“Oh, aye, aye, Commander,” Maggs said.
Lanoe gave him a curt nod. Then he tapped the key at his throat that raised his helmet. “Besides,” he said to Zhang, “you and I are supposed to have a talk. Well, we’ve got hours of flying time to log, so this should give us a chance.”
He stormed over to his FA.2 and strapped himself in. Within seconds he had lifted off the ground and was receding into the upper atmosphere.
Zhang stood where she was for a moment longer, her head bowed, but her shoulders still high. Then she let them fall. Nothing more, but on a body like that such gestures spoke volumes. She went to her BR.9 and readied it for takeoff.
“Maggs,” she called, before she left. “Nobody’s going to begrudge you a little fun. But don’t do anything that’s going to come back and bite us later.”
How deeply insulting, Maggs thought to himself.
What he said was, “I shall be the soul of propriety.”
Zhang didn’t bother to comment. Before he could say anything else she was up, up, and away.
Once they were gone he turned to see if Valk had any comments—people so often did, nosy bastards. But the giant had climbed inside his own cockpit. “I’ll rest better in orbit,” he said. “If anybody asks where I am—”
“They can simply do a search for your cryptab,” Maggs said. “I’ll be busy with other matters.”
Valk didn’t even bother to perform that gruesome bow he used in place of a nod. As quick as the others had gone, he took off for space.
Which left Maggs the only fighter pilot mens sana on the planet.
That had possibilities.
He considered—and not briefly—jumping in his fighter and just lighting out for the wormhole throat. He could be away before anyone noticed, away from this rotten planet and this suicidal mission.
He told himself that he would not do so, because he was a man of honor and he’d been given orders to carry out. The real reason—which his father’s voice was perfectly happy to remind him of—was that he knew Lanoe would just come haring after him to bring him back.
Anyway. Carrying out his orders didn’t need to be such an onerous task. It had its own compensations, in fact.
He took a minder from his pocket and unrolled it across the fairing of his BR.9. The local directory was quaintly small and it didn’t take long to find Mining Administrator Derrow’s address. He pinged her and she answered almost immediately. On the screen he saw a view of her from just below chin level, which allowed him unfettered visual access to the interiors of her nostrils. He gave himself credit for not letting his smile falter one bit.
“Something I can help you with, Lieutenant?” she asked, once they’d exchanged the usual pleasantries.
“I certainly hope so,” he told her. “All my fellow pilots are away at the moment. It’s just me down at the spaceport, which means I’m in terrible danger.”
“Oh?” Her eyes widened and he could tell he had her attention.
“Yes,” he said. “The danger of eating dinner alone.”
Lanoe didn’t say a word for the first hour of their patrol.
He’d burned hard to get away from Niraya, and Zhang had to strain her engines just to catch up. Once they’d matched acceleration she took up a station-keeping formation with him, never getting closer than ten kilometers to his FA.2. She could just make him out as a fast-moving dot on her left.
Out there in the void, there wasn’t much else for her to look at, though. Her cybernetic eyes couldn’t make out the stars. Far away as they were, they were just points of light in a backdrop of darkness—and her borrowed brain didn’t really understand either of those concepts. To her space wasn’t black. It just wasn’t there.
Their course took them on a long, curving path out toward the distant enemy fleet, though she knew Lanoe would turn back long before they got that far. He was worried that they might see more incursions like the one Valk had found—more landers, more interceptors. So far the network of microdrones had found nothing, but years of war had taught both Lanoe and Zhang not to put all their faith in imagery and intelligence.
Lanoe kept his engine burning long after they’d left Niraya well behind. The two of them passed through the belt of dust Valk had told them about. Zhang saw nothing, really—the rocks that made up the belt were too small and too far apart for that. One grain of dust did smack into her vector field in a sudden burst of heat but it happened so fast she didn’t even bother responding to the warning on her console.
It was enough to get Lanoe talking. “You okay?” he called.
“Just a bug on my windshield,” she said.
“Sure. How does it feel, being out here?”
“Flying a patrol, you mean? Lanoe, I never stopped. I’ve trained more cadets than you ever had in your squadron. Part of that was just this kind of work. War games, anyway. This feels fine. It feels like I’m right where I belong.”
“In that—your new body, I mean.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I should be asking you all this. You’re the one who retired.”
She knew it was the wrong thing to say as soon as it was out of her mouth, but once you sent a message by comms laser, you couldn’t exactly call it back. When he didn’t respond for a full minute, she pinged him just to make sure he hadn’t cut off their signal link.
“You said we were going to talk. I get that it’s a chore for you,” she told him. “It’s not like we have much else to do right now, though.”
“Sure,” he said.
She waited for him to say more. A fool’s errand, of course. He was going to make her start. “There’s a lot of ground to cover. It’s been a bunch of years.”
“Yeah.”
“But I’m guessing the big problem is my new body. You aren’t used to me looking like this. I get it. The last time you saw me, I didn’t have any legs. But it’s still me in here. My memories, my training, my feelings—none of that has changed.”
