by Tal Valante
And that was where Tactical Officer Shane Cawley came in.
Unlike the poor, uneducated pilots, the tactical officer was a highly trained, well-schooled person with a master’s degree and at least three-years’ worth of combat experience; Earth-born, but a man of the universe. In other words, a demigod.
“We’ll be playing Red vs. Blue today,” the T.O. announced on their first day on board the Cyclopes. “Live drill, not the sims.”
The briefing room erupted with excited murmurs. Even Mark, hot and stuffy in his spacesuit, straightened up.
“Fighters One through Seven will be Blue Wing. Fighters Eight through Fourteen, you’re Red. We’ll be playing in the asteroid field near Sigma Seven-One-Two . . .”
Shane detailed the fighting conditions and laid down the rules, but Mark only listened with half an ear. The rest of his senses—eyes, ears, and soul—were trained on Shane himself. He liked the T.O.’s profile against the tactical screen, liked his alert eyes and serious face. Shane must have done a million live drills in his military career, but he wasn’t cutting any corners. His intensity was unnerving. It was stimulating.
It was, Mark realized, simply Shane. And Shane was very rainy, in his book.
“. . . the winning team gets their choice of dinner. Understood?”
“Yes, Sir!” they all answered together.
“Move out.”
Mark pushed himself to his feet and filed out the door along with his wing mates, locking on his helmet. They all turned right into the long corridor of drop-tubes. At the third one, Mark jumped and grabbed the ceiling handle, then swung into the tube feet-first and dropped the rest of the way into the cockpit.
He buckled up, took a quick check of his readouts, and was good to go. “Blue Three ready to drop,” he reported.
“Stand by, Blue Three,” came Shane’s voice, intimate in his helmet’s speaker.
One by one, his wing mates reported in. Then, at Shane’s command, they fired auxiliary thrusters and shot out of the Cyclopes, heading for the asteroid field. Mark felt a smile crawling up his lips.
Hunting time.
Shane likes to keep Mark up-to-date on daily events. Sometimes he feels as if Mark’s mind is on vacation somewhere, and he likes sending these vocal postcards—bits and pieces of the life they should be sharing.
“Mr. Furrypants is doing fine,” he tells Mark. “The new diet food is helping his kidneys. Poor puss, he hates it.”
And another day: “Lisa is having a baby. My little sister, can you believe it? Isn’t she supposed to be like, sixteen years old? I tell you, you look away for a minute and they grow up . . .”
And another day, loudly, because the Bible Man—a new patient who reads from the Bible in a constant mumble—is also in the garden: “Mom made her famous blueberry pie yesterday. I swear, I could smell it over the phone.”
Little things. Simple things. Nothing about their days together in the Spavy, nothing about the Redoren War, or Shane’s dismissal with PTSD, or Mark’s decision to keep serving and his time as a POW.
But always, always, “I miss you. Come back to me.”
“Blue Wing, stand by to engage,” Shane’s voice echoed in Mark’s ears. A warm, pleasant voice. Mark liked to imagine it was meant only for him.
He shifted against the grav-belt and fixed his hold on the control stick, the blood singing in his veins. He felt like a hunter’s falcon, ready to launch at Shane’s barest flick of the wrist . . .
“Engage!”
Mark jerked. He pulled on the throttle and swung his fighter into the nearby asteroid field, zigzagging between the rocks alongside his wing mates. Somewhere on the other side of the debris-strewn space, Red Wing was working its way toward them and this mock confrontation.
“Come on, come on,” Mark hummed, dodging one asteroid and skirting another. He flicked a switch on the control board, and the engine whined as some power rerouted from the thrusters to the weapon system.
“Weapons hot,” he reported to Shane.
“At your discretion, Blue Three,” came the answer.
His discretion came in the form of blips on his radar, opposite his own location.
“I’ve got sights,” he said.
“Steady . . .” Shane whispered in his ears as other people reported sights.
Mark dived under an asteroid and came up sharp on the other side—straight at a Red Wing fighter. Months of training made his hands fly to the fire controls, and the fighter, programmed to tag but not destroy its target, recorded a direct hit.
