by Rick Partlow
“What about the drop-ship and assault shuttle crews?” He tried to keep his tone casual, as if his was merely a professional interest. “Have they been selected? Who’s going to be running point on that?”
He was grateful he hadn’t had to raise the question with General Constantine. It had been relayed to him via secure radio transmission up in orbit that he should stay away from the palace altogether during his visit for security reasons. All the official connections between him and his father had been scrubbed from the paperwork when he’d entered the Academy, at his request, to avoid special treatment, and he’d managed to stay out of the press. It helped that General Constantine had agents planted deeply in the official media agencies and a team of hackers to scrub the unofficial ones. But people knew him by sight at the palace and it would be better if he just weren’t around for a few months before the mission went down.
Lyta hadn’t answered him for a long moment and he was beginning to wonder if the wind whipping down the canyon formed by Athinas Boulevard cutting through the center of the city had carried away his words.
“I am,” she said, finally, her eyes hidden by the fall of her fur-trimmed hat across her cheek.
He let out a sigh. That was the best news he’d heard in days.
“Okay, then there’s something I wanted to ask you, kind of a personal favor.” His stomach roiled a bit at what felt like a betrayal, though he knew it was the right thing to do. “Katy has it in her head she wants to go on this mission and she’s not taking no for an answer, not from me anyway. But I know it’s totally inappropriate and there is no way in hell I would ever ask for my girlfriend…” Mithra’s teeth, that word sounded inadequate to describe their relationship. He pushed on anyway. “…to come along on a military mission, so I was wondering if I might be able to get you to play the bad cop and tell her you won’t allow it.”
There. It was out. He’d done it and if Katy found out and dropped him like a hot rock, at least he could console himself that he’d done the right thing, and maybe he’d kept her alive, which was more important to him than her being with him. Maybe she’d even understand that…
“Wait, what?” He’d been so embroiled in his own thoughts, he’d misheard Lyta’s reply.
He must have misheard it.
“I said,” Lyta repeated, matter-of-factly, “Lt. Margolis is already assigned to the mission as an assault shuttle pilot.”
“Since when?” He hadn’t meant the words to carry quite as much invective as they did, but he couldn’t pull them back in, so he doubled down. “I thought we just agreed that was a horrible idea!”
“This may come as a shock to you, Logan,” she said, turning her head just enough for him to see her eyebrow cocked upward, “but strategic and tactical military decisions often occur with no regard whatsoever to whom you happen to be dating.”
“But I’m going to be in her chain of command,” he protested, exposing his hands to the cold just so he could spread them expressively. “I’m going to be at the top of the chain! That’s against regulations, isn’t it? Oh, shit,” he realized, the breath going out of him, “I’m going to have to break up with her, aren’t I?”
Lyta stopped so suddenly he nearly slid on a patch of ice trying to turn back toward her. She was staring at him the way she had when he’d asked a series of progressively stupider questions as a young teenager and she’d still been “Aunt Lyta.”
“Do you think,” she asked him, slowly and carefully, as if he were that dull-witted thirteen-year-old again, “I would make the decision to bring her along if I thought either of you would be stupid enough to put your relationship over the mission?”
“Well, no, of course not,” he agreed readily, now that she put it in terms of her own reliability instead of his. “But even if you think I won’t do something stupid, how can you be sure Katy won’t? I mean, you’ve known me my whole life, but you’ve only known her a few months.”
She sniffed at the question and started walking again. Not knowing what else to do, he followed.
“Part of my job is knowing what makes people tick, junior. It’s how I know which way a guard is going to move, whether he’s going to look up at the wrong time before one of my Rangers guts him. It’s how I know who to send on a long-range foot patrol alone, how I know who to send through the door first. When push comes to shove, Katy is the type of woman who’ll do her duty even if it hurts.” Her shoulders shrugged, barely visible through her thick, winter jacket. “If you want to know why her, it’s the same reason we’re here trying to pick up a company’s worth of mech jocks instead of sitting in Colonel Anders’ office and asking for volunteers to report there. No one knows her. She hasn’t even reported to her first duty station yet. And she’s already proven to me she can keep her head in a sticky situation, which is why I let you get away with bringing her along to Gateway in the first place.”
