by J. N. Chaney
As soon as she was in reach, Thorn gathered Morgan in his arms and pulled her to him. She was wet, filthy, battered—
But she was alive.
“Okay, Mol, let’s go home!”
As the airlock cycled closed, the Gyrfalcon lifted, pointed her prow skyward, and began to accelerate back into space.
Epilogue
“Not used to having children aboard my ship, Stellers,” Tanner said, arms crossed, his frown fixed on Morgan. Thorn could see it was put on, though, and that a smile played in the Captain’s eyes.
Thorn reached out and brushed Morgan’s hair. She’d been cleaned up, her wounds dressed, and now she slumbered on a bed in the Hecate’s infirmary. Kira sat on the other side of the bed, holding her daughter’s hand.
“I never imagined I’d be bringing my daughter aboard the Hecate, sir. Well, except maybe for take-your-kid-to-work day,” he replied.
Tanner shot him a glance, that became a genuine smile. He then turned back to look at Morgan, and the frown reappeared.
“Uh, correct me if I’m wrong, Stellers and Wixcombe, but you said your daughter here was born only about five years ago. This is no five-year old.”
“No, she’s got to be, what? Nine or ten?” Damien said.
Thorn nodded. “When I tried to bring her back from being dead, I guess this is how I envisioned her.”
“Tried to bring her back from the dead. Huh. Probably the first time those words have been spoken here,” Damien replied, but the Hecate’s Chief Surgeon shook her head.
“You’d be surprised at the things that have been said in here. And now, here’s another one. My patient needs rest, so I need all of you to leave. That includes you, Captain.”
“Your infirmary, your rules, doc,” Tanner said, gesturing everyone toward the door.
They stopped outside the infirmary, in the corridor. Thorn looked at Tanner.
“Sir, I just want to thank you. I know how risky this was.”
“Worth it. Your daughter’s a strategic asset.” He started to turn away, then stopped and turned back.
“She’s also the daughter of two people for whom I have a great deal of respect. Still have some explaining to do to Admiral Scoville, but I’ll be doing it with a clear conscience.”
Thorn saluted. Kira and Damien followed suit.
Tanner returned it. “Now, then, ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me, we have a war to finish winning.”
When he was gone, Damien cleared his throat. “Look, I think you two need some time alone. I’m going to—” His voice trailed off, and he shrugged. “I’m going to leave you guys to it.”
Before he could move, Kira hugged him. “Thank you, Damien. You’re a damned good man.”
Damien smiled and hugged her back. “I appreciate that, Kira. But the damned good man you should be concerned about is right there,” he said, pointing at Thorn. He released Kira, and walked away.
“So I guess we’re a family,” Thorn said.
“I guess we are. Now we can actually get to know our daughter.”
“We can, yeah.”
It still hadn’t sunk in, Thorn thought. They might be a family, but their daughter was a complete stranger to them. He was anxious for her to wake up, so he could start to get to know this little girl named Morgan, but a part of him almost dreaded it.
Kira turned to reenter the infirmary. “Come on.”
“Doc kicked us out, remember?”
“We’re her parents, Thorn. No one separates us from our daughter. Not ever again.”
She strode back into the infirmary.
Tanner was right. There was a war to win, against the Nyctus, and now against the Bilau, as well. But it didn’t have to be won right this minute.
Smiling himself, Thorn followed Kira to their daughter’s side.
Keep reading to continue the story in CRY VICTORY.
1
A Kestrel fighter wheeled away from the swirling melee, trailing smoke and debris. The pilot struggled to keep the damaged craft airborne, let alone pry it from the planet’s icy atmosphere, but it was a losing battle. With a flash, the ejection capsule flung itself skyward. The Kestrel immediately plunged into a steep dive and slammed into the ice covering the frozen sea. It smashed a hole through and vanished into the black water. A second later, it exploded, hurling a column of water a hundred meters into the air.
Thorn watched the progress of the escape capsule as it settled onto the ice not far from the crash site. He made careful note of the location, then turned his attention back to the battle raging below—and it was raging, a firestorm of steel and alloy and weapons, all coming together in a merciless, chaotic dance.