“Ha! Take that, Red Seven.”
Mark did a flyby next to the tagged fighter, then straightened up at the emergency sound coming from his console.
“Target locked,” the tactical system warned.
“Shit.” He dove behind the nearest asteroid and wormed his way through a denser part of the field. A quick look at his console: Red Two was hot on his tail, and Red Four was waiting for him up ahead. Mark shut down the weapons system and directed full power to the engines. This could get tight . . .
Red Four appeared on his screen, and Mark pulled up and right, leaving Red Two to take the heat of the targeting system. He drove a hard loop that plastered him against his seat, heated up his weapons again, and came down hard on top of Red Four. Another burst of mock fire, and the opposing fighter was tagged.
“Sayre!” Shane snapped on the open comm channel.
“Sir?”
A pause, then, gruffly, “Stop stealing everyone’s targets.”
“Yessir,” Mark said happily, and set all his sights on the tactical officer instead.
It hurts, Shane has to confess. He’s a Spavy officer—was a Spavy officer—and denying pain is part of his training and mentality. But pacing the little garden around a nonresponsive Mark hurts, and he can no longer ignore it.
Nor can he ignore the other feeling that bubbles in the pit of his stomach.
Anger.
“I don’t get it,” he says to Mark. “What are you seeing in there? What fantasy world is so much better than facing reality with me? I mean, sure, reality sucks, but at least we’d be together. Isn’t that important to you anymore? Don’t you want to—”
He stops when a nurse pokes her head through the gate. “Everything all right, Mr. Cawley?”
All right? Ha. Shane wants to laugh. He wants to scream. He has a feeling that either reaction would get him thrown into Rigsby Psychiatric Ward alongside Mark. Would that be so bad? God, he’s losing it.
“All right,” he manages to parrot back, and the nurse disappears.
He looks at Mark and sighs. “You know it isn’t. Not without you, buddy. Never without you.”
It was different when it wasn’t playing tag.
The first time they’d gone after raiders, Mark felt a whole different kind of song in his blood.
He kicked off from the Cyclopes and took his place in the formation of fighters. Up ahead, a raider’s loot ship idled with glowing engines; it had just Punched through space and was stuck here for at least five minutes. The enemy fighters swarmed around it in a defensive pattern.
A blip called Mark’s attention to his console. On his radar screen, one of the enemy fighters had turned red. Mark’s target, fed in by Shane. Mark heated up his weapons and rolled his shoulders while the rest of the wing took formation around him.
“All fighters, you have your targets,” came Shane’s voice in his ears. “Engage.”
Mark pulled the throttle to full force and took off in the enemy’s direction. His hands remembered months of training, and he swept in on a gentle arc. The enemy fighters opened fire, and Mark spun and dove under the volley, then came up on his target from below.
“I’ve got a lock,” he reported, and squeezed off a tight barrage from his forward cannons.
It was a good shot, beginner’s luck. The enemy fighter exploded in a bright, brief ball of flames, immediately quenched by space’s vacuum.
Soundless.
Merciles
s.
Irreversible.
“Fighter Three, engage the enemy!”
“Fighter Three, move!”
“Fighter Three! Look out! Sayre!”
Mark started and looked up. The enemy’s main vessel loomed over him like a leviathan. He yanked on the control stick and managed, barely, to skirt its hull. A barrage of shots followed him like a pack of angry wolves. At this range, one direct hit would end him. Mark pulled up sharply, and his fighter obeyed, but then shuddered, struck. The engines? No, only the aft thrusters. Mark’s heart started beating again.
“Fighter Three, report.”
Mark spun his fighter around and fired the damaged thrusters, bringing his vessel to a standstill in space. He licked his lips. God, he’d been two degrees off death. The pilot he’d shot down hadn’t been that lucky; Mark couldn’t even see the debris of his fighter. He felt frozen throughout. Numb. There’d been a person in that fighter, dammit, a pilot just like himself—
“Sayre. Switch to private channel.”
Mark did so with trembling hands.
