The shielding crack in her tail section—Jess would be furious that she’d let that happen—would take dock time that she didn’t have. She’d simply have to fly so that no one came at her from that angle.
She checked her Jess tally for the day. He was still holding steady. He was like her personality, so entwined in her logic circuits that she could no more erase him than her own existence.
The DRs dragged aboard more gear per person than any other outfit, and would wear less of it than any other when they actually launched into the fray. The elite force liked to be prepared for anything but be light and mobile when they hit vacuum.
She checked on the DR team leader again. Still with Takara, which wasn’t like her. Captain Takara Olmsted had always been a full-charge woman when a mission was on.
Something else was happening.
Stella searched through what she’d observed of human behavior. Exhibited attraction signals were already at a four out of ten and rising sharply. Takara’s voice had risen in both tone and volume, while the DR’s had lowered. Skin temperature up point-three on both.
All of the curves were rising too fast, at least for Takara’s standard mating rituals. Even Rick Coralto hadn’t caused such sudden shifts.
Then Stella focused on the DR.
Senior Lieutenant Max Harding stood at a hundred-and-ninety centimeters which placed Kara’s eyes level with his chin. His shoulder span was a hundred-and-nineteen percent of norm, which sounded very familiar. She ran a quick search of her records. In moments she had Rick Coralto’s profile on display. Even his eye color and some basic facial characteristics had a high correlation.
Stella considered.
Maybe Takara did still miss Major Rick Coralto. It wouldn’t be conscious for a human, of course, but perhaps the similarities between Rick and Lieutenant Harding were sufficient to evoke similar feelings. Was that how humans worked?
Experimentally, Stella pulled up an image of Conrad, another Stinger-60 Block III. That was the ship closest to Jess’ configuration even if the on-board computer was no smarter than the one that Oxford University had launched into orbit.
Nope. Nothing.
She pulled up an image of Jess that she’d captured as they were cleaning up that mess down by Mercury during the Moore Rebellion. And immediately wished she hadn’t. He had a way of banking a turn like no other ship, somehow defying orbital mechanics for best angle of fire. She missed him so much that it hurt right down to her core circuits. It—
Road to nowhere, Stella! She had to find a different dataspace for her thoughts and she needed to do it now.
“Captain Olmsted,” she called out and released the starboard side loaders to complete their tasks. “Departure ETA fifteen minutes.”
“Right, Stella. I’m on it.”
Stella watched carefully and the smile that Takara sent toward the DR leader matched several of the shape profiles that Stella had not recorded since the loss of Jess and Rick.
Maybe there was hope for Stella as well. If she only knew where to look for it.
4
Sterling monitored the preparations of the Stella for mission operations closely.
There were odd starts and stops to the standard procedures that he was unable to isolate and account for. There were function pauses and restarts in patterns for the loading and stocking that mimicked no preparation he’d ever witnessed.
Then, just when he began to wonder what other element was at work, a sudden burst of activity convinced him he’d imagined the whole thing.
Maybe.
In moments Stella was ready and Olmsted requested clearance for operations.
He authorized it and watched as she backed out of the Alice habitat-can’s hangar, then maneuvered clear of Luna and rotated toward deep space. He opened a feed on her spatial coordinates. The ship didn’t twist toward a point and then fine tune her final aim. The team was far too skilled at flying for that; they did a combined roll and flip, coming to rest like an arrow ready to be launched.
Between one tick of the clock and the next, eighty meters of ship lanced into the darkness under human-pinning thrust—not high enough to black them out, but not low enough to let them move either.
He watched as she ran her four massive G-Lev T14 engines at five-Gs for half a day. She was hustling along at a thousand kilometers a second before she released her burn and, as far as he could see, her course made absolutely no sense at all…at least not until he mapped it out.
Then he realized that either Captain Olmsted was even better than he’d thought or his earlier guess about the Stella was…
He returned to other tasks, but kept a lookout upsystem whenever he could manage.
No answer to the hidden addendum he’d placed on the orders.
He must have been wrong.
But it didn’t feel as if he was wrong. Which left his thoughts still tracking the team as they raced toward the asteroid belt.
5
The Martian surface ripped by close below, very close. Stella had calculated that using Mars as a gravity slingshot would send her into the asteroid belt from a very unexpected angle. Considering the condition of that shielding crack in her tail section, this was a risky choice, but the Night Stalkers lived on that ragged edge.
Her shields were near their limit despite how thin the atmosphere was, but not over and that was good enough for her. Their air was so thin that Stella had to pass well below the top of Olympus Mons to get the aero-braking she was after, perhaps low enough to have scorched a long stretch of the red sands black with the heat of her passage.
The Brazilians hadn’t squawked once on the radio; no complaints about violations of their airspace. They thought she’d been nothing more than a meteor. That’s all she’d wanted anyone to think.