“And you don’t think I’d do something to compromise the mission to protect her?” He wasn’t so much asking for confirmation of her faith in him as a leader, as he was honestly wanting to know the answer. Because he wasn’t so sure.
“What makes you think I’d let you do that?”
That’s a gut punch, he thought, feeling properly cut down to size. How much, he wondered not for the first time, am I actually in charge of this mission, and how much am I just a figurehead?
“Here it is.” Lyta nodded toward what looked like nothing else so much as a hole in the wall. It didn’t even have an illuminated sign, just hand-worked metal bent into the crude shape of a Sentinel strike mech.
“Why the hell have I never heard of this place?” he wondered, stepping up beside her on the sidewalk, hearing a murmur of voices through the thick, varnished wood of the door.
“This isn’t the kind of place you want to go if you’re aiming to be Guardian someday.” Her mouth twisted into a half-smile. “I believe it would be on the proscribed list if anyone above the rank of Major knew it existed.” The smile hardened. “This is a hard crowd and they won’t know who you are, so keep your head on a swivel.”
“Can’t be harder than Gateway,” he said, snorting humorlessly.
She shrugged at that and pulled open the door. Music blasted through it, distorted by a blown speaker and a bad digital conversion on whatever system they were using, twenty years out of style. The warm air was more welcome than the music, and he squeezed through the door before Lyta yanked it shut.
The place was decorated in a style he’d mostly seen out in the more primitive colony worlds, no fancy, holographic art or video walls, as little electronics as possible. The bar was real wood, hand-polished, as were the tables, while the walls were decorated with memorabilia and bits of armor from various model mecha, some of it decades out of date.
The customers were mech-jocks and technicians, he could tell by a quick scan of the place, by the way they walked or their haircuts or the way they dressed. He might be just a Lieutenant, but he’d grown up around mecha and their pilots and the mannerisms were hard to miss. But no, this was no place for staff officers or battalion commanders. Hell, he’d be willing to bet not even a company commander had ever set foot in the bar. Warrant officers mostly, and younger platoon leaders who didn’t know any better.
Which describes me, too, and I still wonder how I didn’t know about this place. Marc must know… bastard has been holding out.
He followed Lyta to the bar and let her order something for him so he could keep his eyes on the clientele. There were other people here besides the mech-jocks and techs. He’d never seen them in such numbers, but he still knew what they were: Gun Bunnies, they were called. Men and women both, though more women than men for some sociological reason he’d never bothered to look up. Their outfits were tight and of a style and date with the hard-driving music, replete with leather and metal studs and a lot of skin. Hair flowed in meters of bleached blond and red, and even green and purple while oversized sunglasses were nearly de rigueur, along with outsized leat
her, brimmed hats.
They were here for the mech-jocks, though they’d probably settle for the techs if there weren’t enough pilots to go around. He shoved down the visceral disdain and contempt he felt for them and took his dark ale from the bartender when it was offered. The bartender stood, waiting, and Lyta gave him the eye.
“Oh.” He pulled out a handful of paper Tradenotes and laid them on the bar. It was wet and he could see the moisture soaking into them. The bartender took them as if it were no matter, and didn’t offer change.
“You ain’t a jock.”
The words were slurred, and the glaze in the big guy’s eyes spoke to just how much he’d already had to drink, but he was nearly two meters and probably two hundred kilograms of very little fat. And he’d been talking to Lyta.
“You ain’t a jock,” he repeated, more clearly this time, as if the first iteration had been practice. “I can tell.” And he probably could. He was in his thirties, maybe forties, and probably a tech, since you didn’t find too many people his size who wanted to squeeze into the cockpit of a mech. “You ain’t a tech either.”
“She’s with me,” Logan told the man, hoping to avoid a scene.