“Okay, it’s okay,” Shane said in his ears, soft and warm. “I need you to snap out of it. Look at your console.”
Mark looked. Another enemy fighter lit up in red—his new target.
“I can’t,” he said.
“It’s okay,” Shane said again. “Take the control stick. Nice and easy.”
Mark did. “I just killed a man,” he whispered.
“I know. But these bastards just blew up a passenger ship from Earth. They killed innocents, and they’ll do so again the next chance they get. Can you risk that happening?”
Mark shook his head slowly, then remembered that Shane couldn’t see him. “No.”
“Open the throttle,” Shane said, and Mark obeyed as if his hands belonged to someone else. His fighter began to accelerate toward the battlefield, where his wing mates and the raiders were tearing at each other like a pack of mad dogs.
An urgent blip. His tactical system warned, “Target locked.” He thought he should do something about it, but wasn’t sure what.
“Evasive,” Shane whispered in his ear.
Mark evaded.
“Circle back around him . . . Lock your weapons . . .”
Mark circled and locked. He could almost feel Shane’s hands guiding his own across the console, helping him press the buttons and work the stick. He squeezed off a barrage of shots, and the fighter lost its aft thrusters. Another of the Cyclopes’s fighters finished him off, and a new red target lit on Mark’s console.
“Now get this bastard for me . . .”
Mark did.
Two weeks later, Shane can’t resist it anymore.
Slowly, gently, like a lover’s first shy kiss, he brushes his mind against Mark’s. Just for a second. Just to see what miraculous landscape Mark is exploring on his own. But what he does glimpse is enough to shake him to the core.
Mark’s mind is a field of death.
There are bodies everywhere and wounded men crying for help; some shot-down spacecraft, a torn flag. There’s a circle of cages with half-starved, half-naked people in them. And in the middle of it all, a metal cage with bars so thick and tight that Shane can’t see a thing inside. Which doesn’t stop him from knowing instantly, in his guts and heart, that Mark is in there.
Shane pulls out and retches in the bushes for five minutes, until a heavy hand lands on his back, and he recoils, stumbling.
“Sorry,” Nurse Park says.
“Alex,” Shane rasps.
“You all right, man?”
“Yeah. No. Just . . .”
“Lemme get you some water.”
Shane drains the plastic cup, wishes he had some more, then smiles weakly when Alex whips another cup from behind his back.
“You’re a lifesaver.”
“Only doing my job. What happened?”
Shane doesn’t want to tell him about the Resonance link. He’s ashamed of having touched Mark so intimately in his vulnerable state, and—at the same time—ashamed he hasn’t done it sooner. He doesn’t know how to explain the terrible images in Mark’s mind. He doesn’t know what to do about them. He only knows that something must be done.
The war may be over, but Mark is still a POW.
The door chime made Mark look up from his data pad.
“Enter!” he called, and then, “Lopez, I’m not in the mood—”
But it was Shane in the doorway of his small quarters.
Mark tossed away the data pad and scrambled to his feet. “Sha—um, Sir.”
“Sayre. Everything all right?”
“Yeah, sure. Rainy.” He smiled and jabbed his chin at the pad. “E-voicing my brother.”
Shane’s lips twitched up in a quarter smile. “How old is he?”
“Sixteen. The Age of Trouble.”
Shane nodded. A moment later his face darkened and his lips pursed. “Sayre . . .”
Mark gulped. Here it came—the news that there’d been some mistake, that he couldn’t serve as a pilot after all. He’d have to find another job, and who’d take a mining colony brat who’d been discharged from the Spavy? His brother would have to go into mining after all—
“It happens to everyone, the first time,” Shane said. “Freezing up. To the good people, at least. Thought you should know.”
A torrent of relief washed clear through Mark. He felt his cheeks heating up. “Did you . . .?”
“Yes. First round against the Redorens. My C.O. helped me through it.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.” Shane shifted on his feet. “I know it doesn’t really help.”
Except it did, in its own way. Mark felt a wave of warmth unfurl inside his chest.
Then, with a sharp nod, Shane turned to leave. Mark realized he’d never so much as invited him in, and mentally kicked himself.
