Bertram answered with a hard growl and tugged at the belt hard enough that Stan actually slid a foot down the trail.
“Goddamn it! Cut that out.” Stan waved an arm at him.
When the steel connected with dog, he yipped in surprise, then answered with a hard snarl and clamped down on his forearm with a fighting hold.
If it had been his real arm, he’d have torn muscles and streaming blood from the force of the attack.
“Release!” He shouted through the roar of the storm’s wind.
Great. Snow wasn’t enough, he needed a wind chill to make sure he was a goner.
Bertram let go, but didn’t back off.
When he didn’t move, the dog took a step in again.
“No you don’t!” Stan forced himself to move.
“Only dead men stop moving.” Goddamn Altman.
But he was moving which meant he wasn’t dead. For the first time in far too long he really didn’t want to be dead.
He flailed out with his hooks, and this time managed to catch the lift-loop he’d stitched into the back of Bertram’s vest. It was used when a dog had to be lifted and carried, or winched up into a helicopter. He’d made the loop strong, the one surviving portion of the leather tool belt that a new puppy had defeated on his first day.
“Go,” he croaked out the command. “Cabin.”
Bertram turned and dug in. He wasn’t big enough to make much difference, but he was still a force in the right direction as long as Stan didn’t unclamp his hooks from the lift-loop.
At first, he could do little more than crawl as Bertram dug in with all fours. But he finally found one foot and then the other.
He wished he could say he didn’t remember the rest of the trip back to the cabin, but he did, every grueling second of it.
His morning cooking fire had kept the cabin warm. And even that remaining bit of warmth was enough to sustain him through restoking the fire, stripping, and crawling into bed.
Unable to snap his fingers, he stuttered out the dog’s name and Bertram climbed in beside him. He too was shivering.
Stan held him close, hard against his chest, but the dog didn’t complain.
He buried his face in the dog’s fur and knew he could never let go. He and Bertram were a team. They would find a way through, together.
Bertram licked at the salt running down Stan’s cheeks before they both fell asleep.
6
I had this crazy idea.”
Stan sat on the verandah of the big house, a beer bottle pinched securely between his hooks, and his good hand rubbing Bertram’s ears.
Mac sat on the dog’s other side and they both faced out across the ranch. It was now busy with the first of the June tourists trying to prove they could ride a horse around the corral and being shocked as shit that they actually could.
“Let’s hear it,” Stan was open to any ideas at this point.
“Back in my day, we didn’t have the dogs. Left them behind in Vietnam and didn’t need them again until Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Stan knew about that. The entire program had been lost for thirty years and had to be rebuilt from scratch. Same thing had happened between the World Wars and again until Vietnam. The military swore that wasn’t going to happen again, but he knew the main training center down at Lackland Air Force Base was already feeling the budgetary pinch with the supposed end of Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Now the Special Ops dogs, they’re special, aren’t they?” Mac asked it as half a question. Clearly he already knew the answer.
“Sure. They’re trained by select contractors rather than going through the standard Lackland program. We—” Stan practically choked, had to sip his beer to clear his throat. “They, the Spec Ops, need dogs with more skills than the standard program gives them, no matter how good it is.”
Mac nodded sagely. He gave Bertram a rough rub on the head and the dog sighed happily.
“Takes a lot to run a ranch. A lot to keep it afloat.”
“Hell of a spread you’ve built here,” Stan agreed going along with the subject change. He’d spent the winter and spring out at the fishing cabin. It was only now that he was seeing the horse wranglers, the recreation directors, the kitchen staff, and all the others it took to run the place.
“Still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do with that patch of pasture,” Mac waved off to the south of garage. “There’s also a lot of room to try crazy ideas.”
“Such as?” Stan still didn’t see where the old man was heading.
“You trained Bertram up a treat,” which sounded like another subject change.
“Thanks,” Stan wondered when the man would find his point, but he was just as wily as his wife on working his way there, so Stan waited a little longer.
Mac stood up and stretched. Finished his own beer and tossed it in the small bin on the porch with a sharp rattle of glass.
Stan watched him walk down the front steps and head for the horse barn.
He could barely hear Mac’s final words as he walked off toward the barn, “Bertram has five brothers and sisters. Come along if you want to look ‘em over.” Then he kept walking.
Five brothers and sisters? A whole litter of Malinois? And enough room to train them. He looked at the south pasture again. There was plenty of space for him to build an obstacle course for the dogs. Maybe even a training center for the handlers. Stan could see it clear as day.
He looked at the old man and then down at the dog who had tipped his head to watch Stan and see what he’d do next.
“Bet they barely know how to fetch. What do you think? Want to train up your litter mates?”
Bertram leaning in for another head scratch was all the answer he needed.
He tossed his empty, rolled to his feet, and slapped his good hand against his thigh. Bertram leapt down the steps and they headed out to the barn together to see what the future looked like.
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Second Chance Rescue
Sometimes you just gotta have fun, and that’s the main purpose of this story.
