by Jack Colrain
The next checkpoint, Daniel felt glad to see, was right where it was meant to be: a rough gray moon, shaped like a potato or a dried-out sponge and pitted with dents and craters. “Beautiful,” he murmured.
“Hyperion? You have a pretty strange idea of beauty,” Torres said. She glanced at Hope. “Present company excepted.”
“Perhaps,” Hope said drily, “we could get more speed out of this thing if I had you get out and push?”
“I’ve had worse offers.”
Daniel looked beyond the potato-shaped moon and a sulfurous yellow disc beyond it. “It’s all about lining up the shot,” he said. “Hyperion will hide us from Titan Base until we catch up with Titan and make a run for the terminator-line.” He could hardly believe they were actually this close to the target. In truth, he’d expected to be detected long before now, and he was beginning to think that maybe—just maybe—they might actually make it.
The wait for the right moment was excruciating, but eventually it came and, feeling just a little like Han Solo or Captain Kirk, Daniel said, “Punch it.”
The inertial cushioning meant there wasn’t that much pressure pushing him back into the seat, and nobody aboard was turned into a pizza, but the sudden leap in the size of Titan was proof enough of the ship’s acceleration.
“Two minutes!” Torres called. “One-fifty… one-forty...” The defenses on Titan Base were in for a surprise today, Daniel thought. “One minute… fifty seconds… forty—”
Alarms exploded into deafening life throughout the cockpit. “Fuck!” Daniel yelled.
“Missile lock,” Hope confirmed as two sleek metallic darts with stubby wings shot past the shuttle from behind. Daniel knew that two other fighters would be hanging back on their six, keeping the lock live.
A moment later, a voice crackled over the shuttle’s communications net. “Greyhound, this is Sydney Actual. Endex. Repeat, Endex.”
“Shit!” Hope leaned back in her seat, throwing her hands in the air. “I knew it! I said all along that this will not work.”
“Come in, number seven,” the voice from the UES Sydney continued, “your time is up.”
Hope clenched her fists while Bella Torres slowed the shuttle and adjusted their course. “Daniel, this isn’t going to work,” Hope said. “We need to completely re-think how we approach…. whatever this mission is supposed to actually be.”
“I wish I knew what it was, too. But—”
Hope wagged a finger at him. “If it in any way involves making a stealth approach to a hardened location as well defended as Titan, in a ship like this one, we are going to be in real trouble. We will be detected, and we won’t be able to run, hide, or fight our way out.”
“This is only our fourth attempt at the exercise,” Daniel pointed out. “There are so many other tactical permutations we haven’t tried yet, there’s still plenty of opportunity to figure it out.”
“No,” Hope said flatly.
“No? It’s not like you to be negative about a tactical situation!”
Hope raised an eyebrow as if to ask ‘Really?’ “Because this is not a tactical issue. It’s the nature of the vehicle. This turtle shuttle with this cargo set-up is not maneuverable enough or fast enough to make the run against a location as well defended as, and to the technological level of, Titan.” She thought a little longer, then added, “In fact I don’t think it would even be possible in a Mozari-derived fighter. You want to figure it out? I already know what we need to be able to do it. We need a ship that will do .32c at minimum.”
“That’s faster than—”
“Than anything we seem to have available, yes,” Torres admitted.
Hope nodded in agreement. “But when we talk to the admiral and he asks, that is what we have to tell him. Give me a ship that will do .32c or better, and I’ll make that run.”
As the shuttle approached the Sydney, Daniel momentarily shivered with that feeling of either deja vu or someone walking over his grave. The huge starship was now covered in a reflective silvery white, but it remained recognizable as the same vessel that he and the other members of Hammond’s Hardcases had breached when it had been a dark and ancient Mozari flagship.
Sometimes he thought that fighting his way through its automated defenses had been easier, in many ways, than dealing with the situation its human controllers had now put him and Hope in.