The Viper had sent two of her three squadrons of Kestrels planetside to help the stricken Imbrogul outpost, and now they fought desperately to hold off nearly twice their number of enemy craft. The attackers were unidentified, but Thorn suspected it was the Bilau. The lizard-like aliens had become an increasingly irritating barb, pricking not just the ON, but the Imbrogul, the Danzur, and, if intel was to be believed, even the Nyctus. This sort of attack would fit their apparently favored approach to warfare: strike hard and fast, inflict as much damage as possible, then flee.
They seemed to have little interest in taking territory or fighting sustained battles, but if there was some overarching strategy to it all, no one had been able to figure it out yet.
Thorn watched as the Kestrels jinked, banked, dove, and dodged against the smaller, more nimble enemy fighters. The ON fighters had the edge in power and thrust, so their pilots had quickly learned to take advantage of it. They called it boom-and-zoom. Start with an altitude advantage, dive down on the lighter enemy craft, trading altitude for velocity, attack, then climb away, surrendering velocity for altitude again. It wasn’t a new tactic by any means, but it was effective here. The smaller enemy fighters just couldn’t climb as fast as the Kestrels, but the enemy had quickly shifted their tactics in response. They deliberately swarmed one Kestrel during its attack run, taking it out, while ignoring the rest. Losses mounted on both sides, but the enemy had the advantage of numbers.
It was a trade-off the ON could not tolerate. Or live with.
“Bertilak, we don’t have time for anything fancy. Just take us straight in,” Thorn said.
Bertilak’s fingers danced over the controls. His ship, the Jolly Green Giant—now an official ON auxiliary ship, known Fleet-wide as the Jolly—dropped through the clouds and dove toward the battle like a swooping raptor on the hunt.
“Kira, you ready?” Thorn asked.
“Just point me at a target,” she said.
Thorn swept a hand toward the viewscreen, a swirl of ships marked by blue friendly and red enemy icons stark against the ice. “Take your pick.”
Bertilak aimed them at a cluster of enemy fighters savaging a Kestrel. Emerald energy bolts flashed away from the Jolly, blasting apart two of the enemy ships in rapid succession, their hulls reduced to spinning debris. A third suddenly spun and dove vertically into the ice. Kira whooped.
“Splash one!”
Thorn kept his focus on three more of the little enemy craft, dodging and weaving as they lined themselves up for another melee with the Kestrels. Their pilots were canny and careful, flinging themselves around faster than the Jolly could track them. Thorn scowled. There was no time for this. Smoke and flames poured from the Imbrogul outpost, which probably meant casualties and a desperate need for help.
Thorn gripped his talisman, and his senses began to fill with the power of ’casting. He smelled something burning and heard the faint echoes of massive explosions brushing the edges of his thoughts. Despite all the time that had passed, the old book was still infused with psychic echoes of pain and fear, of the trauma of the Nyctus attack on Cotswold, his childhood home. Thorn embraced it, used it to anchor himself, then gathered magic power from the ether and shaped it according to his intent. He picked a spot about a klick ahead of the racing enemy fighters, reached under
the ice with Tidal magic, and lifted a massive chunk of the frozen landscape.
The three enemy fighters didn’t have time to avoid the towering pressure ridge that suddenly loomed ahead of them. All three slammed into it almost simultaneously, sleek little fighters suddenly nothing more than smears of flaming debris across the face of the ridge. Black, oily smoke flared out, then roiled upward.
“Splash three,” Thorn said, then he let go of the ’casting with a gasp. The huge slab of ice settled again, fountains of water erupting around it as it sank back into the water. Bertilak wheeled the Jolly into a hard bank, trying to track another fighter. Finally, he snapped out a curse, yanked the Jolly into an even tighter turn, then poured fire into his target’s trajectory ahead of it. The fighter flew into the stream of searing green blots and vanished with a flash. Bertilak pulled the Jolly up at the last second, cutting it so close Thorn was sure he heard something scrape against the bottom of the ship’s hull.
