; but then I realized that Conrad had been shooting from his kneeling position beside the trail.

“Let’s go!”  He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me after him and we ran down the opposite direction from the Tahni patrol on the cross-trail.

Mud sucked at my boots and I had to cradle the rifle against my chest to keep it from snagging on low-hanging vines and snags on the narrow path.  I heard a high-pitched whine and the “snap-snap-snap” of projectiles breaking the sound barrier just before a twisted, thorny trunk to the right of the trail exploded into wood-like fragments.  Bits of it spattered against my armor but didn’t penetrate it; I almost pitched over from the impact, but Conrad still had a hold on my shoulder and he kept me upright.

What the hell kind of gun did the Tahni foot soldiers use?  I struggled to remember intelligence reports in the Academy that I’d only half-listened to.  Something we called a KE gun, I thought?  Electromagnetic like our Gauss rifles, but shooting small, tantalum darts at a high rate of fire, where the Gauss rifles used heavy, tungsten slugs and could put out maybe one shot per half-second.  I’d rather get hit with theirs than ours, but I really didn’t want to get hit with either one, so I kept running.

I couldn’t have told you how long or how far we ran, though I’m sure there was a way to figure it out in the damned helmet computer.  But it sure seemed like it had been hours before Conrad yelled “In here!” over the helmet ‘link and pulled me into a thick, heavily shadowed grove of the thorn-cluster trees.  My legs were aching and I was puffing heavily inside the helmet despite all the exercise I could squeeze into my downtime, and I didn’t know how the hell Search and Rescue or Recon Marine troops did it.

I slid in past where Conrad had fallen into a crouch and I slipped in the slick mud and banged up against a wall of thorns.  The whole side of the twisted growth shuddered from the blow and I cursed, hoping the Tahni wouldn’t see the movement.  I scrambled backwards, trying to get out of sight and then I bit back a scream and turned it into a loud profanity when my hand came down on something with the unmistakable feel of a body.

I didn’t need a light; the helmet’s optics used thermal imaging, infrared and light-intensifying filters and merged them into a computer-enhanced image that looked as bright as day.  I could see immediately that the body was human, curled into a fetal position with its back to me, the shoulders rising and falling with a ragged, unsteady breathing.  He was wearing a flight suit but no helmet, but all I could see was short-cut dark hair. I gripped his upper arm and rolled him over.

It was Ash, and he was alive.

Chapter Twenty-One

His face was pale where it wasn’t a massive bruise, and I could see the smart bandages wrapped around his right leg, bordered by scorched and melted fabric from the flight suit.  But he was breathing and, finally, so was I.

“Watch the front,” Conrad snapped, pushing past me, ripping open a pouch on his tactical vest and pulling out a medical analyzer.

I crouched near the opening, pointing my rifle that way, glancing back and watching as he touched the device to Ash’s neck for a few seconds, probably reading its output in his helmet display, then tucked it away.

“He’s stable, thanks to the smart bandages,” Conrad told me, “but he lost a lot of blood before he got them on.  That wound on his leg is damned serious; I think it’s from the laser hit that damaged his ship.  Looks like he might have a major concussion, too.  Honestly, I don’t know how the hell he got this far.  We need to get him to the ship, get him into an auto-doc on the Implacable if we can.”

“What about them?”  I asked, indicating who I meant with a waggle of the barrel of the rifle.

Conrad moved past me to the entrance of the hollow, and I went back to Ash.  He’d been beat up pretty bad in the crash, and his right eye was swollen shut, that whole side of his face a mass of purple bruising.  I swallowed hard; if he’d been unconscious for long, that could mean brain damage.  An auto-doc could fix him if we got him into one quick enough, but that would mean catching the carrier before she left the system…and that meant getting out of here fast.

“I don’t think they followed us this way,” Conrad said, turning back to me.  “Can you carry him?”

He didn’t have to say the other part of that:  I should carry Ash because he was a lot better with a gun than I was.  I considered it for a second before I answered.  Ash was a good thirty kilos heavier than me, but this place had half standard gravity.

“Yeah,” I decided.  “I’ve got him.”

I handed Conrad my rifle and he slung it over his shoulder; he was still watching the trail but I could feel him keeping an eye on me to see if I could actually handle Ash’s weight.  I felt a flare of anger, convinced for a moment that his doubt was because I was a woman, but I shook that off; it was because I was a pilot, and he thought pilots were soft.

I took a knee beside Ash, grabbing him by the front of his flight suit and pulling him upright.  I grunted as I loaded him across my back; it was only half the gravity here, but Ash was all dead weight and it was still an effort to get him over my shoulder.  I clenched my stomach muscles and pushed up to my feet, wishing I’d done more squats instead of spending all that time on the heavy bag.

“Let’s move out,” Conrad urged, waving me forward while he glanced back and forth, up and down the trail.

I followed him back out onto the path, my boots sinking centimeters into the mud with each step, and we slowly and carefully headed back the way we’d come.  I kept trying to figure out the helmet’s sensor display, mostly to distract me from the load on my shoulder, and because I wanted to be able to keep a watch behind us without turning around.  I was beginning to appreciate the complexity of the systems built into the thing; it was like a miniature version of the sensor suite in a cutter or an assault shuttle, but everything was displayed visually.  It did the best it could to simplify that display, but it probably took training to get really good at reading it.

Tiny red spikes jumped at the right corner of my vision and I’d figured out that meant that there were unidentified sounds coming from behind me, but not necessarily enemy.  This was a living world, after all.  It could have been one of those herd animals, or whatever they’d brought along that preyed on them, or even wind rustling the thorn trees.

Or it could be a squad of Tahni soldiers about to shoot me in the back, I thought with dull fatalism.  Damn it, Ash, why’d you have to get shot down on this alien jungle shithole?

He wouldn’t have had an answer even if he’d been awake.  I kept jogging a few steps behind Conrad, falling into a regular pattern of picking my feet up out of the mud and putting them back down, trying to hypnotize myself into not feeling the weight on my shoulder, trying not to think about asking Conrad if we could stop so I could shift Ash to the other side.

More noises, more spikes of color in the lower right-hand corner of the HUD, larger this time.  Then a flash of red and the image of a two-legged figure---two, three figures, coming up the path somewhere twenty or thirty meters away.

“They’re behind us,” I said tightly to Conrad.

“They’re in front of us, too,” he told me, slowing to a walk and looking past me.

Wordlessly, he shifted my rifle off of his back and tucked one of them under each arm, bracing himself with feet planted wide.  He aimed them both back into the twisted thorn trees and opened fire.  The Gauss rifles took a half-second or so to recharge the capacitor after each shot, so he alternated left-right-left, the low-pitched hum of the electromagnets discharging contrasting with the thundercrack of the heavy, tungsten slugs going supersonic.  The rounds tore into the foliage, sending fragments flying like shrapnel and he kept it up, putting twenty rounds back down the trail in ten seconds.

“Run,” he suggested, slinging the extra rifle and then taking off the way we’d been travelling.

“Did you hit anything?”  I wondered breathlessly.

“God knows,” he snapped back.  “This way,” he amended, leading me off to the right at an angle on another path, beginning to draw away from me.  “Faster, Sandi.”

“Easy…for…you…to…say,” I grunted, my hips and knees straining at the pounding, running pace.  The trail to the right went uphill, and my quads began to burn, but at least the ground dried up some and I was able to run without slipping every other step.

We crested the top of a small hill but I couldn’t see any better from up there; there was nothing visible but the trees, and some taller hills, small mountains really, in the distance.  And the face of the gas giant, where it peaked through the clouds.  That was always visible, a constant reminder of where we were and how far it was from home.

Conrad cut left again on another trail and we followed it for about fifty meters before it became too narrow to navigate and we were forced to head back the way we’d come.  He was cursing as we turned back, but I held my profanity inside; I couldn’t spare the breath.  As near as I could figure, we’d already covered three kilometers, and according to the mapping software in the helmet, the Artemis was still another two kilometers away as the crow flies.  And we weren’t crows.

We’d gone another few hundred meters on the trail heading straight, still looking for a way to cut back to the left, when I finally had to stop.

