Threshold of Victory

by Stephen J. Orion

  What might have been a sob crept into the channel, and Tarek caught a glimpse of the shattered arcom. The Mauler blood covering it seemed to pour from its own gaping wounds. The pilot was dead, of that there could be no question.

  “Fleet, I need that strike now!” There was no brashness left in the Lieutenant’s voice, just the raw sound of a wounded and desperate soul.

  “Strike package deployed, time to target is one minute and forty-eight seconds,” the officer from the Arcadia replied.

  Tarek wasn’t sure if authorisation had finally come through or if the officer had just decided to clear it himself and hope permission came later. Regardless, a hundred and eight seconds could be a life time on the battlefield, but the possibility of support seemed to energise the stricken defenders.

  The Wolf-Lieutenant grabbed her downed colleague’s rifle and turned it on the next wave of Maulers, mowing them down until the weapon ran empty and she discarded it. As the seconds trickled by, the survivors fell in around her, using her skill and perhaps rage as a shield. She appropriated a Mauler rifle and blew away a half dozen more foes before she was down to just an arcom scale knife.

  Even then she did not hesitate. She charged into the Maulers, stabbing, weaving, dodging and stabbing again. Like water, she used their mass against them, always slipping out of their path when they were moving too fast to stop. Somewhere along the line, the point of the knife snapped off but she continued to use it anyway, alternating with blows from the machine’s steely fists.

  The land-smack package arrived early, but on target – a stream of artillery missiles that traced across the middle of the incline on Mortar Hill’s western face. The effect was immediate and dramatic. The entire western approach of the hill was blanketed in blooming fireballs that smashed open the earth, each one flaring brilliantly before receding into a thick plume of dirt and smoke.

  The Mauler charge was suddenly bereft of its weight of numbers and it faltered. Some were too committed to retreat, others fled back towards the city’s edge. The defenders picked off what they could, but theirs was a pyrrhic victory.

  Barely half the arcoms were still standing to say nothing of the decimation of the infantry.

  And it wasn’t over. On the city’s edge Tarek could see the Maulers massing again already, their baffling numbers somehow undiminished despite the hundreds of their dead almost blanketing the ruined plain from one end to the other.

  This moment, Tarek thought.

  This moment, or not at all.

  Without a thought towards the Warhorse’s Captain, Tarek put the heavy lifter into a steep dive, switching the flight controls to space mode. Walters was right, the lifter was too heavy to dodge properly, but in a dive, he could emulate a gravity free environment. In a dive, he had mass but not weight, and he could use mass.

  There had been a moment in Tarek’s time at the academy – an anti-aircraft exercise not so dissimilar to this – where he began to see, not the enemy fire, but the paths between where the enemy would fire. In that moment, every technique they’d taught him just slotted in one after another to leave his Foxcub trainer swooping, diving, rolling and curving gracefully through the tracks of a canyon only he could see.

  It had been a perfect moment, a moment like nothing else he’d experienced, and not just because it was the one time he’d out-scored Eternity. That experience had never come again, but he had felt it on the edge of his consciousness, almost since the battle over Box Grid had started, like a bird caged too tight to spread its wings that had suddenly broken free once more.

  Vaguely aware of Jackson and Walter screaming at him, Tarek used the Warhorse’s heavy VTOL engines to jink and weave the craft through the gaps in the AA fire. Their efforts were predictable, almost contemptible, and he easily brought the ship lower and lower towards the surface.

  Slowing down was the trick, that was where he’d have to pay back all the energy he’d stolen from the planet’s gravity and the Warhorse would once more be a large, heavy target. For that reason, Tarek angled the ship so it came down behind Mortar Hill, bleeding its speed off in a swooping curve that took him well under what the Navy called Suicide Altitude.

  The G-forces were outrageous through the curve, and the ship fought him the entire way, barely pulling its ugly nose up fast enough to avoid smashing into the side of the hill itself. Keeping the bow above the horizon, he flared the VTOL jets to kill the last of its forward momentum before bringing it to a heavy landing, more or less on the middle of the hill.