The Jolly immediately wheeled back to rejoin the dogfight, but there were no more red icons left. The Kestrels had taken advantage of the confusion sown by the Jolly’s attack to pounce, and pounce hard, downing the remaining enemy fighters.
“Okay, Bertilak, there’s a man down on the ice off to our ten o’clock about—call it three klicks away,” Thorn said.
Bertilak kept the Jolly turning, putting her onto a course to take her where Thorn had indicated. At the same time, he decelerated the ship, quickly reducing her speed to about that of a stiff breeze.
“There,” Kira said, pointing.
Thorn followed her finger. The ejection capsule rested on an ice floe, awash with greyish water as it heaved and bobbed. It had landed close enough to the impact site of its Kestrel that the ice had been shattered around it, leaving the hapless pilot desperately fighting to cling to the floe while freezing water sloshed around him.
As Bertilak brought the Jolly to a halt and hovered over the ice, Thorn and Kira unstrapped and hurried to the airlock. It opened with a blast of frigid air. Thorn lowered the ground ramp and clambered down it, Kira beside him. Together, they clung to it while Bertilak nudged them toward the downed pilot, a few centimeters at a time.
Kira shouted directions over her comm. “Left a bit. A bit more. Now forward. Now left—cancel that, go right, just a bit!”
They were almost close enough to touch the man now. Icy water sloshed around him, and he watched Thorn and Kira, eyes filled with a pleading, last-ditch sort of desperation. The pilot was only seconds away from losing his grip on the ice and sliding into the water. He’d either be caught between two of the rolling floes and crushed, or he would sink under them and drown. Thorn felt Kira ’casting, no doubt Joining with the pilot to try and calm and reassure him.
Thorn blinked as something snagged the corner of his gaze.
An enemy fighter, boring in fast. It must have gotten separated from its fellows, probably during a chase with a Kestrel, and was only now back in the fight. It raced toward the Jolly, only seconds away from opening fire.
“Thorn!” Bertilak said, but Thorn shouted him down. If they pulled away, this downed pilot would die.
“Keep us where we are!”
Thorn yanked magic from the ether and crafted it into the quickest, crudest ’casting possible—a Hammer blow against the incoming enemy fighter. He had time to focus it on the onrushing craft’s engines, then struck. A solid bludgeon of magic smacked into an engine casing, shredding it. The fighter immediately rolled and tumbled, trailing a long tongue of incandescent plasma.
But it kept on coming.
“Shit!”
Kira had managed to grab the pilot by the hand, but the cold was getting to her, too. All she could do was hang onto him, and then only for a few seconds more.
Thorn yelled and flung out a wall of denial, angling it like a ramp dropping away from the Jolly. The fighter struck it, bounced upward, and sailed overhead with a roar of venting plasma. After a brief wash of searing heat, Thorn braced himself for the shock of an impact. But the ruined remains of the enemy fighter swept over the Jolly, missing the green hull by maybe three meters. It came down again on the floe beyond, cartwheeling in a plume of shattered ice and water before the smashed remains came to rest.
“Thorn!” Kira shouted. She held the railing on the ramp with one hand, the pilot with the other. “I can’t hang on!”
The pilot’s eyes fluttered, and he went limp.
Thorn didn’t hesitate. He dove into the water.
A burst of cold so intense it hurt crashed through him, sucking the breath from his lungs. He heard Kira screaming but focused every bit of concentration he could manage into one more ’casting. The water surged, lifting both him and the pilot up to the ramp. Kira was able to drag the pilot onto the bottom step, then she slumped and started to slide downward. Thorn desperately tried to formulate another ’casting, but the frigid water seemed to suck the thoughts right out of his head.
Well, shit. After everything they’d been through, he and Kira were going to die by drowning in some nameless lake.
A massive green hand swept down and grabbed him. Another grabbed Kira. Bertilak strained, pulling both of them back onto the ramp. Thorn changed his focus, desperately hanging onto the pilot so he didn’t just slip back again. As soon as Bertilak had them far enough up the ramp, he shouted, “Jolly, close it up!”
