by Tim C Taylor
“Right.”
“In that case, frakk off, sir!” So saying, she spun around and left him.
That went well.
——
The conversation with Kalli had made his mind up. Her overly defensive reaction spoke volumes – she knew something was up, just as Janna did, but no one was willing to face the fact; except him. Drastic action was needed, and he could only see one course that remained open to him.
Remus took a few moments to compose himself, to work out what he was going to say, and then set out.
Remus liked being a pilot. Yes, there were always strategies to comply with and orders to follow. Being a fighter pilot, particularly a senior one, didn’t absolve him of responsibility. He was a squadron leader, others relied on him and it was his job to ensure they carried out their assigned missions, but when the shooting started even the best laid plans had a habit of going to hell in a hand-basket, of being superseded by events, and then it was down to the individual.
Yes, he liked being a pilot, but times changed. He had been raised a Wolf but turned his back on soldiering, deliberately distancing himself from the opportunity that represented at a young age. Nhlappo hadn’t objected. In fact, she had always been quietly supportive of both him and Romulus in whatever they chose to do. Perhaps, at some subconscious level, she sensed the darkness that lurked within them and recognized why they didn’t want to be Wolves. Fighting that close up, using hand-held weapons and without the bulwark of a hull and the immensity of space between you and an enemy… That prospect had always terrified Remus. Not in terms of his own safety, no, but rather because of the opportunity it would provide to lose control. In the early days, he understood that some of the Marines had called the Wolves ‘berserkers’. Remus had looked the term up, and he could understand why outsiders might think that, but the Wolves weren’t berserkers, not really. Yes, they relished combat, got a real buzz from fighting, killing, and winning, but there was always an element of control, of rational thought in even their wildest moments.
Remus was afraid that should he ever return to the Wolves, that was when everyone would discover what the term berserker really meant.
But Romulus had done it, and Remus hadn’t heard any whispers of craziness, any talk of his losing it in the field…
“Hey, Remus, I want a word with you.”
Janna! That was all he needed.
She came charging up like a runaway fighter. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, going to Kalli behind my back, quizzing her about Romulus?” That hadn’t taken long. “He’s my lover for frakk’s sake and your brother. If you’ve got a problem, you talk to me about it not my friends, or, even better, man-up and ask him to his face.”
“I have!” The ferocity of his response more than matched Janna’s anger, clearly catching her by surprise. “And he keeps spouting the same old drent about being adrift after your ship blew until he was rescued.”
“I was adrift and picked up, so are you saying that I’m a liar too?”
“No! The timings, Janna… He was found much later than you. How come his air lasted so long?”
“For Horden’s sake, we’ve been over this a hundred times. Do you remember what it was like that day? People dying, ship’s systems getting fried – it was chaos out there. Someone’s got their timings wrong, that’s all. Romulus survived, that’s what matters. Why can’t you just accept that, be grateful, and move on?”
“Because he’s hiding something, Janna. You know that. Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t.”
She tried, but her gaze slid away from his.
“Thought so.”
He turned and strode away from her.
“Where are you going?” she called after him.
“To get to the bottom of this.”
“How?”
“By stepping down as a pilot. I’m joining the Wolves, just like my brother did.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Watch me.”
She made no move to follow or to stop him.
— Chapter 12 —
Announced by that gear-crunching noise that the maintenance teams could never quite eliminate, the hatch to Arun’s ready room retracted and his confidence received a boost that no artificial drug could hope to match.
The officer who stepped through exchanged a salute with her military superior before opening her arms to receive Arun in her embrace.
“You ready to tell them, Twinkle Eyes?” Xin whispered into his ear.
“No,” he replied, and kissed her like a hormone-riddled cadet. The universe seldom allowed him the simple pleasure of kissing her. He groaned, frustrated because they only had a few moments for each other.
He drew away, holding her upper arms in a loose grip and wondering when she had bulked out with so much muscle.
