by Marko Kloos
“You’re on, sir.”
Dunstan took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
What have I done to piss off the gods that I’d have to live through times like these twice? he thought before he touched the TRANSMIT field.
“All hands, this is the commander. There has been a surprise attack on our home world. The fleet is now at Planetary Defense Condition 1.”
He paused, momentarily unsure of how much information to give his crew, who were all ready to go home, none prepared to unpack their shipboard bag again and face an unlimited deployment. He still remembered how he had felt when the declaration of war had come across to the fleet nine years ago. The tensions had ramped up gradually back then. Everyone had been able to see it coming. This was brutal in its suddenness. Minotaur had a little over 250 crew members, and statistically speaking, it was likely that at least a few of them would be from arcology Norfolk-9. Telling them about the nuclear strike would only add the agony of that uncertainty to the shock of the PLADEC-1 announcement.
“I will share more information as it comes in. For now, we are safe, but we’re adrift with no power, propulsion, or gravity. We sent out an emergency request for assistance, and we’re just a few hundred klicks from Rhodia One, so we will get assistance to get us the rest of the way. We will rise to this challenge just like we have done before, and we will come out just like we always do.”
He closed his eyes and gathered his thoughts for a moment before continuing. When he opened his eyes again, he saw that every member of the AIC was looking at him.
“I won’t try to claim we’re the best and most powerful ship in the fleet, or that we’re blessed by the war gods, or some other horseshit another commander would serve up to motivate his crew,” he continued. “We all know that the old girl was a hard-ridden hand-me-down already when we got her. And don’t any of you tell me that wasn’t your very first thought when you reported to your new command, and you stepped on that shitty worn-out deck liner at the main airlock for the first time.
“But she took care of us, and we took care of her. And I will claim that we have the best crew in the fleet, and I’ll fight to the death anyone who tries to shed doubt on that. Nothing that happens after we dock at Rhodia One will take that away from any of us. We may not be the shining heroes in the spotless flagship. But we all know how to do our jobs, and we do them well with what we are given, because we are very good at what we do.
“Whether we serve together or apart, don’t ever forget where you were when all of this started. Don’t forget the faces of those who stood the watch with you. When we cleaned pirate gunships out of our shipping lanes. When we went toe to toe with a heavy gun cruiser twice our size and four times our firepower and fought them to a draw.
“All of this will be a footnote in a history book someday. But those of us who were there will know what happened, and who made it happen. And now I am wasting emergency power, so I’ll cut this short. But know that I am proud to have served with you all. And know that I would be happy to let any of you buy me a drink in any bar in the system. Commander out.”
Dunstan closed the channel and leaned back in his couch with a sigh.
“I have a news feed that has a current visual from Kelpie Peninsula, sir,” Lieutenant Mayler said.
“Can you bring it up on a bulkhead screen, please?”
“Aye, sir.”
Mayler opened another screen and flicked it against the forward AIC bulkhead, where it expanded to fill the available space. The footage was shot from a very high altitude, but the visual was unambiguous. Norfolk-9 was a thousand-meter pyramid of titanium, composites, and steel, a hundred million tons of mass anchored twenty floors into the ground, and not even a tactical nuke going off in close proximity was enough to bring an arcology down. But there were thousands of fires large and small burning on the shattered eastern and southern facades, and it was clear that many thousands were dead down there, maybe even tens of thousands. The angry-looking dark smoke from the fires was already billowing thousands of meters into the sky. To Dunstan, it looked like a funeral pyre of world-shaking proportions.
“All leaves have been canceled. They’re calling up the ready reserve,” Bosworth said. The stream of news on the screen of his XO station kept refreshing itself, piling alerts on top of alerts, a rushing cascade of words. “Command has ordered a total flight stop for all traffic in and out of Rhodian space except for military units, effective immediately.”
“What does it all mean?” Midshipman Boyer asked from the helm station. Dunstan turned his head to look at her.
