“I don’t even know what a carrier group is,” she said.
He nodded. “A carrier group is six big ships: a couple of destroyers and cruisers supporting a big Hipparchus-class fighter carrier. Each of those six ships has a crew of up to a hundred people, and the carrier holds a full wing of fighter pilots.”
“We won’t be able to field that kind of strength, then,” the elder said.
“No,” Lanoe said, fighting the urge to laugh. He’d seen entire wars where neither side could put together a complete carrier group. “In all likelihood, we won’t even get a wing—that’s six squads, and every squad is ten to twenty pilots. We’ll be lucky to have a single full squadron by the time we ship out.”
“That doesn’t seem as impressive as the carrier group,” the elder said. “You feel that a squadron will be enough to repel the fleet that threatens Niraya?”
Lanoe looked away from her face. “Like I said, we need every single pilot we can get.”
The elder had learned a very long time ago how to conquer fear. The look on his face made her skin prickle but as she reached for the teapot her hand did not shake. She made sure of it.
Ehta vomited in a trash can on her way to the casino. It made her feel a little better. She carried hydration tabs in a pocket of her suit. A full day’s water ration in a single gel capsule. She’d been a marine long enough to know they had a secondary use. She bit down hard on one to wash the foulness out her mouth before she went up and knocked on the door.
Funny. It was the first time she’d ever seen a casino closed up in the middle of the day. But then, nothing about this felt right. Still, there were some things you had to do. When Lanoe called and asked if she’d be kind enough to come see him, she had to jump to it.
She had to say the words to his face.
Whatever he wants, you just say no, she told herself. That easy. Just, no, sir. He’s not your commanding officer. Not anymore.
The door opened and she looked up at a big guy in a heavy suit with the helmet up and polarized. It was not what she’d expected.
“I’m, uh, here for Commander Lanoe,” she said.
The big guy leaned over her. Ehta was not particularly short. Still she half-expected him to pick her up and carry her under his arm.
Stow that nonsense, she thought. He was just pinging her cryptab. After a second, he stood aside and let her into a darkened room. Inside was silence. No crowd, either, almost nobody in there, just a couple of Navy suits and two civilian women. It took her a second to make out the faces.
“Ensign,” Lanoe said. She recognized his voice. Of course. She’d heard it enough times over a comms laser. “Thanks for coming.”
She stepped into the middle of the room. Faced him and came to attention. You didn’t salute a Naval officer—most of the time you would just smack your hand against your helmet. Instead she nodded. “Sir.”
“Relax. This isn’t an official inspection,” Lanoe said, with a little laugh. He lifted his arms as if he might hug her. If he did, she thought she might throw up again. When she didn’t stand down he dropped his arms. “I was surprised to see you the other night, coming out of that bar. I believe you’ll remember M. Valk.”
The giant came out of the dark behind her. Damn. She did remember, now. She’d nearly bowled him over when they bounced her out of that dive. Her eyes had adjusted and she could make out faces and she was glad to see she didn’t recognize anybody else.
“I’m putting something together, and—” Lanoe stopped in midsentence. His eyes flicked down, across her suit. She knew what he’d just seen. It wasn’t her cryptab. Instead, he’d noticed for the first time the anchor-and-chain motif engraved around her collar ring. The insignia that marked her out as a PBM.
She took a deep breath. “Transferred, sir. Two years ago.”
“You’ve done two years on the ground?” Lanoe asked.
She knew what he wasn’t saying. Marines didn’t live that long. Their officer corps had a reputation for getting the job done. Mostly that was accomplished by throwing enlisteds at an objective until it was buried in a heap of corpses deep enough to plant a flag in. “Turns out some of the things you taught me were actually useful, sir. Keeping your eyes open, watching your tail. I’ve done okay.”
Lanoe shook his head. “I don’t want to know what you did to get transferred,” he said. It was every pilot’s worst nightmare, that you would screw up badly enough they would send you off to the marines. “I can help you get back in a cockpit, though. One of the privileges of rank.”
