by Dan Moren
Antony tilted her head to one side, casting a regretful look at Kovalic. “We always like to believe that, Mr. Fielding.” She waved a hand at him and turned her attention to a display on the desk.
Kovalic let himself out. Once the door clicked shut behind him, he drew a deep breath and slowly exhaled. Over the last twenty years of service he’d been commended, chewed out, and dismissed out of hand by superior officers—but rarely in the same two-minute conversation.
There was a snort from nearby. “Yeah, the Old Wolf can have that effect on people.” Brody was leaning against the wall, arms crossed. “You need a minute?”
Kovalic shot him an irritated look, but didn’t reply, instead jerking his head in a “follow me” motion. There was no sign of the detail who had escorted him in; evidently they had better things to do than see him out.
“Jesus,” said Brody. “Where’s the fire?”
Kovalic stopped and turned around. “No, no, take your time, Mr. Brody. I love dropping onto arctic tundra before dawn on no sleep—it’s a hobby of mine. You want a cup of coffee? Can I whip up a couple of eggs for you?”
Brody raised his hands. “Sorry I asked.”
Kovalic brought his best drill sergeant’s stare to bear and allowed himself an inward smile as the man swallowed. Without another word, he spun on his heel and continued walking. Brody’s tentative footsteps followed. Some training was so deeply ingrained that it never really left you.
The two of them tromped down the stairs into the Ops Center, ignoring the curious glances of the few personnel still on duty—Kovalic trusted Antony would tell them that they’d seen and heard nothing. The longer the exact details of Eli Brody’s fate were in question, the better.
Once out in the corridor, Brody started to turn to the left, but Kovalic grasped his arm. “Where do you think you’re going?”
Brody frowned, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “My room, to get my stuff.”
“Really?” said Kovalic, crossing his arms. “Name one thing you own that I can’t have replaced in twenty-four hours.”
“But, my …” He trailed off as he apparently performed an inventory and came up short. “… comb?”
Kovalic eyed the bird’s nest on top of Brody’s head. “Lot of sentimental value, huh?” Firmly, Kovalic shifted his grip on Brody’s elbow and, not ungently, guided him back in the opposite direction.
“Okay,” muttered Brody, freeing his arm. “No need to get physical.”
Kovalic rolled his eyes and continued down the hallway. Finding the way out wasn’t hard; he retraced his steps to the lift he’d ridden down, where he punched the control to summon the elevator. The machinery began grinding away, the screech of metal on metal even more horrific in the cold. Kovalic rubbed his hands together, studying the man across from him.
His height had been in the file, but he was still taller than Kovalic had expected—the younger man had a couple of inches on him, though his somewhat gangly build made it seem like more. His nose had gone reddish, though Kovalic wasn’t sure whether from the cold or the alcohol he could smell on the man’s breath. Or both.
“Pretty sweet gig,” he commented.
“What?”
“Most guys help invade a planet, they get free room and board compliments of a military prison, but you …” Kovalic glanced around, nodding appreciatively. “You lucked out.”
“Oh, yes, so lucky. Cleaning latrines in the middle of an arctic wasteland. You know, most people never get to fulfill their dreams.”
“Prison’s worse. Trust me.” A cramped room with a bare cot and concrete block walls arose in his memory. It had been damp and cold all the time, though not perhaps as cold as here. His teeth ground together and he consciously pried them apart.
An objection had started to form on Brody’s lips, but it died as he made eye contact with Kovalic.
“Yeah, okay,” he said finally. “I was only in one for a little while. Right after the battle.”
“So, how’d you swing this?”
The kid avoided his gaze. “Antony was the warden. She went to bat for me, convinced the government to furlough me as a maintenance tech. Argued that with the planet in isolation, they might as well have an extra hand somewhere instead of just an extra mouth. Ended up as a two-for-one deal, turns out.” There was a touch of belligerence at the end there, and just the slightest curl of a fist.
So they’d sent the kid someplace he couldn’t get in trouble—and for good measure, they condemned Antony here for sticking up for him. Say a lot of things for the military, but they weren’t generally known for the touchy-feelies.