“What it means, Boyer, is that someone out there is wishing for a war. And it looks like fleet command is about to grant them their wish.”
CHAPTER 21
IDINA
Idina had packed her gear the previous night like any good trooper did before a transfer, but that left her nothing to do in the morning. She didn’t want to scrub down her quarters for the fifth time, and there was no point in making herself more miserable by drawing out the goodbyes with Fifth Platoon and the rest of the company, so she went for a walk around the perimeter of the base one last time, committing all the details to memory.
She was standing at the fence between the main part of the base and the air and space field, watching the flow of shuttles and gyrofoils taking off and landing, when her comtab sounded an incoming vidcom alert. She opened a screen in front of her with her thumb and forefinger. The caller was a Rhodian lieutenant she didn’t know, but from his surroundings, she could tell that he was in the security office at the main gate.
“This is the officer of the watch. You have a visitor at the liaison building, Colors Chaudhary. Can you confirm that you know this person?”
He sent an image of her visitor as required by the gate guard security protocol. Idina looked at the face on the hologram and smiled.
“Yes, sir, I do. On my way. Please tell her I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“I almost didn’t recognize you,” Idina said to Dahl when she walked into the JSP’s liaison building. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in civilian clothes before.”
The Gretian police captain stood at the front of the room next to the briefing lectern, just like she always did at the beginning of their joint patrols. She was wearing her hair in the usual tight braid, but the civilian trousers, shirt, and thermal vest she was wearing looked so wrong that it almost caused cognitive dissonance in Idina’s brain.
“I am sure you are surprised to find out that I even own any,” Dahl said.
Idina walked up to the lectern, and the two women regarded each other for a few moments.
“You shouldn’t have come all the way out here on your day off,” Idina said. “I’m sure you have better things to do than to see me off.”
“Oh, please,” Dahl said. “Like what? I would just have breakfast, clean the living space twice, and then go to the office anyway by lunchtime, out of boredom. And we have been patrolling together for three months. It would seem wrong not to say goodbye properly.”
“Well, I’m glad to see you one last time,” Idina said. “I’m sorry I have to leave you to deal with this mess by yourself.”
“I am sure Sergeant Noor will be an able replacement. But I would rather see you in the other seat of the gyrofoil tomorrow night—that is true.”
“I’ll try to get another deployment,” Idina said. “And when I do, I’ll volunteer for a JSP assignment from the start. They usually give preference to troops who have done the job before. Cuts the need for familiarization.”
“I am sure I will still be on patrol when you do,” Dahl said.
“I hope so. Things are getting hot out there. You’ve done your share. Let someone else stick out their neck for the JSP for a while.”
“I am afraid I have done this job for so long that I am just no good for anything else at this point.”
“That’s supposed to be my personal lament,” Idina said.
“Maybe we bot
h are exactly where we need to be.”
“Maybe,” Idina agreed. “Gods, I hope that’s the case. We’ve got fifty years in uniform between us. It’s a little late for second thoughts now.”
“You are still young. I am the one who is three years from mandatory retirement. Maybe I can come visit you once they push me out of the door with a pension. If they allow Gretians on your planet again by then.”
“I’ll make sure they allow you in,” Idina said. “You’ve paid for the privilege, I think.”
“I am glad you think so. And I hope you think a little better of this place now. Not all of us agreed with the war. Or the invasion of Pallas.”
“I’ve lost too much here to ever forget,” Idina replied. “And I sure as hells can’t bring myself to forgive. But you don’t need my forgiveness. You had nothing to do with any of it. And if I gave you the impression in the beginning that I thought all Gretians were the same, I’m sorry.”
Dahl nodded.
“It would be nice to see you again one day. Here or on Pallas. Or anywhere in between.”
Dahl had a bag slung over her shoulder, which she now swung around to the front of her body. Then she opened it and took something out.