“Give me a second,” I rasped, setting Ash down as gently as I could, then taking a knee beside him.

It was all I could do not to collapse.  I felt sweat soaking the small of my back and collecting in my boots despite the best efforts of the armor’s cooling systems, and the muscles in my back and legs were starting to spasm and cramp.  I found the drinking nipple inside the helmet and sucked down a few mouthfuls of water; it tasted sweeter than any wine I’d ever sampled.

“Okay, we need to switch out,” Conrad decided.  “I’ll carry him for a while.”

“Fuck that,” I said, the effect ruined by the cough that welled up from water going down the wrong way.  “Can this suit give me a stimulant?  Because I can make myself carry Ash all the way to the ship, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to turn into a Recon Marine between here and there.”

“I’m not a damned Marine,” Conrad shot back.  “I have an IQ above room temperature.  Pick up your boyfriend and let’s go.”

“I thought you were my boyfriend,” I reminded him, groaning as I ducked under Ash’s arm and lifted him off the ground again.

“I’m just a handsome face,” he said, heading back out at a slightly slower pace.  “A very handsome face,” he amended.

“Don’t forget humble,” I suggested between strained breaths.  God, my back was killing me.  Didn’t this damn suit have painkillers built into it?

“I’m not the guy you threw away your career to rescue his ass from an enemy-held world all by yourself.”

I wanted to keep arguing the point, but then we turned on another trail to the left, this one heading downward at a fairly steep angle, and it was all I could do to keep from sliding down the hill as the dirt turned to mud again.  I dug my heels in and kicked rocks and clods of soil down in a miniature mudslide that skittered around Conrad’s feet and probably announced our presence to anyone in a kilometer radius.

I just kept hoping and wishing that this trail wouldn’t turn out to be a dead end like the last one, because there was no way I would be able to haul Ash back up that hill.  As it turned out, I didn’t have to; the path narrowed slightly at the bottom of the hill, but it stayed wide enough for us to squeeze through.  I saw large piles of marble-sized shit at the edges of it and I guessed it had come from the big herbivore we’d seen; it looked similar to elk poop on Earth, and I wondered if there were some sort of convergent or parallel evolution concept that could explain that.

Then I kicked myself mentally for wasting time thinking about the evolution of shit and started trying to pay more attention to the sensors.  There was a red spike on them, but this time it was coming from the upper right corner of the display, and I wasn’t sure what that meant; I hadn’t heard the sound yet myself.

“You getting that?”  I asked Conrad.  He hadn’t stopped or turned, so I wasn’t sure if I was seeing something innocuous.

“Yeah.  It’s their aircraft coming back,” he told me matter-of-factly, still not turning around.  “Hurry.”

You keep saying “hurry,” asshole, I thought but didn’t have the breath to say, like I’m not already going as fast as I can…

He picked up the pace anyway, and somehow, I kept up with him.  It was only a couple minutes later when I heard the whining roar of a turbojet somewhere overhead; it had to be the Tahni flyer.  It wasn’t a shuttle or a dual-environment fighter, at least.  Those would have the sensors and weapons to detect the three of us and take us out from kilometers away, and the helmet’s systems would have warned me if the sonic signature had matched.  At least, I hoped they would.

I tried to read the HUD’s analysis of the sound and I thought it was telling me that this was probably a civilian aircraft---well, as close to a civilian anything as the Tahni had.  It was a transport for their colony here, maybe not even armed, though the soldiers it had carried were.  And it might be bringing more of them, and it was definitely going to spot the Artemis and probably call for support from whatever ships were within hailing range.

Yeah, I guess Conrad was right, we’d better hurry.

We were lucky; the trail he’d found was a Godsend, and, according to the mapping systems, it was leading us right to the landing site.  The knowledge that the ship was only a few minutes’ walk seemed to give me a second wind and I dug in, going from a fast walk to a jog.   Just another few hundred meters and I could see the reflected light of the gas giant flooding onto the path from where it opened up into the clearing.

We were almost to the opening when Conrad stopped abruptly and I nearly collided with him.

“Down!”  He hissed, his voice hushed instinctively even though the helmet would have kept the sound inside.

I sank to my knees, shrugging Ash off of me and setting him down a little harder than I’d intended, not that he’d feel it.  His eyes were closed, but his chest still rose and fell regularly.  Conrad was down on his belly, and I imitated the position, scooting up through the mud and patches of the local grass analog to pull up beside him.

He was staring out the end of the trail, into the clearing, and I could see immediately why he’d stopped.  The Tahni flyer was pudgy and stub-winged, colored a dull, matte grey with markings in their chicken-scratch of a language stenciled on its side.  Its only armament was a small, remotely-operated gun turret under the nose, hanging downward unpowered, but its boarding ramp was down and even as I watched, armored Tahni soldiers were tromping down it.  Their armor was grey and black and patterned in a way that I guess was camouflage to their eyes, though it didn’t seem like it to mine, and they seemed even bulkier and more imposing in the armor than they already did without it.

There were eighteen of them in the clearing now, all carrying what I guessed were the same KE guns that had been fired at us earlier:  bulbous, rounded weapons with a cylindrical cooling jacket around the barrel, fed by something like a drum magazine.  Most of the troopers were spreading out in a perimeter around the Artemis, one or two monkeying with the lockplate on her belly next to the ramp.  The closest of them was only about fifty meters from us, though none seemed to be looking our way.

“Shit,” I said, feeling the bottom falling out of the world.  “What the hell do we do now?”

Conrad didn’t respond at first, and I wondered if he thought it was a rhetorical question, because it sure as hell was not.  I was still waiting for him to answer when the ramp on the Tahni flyer folded inward and its engines began spinning up, the turbines building from a low hum to a screaming whine as dust and bits of grass began circling around the variable thrust nozzles like a tornado.  In seconds, the jets were lifting it up off the ground and carrying it over the clearing, leaving a wake of smoking foliage behind it.  I followed it as it disappeared into the low clouds, leaving the platoon of troops behind.

“You stay here,” he said, finally, not looking back at me.  It was odd hearing him in my headphones like he was standing just behind me, whispering in my ear, at the same time I was staring at the back of his helmet; it was like it wasn’t really Conrad in the armor beside me but some stranger.

“There’s a side-trail about a hundred meters back that way,” he went on, motioning behind us, “that goes off to the right.  I’m going to circle around behind the wreck of the Acheron and get their attention, try to draw them off the Artemis.  When I do, when you think it’s safe and they’re far enough away, grab Ash and run for the boat.”

“There’s like twenty of them out there!”  I protested.  “They’ll kill you!”

“Hopefully not,” he responded drily, and I imagined I could see him cocking an eyebrow at me.  “Once you’re on board, you can use the Gatling laser to clear them out, then swing back and pick me up.”

“What if they don’t all leave the ship?”  I wanted to know.

His answer to that was to unsling my rifle and offer it to me one-handed.

“Wonderful,” I muttered, snatching it from him.

He took a moment to reload the partially spent magazine in his weapon and I did the same, remembering he’d shot both of them, one in each hand like some kind of movie action hero.  He made sure I’d seated the fresh magazine correctly before he took one more scan of the clearing.  The Tahni soldiers were still milling around in a defensive perimeter, none of them heading our way.

“If they spot you before I’m in position,” he instructed, “lay down a full magazine at them, then fall back and I’ll come help.  But don’t get spotted, because this is really our only chance.”

“You should be a motivational speaker.”

He chuckled at that as he snaked away from the trailhead on his belly, not coming up to his knees before he was a good twenty meters back.  Then he was sprinting back towards the side trail, moving a lot faster since he didn’t have to drag me along.  And I was alone.  Well, Ash was there, but he wasn’t too talkative.  I pushed him back as far into the shelter of the trees as I could without the thorns tearing into him, then laid down at the edge of the trail, shielding him as best I could.  I was armored and he wasn’t, and I hadn’t dragged him all this way just to let him get shot.

“Just as well you’re unconscious,” I murmured to him, knowing he couldn’t hear me.  “You’d get all protective.”

I shook my head.  “Why’d you have to go and say you loved me?”  I demanded, feeling suddenly and irrationally angry at him.  “Now what the hell am I supposed to do?”

