She stared at him, her nostrils flaring, a vein pumping on her temple. She had fire enough for a star wolf raider, whatever other qualities she was lacking. She opened her mouth like she was going to say something else, then turned on her heel and stormed out of the command room.
#
Some time later, during the long, dull haul to their new base in the asteroid belt, Svensen was awakened in his bed by a persistent ringing on the bell. He threw back his covers, shrugged into a pair of trousers, and made his way to the door. It was Kelly.
“Put on a shirt,” she said. “I need to talk to you.”
He looked her over, grumpy and still a little drunk from the ale he’d downed at supper. Too many rounds of old raider drinking songs, and he’d had a hard time pulling himself away. Meanwhile, Kelly was uniformed and on shift, if he remembered his schedules right, and there was nothing more irritating than the alert and awake troubling the exhausted and sleeping.
“It’s not an emergency, or you’d have called on the com. So whatever it is can wait until I get back to the command room.”
“I’ll be off shift by then.”
“Oh, and let me guess. Asleep in your bed and not wanting to be disturbed?”
She pushed past him and turned on the light in his room. He blinked and palmed it back off.
“Go over by the viewpoint if you need to see,” he told her. The nook was only big enough for one, and he settled on his bed with a yawn, wanting nothing more than to turn his back to her and go back to sleep. “All right, what’s this about?”
“I want to warn Blackbeard,” she said.
“How are you going to do that? McGowan said the aliens are blocking subspaces.”
“That’s what he claimed, and maybe he’s right. Or was right, anyway. But I’ve looked at the data coming across from Peerless and the others, and I’m almost positive he hasn’t tried since he jumped into Castillo. He’s afraid, for one thing.”
“And you’re not?” Svensen said. “Forget what I said in the command room—we’re all terrified here, and anyone who says he’s not is a liar.”
“We have no evidence these aliens can intercept our subspaces. In fact, if they could, they wouldn’t have blocked McGowan’s to begin with—too much intelligence to steal. It doesn’t fit their MO, anyway. These aliens are about breaking apart and shutting down. Collapsing one’s options and isolating one side from the other. Blocking subspaces, yes. Stealing them, no.”
“That’s a guess.”
“We’re in a desperate situation,” she said. “Guessing is the best we can do.”
“And you want to send a subspace without informing McGowan?”
“That’s right,” she said. “I’ll need your signalman, and Lund is too loyal to do it without your permission.”
“Meaning you tried him already. Meaning that you’re here during my sleep cycle to explain it to me before I see Lund’s report that you went behind my back and I get pissed off again.”
Kelly looked unhappy. “I’m in a bad spot here.”
“One of your own making, unless you’re talking about the bad spot we’re all in.”
“The fleet gave me orders. Came from the admiralty directly. You saw them. But now I’m here, and I have no real power. With McGowan in-system, even less, because he’s taking command, so where does that leave me? Just a stupid torpedo specialist, like you keep reminding me. I was set up to make a fool out of myself, is what.”
He felt himself softening. Sure, they’d sparred a lot, and would continue to do so. He had no doubt of that. She was arrogant, demanding, and showed no respect. And she was a woman, which would have the crew on edge, especially the superstitious ones, until the moment she left.
“You can try to persuade me, how about that?” he said. “All that bluster about how Scandians are out of control forgets one thing. We’re out of control because we’re independent, not because we’re undisciplined. I command this ship by persuasion, and you can try the same thing. I won’t shout you down for insubordination.”
“So you’ll let me send the subspace?”
“If you’ll take responsibility when McGowan calls you on it, sure.”
“He won’t know, look.”
She pulled out her hand computer, sat next to him on the bed, and tried to pass it to him, which led to an awkward moment where she was fumbling at his stump arm.
“Just tell me, why don’t you.”
Kelly nodded. “If you look at the chart of systems—the actual chart, how they’re positioned geographically in the sector, not the chart of jump point connections—you’ll see that Fortaleza is back behind our course on the X-axis, and across from us somewhat on the Y.”