“I’ve been looking at your file,” said Kovalic. No need to tell Brody he’d committed almost the entire thing to memory. “Not a lot of folks from Caledonia itching to join the Illyrican military after, you know, being crushed under their boot heel during the war.” Earth’s two major colonies, Caledonia and Centauri, had fallen to the Imperium shortly after the homeworld had.
“Just because I flew for them doesn’t mean I subscribed to their politics.”
“So if it wasn’t out of a sense of patriotism and duty, then why? No offense, but you don’t strike me as much of a soldier.”
Brody’s cheeks reddened to match his nose, and his tone turned almost defensive. “I’m not.” His jaw clenched. “Look, I went to fly ships, and because it got me off that dirtball. I didn’t ask to be in a war.”
“I always worry more about the ones who do.” A certain eighteen-year-old private with delusions of grandeur came to mind. Much like Brody, that kid had learned about reality the hard way. But he was still walking and talking, and that counted for something.
They were interrupted by a chime signaling the elevator’s arrival; the doors slid open and Kovalic stepped in, Brody trailing after.
“What about you?” said Brody, when the doors closed. “I suppose joining the Commonwealth military isn’t so surprising for someone from Earth.”
Kovalic’s eyes flicked to him in surprise, quickly masked. “What makes you think I’m from Earth?” he said evenly, trying to suppress a grimace. Antony getting a read on him he could understand, but this kid? Maybe he was losing his touch.
“Caledonia’s just a wormhole jump away from Earth, so I’ve met my fair share of folks from the old world. Most never do manage to shake that accent—though, you ask me, that’s partially on purpose.” Brody shrugged, eyes rolling up. “Earthers always like to remind you where they’re from.”
Kovalic scratched his chin. To be honest, he’d never thought of himself as having an accent. Everybody else had accents. “Can I offer you a piece of advice, Brody?”
“Sure.”
“Talk less.”
He wasn’t entirely sure, but he thought the hand Brody raised to cough into might have been covering a smile. Disheveled as the kid might look, it was pretty clear that he still thought he was clever.
The elevator let them out into a hallway with a patina of frost, which they followed to a large, heavily shielded security door. Kovalic punched the release button on the wall beside it, and with a heaving groan, the door’s servos kicked in and it began to slide open. A gust of icy cold wind swirled through cracks, whipping a wispy tail of rapidly disintegrating snowflakes.
“Uh, I’m not really dressed for the occasion.” Brody plucked at the relatively thin sleeves of his work uniform.
“Don’t worry, we won’t be out there long. Our ride’s waiting.”
Kovalic turned up the collar of his jacket and slipped out through the still-widening crack in the door. He heard a deep breath from Brody as the underdressed man plunged out after him.
Snow and wind enveloped them—the few flakes that Kovalic had seen upon their arrival had apparently grown into something just short of a blizzard. Ice particles nicked at his face, melting even as they made contact with his skin. His nose started running.
At a noise from behind him, he turned to see Brody doubled over in a fit of coughing. Kovalic ha
d figured the man would have adjusted somewhat to the cold after having been stuck here for almost five years, but apparently he hadn’t spent a lot of time outside of the “comfortable” environs of the base.
Kovalic thumped the younger man on the back until Brody put his hands up, warding him off.
“Invigorating, isn’t it?” Kovalic shouted.
Brody just stared at him.
With a grin, Kovalic tugged him further onto the tundra. A thrumming permeated the air, and powerful lights cut through the darkness, refracting off the whirling flakes. The snow began blowing at them in even greater gusts.
“There’s our ride!” Kovalic hollered over the sound of the engines, pointing to the shuttle.
The ship’s thrusters were powering up, melting deep gouges in the snow around them, and its repulsors blew the flakes out from beneath, surrounding the vessel in its own little protective circle.
A hatch on the side of the ship slid open and a makeshift staircase unfolded, beckoning them into the blackness inside.
Brody’s eyes darted, panicked, between Kovalic and the shuttle. He yelled something over the noise, which Kovalic managed to interpret, after a moment, as “You want me to get on that?”
