by Paula Guran
Just like the ships that searched for the Sikkerhet found nothing all those years ago.
When it became clear that the Geneva’s role would be downsized, Sabin took some time off—actual time off.
She got some sleep. And she spoke to a mandatory grief counselor. She was proud of herself; she didn’t lie. She said the discovery of her father’s ship brought everything back up, and created as many questions as it answered.
The remaining information systems on the Sikkerhet were corrupted, the life pods were in place in the intact portions of the ship, but all of that meant nothing considering how much time had passed.
The foldspace investigation and rescue team brought the Sikkerhet back to real space, and would take it to Sector Base V for study. There they would figure out what the information systems said, what happened in the last few hours of the ship, and how it got to that part of foldspace.
For all anyone knew, that part of foldspace was the part ships went to when they activated the anacapa decades ago. Or maybe it was easily accessed from the part of real space where the Sikkerhet had been when it disappeared.
No one knew, but they did know they had to answer some questions. Sabin knew that she needed the questions answered as well.
Because, she figured, if they found out what happened to the Sikkerhet, they might end up with more information in their search for the Ivoire.
That search would continue for months, maybe years. Already a mathematics and theoretical physics team had come in to watch the imagery of the Ivoire in the moments before it vanished. They were timing the last message, and figuring out why it had reached the ships before the Ivoire vanished, since those two things should have happened simultaneously.
The hope was that they would figure out the differential, use it in the equations that sent ships into a particular part of foldspace, and find the Ivoire.
The Alta had sent another diplomatic ship to work with the Xenth in locating the ships that had attacked the Ivoire. If a team from the Fleet got to investigate those ships’ weapons systems, they might figure out how the weapons interacted with the Ivoire’s anacapa, if those weapons did indeed interact with the anacapa, and maybe come up with some answers that way.
The Geneva was to help transport the Sikkerhet to Sector Base V. Sabin knew that she had received a charity mission, one that would let her find some answers slowly, and for once in her life, she didn’t care.
Because she had finally come to some conclusions.
As the Geneva traveled back to Sector Base V, she asked for a private conference with General Zeller.
She spoke to him from her private communications room in her captain’s suit, the same room she had spoken to Coop night after night after night.
She didn’t miss the sexual side of her relationship with Coop—that had happened only a few times per year—but she missed the friendship, the ability to consult with someone who had a similar job but a different point of view.
She felt alone now, in a way she had never felt alone before.
But she didn’t tell Zeller that.
Instead, when his disapproving face appeared on her screen, she actually smiled at him.
“I’m finally going to do what you want, General,” she said, after the initial niceties ended.
His gaze kept moving away from her image, as if something else in the room interested him more than any conversation with her could. “And that would be?”
“I’m resigning my commission. I’m stepping down as captain of the Geneva.”
His entire posture changed. His gaze snapped forward, meeting hers.
“That is not what I want,” he said. “You have become one of the best captains in the Fleet. You proved me wrong long ago, Captain Sabin, and even on this most difficult mission, you kept your focus on the task at hand, setting your personal problems aside and rising to a standard that few captains achieved.”
She had waited years for praise like that from him. Her cheeks warmed as her face flushed. But the praise was no longer relevant.
“Thank you, General,” she said, “but I realized on this last trip that you were right: my father’s disappearance has haunted me. It still does. We don’t entirely understand what happened—”
“We’re pretty sure that the ship collided with something in foldspace as it arrived,” Zeller said. “Every captain’s nightmare.”
“Yes,” Sabin said. “It is, and they’re probably right. But I want to know.”
“You can get reports. Your talents would be wasted working on the remains of the Sikkerhet. Let the technicians do it—”
“General,” she said gently. “I’ve acquired a new ghost on this trip.”
To his credit, he stopped speaking and frowned. “Someone on the Ivoire?” he asked, keeping the question both professional and delicate.
“Captain Cooper and I were good friends,” she said, unwilling to explain more. “I believe if I return to foldspace and anacapa research, I might be able to find him.”
“We’ve lost one excellent captain on this trip,” Zeller said. “We can’t lose you as well.”
A month ago, these comments would have angered her. She would have wanted to know why he hadn’t said such things to her before, why he had kept his evaluations to himself.
Or she would have demanded to know why he believed her good now, instead of earlier. She could almost hear her own voice, strained, angry: Am I a better captain now that you’re short a captain, General? Or are you supposed to say this to keep me in line?
But she didn’t have the energy or the desire for that kind of confrontation.
“General,” she said gently, “my full attention will never again be on the Geneva and that, by definition, will make me a bad captain. I’m going to resign my commission, and you can’t talk me out of it. If you value my work, please help me secure a good spot on the teams investigating the Sikkerhet and the disappearance of the Ivoire.”
His expression was flat. Only his eyes moved, as if he could see through the camera into her soul.
