The Ides of Matt 2015

by M. L. Buchman

  “Beware the low rotors!” The attitude of the blades would be sucking their tips closer to the ground than was normal for a Black Hawk, from eight feet to perhaps six.

  Sergeant Hamlin yanked open the big cargo bay just as a big gust slammed into them. Moisture, air thick with salt, and cold assaulted her.

  She heard a cry and a foul, “Damn it!” from the medic.

  “What?” She twisted around but couldn’t see anything.

  “Hold on,” it was Hamlin and he grunted as he spoke.

  Diana watched the mission clock count out five seconds and was about to repeat her shout when Hamlin spoke again.

  “Doc stepped out and caught the bad gust. Think he broke his ankle.”

  “Shit, sorry!” The medic’s voice came back on the intercom, wrenched in pain. “Maybe a sprain, but I don’t think I can walk on it.”

  “I got this,” Jack laid his hand over hers on the collective for a moment and squeezed her fingers. He mouthed something else she couldn’t see in the darkness; damn him!

  He opened the copilot door and there was a great flurry. With an open passage now completely through the helo, the wind grabbed anything that had been left loose in the cargo bay and ripped it out the copilot’s door, all of the detritus battering at Jack. Under the barrage, he rolled out on the gust and then fought his door closed. Ducking low around the nose, he raced around to grab the other end of the stretcher that Hamlin was wrestling with.

  She watched Jack and Hamlin disappear into the storm, then reset the mission clock and began watching it count the seconds. The medic lay in back, thumping around and cursing for all the good it did anyone.

  Outside the windscreen, the wind was heaving miscellaneous detritus across the low island. Waves were tossing logs ashore. Smaller pieces that broke off tumbled along the ground. The helo’s bright landing light showed each wave that lifted, far taller than the Black Hawk. Then it crashed down on the beach so much closer than she was comfortable with.

  “Hurry, goddamn it!” she shouted to no one in particular.

  The lighthouse’s beam, shining from twenty meters above their heads, caught the hint of something other than water moving in its far-reaching light. She waited for it to sweep around and cast its light on the nightmare scene once more.

  “I’m sure they’re—” the medic started.

  The light swung to light the waves once more and—

  “Hang on!” Diana shouted and yanked up on the collective. It wasn’t even a thought, it was now trained into pure instinct. She was aloft by the time a dinghy had tumbled from the waves and crossed her previous position. The little boat was snarled in a fishing net that was floating up and billowing on the wind as if it were an evil ghost net hoping to ensnare her. If even an edge of it snagged the rotor, it would bring the Black Hawk down hard.

  She cleared it by mere feet.

  More detritus passed by: plastic barrels, those big orange boat bumpers, another dinghy. There was a boat in real trouble out there.

  She shouldn’t be flying without a copilot, but she didn’t have a whole lot of choice. And riding this weather alone was the hardest thing she’d ever done.

  “Damn you twice, Jack Slater.”

  Not daring to land yet, Diana eased forward into the storm, but found no big fishing boat battered in the surf.

  “Hey! Where are you?” a shout came over the radio.

  “Coming back to you,” she called over the radio. “Stay by the lighthouse until I’m in.”

  She repeated her crash landing with less drama than the first time, courtesy of a momentary lull in the storm.

  They had the lighthouse keeper on the stretcher and his wife aboard in seconds.

  Jack didn’t risk coming around the front of the helo but instead entered by the cargo bay and climbed over the radio console, dripping water everywhere, to get to his seat. She didn’t look at him, she was far too intent on what might be flying her way next.

  “Let’s go, Wonder Woman.”

  She waited on the wind and then jerked aloft in the midst of a strong gust that would give her a lot of lift.

  With a patient to work on, the medic was done cursing his ankle. Hamlin was still talking down the near-panicked wife.

  “He’s responding well,” the medic reported.

  Diana could hear a machine now beeping in the background.

  “We need to get him to a hospital, but the wife is requesting Seattle and he’ll be good for that long.”