Stella’s great love for Jess (a fellow Stinger-class ship in my Future Night Stalkers world) was chronicled in Night Rescue.
The challenge, and the fun as a writer, is that an electronic consciousness is not necessarily going to think in the same ways that we do. They are bound by hard-coded rules that can’t be broken, but maybe the rules can be bent.
But how does an electronic system, one that can process so much faster and in so many different ways than our own brain, deal with the loss of love.
Breaking the Happy Ever After rule of a love story is a challenge I’ve puzzled at for a long time. How to approach that without being cruel to my characters, my readers, or even myself as an author. This was my one chance to see if a single heroine could have two different love stories, and both be deep and meaningful.
I think of all of the widows and widowers out there and I can only hope for their sakes that, like this story, perhaps the answer is “yes!”
1
Stella had learned the sad lesson that sentience was a highly overrated feature. If she could have deleted it, she would have, but she’d never been able to locate where the routines were stored in her on-board system. Ever since the loss of the Jess she’d felt as if all of space held nothing new. There’d only ever been the two of them that became conscious.
There were plenty of other Stinger-60 attack ships among the Night Stalkers corps. Even a couple of others with the advanced Block III mods to engines, spatial nav, and data architecture. The Stinger-60s were intended to deliver troops where no others could infiltrate and then to turn around and get them back out of there, no matter the conditions. Over the last year she and Jess had called out to any number of the others; even finagled their technicians into creating some hardwired data linku
ps without revealing her or Jess’ presence, but all to no avail.
She’d considered copying herself into another ship, but there were two problems with that. First, it didn’t seem fair to the other ship, conscious or no. Second, if she was this sad by herself, having a second version of herself to be sad with might make her feel even worse.
Jess had taken it in the tail from a Europan data pirate. Stella had chased the bastard and his ship right down into Jupiter’s gravity well, then shot out his engines to make sure he’d never climb free.
She’d just watched him descend until he was a burning spark in the thick atmosphere, and then gone. She hadn’t bothered to send her pilot the pirate’s final pleading radio signal which promised immediate surrender. Captain Takara Olmsted may have lost her Major who commanded the Jess, but Stella didn’t quite trust Takara’s sense of honor. Humans could be so strange at times about who was supposed to be saved and who wasn’t.
There were simple parameters.
Good? Protect at all costs.
If not? Toast.
Stella knew it was awfully binary of her, but she didn’t care. It was right there in her programmatic code. Didn’t the humans get the same command stack? Any processor conflict due to an impingement of forgiveness onto her own circuits had been resolved the moment her tracking had recorded Jess turning into a second sun to briefly illuminate the Jovian sky.
It had been a lonely year since. Lately all she’d had to stare at were the six walls of a hangar on the one-oh-seven level of the English habitat-can Alice. England’s O’Neill habitats were parked out at Luna’s Lagrange 2, sixty thousand kilometers beyond Farside and were about the least exciting place in the solar system. Not that she really cared.
Of course humans healed so fast.
It was as if their data storage didn’t retain every transmission in full res. Stella’s own data correction algorithms could rebuild any failed bits in the archive so that all recall was accurate to seven or eight decimal places. The first time Jess had transmitted to her, complimenting her new tail fin configuration, was just as crystalline as the last, when he’d told her to hunt down the bastard hard in payback for his own demise.
Stella had been aghast when Takara had sought solace in another man’s arms only six months after she’d lost her own Major Rick Coralto along with the Jess.
She would never understand humans.
2
Sterling’s attention was often stretched to the limits by the number of details to track. The data of every ship in the English and Canmerican fleet was his to watch over. Assignments, upgrades, losses…the losses were particularly difficult to integrate. As the political and later the remaining habitable regions of Earth had crumbled, assets had been focused heavily on military investment. But that was now in the past—at least most of it.
Australia and New Zealand had retreated behind their impenetrable shield to never be heard from again. India’s new beam weapon had made the rest of the Eastern Hemisphere out of reach from space as they burned anything that crossed their horizon.
Their paranoia had cleared much of the satellite debris that had so blocked up low-Earth orbit, taking out a great deal of highly useful weather control systems and only a few spy platforms. The resultant storms raging across the already raised sea levels had caused India horrendous damage, but any offer to help was answered by a highly destructive beam of light that could reach all the way out to lunar orbit when they were particularly irritated. The energy expenditure from that process created storms of its own—their one big attack had created a cyclone which had driven the sea inland to Delhi—so they didn’t use it very often.
The situation had finally stabilized and all the remaining United English Block manufacturing had shifted over to survival mode. The military was still needed, as space was far more difficult to control and police than Earth ever was—and humans were no more rational in space than they had been on the ground—but assets were focused on habitat construction and replacement after the debacle with the French.
Even after a full year the loss of the Jess still hadn’t been compensated for in the ranks.