“I get that.”
“Do you?” she asked. She touched her stick and banked over a little until she was closing the distance between them. “The way you look at me—okay. This body is young. It’s very young. But I didn’t choose it. I was on a list and this was the first body that came available.”
“How does that even work? This girl, the one with no optic nerves. She’s in your old body now, right? The one I remember. Is she going to live like that for the rest of her life?”
“It’s a temporary swap,” Zhang told him. “Just until one of us decides we want to switch back. I talk to her occasionally and she tells me there are still plenty of things she wants to see. She loves having eyes for the first time. Just like I love having legs again. So far we’re both happy with how it worked out.”
“What if you die out here?” he asked.
“That’s a risk you accept when you go on the list.”
She could imagine him shaking his head. Trying to grapple with it all.
Maybe she needed to give him some space.
“If you can’t get past this, then maybe somebody else needs to be your second in command,” she said.
“Come on—”
“Not that there’s a lot to choose from. Maggs is definitely not right for the job. You and Valk seem to get along, though.”
“He’s not a people person,” Lanoe pointed out.
“I’ve noticed that.”
“And,” he said, as if he were admitting something deeply disagreeable, “you’re still a pretty good wingman. Back in the elder’s office, when I started talking to her like a problem cadet—you reeled me back in. Just like you used to.”
“Somebody had to,” she suggested. “Okay, I’ll keep the job, since you asked so nicely. But we were more than just squaddies, before. We can’t just ignore that.”
A collision detection warning sounded inside her cockpit. She ignored it—but Lanoe must have heard it as well.
“You’re slipping left,” he told her. “You need to correct your
course.”
“No, I don’t.” She tapped the throttle and then hit her maneuvering jets to swing herself around on her long axis. When it was done she was only a few meters from Lanoe’s fighter. Flying upside down, from his perspective, and just above him. She drifted a tiny bit forward until their canopies were almost touching, and she could look straight up and into his cockpit.
She saw him through four layers of glass—two canopies, two helmets. Her lidar eyes were almost up to the task. The image of him she received was washed out, a little indistinct. He looked like a ghost down there. Maybe like what a memory would look like if you put it under a microscope.
But then he looked up at her and their eyes met.
“I’m still the woman you proposed to,” she said.
“Which means you’re still the woman who said no,” he answered.
The sun hadn’t moved a millimeter in the damned sky.
Maggs kept glancing up at it, daring it to move while he wasn’t looking. Still it hung there more or less exactly just about overhead.
He pulled up a display on his wrist and pinged the local time server. “Bloody bones,” he said. The sun wasn’t going to set for another three weeks. The night would be twice that long.
He made a mental note not to be here when it fell.
“Did you say something?” Derrow asked, from the kitchen.
He let the curtains fall back over the window—now he knew why they were so heavy—and stepped through the archway that separated the two halves of her apartment. She was stirring a pot of noodles, glancing back at him over her shoulder.
Getting a home-cooked meal out of her had been a bit of a coup. There were restaurants on Niraya, of course, though none that Maggs would have eaten in on a bet. He’d made a big show of laying his cards on the table, telling her that he was under orders from his CO to talk business tonight, that they ought to head somewhere with a bit of privacy. She’d seen right through his tale, of course—just as he’d meant her to. But here they were.
“How do you know when it’s time to go to bed?” he asked.
She looked the tiniest bit shocked. “Is that a riddle?”
He pointed upward, through the roof. In the general direction of the sun.
He was pleased to find it didn’t take her long to get it. “Oh, you mean with how long the days are? We’ve developed a simple but efficient system for ordering our daily schedules. A real triumph of local engineering.”
“Oh?”
She gave him a sly smile. Then she tapped her kitchen counter, calling up a display there that showed local time. “It’s called a clock,” she said.
He laughed and leaned up against the wall. It had been a pleasant surprise to find that Derrow thought this planet nearly as uninspiring as he did himself. She had a rather nice laugh, too.
“There’s beer in the fridge,” she told him. “Imported, I promise.”
“That must be expensive,” he said. He bent over the refrigerator and found the promised bottles, and behind them—aha—a glass jug full of vodka. At least, someone had written the word VODKA on the bottle in black grease pencil. “Hate to waste the good stuff. How about we stick to this?” He held the jug up at an angle and raised an eyebrow at her.
“You sure?” she asked. “That’s local. We have a still out at the refinery we made out of surplus equipment. Don’t tell Centrocor.”
He explored her cupboards until he’d found two pony glasses. He gave them each a generous splash, then handed her a glass. Clinking his against hers, he said, “Here’s to the poly who watches over and protects us all.”
She looked down at her glass. “Except when they don’t.”
“Precisely,” he said, and took a sip.
Bracing was one word that came to mind. Industrial effluent was another. It made his eyes water a bit but he nodded appreciatively and set his glass down.
Derrow knocked hers back with barely a grimace, then held it out for another go. He laughed again and poured, though he said, “Don’t get too far ahead of me. We have plenty of actual work to discuss.”
