by Ian Douglas
Dev stood just inside a gold-decorated archway opening onto the parade ground. The ceremony was due to start in another few minutes, and the area inside the archway was crowded with the men and women of the Loki Fifth as they began to form up ranks for the processional march. Outside, the bleachers were nearly filled by those Midgarders with money or political rank or social pull enough to attend. Dev had heard that a fair-sized contingent from Asgard had descended Bifrost the day before. They would be in the special review stand seats, out of sight from his vantage point in the seats behind the speaker's podium.
He tugged at his collar with a forefinger. This was the first time he'd worn full dress army grays, and he was finding them damned uncomfortable despite the tailor-programmed fit. The crisply fashioned two-toned uniform had been fresh-grown in the base nanovats just that morning, and still it felt stiff, especially around the rigid collar. He didn't mind the formal discomfort in the least, though. His shoulder boards and collar both bore the thick gold stripe and single cherry blossom insignia of sho-i, sublieutenant.
Strangest of all, though, was his being accepted once again into the Fifth Loki Warstriders.
He checked his internal clock. Eight minutes to go. Yeah, no static. He could hold on another eight minutes. Outside, a crash of music announced the beginning of the festivities. The crowd cheered, creating the atmosphere of some mammoth sporting event.
Wryly, Dev shook his head. All this fuss. Victories against the Xenos were rare enough, so the Battle of Norway Ridge, as it was now being called, certainly deserved a celebration. The who-was, though, hinted at some sort of breakthrough, possibly a new discovery or weapon of some kind. Nobody knew any details, though, save that some mighty high-powered brass was coming down from Asgard for the awards ceremony today.
"Hello, Lieutenant."
Startled, he turned, still not used to the honorific that went with his new rank. Katya Alessandro stood there, slim and attractive in the female version of Hegemony dress grays, with a rack of medals and campaign ribbons above her left breast that made him do a double take. Above a rainbow collection of campaign ribbons and unit citations, she wore a silver star, three combat drop badges, a blood bar with one cluster . . . and the Yukan no Kisho, the Imperial Medal of Valor, fourth dan. His eyes widened. He'd not realized she carried that much show metal.
But then, he'd never seen her in full dress before. He saluted. "Good morning, Captain. You have this habit of sneaking up behind me."
"Stealth, Lieutenant. The secret of strider warfare. How are you feeling?"
He grimaced. "Sore. They've got me on the new exercise program. And the brace is hurting my legs worse than that damned Gamma. They say it's coming off tomorrow. I don't know if they mean the brace or one of my legs."
She laughed. Strange, he thought, how shared black humor could acknowledge yujo, the warriors' bond. He felt comfortable with Katya, despite the difference in rank and experience.
"So what do you think about all this?" The tilt of her head took in the arch and the stadium beyond, with its screaming thousands.
"Am I supposed to think something?"
"Well, it is in your honor, Dev. Your little exploit on Norway Ridge created quite a stir. Or hadn't you noticed?"
"I guess I did. I'm still trying to figure out why."
"Stop thinking. Give me your 'face."
He held out his palm, and she touched it with her own. Data passed from her RAM to his, a trickle of words and numbers. A place, a restaurant in Towerdown, and a time, that evening. "We're having a party. Be there."
"Why me?"
She grinned. "Because you're the guest of honor, newbie."
"Is that an order?"
"If it has to be."
"I'll be there," he said. "Hey, I hear you're getting some more show metal today to add to your collection. Congratulations."
She made a sour expression. "That and a sen-en will buy me lunch in Midgard."
"No big deal, eh?"
"Hey, I didn't mean to put yours down, Lieutenant. You did pretty good, first time up."
First time up. It was as though she'd forgotten his first ignominious experience under fire. Or was she telling him his first time didn't count?
He was about to ask, but her head cocked into a listening position. "They're calling me," she said. "Time to odie. Good luck, Lieutenant."