  Tarek slumped back in his chair, breathing heavily and suddenly exhausted. There was an odd silence in the ship now that they were down, the engines still idled, the hull ticked with heat and outside he could still hear the crackle and bellow weapons fire. Somehow all those sounds seemed distant, like they all came from so far away.

  “We’re loading now,” Walters said quietly, he sounded furious, but like always, he wasn’t wasting the words. Yet. “Do you figure you can us back up, now that you’ve gotten us down?”

  Tarek gave a moment before answering to come up with an acceptable idea and hide the fact he hadn’t actually thought about that at all before committing to the approach. “I’ll stay low and keep using the hill for cover, pull us up once we’re out of range.”

  There was no further comment from the Skipper, only the noise of the drop ramp hitting the deck and the dissonant clang of the arcoms powering up it with a force that vibrated the whole ship. A few of the machines, including the Wolf-Lieutenant’s, remained outside until they’d loaded the wounded and a few of the less damaged arcoms. He watched it all through the canopy, always with one eye on the lip of the hill, still wreathed in smoke from the earlier bombardment.

  “We’re good, get us out of here,” Walters finally reported.

  Tarek glanced across the top of the hill to make sure there were no survivors they’d missed, but what he saw was only a graveyard for all those they hadn’t been in time to protect. Ruined vehicles, arcoms and the limp bodies of foot soldiers were the only features in the still scene that stared back at him.

  Not caring had been easy. You never had to stare at a mangled corpse that had half pulled itself from a ruined arcom and died with a hand reaching out, begging for help. Not caring had expensive cars and a penthouse and the food was always great and you never had to take responsibility for anyone else’s misery. Tarek tried to remember how to not care, for just a little bit, as he put his hands back on the flight controls and left it all behind.

  ****

  Constellation Carrier CNS Arcadia

  Shallow atmospheric flight

  Planet Grimball, Bryson System

  19 April 2315

  After Warhorse One’s daring rescue of the ground forces, the Undying were able to disentangle themselves from the enemy fighters and withdraw to the carrier. They landed in time to see Tarek being escorted off the flight deck by Walters and a pair of marines.

  As she pulled herself out of her fighter, every fibre of Kelly’s body felt heavy with fatigue. The stims kept her brain buzzed and the world in sharp focus, but as she metabolised them, the side effects were arriving in force. There was bile in her throat, her chest throbbed, she felt freezing and like her flight suit was full of crawling, stinging ants. Her mind fixated on the need to catch up with Tarek and make sure everything was okay, but obstacles kept throwing themselves in her way.

  No sooner was she down the ladder than a dour flight tech insisted she run through a proper post-flight checklist. She’d barely finished that when Lieutenant Commander Phillips called the squadron to fall in. At the entrance to the hangar she could see the medics arriving to cart them off to detox. With an irritable sigh, she resigned herself to failure and fell in with her squadron. For now at least, Tarek was on his own.

  “The final tally,” Phillips announced before pausing for effect, “was five kills total, three to me, one to Clumsy, and one to Errant. Most importantly, after our first mission, we now have the highest kill/loss
ratio in the fleet, indeed it is a number so high it cannot be expressed numerically.”

  The cheer in response was aborted by a chill voice interrupting.

  “But you failed your mission.”

  All eyes turned to the arcom pilot standing with her arms folded at the base of the gantry stairs. Her slate grey eyes were dark ringed, her neck and brow was salted with dried sweat, and her dirty blonde hair a short-matted tangle. Her muscled limbs looked as hard as her arcom’s, and tired as she was, it looked like she could take the entire squadron down hand-to-hand.

  As tired as she was, it looked like she might.

  “Stand to when you address the Commander, Lieutenant,” Hanagan snapped.

  “No, it’s alright,” Phillips said, waving him off. “If you have a problem, Lieutenant…” He read her tag. “…Rease, let’s have it.”