  “Roger,” Diana acknowledged, then she switched off the intercom to the rear of the helo.

  Instead of turning for Seattle, she took one more pass out over the beach.

  “What is it?” Jack looked like a drowned rat, a big, very handsome one.

  She’d never been so happy to see anyone in her life. It had finally sunk in that because she’d flown away from the lighthouse without telling him why, that a ghost net could ensnare him and drag him away into the permanent darkness.

  Another lesson, okay to leave the ground, but don’t leave your team without a warning.

  She nodded forward and down, “Look.”

  “Nothing on infrared or radar,” he began working the radio.

  Then she spotted it in the first faint hint of dawn beyond the black clouds. A forty-footer, belly up. Caught in the shallows well off the spit.

  She quartered the waves several times, but there was no one there. A final pass along the beach, no one in the surf or washed up. It would be a grim job for the Coast Guard after the storm died.

  Jack called it in and she turned for Seattle, climbing and laying down the hammer.

  “Dead,” Diana swallowed hard and tried not to think of her father. “That fast.”

  “I know. Nothing we can do to help them.”

  She slewed past Port Townsend and turned south for Seattle. “That’s not the point.”

  Jack gave her his attention, another thing to like about him.

  Into that silence she spilled out her past, or more accurately her mother’s. A man beloved and then dead. All that he’d left behind had been a child and a woman’s heart so full of love that there had never been room for another. She’d dated, but never loved again.

  “You really believe that?” he asked it softly.

  “What?”

  “That a heart can do that? That one person can fill it for a lifetime?”

  Diana could hear the deeper question behind it, even if she didn’t know the details.

  “Better than believe. I’ve seen it. If you were to meet Mom, you’d see it too. It shines out of her.”

  His silence was different this time, though no less deep.

  She had to handle the radio calls to Harborview Medical Center Heliport in Seattle. The winds were mostly at thirty knots and dropping, she could land well enough in that. The morning’s light was slowly revealing the city—the perimeter lights on the helipad were barely needed anymore.

  They off-loaded the man and his wife to the waiting med team. The medic decided his own injury was a sprain, so he stayed on board to deal with it at Lewis-McChord.

  They were aloft again for the short flight back to base before Jack spoke again.

  “I have no experience with anything lasting. The only thing that’s ever lasted in my entire life has been flying for the Army.”

  This time it was her turn to remain silent.

  “But what you make me feel, Wonder Woman,” and she could hear the joy back in his voice, that joy that had radiated from him since the moment she’d first met Jack-the-Giant-Killer.

  Oh god how she wanted to be a part of that joy.

  “I don’t have the words for it though I spent all last night looking for them. Whatever it is, I want to feel that every single day of my life.”

  All she could think to whisper was, “Me to
o.”

  She kept her right hand on the cyclic, but moved her left one off the collective. He did the opposite, keeping control of the collective with his left. Between them, their outside hands had control of the aircraft.

  They finished the flight back home, flying together through the quieting storm over the terrain glistening in the first rays of sunlight.

  And holding each other’s inside hands tightly as they flew.

  Night Rescue

  Last year, The Sword of Io introduced me to the Future Night Stalkers. That came out of a writing assignment in a week-long craft workshop.

  So I built myself a box, a very tight one.

  I believe the assignment was to write a military science fiction story. I took my Night Stalkers, shoved them forward three hundred years, and asked what would happen. Now all of my Night Stalkers stories are romances (or in the case of Heart of the Storm a bro-mance), therefore I decided this should be as well. Now I had a future-set, military, science fiction romance…whew!

  For Night Rescue I wanted to go back and play some more in that future world. I set up another romance, this time between two pilots. Then came this odd voice at the end of the first scene…and, well, that changed the world of the Future Night Stalkers far more than I expected.

  1

  “Good morning, Takara.”