Another question he wouldn’t have an answer to.  I shoved it aside and concentrated on getting a feel for how the sighting system worked.  When I touched my thumb to a plate beside the trigger, a targeting reticle lit up on the HUD, showing me exactly where the rounds would hit.  I settled it onto one of the Tahni soldiers and tried to steady my breathing so that it didn’t waver too much.

The safety was off.  Just a touch on the trigger pad and the gun would fire.  I’d never killed any of them up close like this, but I didn’t think it would be too hard.  Their darkened visors hid their features, just like ours did.  We went to war like robots, and the only reason we didn’t send robots to fight for us was their religion and our laws forbade it.  I thought I understood why; if we let the AIs kill people for us, who was responsible?  Who was to blame when mistakes were made and things went wrong and people got killed who shouldn’t have died?  A computer?  An Artificial Intelligence subroutine?  The man or woman who programmed it?  The factory that built it?

A thinking, living person had to make a choice.  If not, we gave up our humanity and there was nothing left to fight for.

And that sounded very nice and pretty in my head, but I really wished there was some robot holding the rifle instead of me, and some AI flying the cutter instead of Ash, and some machine trying to flank the enemy instead of Conrad, and that no one was about to die.

Chapter Twenty-Two

I’d known it was coming, but I still jumped at the sharp, hypersonic crack.

There was a flash of ionized air and one of the Tahni soldiers on my side of the perimeter, maybe fifty meters away from the trailhead, pitched forward with a hole the size of my thumb through the armor over his chest.  The others didn’t seem to comprehend it at first, a couple staring at him in disbelief, until the trooper five meters from him spun to the ground with his neck blown out in a spray of arterial red.

Then they moved, scattering for cover, seeming silent and mechanical to me but probably yelling commands and curses and prayers to their god-emperor inside the privacy of their helmets.  I tried to track them, tried to keep the rifle pointed at one in case I had to use it, but they were moving too fast, rushing for cover…unfortunately, the cover they were rushing for was the Artemis.

I saw a helmet blow apart as one of them tried to make a rush at the Acheron, but the others clustered around the Artemis’ landing gear and poured KE-gun fire into the surrounding foliage, ripping it to shreds of wood and pulp fragments.  Green fungus sprayed like a halo around the destroyed clusters of twisting vines, like it had been waiting there for this battle to pollinate it into the clearing and fill the gap left by some forest fire years ago.  Conrad was back there somewhere; he’d started out behind the wreck of the Acheron, but I knew he wouldn’t stay there.  He’d told me more than once that the key to surviving a firefight was to keep moving.

And here I was, sitting in the mud like an idiot.  We had to get the bastards away from the ship.  I looked down at Ash and cursed.  I didn’t want to chance leaving him alone and helpless, but if we didn’t get to the boat, he was dead anyway.  I wanted to tell Conrad what I was doing, but we’d turned off the microwave frequency transmitters before we left the Artemis; we’d been using laser line-of-sight communications to talk, since it was secure from detection by their aircraft, but he wasn’t in my line of sight anymore.  I’d just have to hope he was smart enough to understand what I was doing.

Working quickly, almost frantically, I shoved as much mud and dirt as I could on top of Ash, turning his head away from the trail and tucking in his hands to conceal him as much as possible, all the while running over and over in my head what I should do.  To the left, the bulk of the Artemis stretched across the width of the clearing, its nose pointed towards the wreck of the Acheron, and I could clearly see the Tahni taking shelter behind the landing treads or lying prone in her shadow, aiming their weapons off to the right, just past Ash’s boat.  I could have shot them from the trailhead, but that would have brought fire in that direction and cut Ash and I off from the clearing.  I had to get behind them and drive them off, make them break cover.

There.  I spotted it with the help of the helmet’s enhanced optics, a gap in the tree clusters over behind the Artemis.  I didn’t know how far back it went, but I just needed a bit of concealment for a few seconds.

I left Ash with a last touch of my hand on his shoulder, and took off into a sprint.  My feet nearly slid out from beneath me in the deceptively solid-looking mud, and I caught myself on the butt of the rifle, feeling my teeth click together.  I swore under my breath and pushed up again with the rifle, setting off at a more stable pace with smaller steps.

I cut left from the trailhead and ran along the edge of the clearing, as close as I could to the thorn trees, feeling them catching at the armor on my left arm.  The hum-snap discharge of electromagnetic weapons was near-constant now, and I tried to keep my eyes on the enemy, but I had to divert my attention to my feet to keep from tripping on the spiral roots that stuck up from the ground at odd intervals.  Every time I looked away, I was sure that was the second when one of them would spot me, that I’d never see the shot that killed me.

But the shot didn’t come and I was suddenly at the gap in the trees before I realized it, and I knew there was no way I’d be able to slow down without going head-over-heels.  I’d played baseball in high school and I threw myself into a feet-first slide into home plate, winding up splayed belly-down on the ground, my helmet’s visor covered in mud.  The sensors still worked and I could see a computer-graphics representation of the scene around me despite the mud, but I scraped a hand across the visor and wiped it away out of instinct, needing to see.

There they were.  It felt like it had been an hour since Conrad had opened fire, but the chronometer built into the HUD told me less than two minutes had passed, and I could see a few of the Tahni trying to reload their KE guns, having burned through a full drum.  Others were starting to low-crawl forward, trying to get to the Acheron and use it as cover to flank Conrad.  I shook mud off my Gauss rifle and settled the stock into my shoulder, trying to remember what I’d been taught in the single familiarization class I’d taken in the Academy:  fifteen minutes and we hadn’t even got to shoot the damn things.

I put the aiming reticle over the Tahni soldier nearest to me, only about thirty meters away, and touched the trigger pad.  The gun kicked hard against my shoulder, but I was ready for it this time and I saw the armored figure stumble out from behind the portside aft landing tread with his left arm dangling useless, a ragged hole blown through his shoulder.  I shifted the barrel over just a centimeter and fired again; this time the round went straight through his chest and he went down.

I felt a surge of bloodthirsty joy, and totally forgot that lesson that Conrad had tried to pass onto me in moments of post-coital introspection.  I didn’t move.  The only reason I didn’t die was that the idiot shooting at me was as scared and adrenalin-rattled as I was; instead of blowing my head off, the burst of tantalum needles hit the twisted cluster of thorn trees beside me.  It exploded like a grenade had gone off inside it and fragments thumped painfully against my side, though they didn’t penetrate the armor there.

I rolled away from the explosion instinctively and another burst kicked up gouts of mud where I’d been just a half-second before.  I hadn’t thought I could be more scared than I already was, but I was constantly surprising myself.  I was firing again before I even stopped rolling, trying to wrangle the bouncing aiming reticle onto the Tahni who was shooting at me.  Sparks sprayed off the metal of the landing gear and the soldier flinched away, giving me enough time to bring the rifle under control.

I fired three times in as many seconds, then skittered backwards on my belly and angled back into the trees on the left side of the trail, not waiting around to watch the enemy fall.  This time, though, no one was standing and firing aimed bursts; the others had finally noticed that they were taking fire from behind, and most of them were making a run for the wreck of the Acheron, the ones trying to return fire merely spraying full-auto in my general direction at hip level.

I saw two more fall to Conrad’s rifle and then I was running.  I had to get to the ship, get the weapons up and take out the enemy, then I could go back for Ash.  It had been a mistake to think we could sneak him past all those soldiers, I thought.  There were too many of them and too few of us.

It was less than fifty meters to the ship, and at half a g, I was running pretty fast, but it still seemed to take forever to reach it, like one of those dreams where the distance in front of you keeps stretching out and you run but can’t ever get anywhere.  But then it rushed up at me and I slammed my hand into the lock plate and the ramp began to lower with infuriating slowness.

I heard a loud, pinging ricochet and realized they were still shooting at me from over at the wreckage; I ducked behind the belly gear and emptied the magazine of the Gauss rifle at them, not sure if I actually hit anything.  Then the ramp was down and I dropped the rifle and scrambled out and sprinted up it, hitting the control to close it behind me before I flew through to the cockpit.