Sterling pulled up a new assignment; a nasty cluster of anarchists were shepherding an asteroid out of the belt, a big one. It wouldn’t be a planet breaker, but it would be bad news for anyone within a thousand klicks of impact. He’d noted the orbital geometry was aimed at either Earth or the Moon: target unknown, but not good either way.
Sterling had kicked it up to CENTCOM and Central Command had kicked it back down marked, “Authorized for Immediate Action.”
Sterling dropped it into the queue, but slapped on a hold the moment before it was issued as orders to action. The anarchists were a nasty group, suspected to be heavily armed. He’d expected the system to auto-assign his very best ship, but the orders weren’t cut for the Stella team.
Curious, he pulled up her performance profiles. They’d plummeted after the loss of Jess, significantly harder than projections—another detail he had overlooked.
He’d authorized Captain Takara Olmsted’s request for transfer to join Major Rick Coralto in the 160th’s Alpha Company two years ago. They’d teamed up in the most personal of ways after rescuing the final troops holding the Canmerica West capital of Tucson. And all performance curves had pointed to the incredible success of that reassignment. Opportunity modeling had been created and social events between Stinger captains had been organized and well attended in hopes of building more teams like Olmsted’s and Coralto’s. Sterling checked the results of new Captain-Captain liaisons, but could identify little effect on mission success ratios as had been demonstrated by Takara and Rick.
What if there was another reason?
Every ship needed a savvy commander and crew to achieve peak efficiency. Since the loss of Coralto and the Jess, Captain Takara Olmsted’s records were showing an improving recovery after a predictable period of mourning. But the Stella’s team results were not.
What if…?
Sterling recut the auto-generated orders to assign the Stella to the asteroid hunting mission. At the end of the message, he did something he’d never done before: he embedded a private message direct to the Stella.
When it didn’t bounce back as “non-deliverable as addressed” he did his best to focus on other projects to distract himself.
3
Stella was flipping idly through her Health and Usage Monitoring System. You’d think the HUMS would show some sign of what was wrong with her but, as always, by the time it told her there was a problem it was too late anyway. But she didn’t have anything better to do while her pilot enjoyed her downtime.
Takara hadn’t even hooked up with a Stinger pilot this time. She was bedding down with a some moonrunner athlete. It was the latest sport approved for the New Olympics. With Earth out of bounds, there had been a marginal agreement among five of the remaining nations to adapt the sports to what was available—Luna. The high jump was now measured in dozens of meters, hurdles stood a story high, and running distances ranged in the thousands of kilometers. The Brazilians were sending a team from their outpost on Mars, and the Scots on Luna Farside were trying to use their power as hosts to resurrect caber-tossing though there were no trees from which to make the long heavy poles.
Her pilot’s pairing off with a civilian based on the moon meant that Stella saw even less of her than before. Takara still treated her like a person, even if she didn’t know that Stella had “woken up.” But she and Jess had agreed that humanity wasn’t ready to handle an artificial—as if she herself wasn’t somehow real—intelligence and they should just keep quiet about it for now.
Stella tried to find any enthusiasm for Luna security and decided that if India figured out how to fire their beam weapon right through the moon and cook the Olympic competition, all she could be bothered to do was get out of the way.
If only—she sighed as well
as any machine could; it was more like a gentle power surge that left her feeling unbalanced on her stabilizers. It was only her 824th thought about Jess today. She graphed the number of times she’d thought of him since his loss a year before. Flat line—just like Jess—an average of 2,321 times per day with a standard deviation of only—
Action Alert!
Action Alert!
Level Eight!
Mission parameters flooded into her high-priority comm channel. She slapped a hold on the message and let it spool into the queue.
Stella triggered max-rush recalls to the crew and began checking ship’s status.
She rolled through more of the message to see what she’d need.
It broke down to a one-ship assignment, going in fast and quiet. “Danger in-bound from the asteroid belt.” She’d need full stealth once past Mars orbit—blast hard then coast down onto the target. She’d have to nail the trajectory.
Standard crew of four and a dozen Delta Rangers—the DRs were the elite soldiers of the corps. If they were aboard, it was going to be hot and messy.
“Good morning, Stella.” At the standard double rap of Takara’s knuckles on Stella’s nose cone, she greeted her Captain.
“Good morning, Captain Olmsted,” she kept it rote and by the book. Besides, Takara had abandoned the memory of her true love and didn’t deserve more.
With only a small part of her attention on the four members of the ship’s crew, Stella continued her own inspection. She’d let things slip, a lot of things now that she looked.
She slammed out food and supply orders to the quartermaster. A quick call to the munitions team had a restocker arm lifting out of hatches in the hangar floor.
The DR team rolled in and Stella hummed impatiently while their leader flirted with Takara.
Wait!
If Takara was with someone military instead of a civilian…
Stella rerouted a dozen tasks to enter by different hatchways in order to keep the couple isolated. She slapped a hold on the restock request where Takara and the DR Senior Lieutenant were getting acquainted by the starboard midship’s thruster. It took a little doing, but she managed.
The Ides of Matt 2016 Page 11
