by Rick Partlow
“That won’t work on the Jeuta,” Lyta said grimly, shaking her head. “They don’t get mad, they get even. And they don’t have a human’s ingrained fear of radiation. They’re more resistant to it than we are. Dagda has too much to lose to risk the Jeuta coming here for payback and you said yourself, we can’t beat that destroyer if it comes to us.”
“Then what?” he asked helplessly. “What are we gonna do?”
Jonathan smiled with an infuriating confidence that made Osceola want to punch him in his too-handsome face.
“We’ll figure something out,” the kid said. “The way I see it, we have days…maybe even weeks.”
“Yeah, and I suppose you’re going to let us,” Osceola motioned back and forth between Kammy and himself, “do all the work hunting down the signal while you do what? Sit here on your ass and think?”
“Hardly. We’re going to have to find a training area where we can offload the mechs and the ground troops and run through some training scenarios. But before we do all that…” His eyes went back to Rhiannon and his smile grew wider. “That’s a really pretty place. And I’d hate to come all this way without getting a look at it.”
“You’re nuts, you know that?” Katy shouted in his ear, her voice barely audible over the rush of the wind.
He laughed. He was sure she couldn’t hear it, though maybe she could feel it in his shoulders. Her arms were wrapped around his waist, her body pressed against his back and it took a concerted effort to concentrate more on the handling and feel of the motorcycle between his legs, rather than the woman clinging to him. The mountain road twisted under the wheels, the switchback curves hanging out over a thousand meters of wispy clouds, blue sky, and nothing but bare rock almost vertical beneath them.
Mount Doral stretched high into the morning sky, a grey monolith hiding the city of Westport in its shadow, sheltering her from the storms rising up on the east side of the range. Jonathan had seen her for the first time flying in to Westport to negotiate for a training and staging area for his company, and she’d seemed to be challenging him, inviting him. The first question he’d asked the rep for the Dagda government when she’d picked them up at the shuttle port was, “Is there a road up the mountain?”
He’d waited till later to ask about renting a motorcycle. Didn’t want to seem unprofessional.
“You’re a pilot!” he yelled back to Katy, feeling the wind trying to worm its way beneath his driving goggles. “I thought you’d like this shit!”
“I do like it!” She laughed wildly and kissed the side of his neck. “That doesn’t mean you’re not crazy!”
As much as he loved the ride and the view, and the company, Jonathan had to admit it was getting damned cold the higher they went, and even his insulated flight jacket wasn’t doing enough to shut out the chill wind. He felt a sense of relief when they reached the summit overlook and he slowed the bike to a stop, shutting down the motor and kickstanding it.
“The road just ends here,” Katy said, swinging a leg off the bike behind him. She took a few, tentative steps off the paved parking area, to the carefully-arranged boulders lining the overlook. “Do you think they built it just so you could drive up and see the view?”
“I’ve heard worse reasons to build a road,” he said, coming up beside her, slipping an arm around her shoulders as he took in the incredible vista below.
From up here, he saw all of the sprawling city of Westport from the foothills right down to the ocean. There was little in the way of a metroplex here; it wasn’t needed. Most of their business was done off-planet and it made sense to have the centers of business and administration closer to the production. He’d seen images of the colony on Lugh, one of the habitables orbiting the gas giant Danu, and it fit much closer to what he would expect from the capital of something called the “Dagda Commercial Investment Council.” The cities there were enclosed and inclusive, domed and shielded against the climate extremes and the background radiation, more useful and practical than orbital facilities simply for the convenience of gravity, a breathable atmosphere and liquid water.
Rhiannon, by contrast, was an outdoor place, a planet of warm oceans, rugged mountains, and rolling planes. Executives who worked on Lugh vacationed and retired on Rhiannon, and the super-rich built their mansions here and forced the nose-to-the-grindstone types to come here to do business with them. He saw the mansions dotting the hillsides near the beach and wondered how much each of them cost in relation to, say, a mech like his Vindicator.
“Things are different here than on Sparta,” he said, knowing it was inane but not afraid to sound that way with Katy. With her, he still felt more like Logan Conner, what he hoped was the real Logan Conner, and not the made-up, cocky mercenary captain Jonathan Slaughter. “The money’s more concentrated, but the population’s smaller on the actual planet. You almost can’t see the machinery running, the gears being greased.”
“Sparta has a government founded on providing military stability after the Fall and the Reconstruction Wars,” Katy replied, staring down at Westport with an expression he thought might have been wistful, as if she hated the thought of leaving even though they’d just arrived. “This place, and others like it, are built on business, on making a living, because they were too far away from the wars for security to be a factor…until now.”
He laughed, miming applause.
“Wow, aren’t you the government and history expert? And here I thought all pilots were math nerds.”
“I am a math nerd.” She punched him lightly in the arm. “My parents are the social sciences experts.” She sniffed. “They think so, anyway. I’ve never thought there was much science involved, just a lot of guesswork and opinions passed off as fact.”
“You sound like my mom.” He wanted to chuckle at the thought, but he couldn’t, not even after all this time. “She always said science was something you could falsify, something you could reproduce, but the human experience was always different, never really something you could replicate.”