And so they did, over bowls of noodles. The food was atrocious but she barely glanced at her bowl as she shoved the carbohydrates into her mouth. Her eyes were on a minder she had unrolled across the table. The display there showed a slowly rotating schematic of a basic rail gun. He had downloaded it from the Naval archives. A legend at the bottom of the display insisted the plans were only to be looked at by an officer of the Neddies, the Naval Engineering Division, but the encryption on the archive had been laughably easy to defeat.
He watched her as she studied the display. Her black hair had been cut just below her ears, which exposed her long, tanned neck. Her eyes were clear and rather bright, and if her chin was a little weak he didn’t suppose it was a deal breaker.
She caught him looking and speared him with her gaze. Then she raised one eyebrow.
He made a point of looking decorously away.
“The principle’s nothing special,” she said, poking at the schematic to make it turn faster. “Just a mass driver with a ramped-up output.” She frowned. “There’s some fiddly stuff over here you need to keep the rails from melting every time you fire. But yeah, any half-competent engineer could put one of these together.”
“We need a bit more than just one,” he said.
“Lucky for you, I’m more than half-competent,” she said, and smiled at him.
It was one of those kind of smiles. Business wasn’t quite done, though. “How many do you think you could put together in the next week?”
He could see in her eyes that she thought that was a ridiculously short amount of time to build a gun capable of shooting spaceships out of orbit, but she didn’t say so. Instead she bit her lip and inhaled slowly, taking in extra air to cool her overclocked brains, perhaps. “I’ll have to work up some schedules, make sure we have the right materials, or, because we won’t, find materials that can be substituted for what’s listed here. I’ll need to get my teams sorted out, find the best people from each of my workgroups…It’s not the kind of project where I can just give you an answer tonight.”
“Oh,” he said, “I can wait until morning.”
Her mouth pursed as if she was trying to hold back a gasp. “I’ll work up a proposal, a budget, start on a schedule,” she said, never quite looking directly at him. “I don’t know where to send it, though. Where are you and your friends staying?”
She could, of course, have sent the information directly to his electronic address. No need to have it couriered over. “We haven’t worked that out yet. I suppose we can always bunk in our tender, if we have to. The accommodations are a bit…rough.”
“Maybe I can help with that, too, sort out a place for you to billet.”
He lifted one shoulder in a desultory shrug. “Shouldn’t be too hard. I’m the only one who needs to find a place to sleep tonight. You’re very kind, M. Derrow.”
“You need to start calling me Proserpina,” she said.
“Auster,” he replied, holding out his hand.
She took it in both of hers. Without releasing it, she got up and moved around the table until she was standing over him. He tilted his head back to meet her gaze and she leaned closer and then her lips brushed his, quite tentatively. When he didn’t try to escape she went for a much more elaborate kiss.
Then she pulled back and returned to her seat. “I just wanted to get that out of the way,” she told him. “I’ve been waiting for it this whole time and it was distracting me, thinking so much about it.”
“Forthright,” he said. “Commendable.” He reached for the vodka.
“Now,” she said, “let’s get back to this.” She unrolled the minder again and started poking at the schematic, pulling the virtual gun there to pieces to see how they fit together.
Zhang remembered when Lanoe first asked her to marry him.
They’d been in a bunk on a destroyer, a coffin-sized and -shaped room just big enough for o
ne person to lie down in, with a display at one end and a fan at the other and not much else. Neither of them had cared that it was cramped.
She remembered the beads of sweat that floated around them, gently gravitating toward the fan. She had stretched out as far as she could and when she was drifting off to sleep, her face buried in his chest, he had said it. Very quietly.
Marry me.
She had smiled against him, wanting to laugh but lacking the energy. He was making a little joke, she thought.
The second time they’d been standing on a ridge on a moon. She forgot what planet it circled but it was a gas giant banded with white and green, with storms like staring eyes that pulled themselves apart as you watched. It filled half the sky.
The ground below them, ammonia ice as hard as steel, was littered with the wrecks of a dozen fighters. They’d lost half the squad that day but they’d won. They’d won the battle.
You and me, he’d said. We quit this, go find a planet someplace warm and I don’t know. Start a farm. Get married and have babies.
All she remembered thinking that day was that they’d won. That the battle was over and the Establishmentarians were beaten, shoved back from another star system, and the two of them—they’d made that happen. Why would they ever want to stop flying? Why would they ever stop fighting, when it was so glorious?
After that it was a joke between them. Marry me. He’d said it when she flew rings around some poor half-trained idiot, when she fought her way through a bad line of carrier scouts. Marry me. When she figured out how to scam the computers so they got double rations of beer. Marry me.
Maybe those times didn’t count.
The last time did.
She’d been so high on painkillers she could barely speak. She knew there was something wrong, really, badly wrong but all she could see was the pattern of threads in her white sheets, the weave of the bandages on her arms. The bubbles in the tubes that stuck out of her belly below her navel.
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