“Thank you, sir, but—”
“Don’t thank me yet,” he told her. “I want you meet some people. This is Lieutenant Maggs. The civilians are Elder McRae and her aspirant, Roan. They’re from a planet called Niraya. Ever hear of it?”
“No, sir,” she said.
“I’m hoping you’re willing to change that.” He turned and faced the others. “Ensign Ehta—that is, Corporal Ehta now—was one of my squadmates back during the Establishment Crisis. She’s a hell of a pilot, and she could really help us. Assuming she says yes.”
He turned back to her with that smile. The one he wore when he asked her to fly into the jaws of death. Back in the old days, that smile worked every time.
Just tell him no, she thought. It’s two simple words, one syllable each. No, sir.
Then she could leave. And not have him looking at her anymore.
Chunks of ice. The size of her fist. The size of her head. Trillions of them.
She realized she’d closed her eyes. That she was flashing back. Sometimes she couldn’t help it. She balled her hands into fists. Squeezed her toes together. Opened her eyes.
“—fleet, we don’t know whose,” he was saying. She felt like there was nobody else in the room except the two of them. Her vision had shrunk down to a narrow tunnel. But she was back, in the present. Aware of her surroundings. “It’s, well. It’s pretty big. We never shrank from a challenge, though, did we? Back in the Ninety-Fourth, back in the Crisis. We took what they threw at us and we prevailed.”
“So we did, sir,” she said.
Chunks of ice all around. She was wedged into the broken shards of her canopy. Every display she could see flashed red. One of them told her that the containment of her power plant was slipping.
She fought to stay in the room, in the empty casino. To listen. She knew she was going to lose that battle. Half her mind was back there, in the ring around the gas giant Surtur. Seventeen years ago and it was still happening, inside her head.
“—get a squadron together. It’s the right thing,” he said. “It needs doing.”
Gloved hands pulling at her. Not gently. Both of them cramming together inside the cockpit of his old FA.2, what she always called his Jalopy. The canopy wouldn’t shut—she grabbed and pulled but she couldn’t get it shut. Then the crushing tug of gravity, as his inertial sink failed to compensate for the speed he poured on, getting them away. Getting them to a safe distance.
“—cataphracts. We can help these people. We can—”
She looked back, just in time to see the flash. To watch the ring, all those tiny chunks of ice, spread outward, twist and braid with the vaporizing heat, the shrapnel. And heard him breathing, his helmet touching hers, heard him breathe, and say nothing. He didn’t say a word to her until she was back on the destroyer, where she dropped to the deck plates and wept, and took a real breath again, herself.
“—not strictly sanctioned. I won’t lie, what we’re doing breaks so many regs we’ll probably end up in the brig even if we make it back. So this is strictly a volunteer mission,” he said. She could see his eyes, now. Just his old, old eyes that never quite met hers, never quite seemed to really see her. After what he’d done, after what he’d risked for her, still, he always seemed to be looking at something just over her shoulder.
“I’m afraid time is tight, Corporal. I really do need an answer now.”
She shook herself. Looked around the room. Everyone
was staring at her, as if she’d been standing there silent for far too long. She felt blood rush through her cheeks, felt her spine curl in embarrassment. It was a feeling she had gotten pretty familiar with.
“Sir,” she said.
Just tell him no. That’s all.
“Yes, sir. What are my orders?”
M. Valk had arranged for a simple room above a respectable restaurant for the elder and Roan. Perfectly acceptable, except that it was on the third floor of the building. By the time she reached the top of the stairs, the elder was out of breath.
There were therapies one could take. Tailored chromosomes that could be delivered through a drop of medicine on the tongue, elastomer-producing cells that could smooth out wrinkles and make one’s skin pliable and soft. Trained viruses could repair one’s frayed telomeres and reverse the course of aging. In these days, one did not need to grow old.