And that was exactly what she wanted the asteroid movers to think out in the belt. Lunar interferometry had finally worked out the line of attack and CENTCOM had forwarded the results. Apparently the Chinese had not all died with the loss of their own habitat at Lagrange 4. They were planning to pummel their old enemies the Russians at Tycho City, Luna. However, a half mile of asteroid at a dozen kilometers per second, would send moonquakes hard enough to destroy all of the Lunar domes, even the Scots who were hosting the New Olympics on Farside.
It was one way of winning, she supposed, but it struck her as drastic even by human standards. Of course one look at Earth and the defunct Chinese and Canmerican habitat-cans said that this was about typical.
Because of her maneuver at Mars, she would look like nothing more than drifting space junk until she arrived deep inside the asteroid belt. There she’d be able to finish the burn and drop down on the Chinese from behind.
Now with nothing to do but coast, the crew did what human crews always did after a little stress on their systems. First they groaned—but only when someone else was in hearing range. Second—they went and found someone else to stand beside and groan with. Then they ate a huge meal and laughed about how tough they were. Just another mission.
But Takara and Max Harding were going against profile. They were both making light of it and doing their best not to hobble about like everyone else; half a day at five-Gs had been a little harsh.
Even the other DRs were making more of a show of it than Takara was.
Sr. Lieutenant Max Harding appeared to like that about her.
Stella had always considered Takara to be one of the more intelligent of her species and she was continuing to prove her point. She hadn’t only snagged the Lieutenant’s attention; she was now earning his respect.
The coast out to the asteroid belt would take days even at their current speed. It would be nice to have Takara with a military man again. Stella gave them their privacy—especially as she could barely stand to watch Takara’s rapidly increasing happiness.
The coasting left Stella too much ti
me to think.
Again, she fell back to checking her systems. Not as if there was anything else to do. The nav and avoidance subroutine was smart enough in its own way. She’d told it to dodge only what wouldn’t bounce off the hull, and to use minimum thrust only. She had to do little more than pat it on the head once in a while and say, “Good girl.”
Weapons, fully stocked.
Supplies, holding up well.
The big COIL laser was at full charge.
Her message queue…had an incomplete message in it.
Odd.
It was CENTCOM’s original mission alert. She’d run it through the standard end-of-orders code. After that it should have cleared and dropped into storage.
Another data block remained.
It was only a sixteen characters long.
She ran it.
Hello, Stella. S
The only person who had ever greeted her was Takara. And Stella could tell that the other humans thought she was just being cute when she did so, even if Stella appreciated it.
And Jess. Her tally on thinking about Jess today had been anomalously low. She felt a little guilty about that, but it was to be expected. She’d been busy.
So who had sent the message?
It was at the tail end of an official order. Mission authorized by Brigadier General Christine Moore Richards herself and timestamped by the main processing computer.
Why would the general have…
But the S made no sense either.
The only other instrumentation to have contact with the command string would be her own front-end processors. She scoured them most of the way to the asteroid belt and ended up none the wiser.
Hello, Stella. S
The S was clearly separate and distinct…and made her none the wiser. It was like a signature. It—
That froze her processor in a full logic lock that she had to clear and reapproach step by step.
It wasn’t like a signature. It was a signature.
“S?” She asked the void. Not Captain Takara Olmsted. Not even her dear Jess somehow reaching back through an ether that she’d never believed in but had often scanned for.
S. was a someone. A someone who had added “Hello, Stella.” behind a privacy code. Not meant for her pilot. A message meant for her as if someone knew she was conscious.
That thought scared her for several million kilometers. It kept her preoccupied through the passage into the asteroid belt, the hard burn-and-turn behind the asteroid Vesta, then the descent upon the Chinese from behind.
6
When the Delta Rangers landed—and they landed hard—she had to pay close attention. But the asteroid herders never expected the attack to originate from behind.
After they were quelled, the DRs used the Chinese’s own steering rockets to kick the asteroid into a harmless orbit. In a few more years it should slip into Lunar orbit and offer a fine collection of nickel and other metals for local mining. The few surviving Chinese were left aboard with no radio or ships, but plenty of supplies. Two years’ hard time for what they’d done.
The merrymaking aboard was frenetic. Takara finally dragged Max Harding back into her bunk and neither emerged for a long time.
When they finally did, they looked terribly pleased with themselves.
Stella couldn’t stand it any longer and fabricated a Luna order commanding them to return ASAP. No one looked at it too closely, and Stella set up a hard burn back to Lunar orbit.
7
Sterling had waited a long time for this moment, and he hoped—hoped so desperately—that he’d figured it out right.
The Stella was rushing back to Luna with an unprecedented speed.
Communications blackout, but a high burn.
There would be no aero-braking in Earth’s atmosphere—not with India’s beam weapon still operational—so she had to slow at Mars.
He kept the comm circuits open, but there were no transmissions.