I was ripping off my helmet and tossing it away carelessly, throwing myself over the back of the pilot’s acceleration couch and grabbing the interface cables from their spools, jamming them into my jacks with fingers made clumsy by haste and caked mud.  I noticed a sharp, rancid odor I hadn’t been able to smell with the helmet on, maybe something in the soil or something I’d rolled in; and then the cockpit and the smell and everything faded and I was back in the interface.

I fired up the reactor at the same time as I spun the Gatling turret around and targeted the Tahni soldiers huddled in the lee of the Acheron.  They tried to run, tried to scatter like bugs when you turned over a rock and let the sunshine in, but I caught four or five with the short burst I sent out before they could get away.  I’d never fired the Gatling in an atmosphere before, and the flare of the laser pulses turning the air around them into superhot plasma as they passed startled me.  Not as much as it startled the Tahni it blew into shreds, of course.

The others were trying to get away from the firing arc of the laser, but now the turbines were spinning up and I fed power to them recklessly, nearly throwing myself out of the seat as the boat jumped up on columns of fire.  I spun her around like a dervish, hanging onto the acceleration couch with numb fingers and trying not to lose my concentration as I swept the Tahni soldiers with a long burst.  When a pulse from the laser struck, it vaporized everything around it in an explosion of superheated bodily fluids that their armor couldn’t contain and six or seven more popped like balloons before I’d emptied the weapon’s hopper of ammunition.

Another fell as I watched, the round from Conrad’s rifle seeming tame and anticlimactic by contrast, and the rest didn’t stop running when they hit gaps in the trees, disappearing from view in seconds.  I grinned savagely, feeling a feral satisfaction at their terror, but I thought of Ash and forced myself back to practicalities.  I swung the nose of the Artemis in line with the trail where I’d left Ash, then took the ship down just as close to it as I could, smashing a small clump of thorn trees under the edge of the starboard wing.

As soon as the gear touched, I gave a final command for the ship’s systems to open the belly ramp, then I yanked my jacks and ran back for the utility bay.  I felt out of breath, exhausted, but I couldn’t leave this for Conrad; I’d left Ash out there, I had to get him myself.

I didn’t remember that I’d taken off my helmet until I was halfway down the ramp, breathing in the humid, pungent air and wondering if it smelled as bad to the Tahni as it did to us.  I should have been more cautious, but nothing seemed to matter as much as getting to Ash and getting him on the boat.  I jumped off the end of the ramp and my boots sank three centimeters into the mud and nearly sent me sprawling backwards before I regained my balance and loped towards the trailhead.

There was someone standing there in the trail, and for a half-second I thought Conrad had beat me to it somehow.  Then for another half-second, I thought that Ash had woken up and managed to stand…and then things came into focus and I realized it was a Tahni soldier, and he was poking at Ash’s half-buried form with the muzzle of his KE gun and I felt a scream rising in my throat.

I’d dropped the rifle somewhere before I’d boarded the Artemis, but I was still wearing the gunbelt I’d snagged earlier and I clawed at the pulse pistol desperately.  There was no helmet targeting system, just a pop-up holographic sight that I don’t even remember seeing.  I pointed the gun at him and held the trigger down, the flashes of ionized air not as impressive as the fireworks show that the Gatling laser had put on, but much, much closer.  There was a series of high-pitched cracks as air rushed to fill the vacuum the laser had left, and the noise nearly drowned out the explosions of liberated water vapor that the pulses made when they hit the trees behind the soldier.

I emptied the magazine into him, the last hyperexplosive charge pulsing through only a second after the first, and I could see the sparks and flashes as at least six or seven of the shots scored blackened craters in the armor over his chest…and didn’t penetrate.  That’s why they wear the damn armor in the first place, I guess.

I kept running at him, hoping I could get to him before he raised his gun but more hoping I could keep him busy killing me long enough for Conrad to get there and save Ash.  I was five meters away and the KE gun muzzle was nearly in line with my head and I knew I wasn’t going to make it in time.

“Get down!”

The voice was Conrad’s but I barely registered that, I just acted, going into the baseball slide I’d already used once that day.  I didn’t hear the shot, but I saw the result:  the Tahni trooper jerked and spasmed as three ragged holes drilled their way through his chest armor and another shattered his faceplate.  His blood sprayed out and I covered my head with my arms but still tasted the salty, coppery liquid in my mouth and spat it out reflexively.  The Tahni collapsed into the trail and I ignored his corpse, lunging over towards Ash.

I rolled him back over, pushing away the mud I’d covered him with earlier.  I put a hand on his shoulder and I could feel his chest rise and fall slightly with each breath.  Conrad tromped up beside me, his heavy footsteps spattering mud onto my shoulder.

“Is he okay?”  He asked me over the external speakers of his helmet, his rifle barrel swiveling back and forth as he kept a watch up and down the trail.

“He’s not any worse than he was before,” I said, grabbing him and working his arm around my shoulder.

“I thought I told you to stay put while I drew them away,” he chided me as I lifted Ash up one more time, beginning to feel a little hope that I’d live to feel the back pain this was going to cause later.

“Your plan wasn’t working,” I said, my voice strained with effort as I took a step back towards the open ramp of the Artemis.  It seemed a lot further away than it had when I was running over here, or maybe my adrenalin had finally just run dry.  “I had to improvise.”

“Fuck,” he muttered, and I thought it was a commentary on what I’d said, till I heard the jets in the distance.  “It’s the damned flyer again.  Here, let me carry…”

Whatever he’d been about to say, he never got the chance to finish it.  There was no sound except a metallic slapping, so it seemed to me at first as if Conrad had slipped in the mud and stumbled down to a knee.  Then the ripping thundercracks of the tantalum slugs breaking the sound barrier echoed down the trail and he slumped onto his face.  That was when I saw that the back of his helmet had been sheared off clean, along with the rear of his skull.

The flyer screamed by only fifty or sixty meters up, its chin turret still firing, the rounds gouging divots in the armor on the starboard wing of the Artemis.  I took a step toward Conrad and felt bile rising in my throat when I saw what was left of him.  I couldn’t grieve for him yet, though; there wasn’t time.  I had maybe ten or fifteen seconds before the flyer looped around for another pass.  I shifted Ash into a fireman’s carry and ran.

Pain jarred through my back and legs and shoulders, and exhaustion dragged at me, but I kept running because there wasn’t any other choice and I decided I could ignore the pain for the rest of my life.  The whine of the jets had grown more distant as it passed over us, but now it was getting louder again and I knew it was making its turn.

I was ten meters from the end of the ramp.

The whine turned into a roar, and I knew it was coming around the arc of its curve; it would be clear of the ship in seconds and then it would have a clear shot at us.  I didn’t look up; I couldn’t, I had Ash’s weight pushing my chin down into my chest.

Five meters.

Is this the way you saw me going, Mom?  On some alien moon, cut down just short of safety?

I heard the impact of the slugs on the dirt and mud behind me before the sound of their passage caught up with them, so damned close…

One meter…

My boot slammed into the metal of the foot of the ramp with a metallic thump, and I heard the ringing of KE gun rounds off the hull of the ship above me as I threw myself forward.  Ash slumped forward off my shoulder and I dug my toes in, rushing the final few meters up into the boat and hitting the control to raise the ramp.  Ash raised with it and I grabbed him under the arms and dragged him as I walked backwards, breath chuffing like one of the steam engines I’d seen in museums.

There was a fold-down medical cot in the utility bay and I yanked it into place and hauled Ash onto it with one last burst of strength, strapping him down tightly.  I lowered the medical analysis unit over his head and chest and activated it, then staggered up the passageway, steadying myself against the bulkhead.  I still wasn’t thinking, still wasn’t feeling anything except a dull sense of disbelief that I was still alive.

I wished I’d had time to put on a flight suit and a helmet, wished I’d had time to get Ash into one, but if I gave the flyer any more time to shoot at us, it might eventually find a weak spot.  I’d left the reactor hot and the turbines idling, so when I plugged into the computer, it only took seconds to spin the jets back up.  The Artemis lurched into the air and I found the flyer with a single sweep of the sensors; the pilot knew he wasn’t going to be able to take me on and he was running as fast as his little turbojets could take him.