“I have never understood you,” he said. “I always thought I did, but I don’t.”
“I disagree, General. You believed me obsessed with my father’s disappearance, and I was. When I realized I could learn no more, I put myself in a position to emulate him. And now that we have information again, I want to return to research.”
Zeller shook his head. “Your father wouldn’t understand this.”
“Probably not,” she said. “I think it would make him angry.”
She didn’t add the rest. She had finally realized that she was her mother’s daughter as well as her father’s. Unlike her mother, Sabin thrived in a military environment. But unlike her father, she had to choose her own path, and if that path deviated from the norm, she had to follow the new path instead of trudging along the old.
Amazing that a double loss—learning her father was truly dead and suspecting that Coop was as well—would help her discover who she really was.
Perhaps that was what living was all about, using the good and the bad to determine the essence of one’s self.
“I’ll be more useful in research,” she said. “Of course, I will remain on the Geneva until the Fleet can provide a suitable replacement.”
“I don’t think anyone has resigned a captain’s commission after such a success, Sabin,” Zeller said. “Not in all the years of the Fleet.”
She didn’t believe that was true. There were centuries of Fleet history, and so much had disappeared into legend.
“I don’t consider what happened in foldspace a success, sir,” she said. “We lost the Ivoire.”
“And found a ship that we had thought gone forever, Captain,” Zeller said. “We wouldn’t have found it without you. The foldspace rescue team says they might have dismissed that blip on their equipment. They think you and Captain Foucheux saw things they did not, and they must change their algorithms accordingly.”
This was one of the reasons t
hat Sabin had to return to research and foldspace investigation. The method of doing things had become more important than the purpose for doing those things.
The teams no longer thought of the lives hanging in the balance. They thought about the probabilities for success.
And with that realization, she finally understood what Zeller was telling her.
There was only one person who could have found the Sikkerhet on this mission, one person whose thinking was both rigid enough to conduct a grid search and creative enough to explore all the possibilities.
That was why he considered her mission a success.
“I am going to see if we can invent a new position for you, Captain,” Zeller said. “We need something better in investigations, and we need someone of command rank who can run that new system. Tell me you’ll keep your captain’s commission and accept the reassignment.”
“Only if I may focus on research, sir,” she said.
“Research, investigation, and the technology itself. I’ll see if we can change the Geneva’s designation so she can be the ship in charge of that part of our team.”
“Sir, the Geneva’s not equipped for the kind of work we would need to do,” she said. “We would need a newer ship, one outfitted especially for us.”
His eyes narrowed, that disapproving look she knew so well. He had once accused her of taking what little she was offered, and ungratefully asking for ten times as much.
She had just done so now.
But she didn’t take back her request.
“My instinct is to say no, Captain,” he said. “But I have learned that my instinct always discounts you. So I will see what I can do.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said as he signed off.
She sat in her small back-up control room for several minutes afterward, staring at the blank screen.
For the first time in their careers, neither Zeller nor Sabin had won the argument with each other. They had compromised in a way neither of them would have thought possible two decades before.
She was starting something new, remaking something old into a brand new part of the Fleet.
And, sadly, the first thing she wanted to do was tell Coop. He might not understand her choice, but he would give her an intelligent and lively discussion. He would let her know what she hadn’t thought of, and what she needed to do to make the experiment work.
She closed her eyes for just a moment.
She would remain a captain, and the loneliness would still be a large part of her life.
Maybe even larger now, without Coop.
As a young girl, she had needed her father back. She couldn’t imagine life without him.
As an adult woman, she wanted Coop back. But she could easily imagine life without him. It wasn’t just something she would have chosen.
None of this was.
And here was the difference between her childhood and now: If her research found Coop alive, she still would retain a job in research and foldspace investigation. If they had found her father before she quit school, she would have become someone else.
Funny how the events of one’s life changed that life.
Coop understood that. He seemed to fathom how wisdom was hard-earned, not something someone else could impart and believe that another person would get.
Maybe that was why the Fleet’s insistence on stepping into life in other cultures bothered him so much. Because he hadn’t even been certain he understood his own life.
She wished she could tell him that she finally realized what he had been telling her all those months ago.
And, in acknowledging the feeling she had, she realized also that she believed, deep down, she would never get the chance to tell him. Even if her research led to his ship’s discovery forty years from now, she suspected Coop would not be on it, just like her father hadn’t been on his ship.
Hard-won understanding.
It wasn’t quite the death of hope—part of her still hoped that Coop was alive somewhere.
It was more like the application of hope.
She wanted to make sure that no one else—child, adult, crew member, captain—would ever lose a loved one to foldspace again.
It was probably a vain hope.
But it would keep her going, for at least another forty years.
