Homer felt such a flood of relief that for a moment he became lightheaded. He took a slow, careful breath and for the first time since the battle it came easily. He picked up his spoon and took his first bite of oatmeal. It tasted extraordinary.
“Kill their siblings? That’s pretty dark, sir.”
“I am a very bad man, Mister Alexander.”
He said it lightly, but Homer knew people often hid the truth in jest. Did the captain really believe that about himself?
Major J. C. Merderet looked away from the flux welder as it attached the big magnetic anchors to the souped-up utility pod. She regretted having ordered it. The austere, functional lines of the utility pods—the one-person vehicles the engineering crew used to make repairs on the exterior of the ship in vacuum—had a sort of beauty which the improvised magnetic anchor and weapon pack had completely destroyed.
She saw Wisnowski, her wing sergeant major, stick his head down through the overhead hatch and wave to her.
“Old Man’s on the way, Ma’am.”
“Sergeant Major, you watch who you’re calling old, you. He’s younger than me.”
“You’d never know it to look at you, Ma’am,” he answered with a grin.
Merderet turned back to the utility pod but only as an excuse to avoid eye contact with anyone else. She needed to collect her thoughts and put on her game face. As squid officers went, Captain Bitka was one of the better ones, but he was still a squid.
The tremor had returned to her left hand. She watched her hand tremble for a few seconds and then clenched it in a fist. That stopped it. The tremors didn’t seem to be coming any more frequently, which was good. Probably not neurological, just psych, which figured. Her biomonitor would have picked up any serious physiological problem.
Just psych. Tough it out.
“Congratulations, Captain,” she said as soon as Bitka rode the manual conveyor down through the hatch to the machine shop in forward engineering. “Damned fine shootin’. Two long ships dead and one helluva rescue.”
“‘Boats’ Wainwright was the miracle-worker on the rescue, Major,” Bitka said once he stepped off the conveyor and to the deck. “He came up with the idea of docking the stern section of their first ship with the surviving habitat module from the second one, then had Lieutenant Ma’s A-gang help the bugs get their stand-by reactor running to give them power. I don’t know how he did it in twelve hours, but those roaches ought to make him their new god.”
“They could do worse, sir. Seems we got a bit more gravity this morning, too.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” he said. “I kicked our acceleration up to over a tenth of a gee, going to damn near drain the HRM tanks but it will get us there six days sooner. These guys have seen too many of our tricks. We have to speed it up, get this thing wrapped up. So, do you have a workable assault plan for hitting the Destie-Seven-Echo highstation?”
“Yes, sir. Grab ’em by the throat and choke the shit out of ’em till they say je me rends!”
“Grab them by the throat?”
“In a manner of speaking, sir. Life-support. They got thick security at all the C3I nexi on that station, but we think we can take and hold life-support at a lower cost.”
“By we you mean . . . ?”
“Me, my two company commanders, my Ops boss, and my wing sergeant major. Consensus plan, sir.”
“Okay. And the intel on where their defenses are thick? Where did that come from?”
J. C. knew what he was getting at and made one quick nod of agreement. “Yes, sir, it’s all from the alien prisoner Te’Anna. If we’ve got anything better I’ll be happy to redraft the plan based on that.”
The captain squinted and scratched his close-cropped hair, then shook his head.
“No, we don’t. Hell, I know that’s all we have. I’m just not crazy about it.”
“I ain’t neither, sir.”
“No chance of just threatening them with bombardment? After what we did to their complex on Destie-Four, that should have some credibility.”
“Well, that’s your department, sir, and you’re doing pretty good at engineering surrenders. If it works out that way, that smacks. But when they call your bluff, we’re ready to go.”
“When, huh? You think they’ll know it’s a bluff.”
“Well, sure. How we gonna get home if we blow up the one place can fix our jump drive? Bet they figured that out by now. Meantime, we been turning your utility pods into ugly-ass death machines, along with some help from Lieutenant Ma’s A-gang. Adapt, improvise, overcome. One more thing, sir, it’s important I take this ride with ’em.”
