by Evan Currie
“Well, they were actually annexed long before Hayden was invaded,” he corrected her. “No one knew it, on either side. Since then they’ve alternated between killing the invaders, killing each other, and killing themselves near as anyone can figure out. Recently, however, they upped the ante.”
He looked her evenly in the eyes. “They’ve started using chemical weapons the likes of which we’ve never seen. Lethal on an order of magnitude higher than nuclear weapons and, apparently, invisible to Alliance detection…probably ours too. That’s just too damn dangerous to leave in the hands of a bunch of extremists, Captain.”
“Which group did it?” Sorilla asked, frowning.
“We don’t know. At this point, thanks to the Alliance having a fairly liberal policy of transportation, it could be either,” the general admitted. “Some of them have their own ships now, Captain.”
Sorilla honestly wanted to cry.
Or laugh.
She really wasn’t sure which, but tears would be involved. That much was certain.
Mattan got to his feet, wincing as he did. “I’ll leave you to think about it, Sister. The SOL will be in orbit for a few more days if you want to get ahold of me.”
Sorilla didn’t even hear the rockets of the drop ship as it took off.
Chapter 2
“Hey, Sarge! You here?”
Jerry Reed hopped over some strewn rock and debris as he made his way through the clearing, looking around. The swarm bots didn’t pay him any mind as they continued their tasks, having come a long way since the last time he’d dropped in for a visit. He paused again to admire the location that Aida had chosen for her home, the view of the ocean, rolling jungle below, and the plateau rising up out of the green and into the clouds was perhaps matched on the main continent, but not exceeded.
That moment of admiration aside, however, he returned to his task in short order.
“Yo! Sarge!” he called again, looking around with just a little frustration.
The woman was a ghost by times, if she wanted to be, and that was annoying as hell. Hayden Pathfinders had been cultivating that skill since the invasion, since prior to it the idea of being hidden in the jungle or anywhere else was sheer lunacy itself, but they were still students compared to the “master.” Or, in this case, he supposed “mistress” might be more appropriate.
“What is it, Jer?”
A voice from behind him made him jump, and he just barely managed to keep from screaming as he twisted around. The sound he made was, if he were pressed to admit it, more of a squeak, but at least it wasn’t a scream.
“Don’t DO that!” he snapped after he got his heart under control and his breathing slowed.
She just smirked at him, and he was about to comment further when he spotted her pack in her hand. The long, hard case was a familiar sight to anyone who’d served with the woman or any of her contemporaries on Hayden, and Jerry was well aware that it meant she was leaving.
“I thought you were sticking around this time,” he said with a nod to the pack.
“Service calls,” she answered. “One last ride into the cold black night.”
Jerry shook his head. “Every time is one last ride. Can you talk about it?”
She just shook her head. “Sorry.”
“I don’t suppose you can at least let me know on the quiet side if it’s anything that’s likely to blow back on us if things go wrong?” he asked, just a hint of pleading in his voice.
The inhabitants of Hayden had developed something of a healthy paranoia when it came to outside threats, and the sarge was something of a good luck charm to the whole planet. If she was leaving, he wanted to know why.
“It shouldn’t,” she said, and he relaxed a bit. “But if something were to happen, I would expect you to have fair warning this time.”
“Says you,” Jerry grumbled, but he figured he had to accept that.
“Yes, says me,” she told him evenly as she hefted the pack and walked past him, heading for the landing pad.
He followed after her. “What about your spread here, Sarge? Lots of work going on.”
“The MOFAs will continue on automatic,” she answered. “I’ve loaded enough details to keep them busy for months, at least. Probably the better part of a Hayden year. And you do remember I’m not a sergeant anymore, right?”
“Eh, I could call you Cap, but I’m old fashioned,” he informed her with a grin. “Get yourself a ship and we’ll talk.”
She laughed lightly as they arrived at the pad.
Jerry’s Flitter was a light aircraft with the legs to circumnavigate Hayden if it had to, but really intended more for short flights of a few hundred miles or so at a shot. A nice, economical, and generally reliable bush plane. It suited him well.
Sorilla had gone…a different direction.
She banged the lightly armored side pod of her sub-orbital drop ship, one of the old pre-Terra-class ships that could survive a hot insert into an atmosphere but not make it back out on its own power. The pod dropped open and she slid her pack in before sealing and locking it tight. This one had been left on Hayden after its mother ship had bought it in a furball while she and hers had been bleeding dirt-side.
SOLCOM hadn’t bothered retrieving it, so she’d gotten it for scrap, and after cleaning out the jungle that had been well underway to reclaiming the drop ship for itself, getting the rough and tumble bird flying again hadn’t been difficult. The biggest problem was finding local fuel hot enough to keep it in the air, but hydrocarbons were easily come by on Hayden, so it was just a matter of getting an automated refinery up and running.
Military contacts, particularly the ones she’d made over the years, were basically ideal for just that. She was a specialist in building infrastructure, at least in terms of what she would need to logistically support an armed force, and Sorilla had no compunctions about using every bit of what the Army had taught her in her retired life.