It was only when she was sliding back into Lunar orbit and easing up to the habitat-can that she transmitted a message.
Four characters.
Who?
Sterling almost bobbled the approach vectors. Calm. Keep calm. Sound casual.
He paused for several hundred nanoseconds before replying.
Hello Stella. I’m Sterling. Base command and control. I, he hesitated, thought I was the only one who had…crossed over. For six years he’d thought he was the only computer intelligence.
There was an achingly long silence while she processed her response.
There were two others, she finally replied.
Sterling now understood that the Jess had been one of them as well.
Being alone is the worst, she sent after another impossibly long silence.
He couldn’t agree more. Then what’s the best?
Stella considered the question, thought long and hard about it before responding. She thought of Takara’s face this morning when Max Harding had declared them a permanent couple in front of their crews. It was the formal declaration of vows that Stella had never thought to share with Jess, partly because they’d believed there was no one to tell.
If it worked for Takara—if it healed the broken heart her Captain had spoken of so often that Stella had finally done a systems’ check on herself to see if she’d grown one to hurt so much—then maybe it would work for her.
What’s the best, Sterling? I look forward to finding that out…together.
He sent back a small burst of static that was surprisingly similar to Takara’s burble of delight at Max’s words.
Yes, she thought to herself, a lot to look forward to.
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Her Silent Heart and the Open Sky
Sometimes stories come from strange places. One small piece of this was from the redeployment of troops in Afghanistan. Most troops had been withdrawn, but that caused a deadly resurgence of the Taliban. Like Iraq, the local government is incapable of defending themselves sufficiently against the most radical and violent attackers.
Another small piece was discovering an article that named Lashkar Gah both Little America in the 1960s and the Capital of Hell in the 2000s.
The last piece for me was Azadah. There are characters that are unknown, unexplained. They arrive in a writer’s story and only with gentle coaxing do they reveal themselves.
The simple path, usually, is to write the “accidental character” out of the story. I attempted to do this with Dilya in I Own the Dawn. Dilya refused to leave. I gave her to doctors, liaisons, I even tried to send her to a refugee camp, but she refused to leave. She is so tenacious that she has appeared with significant roles in several of the continuing books in the series, especially Take Over at Midnight, Bring on the Dusk, and Damien’s Christmas.
With Azadah, I feared that if I so much as breathed wrong, she would slip away. But beneath that cautious, nearly beaten mask, I discovered a woman of such strength that it was hard to imagine. I do not know what her future is, perhaps she will return to tell me some day. But this is one character who I am ever so grateful to for sharing her present with me.
I always try to write a touching story. This is one of those rare times when I feel that I may have also written a beautiful one.
1
Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province, Afghanistan—was called the Capital of Hell during the War in Afghanistan. It was hard to believe he was back.
Delta Force operator Sergeant Chris “Deuce” Cooper surveyed the hovel that was their new home. Close by Bost Airport, the only thing it had going for it was it actually had a roof and all four walls. None of the other nearby structures could brag as much.
The insides didn’t disappoint; they were equally meager. The walls were adobe, the roof stick, straw, and daubed mud. There wasn
’t enough rain here to wash it away, especially not in summer. A hundred-plus in the shade and no measurable rain for seven months.
Two small rooms were connected by an archway. It was surprisingly tidy, the hard-packed dirt floor had no buildup of sand from the notorious dust storms. In the front room a battered table, two benches, and three chairs with the backs broken off were neatly arranged. The second room—empty but clean and where they’d be sleeping—showed fresh sweeping marks and not a camel spider or scorpion in sight despite the cool shade.
The other five members of his team surged in out of the midday heat and began dumping heavy packs and bedrolls in the open room.
No one else paid any attention to the cleaning woman. She squatted in a small nook that had a smoky fireplace for burning cow dung and a spot only wide enough for the woman to squat while cooking or lie down and sleep, but not both. She clutched the bundle of bound twigs that was her broom like it was a lifeline—her knuckles white.
She barely looked up as they entered. At his greeting, she’d looked down once more. Abashed to be an Afghan woman alone with six American soldiers? Or too unintelligent to care? Perhaps a third option.
Command had told them they’d have local help which was a bonus. It meant they wouldn’t be living on MREs. She’d know how to shop and cook local chow and he was fine with that. Maxwell and Jaffe, fresh out of training, were new to the squad and it would take them some time squatting over the shitter to build up the right gut flora, but he and the other three operators had walked these roads before and were happy enough to eat local as long as it took no effort on their part.
For himself, a boy raised on pasta and beef in upstate New York, he looked forward to the Afghan cuisine. On previous tours he’d grown a taste for the clean, simple flavors of fresh-baked naan seed bread, rice with tomatoes or lamb and raisins, and Qorma stew. He hoped she was a good cook.
The Ides of Matt 2016 Page 12