He gave Brody a curious look. “Obviously. How else did you think we were getting out of here?”
Brody’s face had turned as white as the snow surrounding them, and his expression reminded Kovalic of the young, pimply soldier who had escorted him into the base: pure, stark, untempered fear.
Brody wiped his hands against his trousers. “I—I—I can’t.”
Kovalic blinked. “Why the hell not?”
The bloodshot eyes flicked away from him. “I’m afraid of flying!”
Kovalic stared at him, dumbfounded. He’d read Brody’s personnel record front to back, and if there was one thing that every instructor and commanding officer had agreed on—besides his smartass-verging-on-insubordinate attitude—it was that Eli Brody was an ace pilot, the best many of them had ever seen. The man was born to fly.
Shaking his head, Kovalic closed the distance between them and put a hand on the other man’s shoulder.
“Brody.”
“Yes?” He looked up, hopeful.
“Get on the goddamned ship.”
CHAPTER THREE
In the list of experiences that Eli Brody hoped to recall on his deathbed—many, many years from now—the flight up from Sabaea’s surface would rank very near the bottom. His stomach churned and roiled from the moment he set foot on the shuttle’s entry ramp, and it kicked into overdrive as soon as they lifted off.
It had been four years since the last time he’d been on a ship, back when he was first transferred to Davidson Base. He’d thought that maybe the nausea and shaking would have passed with time, but if anything they seemed to have gotten even worse.
The very fact of the illness offended him; he’d been flying since he was a kid. He’d sat on his Aunt Brigid’s lap during her short haul trips between the Caledonian mines and Raleigh City. He’d logged hundreds of hours in every simulator he could get his hands on. At the academy, he’d put in more time in training ships then almost any other two members of his graduating class combined.
And in all that time he’d never had so much as a hint of space-sickness. Not a flutter, not a twinge, not even a burp.
Then came the Battle of Sabaea.
“Who the hell is flying this thing?” he muttered, raising his head from between his knees. “Didn’t anybody ever tell them that piloting and amphetamines don’t mix?”
The ship juked and shook as it ascended, every little jolt making Eli’s stomach lurch, dance, and twirl in time. Fielding, seated next to him, watched his distress in wry amusement—just one step short of full-blown sadism from Eli’s point of view.
Gripping the armrests so hard he worried he might wrench them off the seat, Eli lolled his head to one side and favored Fielding with a sickly look. “Enjoying yourself?”
“What can I say?” Fielding gave him a death’s-head grin. “The pilot who can’t stand flying? I’m a sucker for irony.”
He won’t be laughing when I throw up on those nice boots of his, thought Eli with a grim pang of satisfaction.
If the ascent was bad, the docking maneuver was worse. Like two beached whales mating, his flight instructor had once described the process, and this pilot seemed determined to wring every ounce of truth from that quip. The ships flopped and bucked against each other, flailing around until sheer persistence finally paid off.
When the clank of the docking collar’s seal reverberated through the hull, Eli offered up a silent prayer of thanks to whatever almighty power had seen fit to spare his life. He reached for the seat-belt release, but it slipped out of his shaking fingers. His second attempt was no better, and even a deep breath did little to banish the tremors.
“So,” said Kovalic. “You realize you’re going to have to do that all over again on the way down, right?”
Eli opened his mouth to fire off a choice rejoinder, but his stomach spasmed and heaved for the final time, and he scrambled free of his restraints just in time to dash for the head.
Cleaned up and newly minted—by virtue of a swig of mouthwash—Eli stepped onto the deck of the CMS Indefatigable.
“Kind of a stupid name, isn’t it?” offered up Eli as he followed Fielding down the narrow gunmetal corridors. The size of the ship, coupled with the fact that it maintained its own gravity, had helped trick his brain into thinking he was on solid ground—at least temporarily.
Fielding quirked an eyebrow. “It means ‘tireless.’”
