by Rick Partlow
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.
“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.