“Hey,” he called after him. “Um, Sir? You said those raiders hit an Earth liner?”
Shane turned back with a raised eyebrow. Mark had never seen anyone pull off that look until then. “Yes?”
“I, um, thought you were from Earth. I hope it was no one you knew—”
“Not that I’m aware of, no.” Fire entered Shane’s eyes, and he straightened up, like Dale used to back at basic training. “But it might have been. That’s the whole point. That’s why we’re here.”
And suddenly Mark sensed it: a thrum of excitement, the warmth of belonging. The pride of doing something worthwhile. The sentiments rolled off Shane so strongly that Mark could almost feel them as his own.
“Would you like to come in?” he said.
And nearly kicked himself physically, this time.
“I’m afraid that would not be appropriate,” Shane said. “I have to go.”
“Oh, sure. Well then, stay rainy. Sir.”
Mark decided he was absolutely in love with the way Shane’s lips twitched up. “And you, Sayre.”
The door snicked closed after him.
Mark decided he could be absolutely in love with everything about Shane.
Shane drives to the Inter-Stellar Navy Headquarters that day. There, no one asks him questions; they simply wave him through to Admiral McKenzie’s office.
“You lied to me,” he tells McKenzie, skipping the pleasantries.
The admiral regards him with a frown, then motions him to close the door. Shane obeys.
“Is this about Sayre?”
“Yes.” Shane holds his breath, then huffs it out of his nostrils. “I just saw him.”
“I told you about his condition, son—”
“I mean, I saw him. Really saw him. His mind’s a wreck.”
McKenzie watches him without reply. Shane paces the room until he’s dizzy, then drops into the hard chair in front of the admiral’s desk. “Christ, John, what did they do to him?”
He watches as the admiral takes a key from his pocket, inserts it into a desk drawer lock, and turns it, all in slow, measured moves. Out of the drawer comes a silve
r flask, which Shane knows is saved for dire occasions.
“We don’t know,” McKenzie says. He pours out two fingers into his empty coffee cup. “The official story is trauma-related regression. Unofficially, I suspect . . .”
He slides the mug across the table and motions for Shane to drink.
Shane doesn’t move.
The admiral waits.
With a sigh, Shane lifts the cup and tosses back the burning liquid, coughing as he lowers his head again. His doctor will kill him.
“I suspect Lieutenant Sayre discovered something about the Redorens. They had to return him as part of their surrendering terms, but they might have ruined his mind first. I’m sorry, son.”
The room slowly spins around Shane, like the galaxies around a space jet out of control. He remembers flashes from old Earth movies—dark labs and electric shocks and men immobilized on gurneys with teeth-guards in their mouths, unable even to writhe or scream.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he hears himself saying.
“Because. What on Earth can you do about it?”
Their first planet leave was on Kamea II, a military outpost that had sprouted rings and rings of civilian entertainment business. The Cyclopes stayed in orbit while the pilots took turns going planet-side in the shuttle.
Mark disembarked with Lopez and Davenport, and stretched his arms under Kamea’s yellow sun. The orange sky seemed endless above him, and a mere precursor to the endless reaches of space.
“Sayre,” Shane called after him.
Mark waved Lopez and Davenport off as he waited for the T.O. to catch up. Shane was holding a brown envelope in his hands. Strange—print letters were a thing of the past, except for formal occasions. Who could have written the T.O.?
“This came for you,” Shane said, indicating the envelope.
Mark gaped at him. “For me? Who’d be writing to me?”
Shane huffed in fond exasperation, or so it felt to Mark. “How about the Inter-Stellar Navy? That colossal body you’re serving, with its uniforms and ratings and rates—”
“I got a new rate? I got a new rate!”
“Yes, Spaceman Apprentice.” Shane’s quarter smile climbed almost to full-mast. He opened the envelope and retrieved the new rating badge, and Mark snapped to attention as Shane pinned the badge to the upper sleeve of his uniform. He’d never believed he’d be bursting with excitement over a rate. Or was it the closeness of Shane’s body, the butterfly touch of his fingers?