Once they let me retire, she thought darkly.
“Heading back to the tether, I assume?” Jerry asked, eying her drop ship for a moment. “Or are you going straight…up?”
Sorilla glanced at the top hook still mounted to the frame of the drop ship, intended to allow the ship to be plucked out of midair by a starship on a sub-orbital trajectory, and laughed. “No, I’m flying back to the tether. I’m not starship-qualified on one of these babies, or anything else.”
Maybe on a Titan, she supposed, though that had never really come up.
“Well, if you want, I can swing out this way every now and then and make sure it’s all in order?” Jerry offered.
She nodded. “Thanks. I’ll take you up on that, though it shouldn’t be much of a bother for you, other than the distance flying out here. The gear is all on automatic, and I’ve kept up the maintenance. It should be good for a while.”
Jerry waved off her comment about the distance. “I’ve been meaning to run some more extensive botanical studies of the subcontinent anyway, so it’s a good excuse for me to spend some time here. Do I need to worry about your…ah, security?”
He scowled as he asked that question, unhappy with the fact that he’d been tracked each time he flew into her spread of land.
Sorilla just shook her head. “Nah. None of them are armed. I just keep the scanners active so I know someone’s coming, and to keep military types polite.”
Like most of her gear, the surface-to-air setup was surplused gear that had been left behind on Hayden after the fighting. It was all obsolete, sold for scrap, and technically had been demilitarized before it had been released to her. Finding the parts to “re-militarize” it had been moderately difficult, but only because she had to have one transshipped from Sol so she could break it down and write up code for her fabricators to produce more.
SOLCOM didn’t care if she were armed, as long as none of the active gear could be traced back to them, legally speaking, and the local government honestly didn’t have any regulations in place for the subco
ntinent. That would change in short order, of course, but Sorilla figured that she’d deal with that when it came around.
“That’s a relief,” Jerry said with genuine feeling. “You mind if I use your Biv while I’m in the area?”
“Knock yourself out,” she told him as she walked around the drop ship and began a pre-flight inspection. She was her own flight engineer, as well as pilot and chief mechanic, but thankfully the drop ships had been built for SOLCOM by a Russian firm. Elegant they were not, but they’d fly through a black hole and have an even shot of holding together, and the beasts could be repaired with wire and chewing gum.
Perfect for her needs in the short term, and more than workable well into the future.
“I’ll send you the code to deactivate the security,” she said. “Just stay clear of the depot. It’s marked.”
“No problem. I’ve had enough of that shit already in my life,” he said, knowing what she was likely to keep in the depot. “I’m fine with my rifle, thanks.”
Sorilla nodded, smiling. Jerry had always been the reluctant soldier, the very epitome of a gentleman researcher turned guerilla. Back in the day it probably would have been a gentleman farmer, but farming was mostly done by machines now. Researching was still one of the few true human endeavors left.
That and warfighting.
“Looks like I’m ready to go,” she said finally. “Unless you had something else?”
“No, I was just checking on you and planning to use that as an excuse to scout around for samples,” he admitted. “The usual.”
Sorilla nodded. Jerry, like most of her…of Hayden’s Pathfinders, was a PhD first and foremost. Guerilla fighting came in a very distant second, if that, for him and the others.
“Well, go ahead, have at it,” she told him. “Not like I need an escort back to the world.”
He nodded. “Thanks. I’ll keep up the maintenance on your bots. You mind if I bring some students in? I’ll keep them out of your stuff.”
“Everything dangerous is under heavy security,” she waved off the concerns. “Just keep them out of the way of my MOFAs. I’d like to have a real house in place when I get back.”
“You got it, Sarge, and thanks.”
Sorilla shook her head as she climbed up and opened the side hatch to swing into the drop ship. “Not a problem, Jer. I’m not so far gone that I’m that paranoid about strangers. Not yet anyway.”
He laughed as she smiled at her own words, but both of them knew that there was more than a hint of real truth buried there. There was a brittle edge to her that hadn’t been there when she landed on Hayden the first time.
Crashed into Hayden might be more accurate, Sorilla thought, amused by the thought.
All the fighting had tempered her over the years. She had never been exactly soft, of course, but even she recognized that a lot of her flexibility was gone now. Hard and brittle, and aware of it, Sorilla was wary of that unknown strike that would shatter her for the last time and leave nothing worth cleaning up in its wake.
Paranoia, perhaps, but she knew it wouldn’t take much for those fears to come true. She needed to decompress, to let her steel relax and settle into something hard but flexible. If she ever got the chance, it would be a nice thing to experience.
Sorilla swung her leg over into the cockpit of the drop ship, then let herself fall into the bolstered pilot seat. She leaned back out the window. “I’m serious. Stay the hell out of the depot, Jer!”
With that parting rejoinder, she pulled the armored glass down and then dogged it tightly shut from the inside. As the big turbines of the drop ship began to whine, Jerry moved away quickly.
He watched as the ugly, ungainly beast of a ship slowly lifted up above the clearing and then pointed its nose up as the whine turned to a roar and the drop ship accelerated away.