“I know what it means, but it’s a pain in the ass to say. In-dee-fat-eeg-a-bull. The military always gives their ships these overblown names, as if to convince people that they’re totally invulnerable. And you know what? They aren’t. I’ve seen bigger ships than this blown into itty-bitty pieces.”
“What do you suggest?
“I don’t know. Honesty, I guess?” He smiled. “There was this old corvette at the academy used for training exercises: the ISC Dauntless. Its crew called it the Dentless because of the sheer number of engagements it survived. But the academy used it as bait in ambush scenarios during live-fire combat exercises, so we called it the Deathtrap.”
To Eli’s surprise, the other man laughed. The pair reached a T-intersection, and Fielding nodded to the right.
“When I was a private,” Fielding said suddenly, “we had a drill sergeant that would yell and scream his head off at us for not running fast enough, not doing enough push-ups, or generally being lazy no-good maggots. But it was the damnedest thing: when he got up close to yell at you, his breath always smelled like lavender.” He shook his head. “We used to call him Sergeant Lilac—not to his face, of course; we were lazy no-good maggots, but we weren’t stupid.” His eyes had gone unfocused. “I hadn’t thought of him in years,” he muttered.
“Was that on Earth?”
Fielding’s expression shifted into neutral. “Yeah,” he said. “A long time ago.”
They didn’t exchange a word for the rest of the walk. Eventually, Fielding came to a stop before a nondescript door; its placard bore no name, only an identification number: 3-174. He rapped on the metal with his bare knuckles and, at a response from within, slid the door open.
The room itself wasn’t much more distinctive than its door, but shipboard cabins never offered much in the way of personalization. This one had been fashioned into an office, though that didn’t mean much more than the addition of a small metal desk topped with a computer terminal. The normal stark blue-white light was softened by a warmer yellow glow from a decidedly non-standard-issue desk lamp.
Behind the desk sat the room’s only notable feature. The man was in his seventies by Eli’s estimation, mostly bald save for a thin fringe of white hair around his head that matched a pointed white mustache and neatly trimmed Vandyke, making him look like a bleached devil caricature. Like Fielding, he wore military-style c
lothes: a long-sleeved high-collared black shirt that, as with Fielding’s jacket, was devoid of any sign of rank or affiliation.
He set down a stylus and leaned back in his chair as Fielding and Eli entered. Brilliant blue eyes stood out against skin the color of tarnished bronze; they settled on Eli, seemingly taking him in at a glance.
“You must be Lieutenant Brody,” the man said. Something about his voice conveyed not just assuredness, but also an undertone of culture and learning that went far beyond the military. His slight accent rang a bell in Eli’s memory, but he couldn’t quite place it. Whatever it was, it had been a long time since he’d heard it.
“Just Brody,” said Eli, shifting restlessly from one foot to the other. Something about the man’s manner made him feel ill-at-ease, as though he had stumbled into an interrogation.
“Please, have a seat.”
The chair wasn’t comfortable, nor did Eli think it was meant to be; it was standard military issue, fit for everything from the officer’s mess hall to a prisoner’s cell. He squirmed as the cold metal leached out his body heat.
“I trust your trip up was satisfactory?”
Eli bit back a sarcastic comment about the bumpy ride. Fielding might take a ribbing, but something about this guy suggested he wasn’t the right person to crack wise to. “Uh. Yeah, sure.”
“Good, good. Can I get you anything? A cup of coffee? Some …” He glanced at his wrist, frowning. “Breakfast? Dear me, it is early, isn’t it?”
Eli’s stomach roiled audibly at the thought of food. He suppressed a burp that left his mouth tasting like acid. “Uh, I think I’ll pass, thanks.”
“Down to business, then. Mr. Fielding probably hasn’t told you why you’re here.”
“Not so much,” said Eli with a sideways glance at Fielding. “The guy’s a riddle wrapped in an enigma coated in a hard candy shell.”
Well, so much for avoiding the wisecracks.
The old man’s lips flickered in a brief smile. He didn’t say anything for a moment, just smoothed his neat, pointed beard between his thumb and forefinger and stared at Eli with those unnerving blue eyes.