“You know I’m never ready to give the big speeches,” said Arun, “but I’m ten times better prepared for having seen you beforehand.” Arun grimaced. Del had grown into the master of the stirring speech that appealed to different races, but Del-Marie’s position in Arun’s world had become far more complicated after Arun had recognized him as an Amilxi. “Come in,” he said to Xin. “Sit down.”
“Arun, there’s no time.”
“Then at least tell me how you’ve been. I missed you.”
Xin rolled her eyes, and Arun couldn’t resist smiling in delight. The rest of her had been hardened and scarred by war – the look in her eyes even more than her body – but her eyes were still bright pools of wonder, and there were still glances and gestures, such as that eye roll, that were unchanged since their youth.
“It’s only been four months since you last saw me,” she said.
“Four months, three days, seven hours.”
“Way to avoid looking needy, McEwan.”
“You look beautiful.”
“Yeah, I kinda got that. But…” she looked away for a moment. “But don’t ever stop telling me.” She sighed. “I don’t expect the former Governor of Klin-Tula thought I was beautiful at 07:30 this morning.”
He frowned. “I haven’t been following the pacification program down on the planet. Are you referring to her execution?”
“Its execution. The Governor was Hardit New Order. Tawfiq’s freakish monkey-vecks have buried endless Hardit gender wars by redefining their bodies as something post-gender. The very idea terrorizes the Hardits who lived here before the New Order annexed their world.”
“It’s okay, Xin. There’s nothing to feel guilty about. We have to make an example to the remaining Hardits.”
Xin drew in a sharp breath. “Arun, the Hardits are important. You need to get over your bad memories and make the effort to understand them a little more. I didn’t execute their leaders in public to cow the Hardit population into submission, I did it to reassure them that the Governor and the New Order can no longer hurt them, that Legion protection is meaningful and here to stay. It feels so weird to say this about a Hardit planet of all places, but the fight for Klin-Tula feels like a clearer case of liberation than almost any other planet I’ve fought over.” Xin’s eyes narrowed to slits. “And I didn’t just order the executions, Arun, I watched them die in person, and felt deep satisfaction when I saw the light fade from their eyes. Does that make me a terrible person?”
“Terrible?” He squeezed her shoulders. “Yes, Xin you are terrible.”
He let her frown on, teasing her. There had been a time long ago in Detroit when his comrades had regarded Arun as the squad joker, but Xin was the only person he could still tease. Everyone else was too dead or too alien. Actually no, he corrected himself, he still teased Pedro whenever they met. “Xin, you are terrible like the seas of Earth that our mariner ancestors once knew, a terrible mistress, an untamable force of nature that sailors worshipped, feared, and loved in equal measure… which is pretty much how I feel about you.”
Arun delighted in watching the tension fall away from Xin until she could actually smile. “
I like that, Arun. Good recovery. From here on, you’re to worship me as an incarnation of Mazu, the sea goddess. Makes sense. They call Marines like us Homo sapiens marinus, after all.”
Arun placed a hand on Xin’s belly. “My goddess, when we win the final battle–”
“If we win, Arun.”
“No, when we win. I know we will…” He took a sharp intake of breath. “Springer foresaw it. When we win, will you be ready to bring our child into the universe?”
“No.”
Arun’s heart solidified and then shattered. Everything after this point had depended on her saying yes. What the hell just happened?
Xin’s face softened at the sight of his pain. “Don’t despair so quickly, Arun. Since the dawn of time, I don’t think a single prospective parent has truly been ready. Frakk it! Let’s do it, Arun. When we’ve won, we will quicken this little bump into a new life. Into a little girl.”
Arun picked up Xin and swung her around, laughing like a lunatic until they lifted off the floor and bounced off the bulkhead. She had never told him the gender until now.
“Heaven help our child with parents like us,” he said with a grin.
“Heaven help her with a father like you,” countered Xin playfully. “I’m the only one who remembered we’re on a spaceship with nominal acceleration.”