“Look,” Daniel said, “if that’s what you want to report up the chain, I’ll back you up on it. We’ve got a couple of days to think about it, though, while we’re back on Earth.”
Hope’s expression went somber. “Yes, it’s the day after tomorrow, isn’t it?”
“Wednesday, yeah. Can’t say I’m looking forward to it, but… I have to be there.”
“It is duty. Not orders, but duty,” Hope agreed.
Two
Portland, OR.
Daniel and Hope couldn’t simply fly their turtle shuttle to Portland International Airport, and so, after an extensive debriefing to cover their mission rehearsal aboard the Sydney, they’d been rotated back to Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and then caught a flight from Orlando International to Portland. Torres had been there for the debriefing, but remained on the Sydney.
The city was one of the nicest Daniel had seen, filled with bicycles and green spaces. Hope seemed to like it, as well, saying that those elements reminded her of home, although—because everything else was so different from how he imagined Beijing—Daniel couldn’t quite see how.
“Five working days of leave,” Daniel reflected as they waited for their luggage at the domestic terminal’s carousel. “Plus two weekends.” He noticed there were troops on guard now, not airport cops; National Guardsmen rather than regular troops, but they were still military.
“Maybe the last five days we’ll have for a long time,” Hope mused. “Or ever, if the admiral carries out his threat to throw away the key.” She shrugged. “It’s strange, but now that they know about our connection, I feel… more relaxed. It’s a great weight off my shoulders.”
‘I know what you mean,’ he thought to her. And it was true; he felt exactly the same way. “You might get lucky, and just be deported,” he said aloud.
“I think pretty much all of the UN Security Council is pissed at us after what happened three weeks ago,” Hope said pointedly. Daniel couldn’t believe that the battle at Lyonesse had been so recent, nor so long ago. It seemed literally like yesterday, and yet it also felt as if it had always been in his past. It was weird. “I don’t see them deporting me from the whole of Earth,” she added.
“I dunno, there have been some pretty strange rumors doing the rounds, even before that Lyonesse clusterfuck at LTT-8270.”
“Rumors? Oh, are those of the secret Illuminati colonies or the secret gulag colonies?”
Their bags arrived, and they grabbed them from the carousel.
“Same thing. I shouldn’t be surprised,” Daniel replied.
They changed into their dress uniforms in the Marriott room they’d taken for the one night at the airport. The soundproofing was pretty good at muting the too-close noise of jet engines taking off and landing. ‘I’ve got to admit I’m not looking forward to this,’ Daniel said wordlessly.
“No-one looks forward to funerals. Not the funerals of their friends and comrades, anyway.”
“I wish...”
‘I know,’ she thought to him warmly.
“I was her CO, Hope. Hers, and Barnard’s, and Ramirez’s, and—”
“None of them were married, were they?”
He shook his head. “That’s what makes this the hardest one to take.”
When Daniel remembered how Sergeant Evans had died, he could still see it, feel it, as if it had happened an hour ago. If anything, he could see and feel it more now than he’d been able to in the days immediately following the event, as they had been days filled with rush and fury while the survivors of the Hardcases had evacuated the civilian colonists from Lyonesse, and then immediatel
y had to defend against attacking Gresian forces in the tunnels and galleries of an ancient asteroid. The memory was all too clear whenever Daniel recalled it…
Daniel’s squad gave covering fire while Kinsella and Pipsqueak and a couple of soldiers blasted their way through to a pit in the floor.
“They’re alive,” Kinsella shouted over the cacophony.
Staff Sergeant Jessica Evans fired at a seven-foot armored figure—a Gresian—who evaded fire almost miraculously, swarming up one of the pillars to join another that was hanging from its claws up there. The second Gresian was aiming some kind of larger weapon at her—
No. It was firing.
Daniel was turning, but too slowly.