The Confederation fights only because the baffling Others continue to battle them. Staff Sergeant Torin Kerr’s aim is to keep both her superiors and her motley crew of space marines alive as they deal with lethal missions in defense of the galaxy. Tanya Huff’s story is set in her Valor Confederation universe.
Not That Kind of a War
Tanya Huff
“We still have one hell of a lot of colonists to get off this rock before we can leave.” Captain Rose frowned at Sho’quo Company’s three surviving second lieutenants and the senior NCOs. “And every ship going up is going to need an escort to keep it from being blown to hell by the Others so we’re on Captain Allon’s timetable. Given the amount of action up there . . . ” He paused to allow the distant crack of a vacuum jockey dipping into atmosphere to carry the point. “ . . . we may be down here for a while. Bottom line, we have to hold Simunthitir because we have to hold the port.”
“The Others have secured the mines,” Second Lieutenant di’Pin Arver muttered, her pale orange hair flipping back and forth in agitation, “you’d think they’d be happy to be rid of us.”
“I’d think so. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to.” The captain thumbed the display on his slate and a three dimensional map of Simunthitir rose up out of the holo-pad on the table. “Good news is, we’re up against a mountain so, as long as our air support keeps kicking the ass of their air support, they can only come at us from one side. Bad news is, we have absolutely no maneuvering room and we’re significantly out-numbered even if they only attack with half of what they’ve got on the ground.”
In Staff Sergeant Torin Kerr’s not inconsiderable experience, even the best officers liked to state the obvious. For example: significantly out-numbered. Sho’quo Company had been sent off to this mining colony theoretically to make a statement of force to the Others’ scouts. They’d since participated in a rout and now were about to make one of those heroic last stands that played so well on the evening news. No one had apparently told the enemy that they were merely doing reconnaissance and they had, as a result, sent two full battalions—or the Others’ equivalent—to take the mines.
“Lieutenant Arver, make sure your remaining STAs . . .
And what fun, they’d already lost two of their six surface-to-air missiles.
“ . . . are positioned to cover the airspace immediately over the launch platform. See if you can move one of them up here.”
A red light flared on the targeting grid overlaying the map.
“Yes, sir.” The lieutenant keyed the position into her slate.
“Set your mortars up on level four. I want them high enough to have some range but not so high any return fire they draw may damage the port. You’re going to have to take out their artillery or we are, to put it bluntly, well and truly screwed. Staff Sergeant Doctorow . . . ”
“Sir.”
Doctorow’s platoon had lost its second lieutenant in the first exchange.
“ . . . I want all accesses to the launch platform in our hands ASAP. We don’t need a repeat of Beniger.”
With the Others beating down the door, the civilians of Beniger had rushed the ships. The first had taken off so over-loaded it had crashed back, blown the launch pad and half the port. Granted, any enemy in the immediate area had also been fried but Torin figured the dead of Beniger considered that cold comfort.
“Lieutenant Garly, I want one of your squads on stretcher duty. Get our wounded up into port reception and ready to be loaded once all the civilians are clear. Take position on the second level but mark a second squad in case things get bad.”
“Sir.”
“Lieutenant Franks . . . ”
Torin fel
t the big man beside her practically quiver in anticipation.
“ . . . you’ll hold the first level.”
“Sir!”
Just on the periphery of her vision, Torin saw Staff Sergeant Amanda Aman’s mouth twitch and Torin barely resisted the urge to smack her. Franks, Torin’s personal responsibility, while no longer a rookie, still had few shiny expectations that flared up at inconvenient moments. He no longer bought into the romance of war—his first time out had taken care of that—but he continued to buy into the romance of the warrior. Every now and then, she could see the desire to do great things rise in his eyes.
“You want to live on after you die, Staff . . . ” He danced his fingers over his touchpad, drawing out a martial melody. “ . . . do something that makes it into a song.”
Torin didn’t so much want Lieutenant Franks to live on after he died as to live on for a good long time so she smacked that desire down every time she saw it and worried about what would happen should it make an appearance when she wasn’t around. The enemy smacked down with considerably more force. And their music sucked.
The captain swept a level stare around the gathered Marines. “Remember that our primary objective is to get the civilians out and then haul ass off this rock. We hold the port long enough to achieve this.”
“Captain.” First Sergeant Chigma’s voice came in on the company channel. “We’ve got a reading on the unfriendlies.”
“On my way.” He swept a final gaze over the Marines in the room and nodded. “You’ve got your orders, people.”
Emerging out of the briefing room—previously known as the Simunthitir Council Chamber—the noise of terrified civilians hit Torin like a physical blow. While no one out of diapers was actually screaming, everyone seemed to feel the need to express their fear. Loudly. As if maybe Captain Allon would send down more frequent escorts from the orbiting carrier if he could only hear how desperate things had gotten.
Captain Rose stared around at the milling crowds. “Why are these people not at the port, First?”