Mine were powered by a fusion reactor.

I should have let him go.  I should have headed for space and got us both out of here as quickly as I could.  But he’d killed Conrad, and I wasn’t going to let him get away with it.  The boat leaped forward, pushing me back into my seat with an abrupt surge of power, and I was within range in less than a second.  The Artemis struck the Tahni plane down with the divine lightning of an angry god and the smaller craft ceased to exist.

I felt no satisfaction, no closure, just a bitter emptiness that only seemed to grow as I took the cutter out of the atmosphere.  I scanned the sensors by rote and was unsurprised when I saw the corvettes Transitioning in at the edge of the gravity well.  They’d reacted about as fast as I thought they would, in the wake of their losses in the battle, but I was sure they’d be happy to take their frustrations out on a lone human vessel cut off from help.

I nearly gave a spoken high-g acceleration warning until I realized there was no one left to hear it.  Nine gravities would put me out, especially since I wasn’t wearing a flight suit, so I instructed the ship’s computer to take us to what I figured would be minimum safe distance and then to jump back out to where the carrier had been and might still be.

The corvettes launched missiles about a second before the burn began, and I didn’t have time to have the computer calculate if we’d hit the jump point before the weapons intercepted us.

At least if they kill me, I had time to think, I won’t have to be awake for it.

Then the world pressed down on my chest and everything went black.

Chapter Twenty-Three

I stared at the wall and wondered again if it would have been better if I hadn’t woken up.  Not just this morning, but ever.  It had been nearly two months since I’d snapped awake and found myself and Ash and the Artemis floating bingo fuel only 300 kilometers off the portside saucer of the Implacable, and that had been the very last time I’d had control of my own destiny.

Now I was back on Inferno, but it could have still been the carrier, or Earth or a dozen other places, because one holding cell looked very much like another.  The bed was uncomfortable, the food was barely edible, and my uniform was a pair of orange utility fatigues that were changed out every other day, when I was escorted to the showers.  The last time anyone had talked to me other than the guards was when the Implacable had arrived in orbit around Inferno.

When the door slid aside, I assumed it was my personal guard troop doing a random check on me; they did that every once in a while, usually when I’d just managed to fall asleep, the sorry fuckers.  This time, though, it was someone else, someone tall and improbably handsome in a perfectly tailored uniform with an admiral’s rank.

I snapped to my feet and came to attention, but Jason Aviles waved it away with an annoyed glance behind him.  I saw Sgt. Conner scowl as she hit the control to close the door; the old, beat-up Marine bitch never once smiled in her whole life.

“Lieutenant,” Aviles said, staring at me as I still stood at attention, “at ease, rest, do whatever the hell you need to do to stop acting like this is the fucking Academy parade ground.”

“Aye, sir,” I said, relaxing, my hands still clasped behind my back.  For some reason, I was suddenly self-conscious that my hair hadn’t been cut in three months and it was far past regulation, not to mention wild and unkempt.

“Hollande,” he muttered, shaking his head.  “What the hell have you done to yourself?”

“First time I met you, sir,” I said, my voice sounding tired in my ears, “you told me I wasn’t a prisoner and wasn’t charged with anything.  I guess I am now.”

He barked a humorless laugh.

“I suppose so.”  He walked over to the soft, shapeless chair that was the only piece of furniture I was allowed except the bed, and sat down on it.  I followed his gesture and seated myself opposite him, on the edge of my bed.  “Has anyone talked to you since you were arrested?”

“My Wing Commander on the Implacable,” I told him, shrugging.  “No one since then.”

Captain Osceola had come to see me then, probably against orders.  She’d let me know that Ash was recovering and would be as good as new, eventually.  I don’t know if Ash had tried to see me; if he had, they hadn’t informed me.

“No lawyer?”  He asked, seeming surprised.

“No, sir.”  Osceola had also promised to get me a JAG attorney, though that had yet to happen.  “I guess no one figures I need a lawyer since they haven’t bothered to ask me a damned thing yet.”

“Well, the records from your cutter paint a pretty clear picture of what happened,” he allowed.  “Would you like me to get you an attorney?  I can have one here in an hour.”

I considered it for a moment, but shook my head.

“I’m fine with whatever punishment you decide is right,” I decided.  “I deserve it.”

Maybe, I thought, they’d just stick me here until the war was over and forget any of it had ever happened.  I was still hoping for a mindwipe, though.  If they erased my memories, then maybe I wouldn’t keep seeing what was left of Conrad’s head every time I tried to shut my eyes.

“You could have been a Captain in a couple years,” Aviles lamented, his hands palms-up in an imploring gesture.  “You could have had your own Group command.  The way things stand now…”  He sat back, sighing.  “If Esparza hadn’t gotten himself killed, I might have been able to just get you transferred, make this all go away.  But there’s been a death as the result of direct disobedience of orders, and there has to be an official inquiry.”

His eyes narrowed and he looked at me sharply.  “We do have one thing we could use, Hollande.  Esparza was your superior officer, even if he wasn’t in your chain of command…and he was in a relationship with you.  If you’ll be willing to testify that the unauthorized rescue mission was his idea, that he pressured you into it, I might be able to sell that to the board of inquiry and get you back commanding a squadron in one of the other Groups.”

“Commander Esparza was a good man,” I said, fighting hard to keep my voice from breaking.  “He died doing his job.”

And I wasn’t about to try to save my ass by dragging his name through the mud, which I hoped I was making clear.  Aviles scowled at that, but didn’t argue it any further.  Maybe even he was uncomfortable with the idea.

“In that case,” he concluded, “I’m afraid it’s going to be all I can do to keep you out of a military prison.  Lt. Hollande, think this through:  if this goes to a court-martial, you’ll lose your pilot rating, you’ll be busted to Technician Second Class and you’ll spend the rest of the war working in some storage depot out on some uninhabitable moon.  Are you sure you don’t want a JAG attorney?”

“I’ll be better off there, sir” I said dully, not meeting his gaze.  “I won’t get anyone else killed.”

Admiral Aviles sighed heavily and pushed up from the uncomfortable chair, heading for the door.  He knocked on it twice before it opened, with Sgt. Conner still watching carefully, her hand on her holstered stunner.  Aviles turned to someone behind Conner and spoke so softly I barely heard it.

“See if you can talk some sense into her,” he said.

Ash stepped past him into the room and the door slid shut again.

I felt like I was seeing a ghost.  Even though I’d known on an intellectual level that he was fine, the last time I’d seen him, he’d been wounded and unconscious.  Now…

“You look good.”  It sounded inane, but it was the least inane thing I could come up with, and it was the truth; I hadn’t seen him in a dress uniform since the Academy.

His face was such a mixture of anguish and sorrow and longing that I wanted more than anything to hold him.  I took a tentative step forward, unsure if I was allowed or if the guards would come in and separate us…

“Damn it, Sandi,” he moaned helplessly, pulling me into his arms and holding onto me with fierce strength.  “Damn it, damn it, damn it, why did you do this?  Why’d you come back for me?”

“Because I knew you’d have done it for me.”

I buried my face in his shoulder and shuddered with sobs.  I hadn’t touched another person in months and the pent-up emotion flowed out of me with the tears.  His hands gently brushed hair and teardrops out of my face and then he was leaning down and kissing my hair, my eyes, and finally covering my mouth with his.  A warmth spread through me, but I pushed away, shaking my head.

“You can’t,” I insisted, punching my fist against his chest lightly, still crying.  “We can’t.  I’m no good for you, Ash.”  The words wrenched their way out of me, and I bowed my forehead into his chest, clenching my teeth, feeling knives twisting inside me.  “I drag everyone down with me.”

“That’s not true, Sandi,” he said, putting a hand under my chin and tilting my head up toward him.  “It’s going to be okay.  You can fight this.  It won’t be easy, but we can make it through this.  But you have to let Admiral Aviles and me help you.”

“Help me do what?”  I demanded, pulling away from him.  I realized my voice was beginning to sound shrill and out of control and I fought to rein myself in.  “Help me try to tell everyone that Conrad used a younger officer he was sleeping with to pull off an unauthorized mission because he was a glory hound?  Damn it, Ash, he gave his life to save yours!  Do you really want me to do that to his memory?”