His own call came moments later, the official-sounding voice of the Ceremonies Master in his mind, relayed through the tiny radio/cephlink transceiver plugged into his right T-socket. He found his place in the waiting ranks of First Platoon, a solid block of men and women in two-toned grays, with full-dress epaulets and medals. A simulated band was blaring out the opening bars of "Earth's Hegemony" outside.
"Regiment, stand by!" the voice in his head called. "Ready . . . ten-hut! With the music, and left!. . . and left! . . . and left! . . ."
Dev had seen little use for drill during Basic, but he had to admit there was a martial thrill to the spectacle of over nine hundred men and women marching through the archway and into the center of that vast, circular coliseum. Perhaps it was nothing but showmanship, but for perhaps the first time since he'd volunteered for Hegemony service, he felt himself to be a part of something meaningful. Sho-i Devis Cameron might be a very small part of a vast and impersonal organization, but he did have a place, a slot that he'd made his own.
He belonged.
The Ceremonies Master continued to call cadence for the regimental formation as it turned onto the field and marched in review past a raised, temporary platform filled with the dignitaries and military brass. "Eyes right," the CM called, and Dev had the opportunity to see them.
Most impressive of the visitors were the hundred men of Third Company, First Battalion of the Fifteenth Imperial Assault Guard, the Zugaikotsu regiment, dazzling in the full dress black and silver armor of the marines. Part of the Imperial garrison on Asgard, the 1/15 was arrayed in front of the review stand, blast rifles held at present arms. It was impossible to look at those spotless martial ranks and think of them as crunchies.
Behind them, on the stand itself . . . damn, it looked like half of the Asgard brass was present. Above and behind the stand, an enormous repeater screen had been raised, thirty meters tall and ten wide. At the moment it showed the regiment as it passed in review, endless blocks of marching color: officers in two-toned grays, technicians in green, ordnancemen in red, ascraft pilots in dark blue, enlisted troops in khaki or in dress black armor.
The men on the reviewing stand were divided about half and half, Japanese and gaijin. Shosa Fisher and Shosa Rassmussen, the HEMILCOM Training Command CO, were both there. A civilian, Piotr Klasst, the Hegemony governor on Loki, was present as well, a small, squat, self-important man in a purple jumpsuit and gold sash.
But Dev almost missed a step when he saw the man in Imperial black and gold standing at the podium, none other than Shosho Aiko himself, the commander of Asgard's Nihonjin contingent.
Aiko! He was making the presentation? The last time Dev had seen him, the man had been a captain, a member of the Imperial Staff. He'd been present at the ceremony when they'd awarded the Imperial Star to the newly commissioned Admiral Michal Cameron.
Dev wondered. Did his father's disgrace have something to do with Aiko being given a field command, eighteen light-years from the Imperial Palace? If so, it was astonishing that he'd agreed to preside at this particular ceremony. Behind Aiko was a ponderously fat civilian in nangineered feathers, scales, and inlays. Dev didn't know who he was, but his adornment suggested that he was from the Imperial Court. The who-was was right. This was a high-powered ceremony.
Marching rank by rank, the Thorhammers completed one turn about the stadium circuit, then took up their positions facing the review stand and the motionless line of Imperial Guardsmen. They numbered, all told, nearly nine hundred men and women, about sixty percent of their officially listed strength. From other archways around the stadium, troops from other units march
ed to their assigned places, techies and ordies by the hundreds, line infantry in newly grown combat armor, cadet-trainees in yellow. Only the Thorhammers and the training companies were represented in full, but both the Odinspears and the Heimdal Guards had sent colorfully uniformed contingents, each behind a staff-carried banner.
Music and marching ceased as Dev's implant noted that the eight minutes were up. There was a moment's silence, and then the band began playing the Imperial anthem. After that came the first of several speeches.
Dev stood at attention, watching the Lokan Governor's florid features on the giant repeater screen above the reviewing stand as the man talked about the utter necessity of pressing on, Empire and Hegemony, side by side until the job was done. Dev's mind wasn't on the speech, however. He was more interested in the data Katya had passed to him.
