Wandering Storm

by Steven Anderson

  She put her tray down next to mine, which was a good sign. “You look exhausted, Samuel. Long night?” She sat and concentrated on cutting up her pancakes.

  Sam smiled at her, looking smug. “Not long enough.”

  She nodded, very serious. “As I expected. I knew she’d be more compliant with you here. You make her happy.” She took a bite of her pancakes. “I want to thank you for doing your duty, and doing such a fine job of it. She’s never looked better.” Sam seemed amused, but he knew better than to smile, because I’d make him pay for it later.

  “It’s not like that.” My voice was soft and sullen. “I had a meeting with Captain Rostron before breakfast this morning. I was trying to be respectful of her wishes.”

  “Right. No more defiance?”

  “Nope.”

  “No more disrespect? No more poking the bear?”

  “I’m in enough trouble as it is. I’m going to keep a low profile for a while. I’m going to be–”

  “Compliant,” Winn finished for me. “Well, whatever the cause,” she tipped her head at Sam, “I like it. My life will be simpler with this new version of Mala Dusa.”

  Kal sat down next to her and Colin sat next to him, seeming uncertain about me. “May I pet him?” I asked.

  Kal sighed. “Sure. Go to her, boy.”

  Colin laid down across my feet and waited for me to slip him a piece of waffle or sausage. “Thanks, Kal. I’ve missed him. And you. I know just saying it isn’t enough, but I’m sorry about trying to take Winona from you. Please forgive me.”

  He rolled his eyes and looked at the ceiling. “Winn kept me up most of the night telling me why we have to stay at this God forsaken planet. My bet is that we’re all going to die here, assuming it’s not just RUMINT. That’s what I hope it is, just a nightmare of a rumor circulating around. She also keeps telling me that even though you’re erratic, inconsiderate, and a bunch of other things I can’t remember this morning, that somehow, you’re worth all the pain you cause. For her sake, I forgive you. Is that good enough?”

  “I’ll take it, and I’ll try to earn more over time. I met with the Captain this morning, and I’m pretty sure we’re staying. She might announce something later today if the orders come through.”

  “Then we’re all going to die. This is an elite strike team, not ground troops or police or ‘peace keepers’. That’s not our job. You understand that, right? Your job is just to keep Storm’s innards working. We do surgical insertions and targeted killing. You don’t use a scalpel in a knife fight. For that, you need a big blade that you can use to hack and stab and push all the way through your opponent. You need–”

  “Kal, I think that’s enough.”

  Winona stopped him, and then whispered in his ear while I tried to stop shaking and get control of my breathing. It took a while, even with Sam’s help. “It’s OK, Winn. He’s right. If we stay, every death here will be my fault. I know that.”

  Kal shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mala Dusa. I’ve been reminded that I can be inconsiderate and a few other things too. You lived through hell. I guess you know something about what it’s like down there. I’ve no right to criticize. If we stay and they kill some of us, it will be in the service of the Union. Not your fault.”

  I nodded, thinking unless it is. I cut a bite of sausage and slipped it to Colin, my own appetite gone.

  “What else did the Captain tell you this morning?”

  “That if I ever lie in an AAR again, she’ll have me strapped to the outside of the hull until we make home port on Dulcinea. She said I’d make an even uglier corpse than I do an officer.”

  “You lied in your AAR?” Kal sounded surprised that I wasn’t already dead.

  “Just a little. I didn’t know she’d take it so personally.”

  “What disciplinary action did she give you?”

  “Well, that was hard for her. I guess she usually assigns people to engineering as punishment. She makes them clean the food printers or do maintenance on the hydroponics tanks or work in the engine rooms where it’s always forty degrees plus. Those are my standard duties and I love doing them, so…”

  “Oh, God.” Winona put her hands over her eyes. “Not again.”

  I said it all in a rush, hoping it would hurt her less that way. “I’m helping Winn do part of the plan for putting Kastanje back into the Union. We need to figure out how to integrate an openly hostile military, get the shipyard operational, and squish all of the violent, competing factions until democratic institutions can start working again. We need to rebuild things like the courts, and civil police, and then hold fair elections.”

  “Just the two of you?” Sam sounded stunned.

  “No, of course not. Anything we come up with will have about six levels of review, starting with the Captain, and she’s actually had experience with this sort of thing on Bridger. The Union is supposed to send an advisor, but no one knows when. I don’t think anyone else is working on Kastanje reunification right now because the military commanders didn’t expect this raid to be so effective in causing the collapse of the Collective. That means that the RuComm and Union boards are likely to approve whatever she pushes up to them. Then the Kastanje government, what there is left of it, will review and approve the Union recommendations. The Captain said that if what we plan comes with Union funding they’ll probably agree to almost anything.”

  Winn still had her eyes covered. “Why is it that every time you screw up, I get punished?”

  “That’s not true.” I did my best “hurt and offended” voice.

  “Oh, yes it is. Tenth grade chemistry. You filled the school with smoke and we both got detention for a week.”

  “Well, it was your formula.”

  “Senior year bolo tournament. Anti-grav generators buried in front of the goals so all of the other team’s shots went too high. Another week of detention.”