Sergeant Jessica Evans vanished in an instant at the center of a blazing gold explosion that shook the building and sent a rockfall of carved stone pillars hurtling across the chamber. Dirt and dust and stone chips tumbled from the ceiling, rattling and tapping like gravel skittering across a driveway.
Daniel knew he was never going to forget that sound, It didn’t help that there was a gravel driveway to the Garden of Remembrance where Jessica Evans’ funeral was being held, of course. It wasn’t a funeral in the usual sense, however. There was no coffin, and no body to bury or cremate. Just a flag and a framed photograph.
Of the people, both soldiers and civilians, who had died on LTT8270-iv—Lyonesse, as the colonists had named it—no bodies had been recovered. Most had been buried in the meadow outside the colony’s sole town, and some, like Senior Sergeant Jessica Evans, had died in ways that had left no mortal remains to bury anywhere. Only the soldiers who had died in the interior of the ancient asteroid orbiting the planet’s moon had been brought home with the living, traveling aboard one of the Earth starships that had come to rescue the colonists from the guardian caste of Gresian soldiers.
This was a memorial service more than anything else.
Daniel and Hope weren’t the only military people there, but they were the highest ranking. Most of the congregation for the somber chapel service, however, was made up of devastated and disbelieving relatives, and teachers who worked with Evans’ husband Harry at the local elementary school.
The priest gave a fairly good eulogy, Daniel thought, concentrating on Jessica’s upbringing and family life rather than on her military career, the past couple of years of which were highly classified. Nothing was said about the manner of her death, which neither surprised nor pleased Daniel. He had been pretty sure from the get-go that the Joint Chiefs would have tried to bury and erase the facts about what had happened to the colony. They had to, if they wanted people to overlook what they’d done in choosing to send a thousand colonists, Daniel’s unit, and his best friend in the military to their deaths as a test and an experiment.
Fuckers, he thought. Hope heard him, of course.
Daniel had never met Harry Evans before, of course, but he had seen pictures of the man. He was pretty average, build-wise, with curly hair thinning at the back. Their eyes met at the wake, in a local restaurant that Harry’s sister ran, which was closed for the day for the wake.
Daniel could tell Harry had never been in the service, and it was clear that he was grieving—and not doing it that well, either. He was trembling, looking stunned.
When his eyes met Daniel’s, they sharpened, then widened. “What’s he doing here?” Harry Evans suddenly demanded, his voice hollow. “What...” He couldn’t even get any more words out, and Daniel couldn’t, in all honesty, blame him.
Harry came over escorted by his sister, who looked worried. Maybe, Daniel thought, she was worried that a fight would break out and trash her restaurant. Or that Harry would have a heart attack.
Or that Harry would kill Daniel.
“What are you doing here? Wait, no, never mind that; what makes you think you’ve got the right to come to this service, after what you did? After what happened—”
“I had to,” Daniel said simply. “It’s my duty—”
“Don’t give me that Army bullshit! Duty? You mean orders, right? You’re just following orders.”
Daniel shook his head. “No orders; not that sort of duty. I just… I had to say goodbye, same as everyone else here.”
“You had to say goodbye?!” Harry echoed disbelievingly. “You’re the one that got her killed, I bet!”
“You want to see it that way… that’s your business. But if you want to say the military got her killed… well, I’m not going to argue on that one.”
Harry had had a few drinks, betrayed by the odor of vodka on his breath as he jabbed his finger at Daniel. “You…. They won’t even tell me how she died. Not how, or where, or fucking why! The military just doesn’t give a shit about the rest of us.”
“They must have said something—” Daniel started to protest
“Killed in action, that was it. What does that even mean? Shot by somebody? A crash? A bomb? And there isn’t even a body!” Harry drew himself up to his full height. “You were with her; you must have seen something, or know what happened.”