  “Good morning to you, Stella,” Captain Takara Olmsted, 160th Charlie Company, crossed the habitat’s hangar floor and patted her Stinger on the nose before she started the pre-spaceflight inspection. Some pilots didn’t like their ships greeting them and switched off the functionality; spouting some tripe that they could write a more imaginative program while scratching their backsides. And for some of her fellow pilots, that was the most creative part of their anatomy.

  Takara had always found it rather sweet—once she’d programmed out the factory’s deep male voice that didn’t fit her craft at all. The voice they’d shipped her with was a bad imitation of a passé interactives star. Or perhaps it really was Jess Brock fallen on hard times; an IA star’s moments of glory were even shorter than all but the unluckiest soldier’s. Not that she’d ever been a fan, not even a little. Didn’t matter. Takara hadn’t just changed the selection, she’d erased all the others out of the ship’s banks once she’d found Stella’s true voice.

  A Stinger-60 Block III might be eighty meters of flying death to the enemy, but the Stella was a dainty girl in or out of atmo, quick on her thrusters and ready to dance. She was also chic, space black with a near non-existent profile on enemy scopes, could carry a platoon of SpecOps in full fieldsuits, and was armed to the frickin’ teeth.

  All were attributes that Takara did her best to emulate, except for the carrying-a-platoon thing. Even off base she dressed in black darker than her long straight fall of hair—cutting edge materials so light-absorbing that she was often told she looked like a hole in the space-time continuum. Perfect! She stayed sleek, fit, and was as skilled at hand-to-hand combat as she was at piloting during deep-space warfare.

  The rest of her crew arrived together in the Colony’s hangar, a tight metal box in the zero-G sector that was little bigger than her craft. They were a good team, sharp and dedicated. And it wasn’t that they were late; they were early. But Takara had always been earlier. Even as a cadet she’d been first to class and first to the drill field.

  “Still the sky-eater, Captain,” her port-gunner greeted her the same way he always did.

  “Still,” the copilot answered before Takara could.

  “Always will be,” the starboard gunner agreed.

  “And damned proud of it,” Takara finished their pre-flight ritual.

  They all laughed and made fast work of inspecting the Stella. She was immaculate; no service crews in the air corps like the 160th Night Stalkers. Takara tried to imagine the long-ago crazies who had taken to the night in fragile rotary craft, flying at night by nav gear little better than a torch and a compass. She shuddered, glad to be living in this time despite the troubles.

  At the end of their inspection, she rubbed Stella’s nose for good luck.

  They were going to need it.

  * * *

  Intruder neutralization off.

  Door open.

  Recognize four boarding.

  Seal and secure.

  Input ready for mission profile.

  Mission plan loaded.

  Fuel = plan + 50%. Check.

  Ammo = plan (0)[really?] + full charge COIL laser. Check.

  Air = sufficient 4 crew 6 months or full load 1 week + regen. Check.

  Plan was…Oh dear! Definitely not check.

  2

  Major Rick Coralto, commander of the 160th’s Alpha Company, punched the fist of his combat suit against the center of Jess’ entry door. “Hey, buddy.”

  “Hey, Rick,” the outer airlock door pulled in two centimeters then slid aside.

  It always cracked him up that his Stinger sounded just like Rick’s favorite IA hero when Rick had been going through flight school. Jess Brock, Secret Agent—sappy as hell, but Jess always won, always had the best toys, and always got the hottest women. Not that Rick was complaining; unlike Jess’ toys, Rick’s Stinger was real. But the voice was so good that sometimes Rick wondered if Jess Brock was hiding somewhere aboard. It was just that laid back. The “I’m in perfect control of the situation” tone just slayed him.

  Rick maneuvered his combat suit into the crew’s airlock, stepped it back into the charging cradle and waited for the rest of his crew to float in behind him.

  Rick’s crew and the rest of 160th Night Stalkers Alpha Company were just finishing a training mission with the Brits out at the L2 Lagrange Point, sixty-thousand klicks beyond the Lunar Farside.