“We’ve gone over this before. I can’t afford to lose you, Major.”
“I never bucked you before, but with respect, sir, this time it’s different. What you can’t afford is for this assault to go south. If we blow it, game over. If we pull it off, we probably won’t need to drop again. But either way we get exactly one shot at it.”
The captain frowned and then asked the question she knew was coming.
“Is that the only reason?”
“No, sir. There’s a personal reason as well, but I didn’t mention it because it shouldn’t influence your decision.”
“Or yours,” the captain shot back.
“Understood sir, and I can’t promise it didn’t. But even if it did, that don’t change the rest of it. Best place for me is controlling the assault wave.”
Captain Bitka studied her. She wondered what he thought he saw. He shifted uncomfortably before he spoke, and when he did it was slowly, thoughtfully.
“You know, when we get back—assuming we do—Somerset and Thibodaux are going to be heroes.”
Somerset and Thibodaux were the two Marines who had died with the landing party.
“Way I see it, sir, they’re heroes whether we get back or not, but I know what you mean. People will know they were heroes.”
“Yes. I want to put Thibodaux in for the Medal of Honor. I watched the vid again.” He paused and closed his eyes just for a moment before continuing, not much longer than if he’d just blinked, but a little longer. “He died trying to get to the XO, trying to save her.”
He probably believed that, J. C. thought, maybe needed to believe it. She hesitated before replying.
“Sir, I don’t think that’s true. I mean, put him in for the medal, I think he deserved it, but don’t do it for the wrong thing.”
“Major, I saw him reaching for her.”
She needed him to let her take this next ride, but she was damned if she’d tell a lie over the body of a dead Marine to get it. How to make him understand about Thibodaux, though, that was another thing.
“Thibodaux was in Delta Company, my old command, sir. Went down with me in the first wave on K’tok, landed a hundred meters from the downstation. I saw him come down and even in battle armor I knew it was him, just the way his feet touched the ground. Lord, he was one beautiful, graceful man, him. Funny, we travelled over a hundred and fifty light-years from Earth to do that assault drop on K’tok, and where do you think he come from? Pointe a la Hache, Louisiana, just two parishes over from where I grew up. What do you think of that?
“Sir, Andre Thibodaux was a coon-ass no-nonsense Marine who knew the score. We all watched that vid too, sir, quite a few times. Drank some beers and cried some tears. Near as we can tell, he killed two Desties and crippled another, barehanded, before he died. I can tell you that when Thibodaux made that lunge at Lieutenant Running-Deer, both he and she was mortally wounded, and I believe he knew it. He wasn’t trying to save her, sir.”
“Then . . . why?”
“She was the only one carrying a sidearm. Thibodaux was trying to get to her gauss pistol, take a couple more Desties with him. If he’s going to get a medal, give it to him for that. I know you’d rather it be for him tryin’ to save a life, but all due respect, that ain’t the business we’re in, sir.”
She watched the captain think about that, or th
ink about something, who knew what?
Then he sighed. “I know, Major. I know. When your Marines go into that highstation, I don’t want to lose one of them if I can help it. I’d say go in guns blazing if it’d keep them alive, cut down anything that looks like resistance. But we have to remember—they have to remember—every Destie they kill might be the one who knows how to fix our drive. Taking that station isn’t worth a can of navy beans if it doesn’t get us home.”
“Understood, sir, but there’s no way to make that tactical call by remote control. All you can do is put the assault wave over there and trust the judgment of whoever’s leading it.”
The captain watched the petty officers work on the utility pod for a while and then gave her a sour look of surrender. “Shit. Okay, you win. You lead the assault wave. But you better not get shot, Major.”
There were worse things than getting shot, J. C. thought as the captain rode the conveyor up through the hatch.