That, Daniel did, oh yes. He didn’t know, however, how much he should tell Harry. Half of him wanted to tell the man how all the rumors about the true nature of the mission to Lyonsse, and the military’s betrayal of everyone there, were true. How the colonists and troops, including his wife, had been set up as bait to see how the Gresians would deal with a colony such as theirs. In fact, it was damned hard not to tell him how the Joint Chiefs had denied so much of the truth even in their own reports to the world’s governments, and how the press corps was being given fake news blaming the Gresians for having laid a trap. The same damned story they had given the returning colonists, most of whom had believed it when the ship’s medical officer had convinced them that Daniel had picked up a concussion and gotten confused. But his training was strong, and, more importantly, he knew that going off about it would just scare, upset, and enrage everyone even more. That wouldn’t help them, or Jessica Evans. “Yes,” he said at last, loathing himself, the words tasting like shit in his mouth, “she died doing her duty, doing her job—the job she loved.”
“Duty!” Harry exclaimed. “Fuck duty. Duty kills—”
Daniel tensed, forcing himself to be calm. “You want more? OK, how about this: She died saving my life, and the lives of several other people. And if you’re thinking you wish she hadn’t bothered, and that I’d died instead of her, you won’t be the only one. I’d rather she’d been the one who came home, too.”
“She should have come home!” Harry yelled. “Fuck duty, she should have come home! How can she not be here? How can she not... be…” His voice cracked, and he dropped into a seat, tears streaming down his face. Daniel envied him that.
One of Harry’s friends or relatives, who looked like a quarterback, stepped forward, flanked by several others. “You really should leave now.”
Daniel eyeballed them. “She was my friend and my colleague, and died saving my life. I owe her those respects.”
“She wasn’t your family. You fuck with Harry, you fuck with all of us.” The quarterback guy nodded towards the door. “Get out.”
That night, Daniel and Hope went back to their hotel, but not their room. They sat in a reasonably quiet corner of the hotel’s bar. On a TV, a Formula 1 race was airing live, but Daniel ignored it. He could sense Hope’s concern for him radiating off of her.
“You hear people say they drink to forget,” Daniel said. “Do they say that in China?”
“Pretty much.” She sipped at her beer.
Daniel looked at his, turning the bottle around, remembering the time when she had wondered if he was a drunkard. There were certainly times when he wanted to be, if it would have the right effect. The problem was that he found it didn’t have the effect that he wanted. “It doesn’t work that way, though,” Daniel snorted. “Yeah, I know, that’s probably what you were thinking of saying to me.” He would have understood if it was.
“It doesn’t?”
He sho
ok his head. “Maybe for some people. Right now, I think if I got drunk I’d remember just fine, but I’d remember the shit more than anything else. Remember the backstabbing, and the pain, and the loss… and not know whether I’d get numb enough to not feel it.” He turned the beer around some more. “If I knew I’d get numbed, and be able to not feel it, I’d climb into a bottle without a second thought. But I don’t think I would, and I know I wouldn’t forget.”
“It was bad there,” Hope said. “I could feel it in you. Feel the hurt, but also the determination—”
“How about the anger?”
She looked at him with concern. “A lot of anger, and I wish I could be sure where it was directed.”
“The Gresians or the military…. Flip a coin.” Now he took a long pull from the beer. At least it was refreshing after a long day. “How could they send a thousand people to be bait like that? To be slaughtered by those… things, those fucking animals?”
“Animals?”
“That’s what they look like under their armor,” Daniel explained. “Half lion, half bear, all murderer.” He squeezed his knuckles white. “Those things… they all need to die, and the sooner the better.”
“They’re going to be hard to beat, but we’ll make it work somehow,” Hope reassured him quietly.
“Not beat. Killed. All of them. What I saw…. They don’t deserve to exist anymore. If they can do that to my people, and to the civilians, then the least I can do is return the favor. I think that’s the only thing that keeps me from going over the hill. If I do that, I can’t kill Gresians.”
“If I hadn’t seen it for myself when we took the colonists off...”
“How does a guy like that Falkenstein sleep at night after dumping us all in the Gresians’ litterbox?”