“I think I would have liked your mom.”
Katy’s fingers traced a line down his jaw, touching his lips, followed the touch with her lips. Jonathan pulled her close, relishing in her warmth against the chill bite of the wind, feeling wild strands of hair teasing his face.
“I wish this could last,” she breathed into his ear, her cheek pressed against his. “Being here, away from everything else.”
“This mission won’t be forever,” he assured her, not wanting to let go of her. “We’ll be able to go somewhere for a while if you like, when it’s done, maybe a couple weeks…”
She snorted, skepticism in her eyes when she pulled away to regard him. “And then what, Lord Guardian? Are you going to keep me around as your personal pilot on every assignment?” She poked a finger into his ribs. “I have a career too, you know?”
Jonathan felt a very Logan-like roiling in his stomach at the thought of the two of them apart, and a million possibilities began bouncing off each other in his head, none of them very satisfying. He wanted to say something logical, make a plan, present her with a reasoned and well-thought-out argument, but he couldn’t seem to wrap his mind around one.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I just know I don’t want to give up.”
“You’re a soldier. Even if you weren’t….” She bit down on something sour, and he knew she was trying not to break operational security. “Even if you weren’t the other things you are, you’d still be a soldier, and soldiers go where they’re told. Pilots, too.”
He tried to form an objection, but she put a finger over his lips.
“Let’s not worry about the future. That’s just a good way to ruin the present.”
“Did your parents teach you that?” he wondered, trying to sound light and bantering even though the roiling in his stomach just wouldn’t go away.
“No.” She buried her face in his shoulder and her grip on him tightened. “I learned it on Ramman.”
2<
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“I swear to the Spenta Mainyu, if we have to spend another week crawling between jump-points in this crate, I am going to fucking shoot myself.”
Terry didn’t even look up from his meal. He’d heard the complaints every tedious, endless day of the search and, while he sympathized, at least the crew had something to do. The complainer this time was one of the Spartan Navy personnel, though at this point the only discernable difference between the two groups was their accents. They’d fallen into their new duties and shifts on the Shakak and there hadn’t even been any fights since the battle at Arachne.
If you could call it a battle. He’d been on board the ship and it had seemed more like an execution. The bandit ship was poorly armored and while it had been rigged up with a heavy mining laser and a crude mass driver, its targeting systems were laughable compared to the Shakak’s. In moments, there’d been nothing left of the bandit ship but an expanding cloud of plasma. He wished he could say he’d found it disturbing, but it had been far too antiseptic for that, like watching a history documentary.
He wasn’t sure why he’d volunteered for the point-to-point search for the tracer signal instead of staying back with the ground force. Jonathan had negotiated them an island on the moon Fiachna to train for the battle. He could have been bored and restless somewhere with a breathable atmosphere, a consistent gravity and a little bit of privacy, but he’d fancied once they found the system, he might be useful… somehow.
So far, all he’d managed to accomplish was reconfiguring the ship’s long-range surveillance gear to optimize for planetary analysis, and developing a curious taste for the imitation chicken pad thai the ship’s auto-kitchen could concoct from soy paste and spirulina powder. The stuff was addictive. It had taken him a while to go from grabbing it and eating it in his assigned cabin to actually hanging out in the mess, and he still hadn’t talked to anyone but the technicians he was helping with the surveillance package. He just kept his head down, ate his food, and listened.
Which was why he noticed the sudden end to the bitching by the spacers at the table behind him. He glanced up and saw the reason squeezing through the hatchway into the mess, massive and seal-grey and inhuman. Wihtgar ignored the stares from the table full of Spartan Navy spacers and went to the auto-kitchen, punching in a program code and grabbing a plate from the dispenser. Terry found the Jeuta fascinating. He’d never seen one in real life before, but everyone knew their story, how the Empire had created them as a slave race, designed to be resistant to cold, heat, radiation, and even vacuum for a short time, to replace humans in dangerous jobs.
It had been tried before with sentient AI, and had led to a war devastating enough to end the old Consensus government and along with it, any hopes of controllable artificial intelligences. This time though, the Empire’s biological researchers had been sure they could engineer something strong and capable enough to handle brute force tasks but not smart enough to revolt.
It hadn’t turned out quite the way the Imperials had hoped.
“I can’t believe Captain Osceola lets this freakshow eat with real people,” one of the Spartan sailors said, loud enough to make sure Wihtgar would hear it.
Terry winced. The Jeuta was big and powerful, but there were six of the Spartans, five men and a woman, and he wasn’t sure if Wihtgar could take them all if it came to a physical fight. The one who’d spoken was a junior enlisted, a tall, broad-chested man maybe a year younger than Terry. The name “Nellis” was printed on his duty fatigue blouse and Terry had seen him before, had heard him before, which wasn’t hard given how loud he was. He didn’t complain as much as explain to anyone who listened how things should be run, how he would run them if he were in charge.
Nellis was half out of his seat, fists balled up, staring at Wihtgar with hate in his eyes.
“You heard me, Freakshow!” he yelled at the Jeuta, pounding his hand against the table. “I don’t feel like eating with one of you around!”