They kissed. Arun wanted more, much more, but that would have to wait until after the planning conference. He settled for tracing a line with his fingertips along her eyebrows, across her cheek, and down to the nape of her neck. As he looked into her beautiful face he wondered idly what would happen to the embryos Pedro had stored long ago. They were his children too. His and Xin… and Tremayne’s.
“Please don’t force me to be the sensible one,” said Xin.
Arun took a deep breath. “Okay. Colonel Lee, we have to go.”
“Yes, we do.”
They set off for the planning room, walking hand-in-hand.
——
The ‘A’ Fleet commanders in Vengeance of Saesh’s planning room contemplated the holo-display, but if any there had hoped the display would yield fresh answers, they could only be disappointed.
The vassal races that comprised the Human Legion had always been denied detailed information on the target system, the holo-display reporting only what they could tell through long-range astronomical instruments. The fleet’s astrogation systems didn’t even have an English-language name for the system, something Indiya had rectified. She named the system Olympus-Ultra and the four planets after Earth rivers. It was on the third planet, an inner gas giant called Euphrates, where the White Knight Emperor claimed his species had evolved. Or, rather, on its huge moon, which Indiya had named Athena.
Somewhere on Athena was the Imperial capital where the Emperor waited helplessly inside the shielded citadel. Capture the Emperor, control the empire.
“It is all very well contemplating the target system,” said Graz, the Tallerman commander, pulling her cupola-like head defensively into her rocky body. “But we have no intelligence on what awaits us there. The risk of an attack is huge.”
“The risk of not attacking is greater still,” said Admiral Kreippil. “Does your courage falter, Lieutenant-General?”
For a moment, Arun thought the Tallerman would use her slab-like fists to strike the Littorane, but she must have thought better of it. “A Tallerman without courage is an oxymoron, Admiral. To suggest otherwise indicates only ignorance. The quality my race lacks is blind optimism.”
The big Littorane went very still.
“General Graz makes a fair statement,” said Aureanus, the representative of the Gliesans, a race of hollow-boned gliders from the low-gee world of Gliese-Pavonis. “We cannot know what awaits us because our reserves are overstretched as it is defending Legion territories. The larger our alliance of planets grows the more points of vulnerability we offer to attackers. And they are attacking. Khallini has suffered three major attacks in fifteen years. Next time may be the last one for us. We will not get another chance at to take Olympus-Ultra, and it looks unlikely that our enemies will grant us the luxury of waiting for reinforcements.”
“I disagree,” said Graz. “We could still retreat, consolidate on a bastion of strong worlds, wait and expand when we are stronger.” The Tallerman’s attitude didn’t surprise Arun in the slightest. Stoic defense and fortitude against the years-long winters of their natural habitat on Tallerman-4 was more than cultural: it was their key evolutionary strategy.
“I agree,” said Aureanus. “Both strategies carry risk. We cannot quantify that risk without more intelligence.”
“The only way to acquire intelligence is to send a reconnaissance party to Olympus-Ultra,” said Pedro, who attended senior commander conferences now that several colonies of his people had allied with the Legion. “From our position in the Klin-Tula system, ‘A’ Fleet’s fastest scouts are still thirteen years away from Olympus-Ultra. Not only will a scouting mission cause an unacceptable delay, but our reconnaissance will be spotted and our intention broadcast to the enemy. Let us not waste our time speculating on the makeup of the enemy besiegers. The defensive shield around the Imperial citadel on Athena has so far resisted the constant enemy attempts to cut through. I do not understand the nature of this shield, but whatever makes it resistant to harm also means it is impervious to all forms of sensors or communication other than the instantaneous comm links through entangled chbits, meaning the Emperor cannot see out of his shield any more than we can see in. Outside the shield may wait the largest warfleet the galaxy has ever seen, or it may be that the Emperor is bottled up by a single robot programmed to probe the shield to encourage him to keep it switched on. The true picture is unknowable.”