  “And who designed the generators?”

  “Third year at the Academy. We entered the pattern to do an east to west fly over at 3,000 meters above ground level. We crossed the parade ground doing over two hundred knots, fifty meters up and headed straight toward a mountain.”

  “I still maintain that it was a problem with the engines. I got them working in time.”

  “I had to do a hard burn at the last second to avoid dying, and we started a three hectare wild fire.”

  “Which we helped put out after we landed.”

  “Thirty-five demerits each, because no one believed your story about the engines.”

  “They couldn’t prove anything, and we still had forty left.”

  “Mala Dusa,” Sam interrupted, “merits at the Academy are not like money in a budget. You aren’t supposed to find ways to spend all of them each semester.”

  “I liked spending them. It was fun.”

  Sam turned to Kal. “I think there must be something seriously wrong with us to be in love with these two.”

  “Yeah. But how can I not love her?” He took Winona’s hand and sighed, as if he would have liked there to be an answer to that question.

  Captain Rostron made the announcement as we were finishing dinner. Union Command for the sector had assigned us to support Kastanje reunification and Esprit Orageux was already changing orbit to dock at the Hoog Schelde shipyard. The KDF had asked for three days to prepare quarters for our Marines, so it wouldn’t be until Saturday that we could get off the ship. Storm would use the time to transition us to a twenty-six hour day and sync our clocks with the capital, Oranjestad.

  Our orders were to send all of the personnel from our Marine strike teams to the surface to advise and support the KDF units providing protection to the Provisional Government. Kal and Colin would be leaving us.

  I tried to get Winn’s attention, but she had closed her eyes, silent tears leaking out from under her lashes and pain leaking around
the edges of her emotional block. I had Kal’s attention, though. I whispered to him, “I am so sorry.” He turned away without answering and put his arm around Winona’s shoulders.

  Winona and I would be staying with the ship and working with the Captain on reunification plans. Colonel Gerbrandij would be acting as the Provisional Government’s lead negotiator. He had established his command in one of the many unused sections of the shipyard, and Captain Rostron wanted us to be close to him to facilitate coordination. From the way her voice hardened when she said it, I don’t think she trusted him or the KDF.

  The Union had assigned Sam and two of our certified medical techs to the Central Hospital in Oranjestad to help get their medical AIs working again. I gasped when Captain Rostron announced it. Kal glanced at me, the very slightest hint of a smile on his lips.

  I didn’t hear much else from the Captain’s speech. She concluded with something inspirational about how we were the best the Union had, and that she was confident that we’d excel at whatever tasks Union command gave us.

  Sam had to nudge me when it was over. “Come on MD, let’s walk a bit.”

  “What?” The mess hall was almost empty. “I need to find Winona and Kal.”

  “Not right now you don’t. Give them some time alone first.”

  “OK.” I was still in shock and I let Sam help me to my feet. We walked aimlessly around the ship while he held my hand, neither of us talking much. After a while, he steered us toward the Sim Lab. A tavern sim was running, complete with a quartet playing soft music off to one side and a dozen or more tables full of people laughing and talking. Only the long table in the center of the room was real, though. The beer looked real too, as was the loud talk among the eight men and women sitting there complaining about how messed up Union command was in the Kastanje sector.

  “I don’t think I should be here.” I took a step back toward the door.

  “No, I’m pretty sure this is exactly where you should be.”

  “They’re going to kill me.”

  “They might. But did you hear anything from the Captain laying this at your feet?”

  “Well, no, but Kal knows this is entirely my fault.”

  “Kal’s not the kind to talk. Are you still sure that being here to bring Kastanje back into the Union is the right thing?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “Then let’s sit. I want to hear what they’re talking about.”

  I looked up at him, uncertain.

  “Do I have to say it?” he asked.

  I bit my lip and nodded.

  “You are brave, Mala Dusa.”

  “Damn right I am.” I didn’t feel it, though.

  “Mind if we join you?” I asked a woman whose name I never remembered. Nadia maybe? No, that wasn’t right.

  “Sure thing, Lieutenant.” She scooted a little on the bench to make room. “Thanks for fixing environmental in my cabin today. It was holding a steady twenty-eight in there last night. I about sweated to death. Maybe tonight I’ll be able to sleep. Let me pour you a beer.” She filled a glass and slid it to me before I could protest.

  “You can call me Mala Dusa while we’re off duty. And thanks, but I can’t drink any alcohol.”

  “But I can. I’m Sam Coleridge.” He took the glass away from me.

  “Nyala.” She introduced herself to him. “Why no beer? It would do you good after that announcement from Captain Rostron.”

  I thought about making something up, but Nyala would have known I was lying. “Pregnant,” I told her.

  “You’re shitting me. On purpose? Why would you do that?”

  I shrugged. “My fertility block is still in place and so is his. He knocked me up anyway.”

  She looked around me at Sam, impressed. “Damn.”

  I felt a flash of pride from Sam. He knew my condition was more about Tarakana magic than his own ‘manly’ prowess, but still…He’d put a baby inside me. I grinned at him.