Yes . . . he'd thought so. Besides the date and time for the party, there was a small, closed file, marked personal so that it could not be picked up by a data feed scan without his express permission. He hadn't noticed it when she 'faced him the other information, but its presence had been subconsciously nagging at him.
Curious, he opened it, and heard her voice in his mind.
Dev, you're not even supposed to know this, but I originally put you in for the Imperial Star. I hear the recommendation made it all the way up the sky-el to Aiko's staff before the stiff-necked sheseiji finally squelched it.
Well, I doubt the Star would've passed without more witnesses anyway. The thing to remember is that it's the man who counts, not the show metal on his chest. Medals you can buy at any pawnshop on the Midgard Way; heroes, the genuine variety who don't wear their bravery like a medal, are damned hard to find.
Mostly I just wanted to say thanks again for not leaving me out there. I'm looking forward to seeing you at the party tonight.
—Katya Alessandro
The news rocked him. The Imperial Star? Gods of the K-T Sea, witnesses had nothing to do with it! The Imperials, who thought in terms of family and lineage and the responsibilities of sons for their fathers' names, did not like to be reminded of past failures. Awarding the Teikoku no Hoshi to the son of Admiral Cameron would be like confessing that his father had been a sacrifice to political necessity. Unthinkable!
For himself, he was just as happy he hadn't won that damned Star. Quite frankly Dev found it astonishing that they were even giving him a lesser award instead. The Medal of Valor carried with it considerable prestige, but he'd done nothing to win it, after all, except rather foolishly risk important recon intel in order to drag a wounded buddy to safety . . . and it was his fault she'd been hurt in the first place. The instinct might have been brave, but damn it, he'd been scared. He was still ashamed of that mind-numbing fear, and of how Katya had had to yell to make herself heard above his screams.
He listened again to Katya's note, trying to reconcile it with what he knew was the truth. A hero? Him? Not likely!
The speeches were over at last, with Dev hearing scarcely a word. Later, perhaps, he would play the ceremony back for himself from his own RAM, but for now he was reduced to stumbling through the ceremony, piloting on automatic.
On signal from the voice within his mind, Dev marched forward, taking the corners at crisp right angles, ascended the steps to the review stand between motionless ranks of armored Imperial Guardsmen, saluted, and bowed. Expressionless, Aiko turned to an aide and took the medal from its box, a gold shield dangling from a crimson and yellow ribbon and bearing a holographic relief of the Emperor. The bar supporting the ribbon had a charged adhesive strip that would cling securely to Dev's tunic until he touched a contact point on the corner.
"Yukan no Kisho," Aiko said, pressing it to Dev's chest. "The Medal of Valor, for services to the Emperor above the call of duty." Turning, he reached for a second medal, this one silver and pearl on a scarlet ribbon. "Shishi no Chi, The Lion's Blood, awarded to those wounded in the Emperor's service."
Most gaijin simply called it the blood bar.
"Congratulations," Aiko added, still expressionless. Dev wondered what he was thinking now, wondered if he was remembering giving a medal to another gaijin a few years before. Did Aiko know he was Cameron's son? Of course he did. He would have reviewed Dev's records before seconding Katya's request. The stiff-necked sheseiji, she'd called him. The stiff-necked bastard. But there must be more to it than that.
"Thank you, Admiral-san."
"You have done great credit to your people, Sho-i," he said, this time in heavily accented English, and with the voice circuit off, so that no one could hear but the two of them. "And to your family."
Now, what the gok did he mean by that? Dev wondered. The Japanese tended to be oblique, especially where politics and face were concerned, never saying things directly, avoiding any blunt statement that could carry insult.
Dev saluted, about-faced, and marched back to ranks with the Ceremonies Master calling cadence in his head. After that, it was Katya's turn—another order, or dan, to the Medal of Valor she already wore, and a blood bar, with no mention at all of just how she'd managed to break her leg. There was more to that story, too, he thought. He remembered her expression as she talked about her panic at Norway Ridge. There was something going on inside her, but he didn't know her well enough to even try to guess at what it was.
The thought led to another. He wished he could get to know her better. He knew he liked her, but wondered if it was because she'd treated him like a person back when he'd first joined the Thorhammers, or something more.