The big man had bushy, auburn eyebrows with no hair above them, and they rose in obvious skepticism.
“And who the fuck are you?” he demanded. He looked Logan up and down. “You look like a jock,” he acknowledged grudgingly, “but I ain’t never seen you in here before.”
“Benjie,” the bartender snapped at the man, his voice like ten kilometers of gravel road and a face to match, “no one fucking appointed you the fucking bouncer, so stop harassing the fucking customers.”
Benjie burped a response, then flipped the bartender a bird and went back to whatever was in the glass in front of him. The glass was shaped like the lower leg of a Scorpion strike mech, which seemed infinitely kitschy to Logan but it held a hell of a lot of something alcoholic.
“There.” Lyta was looking across the room, through a scrum of tables and a cluster of pay-to-play VIR games based on mech simulators to the rear area of the bar.
Nearly lost in the shadows back there were a half a dozen men and women, all wearing leather jackets festooned with unit insignias and campaign badges, huddled around a single, large table, nursing what might have been their first pitcher of beer or maybe their tenth. He thought he recognized one or two, though he’d never served with any of them.
Lyta received some curious glances as they crossed the room, a few sets of eyes widening with what he thought was recognition, but no one else challenged her. Even the Gun Bunnies turned their noses up at what they probably thought of as a “crunchie,” an infantry soldier, though a few seemed to perk up when he passed, probably intrigued by the new guy.
The jocks at the table in the back, though, they paid attention. He thought they knew who Lyta was from the respectfully fearful sideways glances they were giving each other. One of them was going to be the first, the one to risk speaking up, and he’d already made up his mind it would be that person he’d wind up trusting.
“You looking for someone, Captain Randell?”
He was about Logan’s age, maybe a bit older or maybe it was just the weathered lines on his face making him seem older. He had the look of a man raised in the outdoors, probably on one of the smaller, more backward colonies from his accent. His dirty blond hair was shorter than regulation, a buzz a couple of centimeters long, and his eyes were narrow, careful, watchful.
“I’m looking for you, Lt. Kurtz,” she told him. “We’re looking for all of you.” She shrugged. “More or less. Four of you at least.”
“We’ve read your files,” Logan put in. “We know your service records. And we know none of you is all that happy with your current assignments.”
“And you are?” This one was the taller of the two women at the table, tall enough and thin enough she might have been raised on a lower-gravity world. Her features were narrow and sharp and quite striking, amber skinned and hazel-eyed, with brown hair pulled into a tight ponytail. Ford, he thought her name was.
“Jonathan Slaughter.” One of them opened their mouth as if they were about to say “no, you’re not,” and Logan interrupted her. “As far as anyone here knows, I am Jonathan Slaughter. And I’m looking for volunteers for a mercenary crew to head out to the Periphery and fight bandits and pirates.”
“What the fuck?” This guy was short and squat, his head shaved shiny, and was definitely the oldest of the bunch. Paskowski. From the smell of his breath, he’d had more than his fair share of the beer. “Mercenaries?” He almost spat the word out. “Why the hell would we want to be fucking mercenaries?”
“Shut up,” Lyta said with a flat, toneless danger to her voice, her eyes going hard. Paskowski bristled and she slammed a hand down on the table hard enough to nearly topple the empty pitcher. “Keep. Your. Mouth. Shut.”
Paskowski swallowed hard, as if he’d suddenly sensed he was messing with the wrong person, and Kurtz edged away from Lyta ever so slightly.
“This is an op,” she told them, voice low without whispering. “You’ll be gone as long as you need to be gone, doing whatever we tell you to do, and we’ll be all on our own without any support or backup. And if you die out there, you’ll be officially registered as having resigned your commissions as of today.”
Logan stepped in, sensing this was his time to be “good cop.”
“But you’ll be piloting mecha in combat, killing bandits and traveling to systems you’d never have seen otherwise. And if we succeed, probably achieving the biggest strategic coup in the history of the Dominions.” He grinned. “And getting combat pay the whole time… accruable when you get back, of course.”