Laptoon Haykuz found Captain Bitka where the watch officer—the “Officer of the Deck” the Humans called her—had told him he would be: in the fabricator compartment in forward engineering. He would have become lost were it not for the frame numbers displayed prominently at the various bulkheads. Forward engineering was at frame sixty-two in the main hull. After months of living in a wheel, where everything eventually linked up with everything else again, finding his way in a straight line was surprisingly disorienting, but he grew accustomed to it by the time he had made his way from the lifts aft through the docking bay, past the auxiliary bridge, missile room, and the long doorless passages which he knew traversed the enormous liquid hydrogen tanks.
Haykuz was becoming used to so many different things, he wondered—in the event he actually survived to return home—how he would ever adapt to his old life. That the current watch officer, the officer in charge of the ship and everyone on duty on it, was a female, he no longer found odd enough to comment on. The only thing odd about the moment was that he did not find it odd at all.
On Varoki warships there were no female personnel of any rank, nor were there any in government or positions of authority in business or education. A handful of Varoki nations had begun to adopt a less traditional view of gender roles, but only because they were weak and powerless among the Varoki, and so sought influence among the Humans and the other like-minded species.
Or was that really the case? Was it really weakness which drove them to break with the past? It was what he had been taught, had always believed, but now he wondered. Perhaps their weakness liberated them. Perhaps power and influence were heavy chains which kept a nation from growing. Perhaps.
The stench of the fabricator room assailed him as soon as he entered. The captain, speaking with a crewperson, nodded a greeting to him but turned back to the swarthy human male.
“It’s basically a Databot Seventeen-Thirty,” Captain Bitka explained to the crewman. “King Defense Industries licensed it, put a different casing around it, slapped their own name on the outside, and called it the M-Seven, because it sounded more military. They hardened about five parts against electromagnetic pulse, made sure the Navy specs were written to specify those five special modifications, and then charged about two and a half time the street value of a Seventeen-Thirty. That’s how you make money doing business with the Navy, Cisneros.”
“How’s that, sir? First screw us blind and then saddle us with this broke-dick piece of shit?”
Haykuz felt his ears fold back defensively and was surprised to hear Captain Bitka laugh. Was that sort of casual disrespect of the service tolerated?
“Well,” the captain answered, “hire a retired officer from BuOrd as a lobbyist to write the specifications the way you want them, and then persuade whoever it takes to get them adopted. That’s the legal way you screw someone blind. But that’s not our concern, Cisneros. Despite all the trouble this thing is giving you, the Seventeen-Thirty is basically a good fabricator. It’s just not very operator friendly, which might sound like a bad thing, but it does tend to generate additional training and field modification revenue streams for the manufacturer. The problem’s all in the rear top injectors. I’m willing to bet they are saturating your rear mold cavity and you’re getting blowout and overfills. Right?”
“Yes, sir.”
The captain then began a long back and forth conversation with the technician, laced with references to injector nozzles and feed temperatures which completely escaped Haykuz, but by the end clearly satisfied and impressed the crewman.
“Keep this guy running, Cisneros,” the captain said by way of conclusion. “It’s the best fabricator we have for turning out thermal pipe. We might not be as lucky next time as we were in this fight. Those big-ass radiators of ours stick way the hell out and will tend to get shot up. The quicker we can fabricate new pipe and get it installed, the quicker we can get the reactor back to maximum power. Maximum power is good.”
“Yes, sir.”
The captain took another look around—a longing look, Haykuz thought—and nodded.
“Okay, carry on, Cisneros.” He turned and walked carefully to Loptoon in the gliding shuffle of low gravity. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Mister Haykuz. We had some trouble with this fabricator during the rescue operation and I wanted to make sure we had it under control. Besides, I like hanging around the machine shop. I like the smell of working fabricators. Nothing quite like it.”