After Katya's award came a Medal of Valor for the Stormwind pilot who'd braved Xeno nano-D fire to land and retrieve the Assassin's Blade, and a Distinguished Service Star for a comjack technician who'd hit on the idea for an unnamed new weapon, something that promised to turn the tide against the Xenos. There were a lot of speeches after that, until it seemed that half of the brass and dignitaries on and over Loki were being given a chance to talk.
Finally, though, there were no more speeches to be made, no more parade or pageantry. Hidden speakers blared the "Imperial March," followed by "Earth's Hegemony." The Ceremonies Master gave his final, inaudible command. "Regiment . . . dis-missed!"
Dev was instantly surrounded by the men and women of the Assassins, who pounded him on his back, fingered his medal, and welcomed him back to the fraternity of the Thorhammers.
The hero . . .
That evening, as the party hit full swing in the officers' mess, Dev and Katya managed to sneak out, making their way to the Tristankuppel's recreational center and an unoccupied pair of comjack booths. Sealing themselves in, they linked with each other; Dev had already downloaded a visitor's sim from the base library, a moonlit evening on a deserted, palm-lined beach at a place on Earth called Tuvalu.
Isolated in separate modules, their sex was purely recreational, a shared erotic dream as detailed and as real and as intense as any physical coupling . . . more intense, even, since they used partial feedback loops that let Dev taste Katya's slow build to a fiery peak while she experienced his faster, harder, desperate hunger and explosive release. Their mental joining began as passion, naked legs moving in the wet sand, but ended in a warm and gentle embrace beneath a tropical, star-filled sky.
"Let's get out of here," she said at last, her voice small against his chest.
The illusion of sand and waves and moonlit sky was so perfect that Dev, still half-lost in the sexual afterglow, didn't know what she was talking about. "Out? Out where?"
"Out of these damned pods." She shivered. "I don't like to be alone in the dark."
He pulled back a little, blinking. Moonlight glistened off her skin. It wasn't that dark at all. "Would you like a sunrise? We can tell the sim—"
"No, I want you. Not a dream."
She couldn't possibly be aware of her physical body, locked away inside the comjack module, but he broke the linkage, then slipped out of his chamber to help her clamber out of hers. She hugged him for a long time, standing there on the
comcenter's steel grating.
They spent the next several hours in each other's arms in an empty lounge in one of the barracks. There was no more lovemaking—real or virtual—but he enjoyed her closeness and their conversation and the way she explained how she'd won her first Medal of Valor at a place called Galahad, before she'd been transferred to Loki. Later, things turned technical as he described an idea he'd had, a way to merge ground troops and striders in a deployment that would let each support the other, and she listened with keen and intelligent interest, asking questions and pointing out flaws, helping him fine-tune the concept and encouraging him to submit a proposal to HEMILCOM.
But he never did find out why she was afraid of the dark.
Chapter 21
I ask you, what good are these research facilities? They cost billions of yen to build, millions to keep staffed and supplied. Handfuls of humans isolated for years at a time in the most godforsaken places imaginable. And for what conceivable purpose?
—Testimony before Terran Hegemony Committee on Appropriations
François Dacres
C.E. 2512
The great wheel revolved slowly in the white glare of the star, providing spin gravity for the complement of thirty-two men and women aboard. Altair DESREF was one of fifty Deep Space Research Facilities scattered through human space to study astrophysical phenomena ranging from gravity waves to the tidal effects of Capella A and B.
Altair, a planetless A7 star only sixteen light-years from Earth, had been under close investigation since the 2360s. Its high rate of spin—its rotational speed at the equator was 160 miles per second—had warranted the construction of a DESREF to study rotational effects on Altair's magnetic field and solar wind. After nearly three centuries, Altair still had not divulged all its secrets.
"Odd," Dr. Jeanne Schofield said, looking up from her board with brown eyes focused on nothingness. A cephlink cable trailed from her left T-socket, feeding her raw data from the station's scanners. "That shouldn't be happening."