“I do not know if this is a Pallas custom, so do not be offended if it seems inappropriate to you. I understand you may not care for a keepsake from your time on Gretia. But I wanted to give you this as a token of my gratitude for our time together.”
She handed the item to Idina. It was a folded piece of clothing. When Idina touched it, the unmistakable organic feel of real animal hide greeted her fingers. She unfolded it slowly in her hands. It was a jacket made from heavy cowskin that had been tanned black.
“They issued these until about ten years ago,” Dahl said. “They are sort of a marker for the old breed of officers, the veterans. Everything about the new clothing is better. The new jackets are synthetic. Lighter, faster to dry, easier to clean. But when it came time to turn in the old gear, most of the old-timers kept their old jackets and reported them lost or beyond repair.”
“That’s yours,” Idina said. “I can’t take that with me.” The jacket in her hands probably weighed two kilos or more, and if that was indeed real leather from live Gretian steers instead of vat-grown leather or synthetic replicate, it was worth thousands of ags in material alone.
“I still have my own,” Dahl said. “I found a colleague who is close to your build, and whose midsection has expanded considerably in the last ten years. So I talked him out of it. Do not worry. I would not give up my own even under threat of death. But I figured that you should have one of your own. If you care to keep it, that is. You, too, have paid for the privilege.”
Idina folded the jacket again and held it to her chest with one arm.
“Thank you,” she said. Then she held out her hand, and when Dahl moved to take it, she seized the other woman’s forearm in a firm one-handed grip, the Pallas Brigade greeting and farewell.
“When we aren’t in uniform anymore, we’ll meet up,” Idina said. “Here or on Pallas, or anywhere in between. And we’ll wear our steerhide jackets and have drinks and bore the shit out of the other patrons with our stories.”
“If the gods have any goodwill left for us at all,” Dahl said. “And if they do not, we will tell them to stuff themselves. And then go do it anyway.”
The orbital shuttle in front of the transit lounge was a Gretian design, part of the military inventory the Alliance had taken over with the rest of the base. It was shaped like a slender arrowhead and painted in what Idina guessed had been a brilliant titanium white with orange accents once upon a time. Now it was flecked in various shades of gray and brown and black, and the paint had scrapes and scuffs everywhere. The Alliance had elected to keep utilizing the Gretian equipment because it was there and because it interfaced with the spin station overhead without a fuss. From what she heard, they had expected the Gretian shuttle fleet to last maybe two more years after the occupation had started, but now they had been here for half a decade, and the birds were still lifting off and landing reliably every day despite their obvious surface wear.
If they engineer their duty clothing as well as they do their spaceships, this thing will outlast me without popping a thread even if I decide to go to sleep in it for the next fifty years, Idina thought as she tucked the leather jacket Dahl had given her into her gear bag before putting it into the cargo conveyor’s loading chute. Then she walked through the boarding door and plodded across the metal gangway that connected the transit lounge with the main airlock of the shuttle. Now that she had said her goodbyes, she wasn’t much for lingering and taking in some final impressions. She had all the memories she’d ever need of the place, and if it wasn’t for the kinship she felt with Dahl, she would have been skipping merrily all the way to the shuttle airlock while humming a happy tune.
Her fellow passengers were mostly Rhodians and Palladians, with a few Acheroni and Oceanian marines sprinkled here and there. The Pallas Brigade troops she passed on the way to her assigned gravity couch nodded at her respectfully. A lot of those faces seemed impossibly young to her. Most of the troops who had received their kukris with her were now either dead or retired, and the former group was considerably larger than the latter. Maybe it was the knowledge that she was being sent home early like a worn-out piece of machinery, but as she strapped into her couch, she felt a deep and profound fatigue that seemed to go all the way to her bones.
Maybe a year or two as the brigade museum curator is all I have left in me, she thought.
She went through the launch prep and listened to the automated briefings with her brain on autopilot, knowing full well that none of the safety features would change the fact that her fate would be out of her hands for the ninety minutes it took to get to the orbital spin station. Then the hull of the shuttle vibrated as the service lines and gangway retracted for takeoff and the engines came alive.