  Good location choice to set up a nation, Rick had acknowledged. The massive O’Neill Colony habitat could hold a couple million citizens apiece. And L2 was the one place where no direct line of fire existed from the Earth. It was definitely a tactical sweet spot that he wished his people had grabbed first.

  Last night, after the mock battles had been won (by the Night Stalkers of course), they’d been invited ashore for a big meal and a little bit of drinking that had turned into a lot of drinking and a little bit of meal…and almost a very cute British Leftenant, but that hadn’t worked out in the end. He still wasn’t sure why, he’d had on his Jess Brock blue-and-gold jumpsuit and been at his most charming. Maybe if he’d spotted her before he drank several of the Brits under the table.

  He was feeling clearheaded, considering, but was glad that the SCS—Stinger Command System—knew more about flying than he’d ever be able to learn. Though control of the ships hadn’t been given to the computers since the International Law of Control had passed, they still had all of their computers intact. And on the SCS, that was a lot of computer.

  He and his crew slid into their seats with a collective groan, they’d all enjoyed themselves last night. Then they began powering up the various systems; Rick thumbing in to convince the software that a human pilot was aboard.

  The I-LoC had been one of the last things that the nations of the solar system had agreed on. Now even lowly cargo ships always had human pilots. Law of Control had meant there were a lot of idiots in space, but it had finally ended the Drone Downfall that had almost erased world commerce.

  Rick’s granddad had flown as one of the first enforcer squads after the I-LoC passed, targeting any unpiloted aircraft. That’s back when pilots really flew; still amazing that Granddad had survived the Drone Wars. Finally gone were the days when a competitor would slam an untraceable drone into the engine of a cargo transport ship to up the value of their own goods. Murder by untraceable drone had moved from nation against nation to neighbor against neighbor during the DD. You slept with my wife? A personal drone moving at Mach 1 hammered into your car while it was driving you to work. You broke up with me, y
ou bitch? Poof! Passed me over for promotion? Boom!

  Everyone agreed that the DD had been bad and no one wanted to go back there. So, wars had shifted to more conventional forms of killing people and relative safety returned to the skies, at least outside of atmo. Inside atmo, Earth just kept getting weirder and weirder, which was why so many nations were heading up the grav well.

  The French had been the first to jump when they’d bugged out twenty years ago. They’d flown out to the asteroid belt, taken over Ceres, and—once they’d hollowed it out—crawled inside and closed the door with barely a Bonne chance, Salope. You too, bitch.

  “Okay, Jess,” he grabbed a food pack and tossing back a painkiller before holding the mission chip up against the reader. “Let’s see what fun we’re up to today.”

  * * *

  Seal and secure.

  Mission plan loaded.

  Fuel = plan + 50%. Check.

  Ammo = plan (0) + full charge COIL laser.

  Air = sufficient 4 crew 6 months or full load 1 week + regen. Check.

  All of Alpha Company. Check.

  Shit! Earth. Going all of the way down to the surface? Ug-ly!

  3

  Takara sat in the Stella and looked up and down the line as she pulled out of the hangar and into black space. Normally their missions were one conflict, one Stinger. Now the entire Night Stalkers Charlie Company was forming up. All three Stingers, four small Tagger gun ships, and the five big Guts that could hold a hundred suited troops or two hundred civilians.

  “Stella? What the hell?”

  “Mission profile,” the Stella read off to her. “Landing Canmerica West capital at oh-two-hundred hours local time. Retrieve all remaining troops.”

  “I didn’t know there was anyone still left in Tucson.”

  Stella ran a list up one of the screens and it made sense.

  The politicians had been the first aloft to the big Canmerican O’Neill habitats out at the Lagrange 5 point—Lunar orbit, but sixty degrees behind the Moon. Of course. Critical skills had flown next and then lottery winners who passed the IQ and genetic thresholds. The last to arrive had deep-spaced all of the politicians who didn’t pass their own tests—about seventy percent. It had been a major pain to clean up before the area’s space lanes were safe for travel again. Lesson learned: next time they wouldn’t just feed them out the airlock.