The ramp smoothly lifted back into place on the Jolly’s underside and sealed with a sharp hiss.
The sudden transition from clashing ice, freezing water, and frigid gusts of wind, to quiet warmth, left Thorn momentarily reeling. He lay on the deck, gasping, shaking so hard he was almost convulsing. Bertilak moved among all three of them, confirming they were conscious, then lifted them, one by one, and carried them through the airlock and back into the Jolly.
For a while, Thorn just lay there, sucking in air as heavy shudders ripped through his body. He finally got his thoughts back under him but found his voice wasn’t working. “I—I—I—” was all he managed because his teeth chattered so hard.
Bertilak raised a finger. “Don’t talk. I’m going to get you out of these wet clothes. Sorry about your modesty,” he said, pulling off one of Thorn’s boots. Water gushed out of it onto the deck.
Thorn focused hard and tried again to speak. “The—others—”
“Are fine. I’ve already taken care of them.”
Thorn managed an unsteady nod. As warmth crept back into him, he was able to regain more and more mastery over his own body.
Bertilak helped him strip down to his underwear. By then, Thorn had managed to sit up. “Where are they? Kira and the pilot?”
“Off getting some nice hot showers, I’d imagine.”
Something struck Thorn. “Did you undress Kira, too?”
“Had to. Say, did you know she has a mole right on her—”
“Yes, I did,” Thorn said, levering himself to his feet. A hot shower sounded just about right, but he shot Bertilak an exaggerated glare. “How about we just keep whatever we happened to see to ourselves, huh?”
“Hey, your intimate secrets are safe with me.” A mischievous grin lit the big alien’s face. “That includes the mole that you’ve got on your—”
“That’ll do, Bertilak. That’ll do.”
Bertilak landed the Jolly on the ice about 200 meters away from the embattled Imbrogul outpost. He wasn’t sure how solid the ice was closer to it. The outpost itself squatted on a small rocky island, little more than a glorified reef protruding out of the lake.
Now properly bundled up against the cold, Thorn and Kira picked their way across the ice, avoiding some ominous-looking cracks. Otherwise, it felt as solid as an alloy deck. The outpost itself proved more of a challenge. They had to work their way around still-smoldering blast craters, chunks of flyrock blasted out of the reef, and scattered piles of debris. They found several Imbrogul in the small compound enclosed by the facility’s outer wall, apparently assessing the damage in a series of musical exc
lamations.
Thorn walked up to the first and introduced himself. The Imbrogul was a woman, though he knew that from her voice, not her appearance. They all looked pretty much the same, wrapped in bulky environment suits, faces covered against the frigid wind.
“I’m Tocci,” she said, exuding a powerful whiff of something similar to mint. The Imbrogul communicated, in part, through scent, and Thorn knew that the mint-like smell denoted approval, or something affirmative. The wind quickly whipped the smell away, but it had been clear. Thorn offered a smile in return.
“Lieutenant Thorn Stellers. Pleased to meet you. And this is Kira Wixcombe. She’s a Lieutenant Commander in the Orbital Navy,” Thorn said.
Tocci’s eyes narrowed slightly as Thorn introduced himself. More importantly, the mint-smell didn’t change. “Thorn Stellers. You were named by Ondric as a friend of the Imbrogul. It is fitting, then, that you’ve come to our aid.”
“You know Ondric, then.”
“He’s my brother.”
Thorn’s eyes widened. “Small universe.” He ducked as a powerful gust of wind swept across the frozen lake. It whipped up stinging ice particles, along with smoke from the damaged outpost, and the wrecked fighters scattered across the ice. “What made you choose this frigid little hellhole as your first toehold toward the Allied Stars, anyway?”
“It is, believe it or not, the closest planet with a breathable atmosphere to our space, in this direction. Everything spinward of this system is controlled by the Nyctus.” Another gust swept over them. “That said, frigid hellhole is apt. Our engineers have restored power and heat, so why don’t we move our conversation inside?”
Thorn glanced at Kira, who gave a grateful smile.
“Sounds good to me. I’ve done the freezing cold thing enough for one day, thanks,” Kira enthused.