“You should take your food to your quarters then,” Wihtgar suggested, the tone of his voice as calm and even as any of the few times Terry had heard him speak.
If the Jeuta had been looking to defuse the situation, he’d swung and missed. Nellis was out of his seat, with his friends rising behind him, a couple of them looking uncertainly at the size of the non-human, but still backing him up. The mess wasn’t crowded and there didn’t seem to be any other of Osceola’s crew in the compartment.
Terry stood before he realized he was doing it, stepped in front of the enlisted man, hands at his side.
“What do you think’s going to happen here, Nellis?” Terry asked him. His voice was surprisingly calm, especially given his stomach was tied into a veritable Gordian knot.
“Get out of my way, egghead,” Nellis snapped, looking as if he wanted to push Terry out of the way but hesitating.
He probably knows “Jonathan” and I are related.
“You think you’re going to beat a Jeuta in a fight, Nellis?” Terry asked him, wracking his brain for something to get through to the man. “Even with your friends backing you up? A Jeuta? And what if they don’t? What if it’s just you?”
“His kind killed my grandfather,” one of the other Navy spacers interjected. It was the woman, Ortiz, and she wasn’t much smaller than Nellis, nor a bit less intimidating. “My father told me stories about what they did to him. I don’t like being on the same ship as one of the damned things.”
Terry had been acting without thinking too much to this point, but the intensity in the woman’s face scared him. Nellis was just a blowhard, but Ortiz might not care if he was related to the boss. He should just get out of the way and go call Osceola.
But what if someone gets seriously hurt? What if it causes a real problem and we have to cancel the whole operation? What if I have to go home and face Dad without having actually accomplished anything?
That prospect was even scarier than facing down angry spacers. Terry raised his hands to chest-level, palms out and sent a pleading look over his shoulder at the Jeuta. He had no idea what the expression on the thing’s face meant. Wihtgar could have been angry, sympathetic or constipated.
“Even if you don’t get your asses kicked,” Terry said to the spacers, hoping his pleading look would work better on them, “you know how pissed Major Randell is going to be. What do you think she’ll do to whoever starts this fight?”
That seemed to get through to them. They might not be afraid of Jonathan Slaughter, even if they knew who he really was, but everyone was afraid of Lyta. Nellis’ jaw worked and his fingers clenched and unclenched before he swept his tray off the table, sending it crashing to the floor.
“Fuck this,” he mumbled, turning. “I’ll eat in my fucking cabin from now on.”
With the slightest hesitation, Ortiz followed him through the hatch into the passageway and the other four spacers at the table filed out behind them, shooting dirty looks at Terry and Wihtgar. Terry watched the last of them vanish around the corner before he let out the breath he’d been holding. His strength seemed to abandon him along with it and he had to support himself against the table, careful not to step in the spilled food. An aged and battered clean-up robot had already detached itself from a nook in the bulkhead down by the deck and was slowly and reluctantly rolling across the deckplates to vacuum up the mess.
“You did not have to do that,” Wihtgar said. Terry nearly jumped at the words, having almost forgotten the Jeuta was there.
“I know,” he acknowledged. “But there wasn’t anyone else, so I had to…”
“I apologize,” the Jeuta interrupted. “I speak your language well, but I sometimes confuse your idiom. I meant to say, there was no reason for you to do that. I am ship’s security for a reason. I am here to handle situations such as this.”
Anger flared in Terry’s chest, working its way to his mouth. He had to head it off before it exploded outward because telling a Jeuta to go mate with its mother was unlikely to be received well, and he
had grown fond of the current arrangement of his face.
“Maybe you didn’t need any help,” Terry said when he could trust himself to say something halfway civil, “but they did.” He jerked a thumb at the hatchway where the spacers had gone. “And we need them doing their jobs.”
That sounded very dutiful and dedicated to the mission, like something his “cousin” would say…not Lyta though. She would have thrown in a lot more cursing.
“Anyway,” he went on, “them blaming you for everything any other Jeuta does is stupid. It would be like you blaming me for the Imperials who enslaved your ancestors.”
“It would,” Wihtgar agreed.
He bent down and retrieved the tray Nellis had knocked down. The food was gone, scrubbed up by the robot before the machine had squeaked and groaned back to its hidey-hole, but it had left the plate and tray for someone taller and with more dexterity. Wihtgar tossed it in the recycler from a meter away, not flinching at the loud clatter of the plastic and metal.
Do Jeuta flinch? he mused. Maybe I’ll find out soon.
“I believe my food is ready,” Wihtgar said, then made an obvious imitation of a human nod, a difficult motion for something with very little in the way of a neck. “Have a pleasant evening, Mr. Conner.”
Terry stood beside his table, feeling a bit nonplussed, watching the broad, muscular back walking away from him.
“I think,” he muttered to himself, “I’m going back to eating in my cabin.”
“You think this’ll be the one, boss?” Kammy asked.
Donner Osceola didn’t snap at the inane question, even though it was the same one his First Mate had asked at every single one of the six jump-points they’d passed through over the last two and a half weeks, because Kammy was quite obviously trying to get him angry. It was what passed for sport when you were bored out of your mind with no end in sight.