“That was the Admiral’s idea, not mine,” Ash assured me, holding up his hands.  “I just want you to get someone at JAG to represent you.  You don’t deserve to take the heat for this, you were just doing what was right…”

“NO.  I.  WASN’T!”  I hadn’t realized I’d shouted the words at him until they were out, and I felt a warm flush in my cheeks from anger and frustration.  “Damn it, Ash, you know that’s not true!  I did exactly the wrong thing for the wrong reasons, the same way I always have!  I went into the Academy because Mom was pressuring me and it was easier to do what she wanted than to go off on my own.  I went the assault shuttle pilot track to piss her off, more than anything else, and because you were excited about it.”

I paced back and forth across the floor, wishing the prison fatigues had pockets to stick my hands into.

“I went against Keating’s orders because I was worried about my own ass, not because I was on some noble crusade to save the war effort.  I went along with becoming a Squadron Leader because I was basically forced into it.”

I paused in front of him, putting a hand on his arm and squeezing.  “And I dragged you into bed because I was more afraid of being alone than I was of damaging our friendship.”  I let my hand drop.  “And then this.”

I shook my head.  “I put people’s lives and careers at risk because I was afraid of losing you, Ash.  That’s why I did it, you know.  Not because it was the fucking right thing to do, not because I owed it to you for saving my life, not because you’re my friend, and not because I love you, or you love me.  I did it because I was afraid of being alone.”

I felt the tears about to switch back on and I blocked them off with a flash of anger.

“I lost Dad, I lost Mom, I lost Chief Burke…you were all I had, the only person who gave a shit about me.”

“Commander Esparza…,” Ash began, but I cut him off.

“Conrad found me interesting,” I corrected him, “because we were both broken, only he knew it and accepted it.  I kept blaming everything on other people.  But it’s not about what anyone did to me, it’s what I’ve been doing to everyone else.  Conrad’s dead, Captain Osceola might lose her command, and you…”  I closed my eyes.  “I hurt you, and I’m so sorry.”

I paced over to the wall and put a palm against it.  It felt cold and hard and hopeless.

“What I did was wrong,” I declared again.  “I took a huge risk, and it could have wound up with all three of us dead.  I’m responsible for this, and I deserve whatever they do to me.”

“But Sandi,” Ash said quietly, in a small voice that broke my heart, “I don’t want to lose you.”

I didn’t look back at him, just stayed leaning tiredly against the wall.

“You have a great career ahead of you in the military,” I told him.  “Everyone likes you, and you’re going to find someone who loves you.  You don’t need me dragging you down.”

I think, maybe, that there was a small part of me that wanted him to fight me on it.  No, it was time to be honest; I definitely wanted him to fight me on it.  I wanted him to scream and yell and throw a fit, even though I knew I was finally doing the right thing.

But Ash was always smarter than me.  He left the room without another word.

***

I stood in civilian clothes and watched the faces pass by on the memorial, one by one.  They moved quickly, yet the hologram had been scrolling for long minutes with no break in sight.  Each face told a story, in subtle shades of expression or in the set of the jaw, stories of doubt or resolve or happiness or grim determination.

Chief Burke’s had been an open book, a study in dedication and professionalism.  When Conrad’s had passed by, I’d seen through the square-jawed recruiting poster to the off-kilter recklessness beneath the surface.  What did my face show?  What would it have looked like there, marching across the Memorial to the Fallen in Armstrong Plaza on a warm, summer night?

Acceptance, perhaps.  Endurance.  I’d learned them both the hard way, these past two years.

I’d been ready for their worst, yet they hadn’t given it to me.  Perhaps it had been the Medal of Valor and the Bronze Star, or the dead hero Admiral mother.  Or maybe it had been Admiral Aviles and Ash and Captain Osceola all pleading my case against my will.  Either way, they hadn’t court-martialed me and they hadn’t busted me to a tech-2 and sent me to load pallets on an airless moon somewhere.

They had revoked my flight status and sat me at a desk on Hermes, and made sure I never got anywhere near the Attack Command for the rest of the war.  It was over now, ended far away in grim, hand-to-hand struggles on remote colonies like Demeter and Canaan, and then finally in an all-out invasion of the Tahni homeworld.

Ash had been part of it, and I’d kept tabs on him from afar, watching as he’d been given his own Strike Wing to command and led them in the decisive battles that won the war for the Commonwealth.  I’d left him alone, because I hadn’t been lying when I said he was better off without me.

And me, I’d kept my head down and filed my reports and done my job and nodded to my co-workers politely and never said a word to them once my shift had ended.  And if I’d maybe drank a bit too much some nights, or had to take a pill or two to sleep through the nightmares, well, I’d never let it affect my work.

But the work was done now, and I’d been cut loose from my obligation to the service before the Tahni Emperor’s corpse had cooled to room temperature.  I had enough money for a flight off of Hermes to anywhere I wanted to go, and I figured I’d start at Belial, the private space colony over in the Alpha Centauri asteroid belt.  A lot of business got done there by all sorts of people, and most of them didn’t care if you’d been stripped of your military flight ratings as long as you had the jacks and knew how to pilot a starship.  It seemed like a good place for a fresh start, somewhere no one knew my name or my face.

But first, I’d had to come here to the plaza, to the memorial.  I’d avoided it the whole time I’d been stationed here because I hadn’t needed to see the faces on it; I saw them every night.  If I was going to start fresh, though, I had to say goodbye.

And there she was.  Helene Gannett.  The face could have been mine, except for the devotion to duty that was set in every line, every angle, every atom of her being.  Everything that made her different from me.

I didn’t salute her; I’d done that before.  Instead, I said what I should have the last time I’d seen her alive.

“Goodbye Mom,” I whispered to her.  “I love you.”

Her image passed on and so did I.

Look for the further adventures of Sandi and Ash in the exciting space opera series Tales of the Acheron.

Book 1: Prodigal is now available on Amazon for Kindle!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B077NZ3TPF

Following is a free sample of the first in a thrilling new series by Rick Partlow:

Tales of the Acheron Book 1: Prodigal

Chapter One

Sandi worked the old shuttle’s balky interface expertly, hanging on for dear life and daring it to buck her off.  The air was thick and hot and it buffeted the lander spitefully, the breath of some vengeful god who knew why they were coming; but she only felt the vibration distantly, like it was happening to someone else.

Hold together, girl.  She gave the controls a wispy caress with the slightest touch of her thoughts and the character of the turbulence changed in a way that no one else in the bird would have noticed, with the grain instead of against it.  Just a little further…

“Jesus Christ, Hollande, I thought you said you could fly this thing.”

The words, and the annoying, nasal whine that accompanied them, brought her out of the interface for a moment.  She glanced beside her, careful to move just her eyes---she didn’t like the way the cables tugged at the sockets implanted in her temples when she turned her head.

The round-faced, pudgy older man stuffed into the copilot’s seat glared at her with dour disapproval.  His brown jacket was worn glossy in spots along the sleeves, where his tactical vest had polished it over years of use.  The butt of the old but serviceable handgun sticking up from the shoulder holster on that vest reminded her who she was dealing with, and she stopped herself from snapping out the first response that had come to her lips.

“Captain, if you have anyone else with the input jacks and the experience to land this brick with wings in this soup,” Sandrine Hollande said quietly, almost a murmur, “then they’re certainly welcome to try.”

Deruda grumbled under his breath, but didn’t respond.  She wrestled down the grin that tried to fight its way onto her face.  He was an asshole, but he was also her boss, and she needed this job.

She submerged again into the interface, absorbing the combination of the feeds from the exterior cameras, the lidar and radar and the instruments in a way that defied description to anyone who lacked the sockets.  It wasn’t like having extra senses in that she didn’t actively perceive each bit of input; she just knew, the same way she knew where her own body was and where her next step would land.  The shuttle, obsolete pile of junk though it might be, was her body, and guiding it down to the roughly-graded gravel landing field in the utter darkness of the storm-shrouded night was no different than surfing a Pacific wave on the California coast.