  “You failed your mission,” the arcom pilot repeated. “Clear the fighters, destroy the AA, you remember that? Maybe if you’d been covering your own asses a little less you might have actually achieved something.”

  “So my pilots are supposed to die for your benefit, Lieutenant?” Phillips responded neatly.

  She regarded him coolly, grey eyes sharp as razors. “Whose benefit do they live for?” Her tone was cold and accusing. “If you’re only here to save yourselves, do the rest of us a favour and go home. No air support at all would have been better than dying on hold for someone who never bothered showing up.”

  She looked across their faces in a way that reminded Kelly uncomfortably of a predator tracking prey. She was remembering them for later and it was a relief when she finally stepped away.

  She gave Phillips a tart salute, so crisp it had to be mockery though her face remained impassive.

  “A lot of people died today, Commander. The fact that none of them were yours is something you should consider.”

  ****

  Constellation Carrier CNS Arcadia

  Orbital Escape Trajectory

  Planet Grimball, Bryson System

  19 April 2315

  Tarek was facing down what, in Constellation Navy Lingo, was referred to as a Deep Shit Committee. By definition, this meant that it was comprised of your immediate CO, their CO and the ship’s captain which meant there was sufficient authority present to administer a summary demotion. Or even execution.

  Tarek’s Deep Shit Committee was comprised of Lieutenant Walters, CAG Jenson and of course the Arcadia’s Captain. An angular faced man named Pierman with dark hair and a goatee that came to an immaculately trimmed point. Despite the fact the meeting was taking place in his office, the Captain was not seated at his ivory ceramic desk but rather standing at the broad window beyond it, looking over the ship’s CIC. The Captain’s pose felt put on, reminding Tarek very much of members of the Council of Peers he’d met in the past; the sort of people who thought a lot about where they would stand and how they would craft their expression.

  The CAG and Walters were standing on either side of the Captain’s desk, forming a triangle with the Captain’s empty chair at its point. Protocol necessitated that Tarek face that chair at strict attention, which was actually easier than having to stare an angry officer in the face. Of course, it didn’t remove the discomfort of the silent treatment they had been giving him for almost a minute now. The only sound in the room came from the CAG’s holopad as he flicked through screens.

  “I suppose you thought that was heroic?” Jenson finally asked, putting the holopad down on the edge of the desk.

  “I wasn’t grandstanding, sir,” Tarek answered stiffly. It was a question he’d been expecting and he needed to be bold but sound repentant. “I was doing what needed to be done.”

  Lieutenant Walters scowled, but it was the CAG who spoke again. “You thought you were in a position to make an accurate assessment on that? Do you expect that your immediate superior shares everything he knows with you? Are you, in fact, de facto commander of the aircraft, Sergeant?”

  “No sir.”

  “Then you couldn’t possibly have known what needed to be done, could you?” The words were explosive, a shouted accusation in what had been, until now, a civil dressing down. “For all you knew there was another enemy fighter squadron inbound, or an artillery strike about to fall on your landing site, or any one of a thousand other things that could have turned your little one man rescue into the loss of this ship’s singular heavy transport.”

  “Sir, it was my—”

  “That pause was not an invitation to speak, Sergeant,” the CAG said. “The reasons you did what you did and the final outcome are not of relevance. This is a hierarchy, not a democracy, so you keep your comments to yourself and do what you’re told or either your luck will run out and you will be killed in the field, or I will have an attack of good judgement and see you spaced under Article Two.”

  Jenson allowed a lengthy pause for that to settle in, and this time Tarek kept his mouth firmly shut. It was difficult, almost impossible. It was the first act of a new life, and he’d done it right, he knew that without doubt, and the need to defend it was almost as strong as the urge to make that fateful landing had been in the first place.

  But here was the same old question: Am I in the right place or not. They were making it very clear that the logistics wing was no place for people who were interested in making a big impact. On the other hand, if he hadn’t been there, if he’d been in a fighter, would anyone else have been able to land that transport? From the right angle, it sort of looked like fate.