“Meaning your subspace would be invisible to the base and McGowan’s ships.”
“All except the war junk,” she said, “but there’s only one, and it’s going to be searching the asteroid belt like crazy. Looking out toward the jump points, too. It can’t keep its sensors on everything at once, and unless it’s specifically looking for an outgoing subspace, it’s not going to pick up on the disturbance.”
“What about power requirements?”
“Fortaleza is a nearby system, only four light-years away, so we can manage. We’ll stop our acceleration, shunt power to the communicator, and claim we’re fiddling with the engines in anticipation of decel. Or I don’t know, something to do with the antigrav. Lund can make up something plausible.”
“Bringing others into your web of lies,” he said in a mock-solemn tone. “What will the message say?”
“Admiral Drake needs to know. There’s no reinforcements coming—he’s on his own. I’ll warn him the way is cut off toward Nebuchadnezzar, but let him know we’ve got a base here, if he can make it.”
“All right. I’ll tell Lund to cooperate.”
“Good, thank you.” She sounded relieved.
“In fact, if you’re wrong, and someone does catch you sending, may as well say the subspace came from me. I’m a Scandian—we have a reputation. McGowan will rage, but what can he do? You, on the other hand, would face a court martial.”
She was quiet for a long moment. “I shouldn’t have said that earlier. All those insults . . .”
“You called me a dumb, smelly space Viking.” Svensen shrugged. “I’ve heard worse.”
“No, not that. That part about being a cripple—that was . . .” She took his arm and put her hand on the end of his stump while meeting his gaze. The light from the viewport reflected off her eyes. “I’m not disgusted by it, and I don’t think that way about a man who has lost a hand. Especially not a wound someone takes in battle. That sort of disfigurement is heroic. That’s my true opinion, when I’m not angry and making an ass of myself.”
“It wasn’t particularly heroic, believe me. A giant bird tore it off with its beak. What about dumb, smelly, ugly, brutish . . . was all of that your real opinion?”
“Sometimes, yeah. It’s not that you Scandians don’t bathe, but my God, do you consume a lot of onions and beer on this ship.” She made an exaggerated sniffing sound. “You don’t stink at the moment. You had some ale at supper, didn’t you? I can handle that.”
Svensen chuckled. “Sounds like a pickup line in a Scandian tavern—‘you don’t stink at the moment.’”
“That’s exactly how I meant it. A pickup line.”
He started to laugh for real, but she sounded so earnest that he stopped. She was still holding his arm with the missing hand, and put her other hand on his bare chest and pushed him down to the bed.
“You’re a man, aren’t you?” she said, voice husky. “Under all that bluster?”
Svensen almost said something stupid, something that would have killed the moment. Instead, he reached up, grabbed the lapels of her uniform and pulled her down. Her hair brushed his face, and her lips were on his. She dug her fingertips into his shoulder.
He kissed her neck, and she sighed and tilted back her head. When his lips reached her collarbone, he worked at her bu
ttons, but with one hand, he needed help, which she seemed eager to provide. She slipped out of her uniform and was slim and smooth and cool beneath his touch. She rose to her knees to kick her uniform to the floor, and he caught a better glimpse of her through the starlight entering through the viewport.
“The gods take me,” he said. “You’re beautiful.”
“You never noticed?”
“I mostly noticed the scowl.”
“And now?”
“Now I want to devour every inch of your body.”
She hooked a hand under his shoulder and tugged until he rolled over on top of her. She squeezed her hips up against his and dug her fingers into his back.
“Do it, Svensen. Devour me.”
#
Later, when Kelly was resting on top of him with her legs entwined with his, he couldn’t help but voice his question aloud.
“Did this just come on you, or has it been building for a while?”
She didn’t answer right away, and he wondered if she’d fallen asleep. “Building. In between wanting to punch you. You?”
“Mostly just the punching part. I did notice your lips, though. You have nice lips.”