The jolt of the landing gear settling into their housings brought her back out of the interface and she began unstrapping her harness with rote motions while she powered back the acceleration couch.  Deruda was still trying to pry his bulk out of his seat when she ducked out of the cockpit and through the short passage into the cargo hold.  The “Captain” was as much of a fat piece of shit as the cargo bird and it seemed ludicrous to grant him the title, but it was due him as the master of a starship.  The fact that the starship was a ragged, patched-together freighter a half a century old didn’t change that.

“Trucks are already out there, Ms. Hollande,” Frankie said, mashing the button to open the cargo doors.

“You can just call me Sandi,” she reminded him again, but the comment was lost in the grinding rattle of the ancient motors as the plastrons in the shuttle’s belly swung slowly open.

She shook her head.  Frankie was an old-timer, his face lined and craggy and weathered from a life lived far enough away from the Commonwealth core systems that anti-aging treatments were unheard of.  His manners were as old as his appearance, and she wondered how the hell he’d wound up working for La Sombra.

Then again, she thought ruefully, how the hell did I wind up working for them?

There was a flare of headlights that lit up the rainy darkness outside the cargo doors and the honk of a horn that signaled the crews outside were ready for the load.  Frankie yanked downward on the lever set into the bulky metal gantry surrounding the cargo elevator and it began lowering with a shudder that vibrated through the shuttle’s hull and forced Sandi to catch her balance on the bulkhead.

“Damn it, Frankie!”  Deruda stalked up behind the slender, long-limbed older man, his perpetual frown deepening.  He’d stopped by the utility locker and was carrying a light carbine tucked under his arm and a spare pistol in the other hand.  “I’ve told you a million times to wait until I make sure it’s our people before you drop the cargo!”

“Aye, Captain,” Frankie answered cheerfully.  With an agility that was impressive for his age, the cargo-handler hopped out onto one of the plastic crates on the lowering freight elevator and grabbed a cable for support.  “I’ll check on ‘em and if it’s not our crew, I’ll tell ‘em to go back home.”

Deruda looked like he wanted to yell at the man again, but Frankie’s Cheshire-cat grin disappeared along with the pallets of cargo and the Captain just growled deep in his throat.

“Come on, Hollande,” he snapped at Sandi, waving for her to follow as he headed for the ladder that had extended downward along with the belly doors.

“Come on where?”  She wondered, following him.  “Can’t they unload it by themselves?”

A cold, damp blast of rain-sodden wind hit her as she clambered down behind the rotund man, dropping to the ground with a crunch of her boots on the gravel.  She fastened her flight jacket up the front, her fingers automatically tracing the blank spots where her rank and the Commonwealth Space Fleet patch used to be.

The crew of a half-dozen locals were already hand-loading the crates into the backs of the two cargo trucks they’d brought, alcohol-fueled antiques probably slapped together from spare parts.  An armored car of some sort was parked facing the trucks and the interplay of the headlights threw ominous shadows against the light grey of the belly plastrons and hid the men’s faces from her view.

“We’re escorting this load into town,” Deruda answered her question, slipping a knit cap on over his unruly, red mane.  “I need to have a talk with the local crew boss.”

“Why do I have to come?”  Sandi objected, following him around to the passenger door of the armored car.  He rounded on her with narrowed eyes.

“Because I said so,” he told her flatly.  “And because there might be trouble.”

He shoved the pistol he’d taken out of the utility locker at her and she took it without thinking, automatically running through a safety check.  It was loaded, a round chambered, safety on.

“You know I’m a pilot, right?”  She asked him, gesturing at the pistol with her off-hand but keeping it pointed at the ground.  “Not a Marine.”

“You’re whatever we need you to be,” he snapped.  He jerked a thumb at the rear truck.  “You’re riding back there.”

Sandi looked at the pistol, then at Deruda’s back as the man squeezed himself into the cab of the armored car, and very carefully did not point it at him.  Though it made a nice fantasy...  She hissed out a breath and headed back to the truck.

***

“This your first time on Asiento?”

The truck driver grinned too widely, and his demeanor was entirely too cheerful for Sandi’s mood.  She grunted as the ancient vehicle lurched over another pothole, throwing her against her safety harness again.  Rain beat against the cracked and stained windshield, and the wipers were barely able to keep pace with it, but even with their best efforts and three sets of headlights, she could barely see both edges of the narrow, gravel road and the ass end of the truck in front of her.  For all she could tell, there could be a thousand-meter cliff or a raging ocean on either side of them.

“Yeah,” she replied.  “But if I’d known it was this scenic, I’d have dropped in ages ago.”

The driver brayed like a scalded mule at that, and she was glad the cab was dark enough that she couldn’t see his teeth.

“Funny and pretty!”  He enthused, pounding a palm against the faded plastic of the dashboard.  “Cap’n Deruda ain’t never brought a female pilot with him before!”

“They do have females here, right?”  She asked dubiously.  “I mean, you’ve talked to one before?”  She was beginning to think she might need that gun.

“Honestly,” he lamented, “the pickings in Hasiera are pretty slim.  The locals don’t much care for any of the La Sombra crew, and the prostitutes are dead ugly.”  He smiled again, determined to be positive.  “I’m Marcus,” he introduced himself.

“Is Hasiera the town we’re heading to?”  She asked, avoiding giving him her name.

“Oh, yeah, it’s the main settlement here.”  He shrugged.  “Really the only place worth calling a city on this whole shithole of a planet, and it’s only got like ten thousand people.”

“What the hell does Abdullah want with this place?”  She wondered.

“I ain’t never met Mr. Abdullah,” Marcus admitted, “but he’s gotta’ be a pretty smart guy to run La Sombra.  I guess habitable planets aren’t that common out here in the Worlds.  Maybe he’s thinking long-term.”

She gave a noncommittal shrug, then leaned forward and squinted at lights in the distance, barely visible through the sheets of rain.

“Is that the town?”

“Yeah, that’s it,” Marcus confirmed.  “You can’t really see it, but we’re already passing by some of the houses near the outskirts.  Lots of people don’t want to live by the extraction works ‘cause of the smell.”

“Extraction works?”  Sandi repeated.

“Where they recycle old electronics,” he explained.  “Not like they can import new stuff out here all the time, so they use a chemical bath to extract the biochips from old processing systems here and sell them to us.”  He shrugged.  “To the other cartels too, I guess.”

“They do that on a habitable planet?”  Sandi asked, horrified.  “In the middle of town?”

“I guess it’d be too expensive to do it in orbit,” Marcus reasoned.  “And the closer it is to town, the closer it is to the landing field.”

Sandi shook her head, wanting more than anything to be done with this and back on the shuttle.  Ahead, she could begin to make out the shapes of buildings under the misty halos of streetlights.  The road curved just before it ran into the edge of the city proper, and she spotted the armored car at the head of their column.

She was looking straight at it when it exploded.

“Jesus!”  The word burst from her lips of its own accord as she saw a fireball erupt from beneath the car’s front wheels and flip it over in mid-air.

Deruda’s vehicle landed on its roof and skidded off the road, wreathed in steam and gouts of black smoke.  The sound and shockwave hit a half-second after, and she felt the truck skidding as Marcus tried to keep it on the road.

“Shit!”  He cursed, the word like a prayer as he wrestled with the wheel.

Sandi braced herself against the dash and gritted her teeth, expecting the truck to run off the road and wind up on its side, but Marcus was a better driver than he was a ladies’ man, and he managed to bring the big vehicle to a halt.  The lead truck driver apparently wasn’t quite as talented; he fishtailed and lost control and the front wheels of the cab bottomed out in the ditch on the right-hand side of the road.

Marcus desperately shifted into reverse and jammed the accelerator to the floor, throwing Sandi forward as the truck shot backwards blindly into the darkness.

“What the hell are you doing?”  She yelled, bracing herself.  “We’re going to wreck!”

“That was a bomb!”  Marcus snapped, eyes flickering from the backup camera to the side-view mirrors.  “It’s those Rif fuckers!”

“Who?”