The therapies were cheap and widely available. Even on Niraya the elder could have her youth back, her old vigor. They could even repair the worn cartilage in her knees so her legs didn’t ache when she climbed stairs.
Her faith did not expressly prohibit such things. It did frown on them. Growing old gracefully was supposed to be an elegant mode of living. There was supposed to be a kind of peace to be found in the gradual decay of the body.
The elder tried to satisfy herself with thoughts on the cyclical nature of life, on the old moving on to make room for the new. It helped a little with the stitch in her side.
At the top of the stairs she heard voices from inside the room, and the high-pitched whine of a cheap display. She opened the door and stepped inside and saw Roan hurriedly gesture to switch off the video she’d been watching.
“Don’t mind me,” the elder said. She was hardly about to chastise the girl for watching videos. The faith had no prescription against that, not at all.
Like most aspirants, though, Roan seemed to find all worldliness to be a sign of weakness. The girl cast her eyes down as the elder headed into the bathroom and rubbed a wet towel across her face. When she emerged, she found Roan standing at the foot of the bed, exactly like a soldier at inspection.
The elder had been an aspirant herself, once. If you wanted to become a true acolyte of the faith, if you wanted to eventually become an elder, you had to prove yourself constantly. The aspirants were almost competitive in the ways they found to be more detached, more at peace with the world.
“Sit down,” the elder said. The girl did so as if it were a holy work. “Please be comfortable. This is hardly the time for discipline. Have you left this room today?”
She used a tone of voice that suggested candor was acceptable. Roan put her hands in her lap and said, “No, I—I find this place overwhelming.”
“Oh, it is that. Full of temptations as well.” The elder sat down in a chair, just glad to be off her feet.
“I’m doing my best to resist those,” Roan said. “I understand that stimulation can lead to attachment. Attachment can lead to misjudgment. Misjudgment only ever leads to regret.”
It was a catechism, more or less. An abstract version of a complicated philosophy. “Temptations can be withstood,” the elder replied, simplifying things herself, but sometimes you had no choice. “There is a story from Earth, about the bad old days of religion. When men—I can’t imagine a woman being so foolish—would try to prove how holy they were by sitting on top of pillars in the desert, with no food, no water, no human contact of any kind. They called themselves stylites. They would sit up there until they would go blind from the sun. Until they starved to death. People would come from miles around to look at these men and see how devoted they were to their faith. But the men didn’t do good works. Hard to minister to the poor from the top of a pillar. They didn’t teach. They didn’t find wisdom up on those pillars. Only horrible suffering.”
The girl’s eyes were wide, and not entirely with horror. Elder McRae worried she might have given Roan ideas. “Is the story true?”
“No story is ever true. You can never know all the details. How many people ever really did such a thing? I don’t know. Did any of them perish up on their columns, or did they give up once they got hungry enough? It doesn’t matter. The point of the story is to show that we can be too committed to our path, too devout. So that we forget that our purpose is to be in the world and make it a better place. Not to turn away from it completely.”
“I’m not doing that,” Roan said. “I came here, with you, didn’t I?”
These children. Always so literal, always so hard on themselves. You offered them forgiveness, compassion, lenience and they rejected them—even if those were the things they craved the most. The elder had studied the human mind for decades and still there was so much she couldn’t comprehend. “Let’s talk about other things. What did you think of Corporal Ehta?”
Roan didn’t sweeten her words. “She seemed distracted. Even ill, I thought.”
“Most likely she was hungover. Marines live very dangerous lives, and they compensate by feeding their impulses when they can. They think this will make them happy, somehow. You’ve never been hungover, have you, Roan? No, of course not. It is the very opposite of happiness. Still, for one so clouded, she seemed willing.”
“I had the impression she agreed out of a sense of duty.”
“Yes? No bad thing, duty,” the elder said. “Humans find structure where they can, any structure at all to organize the randomness of existence.” There could be a good lesson there, the elder thought. She made a mental note to work up a teaching. For the moment there were other concerns.