“How is the rest of me, now that you’ve been acquainted?”
“I’m going to have a hard time wanting to punch you from here on out. Just keeping my hands off you on the bridge will be a test of my willpower.”
“Don’t you dare. And I don’t want the rest to know, so don’t start calling me Elizabeth or anything.”
“There’s fraternization in the admiralty itself, you know.”
“Totally different. Tolvern was in a civilian role when she and Drake married. Then the war brought her back in. Anyway, what holds for an admiral and one of the navy’s top captains doesn’t relax the rules for the likes of you and me. What would your men say if they knew you were in here, right now, naked with a woman?”
“‘You lucky bastard!’”
“I’m serious.”
“That it’s bad luck and the gods will curse our mission.”
“So we’re agreed. We keep it quiet.”
“I like the part where we keep it, that’s all I know.”
Kelly slid off him and groped for her clothes.
“You have to go already?” he asked.
“I’d stay if I could. Shift is about to change, anyway, and it’s a risky time to slip out of here—someone might spot me in the corridor. But every minute that goes by without Blackbeard seeing that subspace leaves them in more danger.”
She bent and kissed him on the forehead. “But I will see you later, my hairy, beer-guzzling space Viking.”
Well, Svensen thought a minute later, when the door slid shut behind her, leaving him alone. That was interesting.
There were a lot of worse ways to be awakened in the middle of one’s sleep cycle.
Chapter Thirteen
Ronaldo Carvalho stood in the launch bay, surrounded by the other pilots of the striker wing. Some of them were full of energy, anxious to climb into their cockpits. Greeves was practically bouncing, her jaw working a big wad of gum.
Twelve Mark-II falcons sat on rails, each forty-eight feet long. Noses pointing up—you couldn’t see much until you rail-launched and dropped that snout. Each had a pulse fire battery and four small missiles on the undercarriage. The missiles could self-guide or be manually directed to their target.
Several of the pilots had recently returned from a lengthy mission sowing mines to slow the Adjudicator fleet as it approached Blackbeard’s position. Carvalho had been one of them. Three hours downtime, and now they were preparing another launch, this time the whole wing. Twenty more minutes, and they’d be riding the rail and tossed into the void.
“It will be a devil of a fight,” he told them. “We do not know everything the dragoons are capable of, but they have firepower—we already know that. Let’s go over their guns again. We’re too small and agile for their missiles. It’s the chase guns that concern us. And here’s what we’ve learned . . .”
They listened as he briefed, some rocking on the balls of their feet, others nodding grimly. Even Greeves, who could be as annoying as an overheated cockpit with her needling and her braying laughter, seemed all business.
Stay away from the star fortresses, he warned them, until they knew what kind of firepower the larger ships contained. And don’t mix it up with the dragoons unless one was wounded and they could hunt it as a pack. Mainly, stay focused on pulsing incoming torpedoes while staying out of reach of the chase guns.
“Until the bridge tells us otherwise,” someone said. “Just wait—they’ll have us doing all that bad stuff.”
Carvalho let this comment go. “You got food, you got water, you got stim packs. Ease up on those. Inject yourself too early and you are going to crash hard. We might be out there forty-eight hours before McGowan’s fleet enters the battle.”
“Nobody can fight for forty-eight hours,” Crispin said.
He was the serious one, had been the sub-commander of Blackbeard’s striker wing before Stratsky blew himself up keeping an Apex harvester planetside and Carvalho came over from HMS Void Queen.
“We will fight as long as we can. You think you are flying dead at the stick, you come in, you rest. But know that there is nobody to take your place. And if you are asleep in your bunk, you will be the only one.”
He continued. Don’t save missiles. If you needed resupply, if your ship was too damaged to continue, the brawler could also take you in. She was called HMS Warthog now, with an independent command. Which meant, of course, that Carvalho wouldn’t be commanding that particular ship again.
A pair of techs were running diagnostics, and one of them gave him a thumbs-up. He checked the time on his hand computer.