No, Haykuz thought, there was nothing like that smell of ozone and hot composite. Dreadful. How strange to be nostalgic for it. They walked together into the main corridor. While they were under acceleration it had become a shaft leading up through the center of the main hull, and they stood together on one of the hand conveyor platforms which carried them up along one side of the shaft.
“Your description of procurement in your navy sounds depressingly familiar, Captain Bitka. I sometimes fear the Varoki way of doing things may have corrupted the species we imagined we were helping.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about it, Mister Haykuz. I don’t think the Varoki had a thing to teach Humans about graft and corruption. If anything, I’d say it’s the other way around.”
Haykuz could not dispute that. Humans were known throughout the Cottohazz as its most daring, accomplished, and resourceful criminals. There was something of that roguishness in Captain Bitka, Haykuz thought.
“So, I got your report on the diplomacy with the bugs,” the Captain said. “Troatta, that’s what they call themselves, right? When you asked permission to round up some help, I never imagined you’d tag our prisoner Te’Anna, but it sounds like it paid off. You think the Troatta commander really thinks he’s stuck in the middle of a Guardian civil war?”
“She, not he. It appears all the Troatta ship crew are female. I believe she suspects there is some sort of internecine conflict, Captain Bitka, but I was careful never to make such a claim. Any claim which can be directly disproved diminished the credibility of everything else, but clues subject to various interpretations are a different matter. Te’Anna’s presence and obvious willing cooperation were sufficient to plant the seed.”
“Sounds like Te’Anna had a good time,” the captain said, “which is very weird, but then what about her isn’t?”
“I agree,” Haykuz said and felt himself color. “She . . . I believe she made a sexual advance to me afterwards.”
He had removed himself from the situation as tactfully as he knew how. It was not simply the idea of interspecies sex which appalled him, it was the idea of a female of any species seeking sexual favors from a male. Were Varoki the only sane, modest beings in the universe? He cleared his throat before going on. “Once she understood the Troatta might think there was strife among the Guardians, I think she was as intrigued by that idea itself as by the actual negotiations.”
“If you’re thinking she might sign on for something like that, for some anti-Guardian revolution, I wouldn’t be too hasty,” the captain said. “She might appreciate the enterta
inment value, but that’s not enough to stick with a real war. Not nearly enough.”
Haykuz knew Captain Bitka was correct, but the captain’s disagreement had not been expressed as a reprimand or as evidence of superiority. Instead it was almost an opinion shared by an equal. The thought disoriented Haykuz for a moment.
“Your actions helped as well,” he said to Captain Bitka.
“Mine? How?”
“By expending so much time and effort in the rescue operation, you made it clear your quarrel is with P’Daan, not with the Troatta, and so by extension not with their Guardian lord, Y’Areez.”
“Huh. Okay, but what’s that get us, exactly?”
Haykuz dipped his head to the side, the Varoki equivalent of a shrug. “I doubt it will cause an open breach, but some friction now may lead to interesting developments later. One never knows exactly what. I suppose diplomacy is not a very satisfactory occupation for those impatient for immediate and unambiguous results.”
The captain laughed again, an easy, comfortable laugh. “Fair enough. Okay, fill me in on everything the Troatta representative said.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Twenty-four days later, aboard USS Cam Ranh Bay,
in orbit around Destie-Seven-Echo
11 July 2134 (one hundred forty-five days after Incident Seventeen)
Objective is secure, Sam heard Major Merderet report via tight beam commlink. I say again, Destie-Seven-Echo-Highstation is secure. All resistance ended, all hostile personnel incapacitated or prisoners, enemy leadership target is in custody unharmed. Two friendly casualties, no fatalities.
Sam released the breath he had been holding.
“Well done, Major,” he said. The bridge crew cheered and he wanted to get up and dance himself, but that would have been neither dignified nor professional. He settled for a very broad grin. Finally, something was going right.
“Lieutenant Ma and your follow-on force are waiting in the PSRVs. Are you set up to receive them?”
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