“So,” she said. “I am told we leave tomorrow morning, to return to Niraya. The Commander says he has an old comrade coming in, a Lieutenant Zhang, and that she will be bringing with her as many of his old wingmates as she can find. He hopes to field a dozen fighters in our defense.”
“That doesn’t seem like much,” Roan said.
The elder shrugged. “It’s twelve more than we had when we came here.”
“Of course, Elder.”
Elder McRae leaned her head back against the hard wood of the chair. Acceptance, she thought, was so much easier to express than to feel.
Maybe there was another teaching in that.
A new suit was waiting for her at the hostelry, fresh from the quartermaster. One with no anchors on the collar ring. It smelled weird at first, but then she realized that nobody else had worn it before her. That was what a new suit smelled like. She checked the cryptab and saw it listed her as EHTA, CAROLINE (ENSN, NEF). Her Blue Star was in there, too. Marines weren’t allowed to have those.
It looked like she was back in the Navy.
A drone waited by the window of her room. She gave it her old suit and watched it dip in the air as it accepted the weight. It flew off without comment.
Then she managed to put the new suit on. Unlike marine suits, it included a comfort garment, a cloth one-piece you put on first. Not unlike civilian underwear, except it was studded with receptacles for the suit’s many hoses and cables. She ran her thumb down a tab on the back of the heavy suit and it slid open for her. Put one leg in, then the other. She didn’t freak out, not very much anyway, when the seals automatically pulled tight across her back and the comfort module snugged up hard against her groin. If anything, it felt right, the way the marine suit never had. Pilot suits were designed to keep you warm and safe. Keep your blood circulating and your fluids balanced. The suit, she decided, had never been the problem.
Maybe she could do this. Maybe it had been long enough.
She reported as instructed to the Vairside docks just before local dawn. Zhang was coming to meet them with the ship that would take them on to Niraya. It was going to be weird seeing Zhang again. They’d been friends, in the kind of offhand way most pilots were friends. You made a point of not getting too close to the members of your wing because every time you went out on a distant patrol you didn’t know which of them would come back.
Zhang was a
grizzled campaigner, a survivor, much older than Ehta. Zhang was Lanoe’s second in command, and she’d seen plenty of battles. It had felt almost safe to get close to her, to confide in her. Ehta had expected Zhang to outlive her—and she had, though not in one piece. In one of the last battles of the Establishment Crisis Zhang had taken a broadside from a destroyer’s Mark II coilgun. It had totaled her Yk.64 fighter but after the shooting stopped they brought her in still breathing. Half of her, anyway. The lower half of her body stayed in the wreck.
Last Ehta had heard, Zhang was working as a flight instructor back on Triton. You didn’t need legs to fly. They’d given her a kind of drone she could ride around on when she wasn’t in a cockpit. The few messages Ehta had exchanged with her were light, breezy. But Zhang had always been like that. Cut her in half and she would make a joke about it making her more streamlined.
The last message had come six years ago. Ehta hadn’t replied to it. She couldn’t stand to.
As Ehta kicked off the floor of the cavernous docks and up toward the bay she saw Lanoe clinging to the edge, waiting for her. He reached down and grabbed her arm and pulled her into the bay. “She’s on her way in,” he said. He had a smile on his face that looked half-genuine. Maybe he was just as simultaneously excited and worried about seeing Zhang again as she was.
Maybe more.
It had been no secret that the two of them, Zhang and Lanoe, were lovers back in the day. Ehta had heard that was over—that one of them had broken things off, and it had gotten messy. By that point Ehta had already tuned out, so she didn’t know the details.
Lieutenant Maggs was there, at the top of the gantry. She smelled gin on him so she stayed clear. She had never met him, nor his famous father, so he was still an unknown quantity. Valk floated next to him, impassive as if he were a drone with its speech synthesizers turned off.
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