“Send in clear, Lieutenant. There’s nothing left to lose.”
Seven: Katechon’s Arrival
“And the Seventh Angel poured out her vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the Temple of Heaven, from the throne, saying, It is done.”
—Revelation 16:17
Day 233 (2100)
IHS Bolimov
Foxtrot Sector, Apollyon Gates
Kris went down the passageway to Bolimov’s CIC at a slow glide. Just outside the hatch, Lieutenant Salsato greeted her with a snappy salute.
“How’s it holding, Tom?”
“Pretty well, ma’am. May I be the first to congratulate on your victory?”
“Sure,” Kris said, smiling. “If you’re certain it’s not premature. What are the Doms up to?”
“Oh, they’re well on their way, ma’am,” Salsato assured her. “Retiring at a fine clip and should reach AG-XI around noon tomorrow.”
“Glad to hear it.”
With the Prince Vorland fleet on the run, Bolimov’s surviving crew under lockdown in the bilges, helmetless and barefoot, and her officers luxuriating the security section, she’d expected to feel elated, but did not. Her feelings were instead jumbled and chaotic, superimposing upon one another to produce a sort of edgy numbness—a numbness that did not extend to the physical, for her temples throbbed, her lower back ached, and her neck and shoulders were tight to the point of burning, giving off little bursts of sharp electric pain.
She rocked her neck back and forth and was rewarded with a series of wet sodden cracks, alarmingly loud. “When will we be ready to boost out?”
“Anytime you like, ma’am. Osiris has already given a us a green light.”
Kris would be transferring into the cruiser for the trip back with the survivors of General Corhaine’s fleet, commodore no longer, since Trumpet V was now dissolved. Huron would shoulder the cleanup here: they were leaving him Bolimov as a consolation prize. The remaining harbors were due to straggle in over the next few hours; they make for great target practice, and firing 18-inch guns at them would take the edge off his crews frustrations at being left out of the fun.
Seeming to echo her thought, Salsato commented, “Admiral Sabr’s gonna be in a hell of a state at missing all the fun when he hears about all this, if you don’t mind my saying.”
No, he won’t, Kris thought. He’s probably having a fine time where he is. But she would let that revelation announce itself in due course. Bringing herself back to the present moment, she said, “Then as soon as we can after the ceremony.”
The ceremony was for Polidor. The battered cruiser was coming apart at the seams and they’d send her to her final rest at midnight, attended by all the ships of the little fleet she’d led so well.
Salsato dipped his head in acknowledgement, and Kris saw a buried pain in his eyes at the thought of his ship’s demise. He’d detested Rhimer, but that gentleman’s sins had been cashed out and left no stain on the ship herself. Kris didn’t feel herself worthy of sharing that pain—for that she felt it—and that added to the strange, crowded hollowness of this victory.
He went on in a more somber tone. “The medicos would like to know if they could have some gravity, but not more than thirty percent and brought up gentle. They say they’ve got some delicate cases and that it’s kinda awkward working with blood and such floating around.”
Kris suppressed a shudder at and such. “Alright. Tell Jeffers to get on it.” She paused to master the tremor in her voice, “What the butcher’s bill for this op?”
Salsato, who’d leaned in through the hatch to relay Kris’s message to Commander Jeffers, leaned out again and said, “We’re compiling that now. No read from the other ships yet, but I’ll have our list in a moment. Overall, ma’am, I’d say not bad, considering.”
The qualification hung there between them for a moment, more than vaguely troubling. “How’s it going recovering the escape pods from Hippolyta and Ethalion?” Both destroyers had been badly mauled in the fight to keep Condorcet at bay and their captains had ordered them abandoned. Penthesileia, Tanith, and the frigates were sweeping for the survivors.
“Can’t say, ma’am.” Salsato looked apologetic. “This barge doesn’t have the right equipment to pick up our pod’s transponder signals. Ariel should tell us in a short bit, ma’am—she’s closest.”
Kris nodded. “Any trouble with the prisoners?”
“No, ma’am. Meek as church mice, for the most part. Had to tank some tens of them until we can get ’em to proper facilities, but Captain Anders is getting the rest sorted and parole chipped, and once the Doms have translated, we’ll start sharing them out through the fleet. Except the officers, that is.”
Icy fingers clamped hard around her pharynx. Captain Anders is . . . ? “Where’s Major Lewis?”
“She took one in the chest, ma’am. No word on her status.”
Min, I fuck’n told you not to get yourself shot! Why the fuck did no one listen to her?
As her struggled to control her expression, an ensign appeared and pressed a flimsy into Salsato’s hand. He passed it to Kris without looking. “The casualty list, ma’am.”
Kris took it and glanced down the list of names. The dead filled the first sheet, three neat compact columns in small print. The wounded and revivables filled the second and third pages. There near the bottom of the third page was listed: senn Vasquez-Montero, Maralena, Tech Corporal.
Both of them? The blow left Kris feeling alone; a sense of crushing isolation. Baz and Tanner; now Min and Vasquez. And . . . Mariwen?
“Who’s in charge of sickbay?”—voice strangled, cheeks paper-white.
“Mr. Harvall,” Salsato answered. “There’s no proper physician since Dr. Bentinck copped it.”