“Well spoken, my friends,” said Kreippil, blinking furiously at Graz, the Littorane equivalent of a filthy stare. But we do have a critical piece of intelligence about the situation in Olympus-Ultra. Whatever we face, our side in this holy war will be backed by the gods. The signs and portents are there for all but the blindest to see. Has the Legion not overcome every challenge we have yet faced?”
“I hardly think–” began Graz.
“Your very presence before me is evidence that I speak the truth,” Kreippil insisted. “If any but the Legion had attempted to evict the New Empire from your world, even your famously hardy people would be nothing but radioactive dust. The Legion under the leadership of General McEwan and Admiral Indiya continues to outthink the enemy…”
The Littorane admiral turned to Arun and nodded.
This was Arun’s moment to make the rousing speech, to explain the long-laid plan so secret that he hadn’t even mentioned it to the Emperor. But his words wouldn’t come out.
He felt a slap of irritation as Indiya’s freakish mind-talk connected with his brain. Don’t hesitate Arun, this is your cue. Speak now, like we agreed.
Instead of speaking to the assembly of commanders, Arun’s mind turned inward. A diagram took shape in Arun’s head, as if a miniaturized tactical planning team were painting their suggestions onto the inside of his skull. Whatever the Jotuns had put in his head when he was a kid was working wonders at winning the war, but he worried that it was starting to take him over. Often, he would wake from troubled sleep with a revised plan of campaign ready-formulated in his head, as if planted there by some outside agency. When he worked his ideas through the AIs in the planning room, he would invariably recognize the three-dimensional war maps they generated, because he had already dreamed those same maps.
Sometimes, as now, the maps and battle plans that pushed into his mind were more abstract. He was seeing a tactical plan with the Human Legion as a central body preparing to make a frontal assault on the forces besieging the Emperor. But on the metaphorical left flank, instead of their advance being anchored by strong defenses, the Legion was threatened by security lapses. Whether through spies or surveillance devices that remained undetectable to the best Legion brains, the enemy was anticipating Legion
plans far too often. Even supply convoys in deep space were being intercepted, something no one could explain.
Arun, this is your chance, Indiya urged, but he couldn’t free his mind from this stupid diagram, which lurked in his skull like an ambush predator, daring him to speak before leaping at him with its poisonous doubts.
And those misgivings extended beyond the obvious security lapses. In this abstract tactical plan, the Night Hummers were heavily involved in providing advice and guidance to many of his commanders in the field. This overt participation was atypical of the Hummers and he didn’t fully understand what his subconscious was trying to tell him, but he knew there was meaning here somewhere. Experience had proven such insights to be trustworthy, which was more than he could say about the Hummers.
Nor were the Hummers his only concern; there was also Del-Marie Sandure, the man who would once have been here at the planning conference as a matter of course: Arun’s mouthpiece, tying the alliance together into a single purpose. But Del had been on that Amilxi ship. The simplest explanation was that Arun had seen a clone or an identical twin, but he couldn’t risk accepting that – it was too convenient, too desirable – but he wasn’t ready to accept the implication of more exotic explanations either. Winning this war was difficult enough without having to contemplate the laws of nature being broken in some new and unlooked for fashion. What if that version of Del he’d seen on the Bonaventure had come from the future? He’d confided these suspicions only to Indiya, who had worried him even more with her insistence that if time travel were practical, then FTL travel would be too. Each was the flip-side of the other.
No one could defend against a hostile warfleet equipped with FTL drives. No wonder his battleplanner mind was trying to warn him that his flanks and rear were not secure.
Arun! Indiya warned. Oh, I see. Your mind is locking again. Here, let me help.
Arun was paralyzed. It wasn’t fear or uncertainty, and he was used to making difficult strategic decisions; the battleplanner AI imprinted in his mind was glitching again. He had the sense of brass gears that should turn smoothly now locked and smoking.