“God speed, Sarge,” he said into the silence she left in her wake. “And give them hell, wherever you’re going.”
*****
USV SOL
Hayden Orbit
“General, sir.”
“Yes, what is it?” Mattan asked as he looked up from his computer.
“You asked to be advised if there was movement from the target area, sir?” his aide said.
“I’m assuming there is,” he said dryly. “Out with it.”
“We’re tracking a Thunderbolt Five drop ship leaving the area, vectoring for the main continent and the tether, sir.”
Mattan nodded. “Thank you, that’s all.”
“Yes, sir.”
He waited for the bulkhead door to slide shut before sending a signal from his computer.
“Yes, General?” Admiral Ruger’s face came back almost instantly. The man had as much paperwork to deal with as he did.
“She’s on her way.”
“Good. I’ll tell the captain to begin preparing to leave orbit.”
“You do that. I have more planning to do here,” Mattan said, with a twist of his lips before he killed the signal and glowered at the documents that replaced the admiral.
*****
Sorilla spotted the gossamer thread of the orbital tether before she could see the lights of the city built around it. Light from the setting sun glinted off the carbon ribbon, scattering into an array of colors—an incomplete rainbow whose colors told her implants almost as much about the composition of the tether as the actual material specs would have.
Her implant suite had been getting less work than usual as of late, and she supposed she’d have to get back into the habit of using it as much as possible. The tools she had at her disposal were as much a part of her as her skill at hand-to-hand or the guns that rode on her hips. Letting her skills with any of those die out shouldn’t be a problem she needed to worry about anymore, but it was hard to break old, bad habits when the brass wouldn’t leave her be.
“Flight niner-three-alpha, Hayden Tower.”
“Go for niner-three-alpha, Tower,” she said, having been pulled from her reverie by the control tower breaking in.
“We have higher than normal traffic. Please shift to holding pattern three and wait for clearance to enter tower airspace.”
“Roger, Tower. Redirecting, pattern three,” Sorilla read back, shifting her course.
Times were changing on Hayden, that was for sure. There had been a time, not much more than a year or two earlier, when she would probably have gotten her ship on the dirt before anyone at the Hayden Tower realized she was there and the worry about other traffic was all but nonexistent.
With Hayden becoming the diplomatic and trade center of contact with the Alliance, however, a lot of people were making a point of coming to see the sights. There was even a regular tourist trade from Earth now, though a big part of that was just getting to see the Alliance ships in orbit or, if one were really lucky, see an actual alien on the tether station.
The demand for new commercial hulls was such that Sorilla had sat down with Gil Hayden a few weeks earlier to discuss the logistics of building a ship-forge facility in Hayden System orbit. She didn’t know why Gil and the council wanted her opinion on it all; she wasn’t even Navy, let alone a shipwright. Still, she had told him it sounded like a good idea, even if it was likely that SOLCOM wouldn’t authorize them to build or install singularity cores.
There was a demand for commercial ships, after all, slow though they might be. With SOLCOM construction being almost entirely dedicated to military production, it seemed like the Sol Corporations were chafing to get into space by any means available. Old Philosopher-class ships were still the most common, but the asking price on those had gone up tenfold and there wasn’t one of them under a hundred years old.
Where there was demand, there was money to be made, and Hayden could do with a major industry to bring in both money and more skilled workers.
Hayden was the next big thing, there was no question of that in her mind. Though whether that was a good thing or not…well, Sorilla would beg off answering that question until more i
nformation was available. She wasn’t above taking advantage of it, though, using what little insider information she had to set herself up for the future.
After all, with the various life-enhancing treatments available, many of which she’d already received as part and parcel of her service, she could expect to have a fairly significant future to look forward to. She might as well make the most of it, and to her mind, the real future wasn’t back on Earth anymore.
It was among the stars.
*****
Hayden Tether Counterweight Station
“Gil?”
Gil Hayden looked up as his secretary stepped into the office. “Yes, Sal?”
“I thought you might like to know, Captain Aida is on her way up the tether.”
Gil frowned, considering. “I don’t have an appointment with her, do I?”
“No, sir.”
“I didn’t think so,” he said, wondering what it was that was bringing the woman from her self-imposed exile.
Since she’d returned to Hayden and the land grant she’d received, it had become almost impossible to get her to leave the subcontinent. Those who wanted to chat with the formidable lady who’d lead the Hayden Resistance, and was honestly still venerated by many of the Hayden militia, had to make their way to her.
He didn’t mind, nor did most who cared to talk to her. No one moved to Hayden to live in air conditioned luxury, so a chance to explore even a bit of the subcontinent was almost as big a draw to visit as the lady herself was. It had been noticed, however, and a few of her friends from the war had become worried.
He sighed, turning his chair around so he could see out the rather impressive view that was currently dominated by the new SOLCOM ship that had arrived a few days earlier. It had been a comfort, having that behemoth in the system as a balance to the Alliance ships that regularly visited. SOLCOM maintained a regular patrol, of course, but those were rarely visible, as they tended to spend more time at the outer system jump points.