The word was barely out of her mouth when something bright and loud and gut-wrenchingly hard slammed low into the driver’s side of the vehicle.  A shrill whine filled Sandi’s ears and a fog settled over her perceptions; the truck seemed to spin in slow motion, the view through the splintered windshield a kaleidoscope of headlights flashing across rain and mud and the vague, shadowy figures standing out in the field by the road.  Time caught up with both her and the vehicle when the left rear wheels caught the ditch and suddenly they were tumbling sideways off the road.

Pain crashed into Sandi’s back and chest and shoulders as the safety harness bit into her, and she gritted her teeth, flinching involuntarily as the truck groaned and shifted and threatened to roll over onto its roof before it settled onto the driver’s side with one final lurch.  Blackness crawled in through the cracked plastic of the windows and into her brain, and she felt consciousness slipping away.

“Sandi!”

Whose voice was that?  It sounded so far away…

“Sandi, Goddammit, wake up!”

“Ash?”  She murmured, squeezing her eyes shut and shaking her head to clear it.

“We got to get out of here!”

It was Marcus.  She was in the truck, on Asiento, with Marcus.  She could see his ugly, scarred face fitfully by the sparking, shorting lights of the dashboard console display, could see the glare of flashlights outside and hear the hiss-crack of gunshots from somewhere far ahead of them.

“Yeah, okay,” she acknowledged.

She yanked at the door handle, pushing it outward and letting it swing open with a hollow crash of metal on metal.  Grabbing the edge of the frame, she pulled the quick-release on her safety restraint and caught herself before she could fall on top of Marcus.

“Come on,” she urged, holding a hand down to him.  “I’ll help you up.”

“Damn release is jammed,” he told her, jerking the strap demonstratively.  “I can’t get out.  You got a knife?”

“Back on the shuttle,” she admitted, sticking her head out the window and trying to get a look around.

There were pin-point flashes of red streaking across between the fields beside the road and the armored car a hundred meters ahead of them, and the beams of hand-held lights bouncing flickering this way and that, but she couldn’t see if there was anyone close to their truck.

“I got one,” Marcus said, straining as he tried to get a hand into a hip pocket blocked by his seat restraints.  “If I can just…”

Something punched through the windshield, trailed by the whoosh of miniature rocket engines and the crack of warheads breaking the sound barrier, and Marcus thrashed for a moment, hands going to his chest.  Then he slumped, his eyes still open, staring into eternity.

Sandi jerked away from him, giving into the desperation she’d been fighting to contain and levering herself out of the passenger’s side door with a grunt of exertion, then throwing herself down into the darkness.  She landed awkwardly on her side, but the muddy ground gave way underneath her, cushioning the fall, and she clawed at the yielding, paste-like mud to pull herself to her feet.

She ran blindly, terrified of heading for anywhere with light, terrified of being spotted, sure that she was only seconds from feeling a slug in her back that would end everything.  The mud sucked at her ankle-high boots, threatening to pull them right off her feet with each step, and she could feel it squishing inside the shoes as well, thick and disgusting.  The firefight echoed back and forth, up and down the line of wrecked vehicles, and each crack of rolling thunder spurred a flash of memory.

She was back in a humid, steaming jungle, a Tahni outpost in some unnamed system, with their troops spread out through the game trails, their flyers buzzing overhead, hunting for her while she searched desperately for Ash.  One of them loomed ahead of her in the darkness, faceless behind the mirrored visor of his armored helmet…

The gun was in her hand.  It had been in her jacket pocket and she didn’t remember pulling it out, certainly didn’t remember switching off the safety or aiming, but her right forefinger retained the physical sensation of touching the trigger, of jamming it down.  She’d fired three rounds before she managed to let go of the trigger pad, each kicking free of the barrel with a hissing whoosh of igniting mini-rocket motors.  The explosive warheads punched into the chest of the dark, menacing figure who’d stepped into her path and he pitched backwards with a gurgling scream.

It was a man, not a Tahni, she realized somewhere beneath the glaze of panic that had settled over her perceptions.  It was one of the attackers, one of the Rif, whoever they were.  She’d just killed a man.  She’d killed hundreds, maybe thousands of Tahni during the war, but never a human, not till now.

She was too scared to care.  She kept running, sidestepping the body, not knowing where she was going or what corner could offer safety.  She didn’t see the small cottage until she’d nearly stumbled over its front stoop, catching herself against a support post of the overhanging porch.  She found the door by touch, grabbing the handle and yanking at it; it was locked.  She put the barrel of the pistol over where she thought the bolt went into the jamb and pulled the trigger, holding a hand across her face.

Light flared and she felt a spray of wooden splinters against her jacket that didn’t quite penetrate, and then the door was swinging open with a creak of poorly-fitted, hand-made hinges.  She banged into it with her shoulder, barging inside and then pushing it shut behind her and sinking to the floor with her back against the thick, rough wood of the door.

There was a light on in another room and it illuminated the interior enough for her to see that she was in a small mud room, sitting on a woven matt next to neatly aligned rows of shoes…and some of them were awfully small.

“Shit,” she breathed, realizing that, in her panic, she’d just broken into someone’s home.

A flashlight shone from somewhere down the short entrance hall, not really that bright but glaring and blinding compared to the utter darkness outside, and she held a hand over her eyes to shield them from it.

“Get the hell out of here!”  A man’s voice shouted, gruff and gravelly.  “Get out now or I’ll shoot you!”

She felt the gun dragging down her hand, and wondered if she should try to get a shot off at him before he killed her.  Then she looked at the small shoes again, and tossed it to the floor.  It landed with a solid thump of metal on wood.

“Then do it,” she told him.  “I’m dead anyway if I go out there.”

“Like I should give a shit?”  He demanded.

He moved closer and she could see his face in the light reflected back off the white-painted walls of the mud room.  He was spare and gaunt and undoubtedly younger than he looked on a place like this.  Grey flecked the sandy brown hair pulled back into a pony tail, and streaked the short beard he wore; and pain drew down the corners of his grey eyes.  He did have a weapon, a crudely-fabricated shotgun, and he held the flashlight against its stock.

“Did any of you cartel fucks care when my little boy got caught in one of your goddamned gunfights?  Did any of you worry about him, or any of us?”

“I’m just a shuttle pilot,” she pleaded.  “I’m just doing my job…”

“Bringing guns for your fucking gang battle?”  He growled, shoving the muzzle of the shotgun closer to her face.  “So you can kill each other and us?”

“James.”  It was a woman’s voice this time, a step back from the man.

Sandi couldn’t see her at first, but then a light switched on in the room the man had emerged from and suddenly everything was illuminated.  She was as haggard and prematurely aged as her husband, but where his eyes were filled with fury, hers were wells of sadness.  She was dressed in a simple, hand-made night-dress and clinging to the skirts of it was a girl of maybe eight or nine, her face a café-aux-lait mix of her father’s pallor and her mother’s ebon.  Her dark eyes were wide and filled with fear.

“Get back in the bedroom, Charlotte,” the man growled.

“You’re scaring Therese,” the woman admonished James, stepping forward and scooping up Sandi’s discarded pistol and handing it to her husband.  “And we are not sending this poor woman out into the middle of a battle.  Can’t you see she’s not one of the cartel thugs?  Now stop pointing that gun at her.”

A struggle passed across James’ face, but finally he lowered the muzzle of the shotgun.

“I’m going to go get some tools and fix the door,” he said with a grunt of displeasure, stalking into the next room.

“Therese,” Charlotte said softly to her daughter, “go with your father and help him.”

The little girl nodded and scurried off quickly, her bare feet padding softly against the wooden floor.

“Thank you,” Sandi tried to say, but the older woman cut her off.

“Save it,” Charlotte snapped, her friendly tone abruptly shifting to something much colder and harder.  “I don’t want my husband to be a murderer or my child to see him kill you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t agree with him.  If you fly in the guns for La Sombra to use in their little territorial battle against the Rif, then you’re just as guilty as the thugs that shoot them.”

The older woman bared her teeth, and for a moment Sandi thought Charlotte was going to hit her, but she visibly restrained herself.  She waved a hand at the door.

“You can stay until the fighting’s stopped, but then you have to get out of here.  We can’t be found hiding you.”  Her expression softened.  “If you still have a soul, then save it and get out of this business while you still can.”

Look for Tales of the Acheron Book 1: Prodigal on Amazon today!

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