“We are cleared for departure. Launch sequence initiated. Prepare for main engine ignition in thirty seconds,” the flight deck announced to the passengers. Idina closed her eyes and leaned back in her gravity couch in anticipation of the g forces she’d feel momentarily. The Gretian shuttles didn’t have gravmag units fitted, so the couches would do all the work to compensate for the thrust from the engines. This was the part of the trip she usually disliked the most.
The thrumming from below died down gradually. A few moments later, the hull was silent again. They spent the next minute in silence. In the cabin around her, some troopers started chuckling and talking in low voices.
Great, Idina thought. I got the defective shuttle. But I guess it’s better for the stupid thing to break now than halfway up to the station.
“All passengers, our launch clearance has been canceled. Please maintain position and remain in your harnesses until the flight deck signals the all clear.”
It took a few more minutes for the all clear to come from the flight deck. Idina unbuckled her harness and raised her couch into the egress position to climb out of it. Outside, there was clattering and clanging as the gangway returned to the side of the shuttle and the service lines locked back into their receptacles.
“Now what the hells is going on, Colors?” the young private in the seat next to hers asked.
Idina shrugged.
“I haven’t the slightest idea, Private. I guess we’ll find out in a minute. But I’m guessing we won’t be docking at the spin station in ninety minutes.”
Annoyed, Idina walked back across the gangway with short steps that made the metal clang. Nothing on the outside of the shuttle gave any indication why they had aborted the launch. There were no emergency pods pulling up on the outside, and nobody had directed them to hurry with the disembarkation, so she guessed it wasn’t a critical technical defect.
She didn’t even register how quiet it was inside the transit lounge until she was already half a dozen steps into it. Everyone in the room was paying attention to the information sc
reens on the wall, which all showed the same visuals, high-altitude shots of a structure on fire. All around her, people were opening smaller screens on their comtabs to check their own information sources. Idina looked at the feed on the lounge screens, and a sinking feeling materialized in her stomach.
“What’s happening, Corporal?” she asked a nearby brigade trooper.
“There’s been a nuclear strike on Rhodia, Colors,” the young corporal said. “Just a few minutes ago.”
“You have got to be joking.”
The corporal just shook his head. He turned his attention back to the nearest screen, and Idina followed suit. The images on the screen were underscored by a scrolling band of text updates.
. . . WARHEAD IN THE TWENTY-KILOTON RANGE. PRELIMINARY REPORTS SUGGEST TWENTY THOUSAND CASUALTIES, BUT THE INITIAL ESTIMATE IS ALMOST CERTAIN TO CLIMB. RHODIAN FLEET COMMAND HAS ISSUED A PLANETARY DEFENSE CONDITION ONE ALERT FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE THE GRETIAN WAR. EMERGENCY PERSONNEL ON THE PLANET ARE IN FULL MOBILIZATION . . .
Who the hells got a nuke through those defenses? Idina thought. This has got to be a mistake.
But then one of the screens showed an inset from a sensor feed on the ground. From the perspective, Idina could tell that it was maybe fifty kilometers away from the event. The mushroom cloud from the thermonuclear detonation was unmistakable. The sight of it made Idina’s heart sink with dread. Fusion plants didn’t explode when they malfunctioned. Only a high-order fission event would produce such a cloud, and the only use anyone had for that dirty and dangerous old technology was in atomic warheads, precisely because the tech was dirty and dangerous.
“What did they hit?” she asked the corporal.
“One of the arcologies. They say it’s on fire. The Rhodies went to PLADEC-1.”
“Well, I fucking bet they did.”
Every single duty comtab in the room went off with the attention-seeking chirp of a military priority message. All around her, there was a flurry of movement as everyone took their devices out of their pockets or made screens in the air in front of them to check the incoming comm.