  “Your conduct has been permanently affixed to your record,” Jenson finally said. “And hereafter you will present yourself to the brig where you shall stay until I feel like letting you out. Dismissed.”

  Biting back a thousand things he wanted to say, the pilot simply saluted and retreated from the room.

  ****

  Once he was long gone, the Captain finally spoke, his voice quietly filling the settling silence. “If one of you had ordered him to make that extraction, we’d be giving him a commendation.” He spread his hands in invitation. “So what happened?”

  Walters looked uncertainly at Jenson who gave him a nod.

  “His graduation marks were impressive, but I’ve never seen a pilot with the skills to do what he did,” the Lieutenant offered. “If he was that good I’d have expected him to be flying combat.”

  “I agree,” the CAG added. “I reviewed the flight recorder, at one point he was evading five separate AA sources and he was doing it in a heavy transport. I’m sure there are other pilots who could do so, but not fresh out of the academy. Lieutenant Walters had no way of knowing the Flight Sergeant would be capable of such a high-risk manoeuvre.”

  “And perhaps he isn’t, perhaps he simply got lucky,” the Captain moved back to stand behind his chair. “Or perhaps we have a prodigy. How long do you intend to keep him confined?”

  “Until people stop talking about his rescue. I don’t want him stepping out to praise and applause.”

  “Good. Tag his file for review in six months. If he’s learnt to behave by then, we might try him out as a combat pilot again. You’re both dismissed.”

  ****

  “Guess you’re going to the brig, huh?”

  Tarek was descending through the ship’s ladders and corridors when the voice interrupted his contemplations. He came back to reality to regard the woman who had fallen into step with him. It was an arcom pilot, still dressed in her black padded fatigues and smelling of the sweat and ash of Grimball. He’d never seen her face, but she had an unmistakable ace patch below her unit badge: a snarling wolf’s head.

  “You…” He found himself at a loss for words.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I thought I’d be taller too.” She swept a hand through the air just about her head. “So I had a talk with your co-pilot, and once he was done trying to take credit, he came clean and admitted you disobeyed orders and, to quote him pulled some seriously whack shit to come pick us up.”

  There was s
omething about her he couldn’t quite express or comprehend. She had an aura of sublime confidence, but he’d seen the moment when that had broken and somehow he could see it now. Between the glow of what she’d become – of what everyone had come to expect from her – were tiny cracks; echoes of what it had cost her. It seemed she could win this war by herself, but Tarek felt suddenly and irrationally angry that she was even fighting in it.

  They’d been prepared to write her off, he realised. This vibrant human being who had crafted herself into some kind of perfect warrior at great personal cost, had been worth less to them than a single heavy lifter. That they’d had the gall to punish him for trying to save her infuriated him beyond words.

  “So if you’re going for strong silent type: the intense eyeballing is putting a bit of a creepy angle on the whole thing.”

  When the Lieutenant spoke, Tarek realised he’d been mutely staring at her the whole time. He coughed awkwardly and looked away. “Sorry, I’ve got a lot on my mind at the moment.”

  “I’ll bet. Look I’ll leave you to it, but I just wanted to catch you before they sweep you, and what you did, under the carpet. Me and mine, we won’t forget, and we’ll never believe it was the wrong call.”

  “Not everyone seems to think so.”

  The Lieutenant snorted. “They never do. Honestly every ace, in the air or on the ground, starts out being treated as a reckless idiot by the brass. If you’re as good as you think you are, then somewhere along the line other people start to realise too. Suddenly people start ordering you to do the things they ordered you not to do just a few weeks ago.”

  “And what if I’m not as good as I think, what if I was just lucky.”

  “Then I wouldn’t be giving you this advice because it would get you killed. Fact is people who are actually reckless idiots never stop to analyse their actions, they just throw themselves in a direction, and it either works out or it doesn’t. That you’re thinking about it now tells me you were thinking about it before as well. You came in to get us because you knew you could. Don’t let the CAG trick you out of believing that.”