“Good luck,” he said. “We don’t need heroes, but you know what must be done. Stay alive, all of you. I expect to see twelve pilots drinking in the mess when this is over.”
“Stay alive, or do what must be done?” someone grumbled.
“Both.”
Grunts and shakes of the head at this, but no one was balking, either. When it became clear that Carvalho had no big inspirational speech to give, they wandered toward their individual falcons.
Greeves came over, still working her wad of gum. “You think McGowan’ll turn the tide?”
“If he brings a big enough squadron, the aliens will run.”
“It ain’t gonna be like that, and you know it, mate. If the fleet had the kinda firepower to make ’em run, we wouldn’t be sitting out here alone like this. They’d have brought in a bunch of ships already.”
“We will win the fight. Don’t worry. We do our job, and everything will turn out like it should.”
“I seen guys die before.” Greeves attempted to blow a bubble, but the wad was too big, and she sucked it back in. “And I know you have, too. Blackbeard did some fighting long before I came around. You figure this is better or worse than what she’s faced before?”
“It’s bad enough. But Tolvern is up there. Capp, too. Nyb Pim—best pilot in the sector. Gunnery—there is nobody like Barker and his crew. We will win.”
He hoped he sounded more confident than he felt. Which wasn’t much. And he was less confident still that the striker wing would do well. Not the pilots—they were veterans now, the best in the fleet—but the craft themselves. These falcons were crafty, maneuverable. Strong enough to sting, and quick enough to zip away before they got slapped. But one good hit—that was all it took. Not like a big ship with its armor, able to trade blows. You were one bad move, one unlucky shot from death at all times.
“It’s just starting, you know,” Greeves said. “These bastards’ve been out here a while, wrecking planets and carting away the survivors. Closed down everything from here to Earth, most likely. Probably destroyed Earth, too. Way I figure, we’re the only challenge left, and if we hadn’t been all built up and stuff from fighting Apex, fighting each other, we wouldn’t have a chance.”
“But we were, and so we do.”
“Yeah, but we ain’t gonna win with one battle cruiser, one brawler, and a few falcons.”
“Bilbao, too,” Carvalho said. “We have turned her into a mobile battery.”
“We’ll see. Nobody’s tested her yet.”
“Hey!” one of the techs shouted. “We got orders to run the rail in three minutes. You going to be ready?”
“Good luck,” Greeves told Carvalho. “Hope to see you on the other side, mate.”
She scrambled into her cockpit, leaving him to wonder if she meant the other side of the battle or in some afterlife after one or both of them had taken a long walk in the void.
Greeves had painted a caricature of Donkey, one of the massive Apex harvesters they’d defeated in the war, on the side of her ship. She’d turned it into something like a real jackass, not a ship, with buck teeth and all, and added a muscular cartoon version of herself, sleeves rolled up, smashing it in the mouth. As the canopy closed around her, she called over to his cockpit and pointed down at the figure.
“Gonna paint me an Adjudicator ship next to that one. Whaddya think?”
Carvalho’s own canopy shut. The lead falcons were already sliding along the rail, moving into launch order. A buzz vibrated through his ship as the rail lit up and shifted him into place. His ship moved through the airlock and into a dark holding room. The nose of his ship blocked most of the view.
Jane spoke in his ear. Blackbeard’s AI sounded calm, reassuring, as she did when announcing everything from a docking merchant ship to ninety percent shield degradation and pending explosive decompression.
“You are fourth in line for launch. Estimated wait, forty-two seconds. Prepare for rapid acceleration.”
The doors swung open, and there was the emptiness of space hanging above him. A creamy blanket of stars stretched across his field of vision, with a dark, circular space at two o’clock, one of the gas giant’s moons, currently hidden in shadow. They were out of view of planet itself from this angle, but he could see its reflected light to his left, entering the bay with a cool, soothing light.
“Ten seconds to launch,” Jane announced.
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