  Nyala grabbed the hand of the man across from us, making him spill some of his beer. “Hey, Ajani, did you know our engineer is up the duff?”

  “Up the what?”

  “Up the duff. Preggers. In a family way.”

  He looked at me, then Sam. “That’s going to make things rough, mate, her raising a kid on her own with you down there.”

  I answered before Sam could. “Oh, but I’m not due until the end of December. I’m sure we’ll be out of here by then, and he and I can…”

  Nyala grabbed my hand. “Hush. Don’t say it out loud. We don’t talk about how long a thing will last, or what the future will be. You never want to speak the end until you’ve reached it, OK?”

  I nodded. “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right, honey.” She let go of my hand and patted it.

  Ajani pushed his glass to me. “Take a small swallow for luck. Getting a little on your tongue won’t hurt you. The truth is, we’re all a little jumpy going into this without Major Alaoui. I still can’t quite believe she’s not coming back.”

  The way he said it was more like a man mourning a lost love than a Marine missing his commander. I put the glass to my lips. “To Major Alaoui, then.” I took more than a sip.

  “Well done. Tell me, ma’am, you were there with her at the end, and the reports from our Captain don’t tell the story. She was too much a part of us to let her go that way, her and the others.”

  Nyala kicked him under the table. “You let her be.”

  “No, it’s OK,” I assured her. I looked around the table. I had everyone’s attention now. “I don’t mind telling you what I experienced, but there’s not much to it. She and her team held off fifty of the separatists while FAC Zero Nine had me locked inside the ship. Nine against fifty and with almost no cover. They kept me alive long enough to sabotage the FAC, but they were dead when I came out, their bodies lined up under the fantail. The KDF sergeant that found me took me to medivac after that.” I reached for Ajani’s glass and Sam slid it out of my reach back across the table.

  Ajani had his head tipped looking at me, reading my face. His skin was darker than Winona’s was, and the flicker of the simulated fire gave his eyes an earnest intensity. “And Costrano was already dead by then? I’d love to hear you tell that story sometime.”

  I wasn’t able to maintain eye contact. “I’m sorry. There’s nothing to tell. I was working in the FAC.”

  I turned to Sam, silently pleading with him to take me back to our cabin. He poured himself another beer. “Tell them about the KDF, Mala Dusa, the kind of men and women you met there while you were waiting for Esprit Orageux to come back for you.”

  “That’s right, poor child. They had you trapped all alone with them for five days. I’m surprised you aren’t dead, or worse.”

  “Costrano was the only monster I saw there. The rest were decent people. Like the sergeant that found me. He knew I was a Union officer and he could have killed me. He chose not to. He saved me. And the doctor at the medivac station, and…” I told them the story I’d invented for my original AAR, and then about why we needed to stay.

  “So to hear you tell it,” Corporal Mengiste asked when I had finished, “these people are worth risking our lives to help? I don’t see it. They left the Union and they fought hard to keep us out. Let them pay the price.”

  “They’re hungry. They’re without power. They’re sick, and the hospitals are broken and without basic supplies or medicine. A dozen factions are trying to murder their way into power. Colonel Gerbrandij is desperate, and he’s right when he says that only a quick integration of the military and government back into the Union can save this planet. People will die if we don’t stay.”

  He shook his head. “Nope. Still don’t see it. You’ve made a great case for RuComm to come here in force. They need economists and political consultants and scientists. They could use some good en
gineers,” he gestured at me, “but they sure as hell don’t need the Union’s best strike team hanging out on the surface being targets. We have more important places to be. If she were still alive, Alaoui would have talked the Captain out of this.”

  There were nods and a grumble of agreement around the table.

  “I don’t think so. I didn’t know her the way you all did, but she saved my life, so maybe that counts for something. I think she would have recognized that the factions down there will be doing all they can to stop reunification. All of them have assault teams, or something like it that will be trying to kill the Provisional Government in its cradle. Who better to teach the KDF how to stop them than the Union’s best? She might not have liked it, but in the end, she would have done her duty and she would have found a way to keep all of us alive.”

  Corporal Mengiste raised his glass to me. “I’m still certain that this is a mistake and we’re all going to die, but damn if you don’t make it sound pretty.”

  I reached for Sam’s beer and he didn’t stop. I only took a small sip after clinking the glass with Corporal Mengiste. Maybe two, but I felt I’d earned it.

  We stood to leave a few minutes later and Ajani walked out into the passageway with us. “Engineer, ma’am, you know you can get into trouble for trying to lie in your AAR. The Captain said that she knew Major Alaoui had killed Costrano based on what you told her in your report. You should go talk to her. She always learns the truth, and it would be better for you if you went to her first.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled, not looking at him. I was ignoring how hard Sam was trying to keep from smiling. “Captain Rostron already made me change it, but I asked her to keep it secret.”

  He nodded. “A noble lie is still a lie.” He took my hand and kissed it while Sam watched. “Someday, when it’s just the two of us, I’d like to hear the real story.”

  “It’s not much of a story. It’s not as noble as the lie.”

  “I can judge that for myself.”

  Sam took my hand and wrapped it around his arm. “It is a noble story, and someday she’ll be ready to tell it.”