Which had never meant anything to him, but Langella droned on and on about it constantly, so he assumed it would be just as important to these guys.
“And what if we decide we don’t want to volunteer?” Rougher around the edges, less respectful, shirt-tail hanging out, hair edging pretty far over regulation cut. This guy was a Warrant Officer, not commissioned, didn’t go to the Academy, just straight from enlisted to mech training.
He let Lyta answer, because this was the sort of thing she was better at than him.
“If you don’t want to volunteer, Warrant Officer Darren Aventura,” she said in the same muted tones, “Service Number 345H6389, mother Sharon, father David, current girlfriend Camilla Watson…” Her lips skinned back from her teeth in half a smile, half a snarl. “Then I think no one should ever hear about this from you. If you’d like to enjoy a nice, long career and a fruitful life.”
Aventura nodded slowly, then began chuckling, not as if he didn’t take the implied threat seriously, but more like he appreciated the art of putting it together.
“I like her,” the Warrant said, wagging a finger at Lyta. “Oh, yeah. I’m definitely in.”
Kurtz looked around the table at the rest of them and there were nods all around.
“You folks sure do know how to sell a feller on a pig in a poke,” Kurtz said, offering Jonathan a hand. “I assume we’ll find out what’s really going on once we get there, huh?”
“I assume so,” he agreed, shaking the hand.
“You’ll all be getting very vague orders through your chain of command,” Lyta told them, not offering to shake anyone’s hand nor receiving any such invitations. “Pack light but… comprehensively.”
He barely saw her turn out of the corner of his eye, had just enough time to follow her without looking like an idiot who’d been left behind.
“You know,” he told her as she fitted her cap back onto her head and pushed the door open, “I sometimes wonder what you’d do to someone if you weren’t bluffing.”
“Logan,” she said into the chill wind of the night street, “I never bluff.”
11
“I don’t like this,” Logan—no, damn it, I’m Jonathan now. Can’t even think of myself as Logan anymore—muttered, watching the bulbous cargo po
ds drifting across the sullen face of the gas giant. The freighter they’d launched from was nearly invisible at the planet’s terminator, an intruder crouching in the shadows.
“What?” Marc Langella wondered, not looking up from the tablet as he checked off another delivery. “Everything’s come through okay so far, and Fourth Platoon should be coming over with the next shuttle.”
Langella was a beanpole at the best of times; anchored to the deck of the Shakak’s cargo bay by magnetic boots, he swayed and flapped like a ribbon in the wind, the tight curls of his jet-black hair shifting with the air currents from the vent in the overhead.
“I don’t like not being able to say goodbye,” Jonathan confessed. He leaned against the bulkhead as if it were an actual window rather than simply a view screen connected to the external cameras. “I thought I’d be able to go home one last time, but they wouldn’t even let me talk to Dad or Terrin.”
“Would have been risky,” Langella allowed, shaking his head, his body tottering precipitously with the motion. “Hell, they barely told us volunteers anything before we shipped out. Didn’t say where we were going or how long we’d be gone, just that it was an indefinite assignment and we’d be getting hazard pay for the duration.”
“You didn’t even get to tell your family you were leaving?” Jonathan wondered. Shit. Should I call myself “Jon?” I never had to come up with a nickname for “Logan.” Is Jonathan Slaughter the type of guy who’d want to be called “Jon?”
“I didn’t even get to pet my damn dog,” Langella told him, laughing sharply. “After you made your visit, I had about two hours to pack and get to the spaceport. Anyway,” he went on, shrugging, “the whole damned platoon came, didn’t they? Along with a bunch of the best drivers in the battalion and I don’t know how they talked Anders into letting them go.” He frowned, waving a hand at the view screen as if motioning all the way back to Sparta. “I thought you said the… ,” Langella hesitated and corrected himself from saying something like “the Guardian” to, “…I mean, your dad sent you a goodbye message.”