“Get him for me, will you?”
Salsato nodded, tapped up the link and handed the pickup to Kris. “Mr. Harvall, this is Kennakris. I’d like the status on Tech-Corporal Vasquez.”
“Corporal Vasquez, ma’am?”
“Yes,” Kris snapped. “Tech-Corporal Maralena senn Vasquez-Montero y Domanova. She led the assault on Engineering. She’s on your casualty list.”
“Oh. Oh yes, ma’am.” The man sounded harried and not a little flustered. “She’s not here, ma’am. I’m afraid I don’t know her status. They may still be treating her down in the engineering spaces.”
“Thank you, Mr. Harvall.” Aches forgotten, Kris thrust the pickup back at Lieutenant Salsato and with a brief parting nod, turned and took off down the corridor.
* * *
Whatever images filled Kris’s mind as she hurried towards engineering—Vasquez sitting up laughing with a pressure bandage on her arm; Vasquez lying senseless in a dark pool of blood, others more lurid and distressing—whatever they were, the sight of the passageways just outside Engineering routed them. The cleaning crews had not reached this part of the ship yet; the bodies had been removed but not the stains where they had landed, scattered and askew, splashed, bathed and clotted with blood, meat, viscera and bits of bone that had hung in midair until the gravity came on and then all fell together to the deck, a perfect kaleidoscope of horror.
Kris picked her way through this ghastly flooring, though it was no more ghastly than the bulkheads or the overhead—in weightlessness the spatter of gore was nearly isotropic—observing that there had been three engagements, each fiercer and more desperate than the last, fought at junctions and hatches, before Vasquez’s party had reached Engineering itself. The engineering spaces were less gruesome; the last battle had been fought just outside the hatchway.
The defenders, apparently about to be overwhelmed, had taken refuge inside, but Vasquez’s people had been able to jam the hatch—Kris could see the blast marks where a satchel charge bent the hinges—and must have disabled the survivors with stun grenades. The undamaged equipment and relative lack of blood showed this.
But all these details were academic, distantly noted and instantly forgotten when Kr
is stepped through the hatch itself and called the corporal’s name, freezing in mid-syllable.
Vasquez lay propped against the near bulkhead, her assault rifle still clutched in her right hand, her left arm wrapped in surgical packing from a few inches below her shoulder to her fingertips. Her right leg was encased in a pressure cast that ended two inches above where her knee should have been; the left was stretched out, whole at least, with a med-tech spraying synthaskin on a gash in the thigh. Two other techs hovered around the corporal’s torso, amid loops of tubing and monitor leads, and strewn about them on the deck were the monitors themselves, their displays cycling through dangerous shades of red and yellow. The tech’s chatter swirled around and through Kris in urgent awful tones:
. . . look here. Goddammit! Jess, can you tie that off?
Shit! Tracy, are you seeing what I’m seeing? Check the PZK’s.
Don’t like ’em, don’t like ’em at all. Doin’ fuckin back flips, I gotta tell ya—
We got another hemorrhage! Sonofabitch! Tailor, gimme a clamp! Flood that, somebody—
Yeah, that’s better. Jesus. More suction here . . .
Kris came over slowly and knelt by Vasquez’s shoulder. Her eyes were open, dark-rimmed and huge, glazed with painkillers, anti-shock drugs and cardiopulmonary stimulants, but she recognized Kris and her bloodless lips curved in the memory of a smile.
“Sorry about the rifle, ma’am,” she said in a barely audible liquid whisper. “I can’t seem to let go.”
“That’s all right, Corporal. You did well here.”
“Thank you, ma’am—piece of cake.” Vasquez coughed. The techs looked up in alarm; one peeled back an eyelid to observe the oscillating pupil and went back to his equipment—How’s that abdominal bleeding? Like a sieve, mate, a fucking sieve—and she asked, “How about the Doms?”
“Hauling ass and headed home, Corporal. Seems they didn’t like the neighborhood.”
“Congratulations, ma’am.”
“Thank you, Vasquez. That means a lot, coming from you.”
The corporal might have been trying to reply but a tech broke in, “Pardon, ma’am. We done all we can here. She’s gotta be tanked now.”
Kris nodded and the tech keyed up his link. “Sickbay, this is Watts. I need a full cryo set. Gimme a team and a pallet down here. On the double now.”
“Corporal—” Kris brushed a few strands of stiff hair back from Vasquez’s forehead. The skin under her fingertips was wet and chill. “Corporal, I want you rest now. Just rest and relax. Okay?”
The corporal’s eyelids fluttered closed, opened and closed, hiding the huge deep chocolate eyes. “If you insist, ma’am.”
Kris nodded, still stroking Vasquez’s sleek short hair.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Watts said a moment later. “Tailor, hand that line over here. Get the drip ready. Okay. Easy. Yeah, there . . .” The party with the float pallet was in the hatchway now. Kris moved off to one side to stand by Jeffers, elbow deep in an equipment rack. “Move the pallet over here. Okay, ready with me—ready . . . lift. Easy does it. Got it. There. Perfect—now hook up that drip . . . it’s okay—no, don’t worry about the damn rifle—fine. Get ready, Jess. Wait till she’s clear. Yeah—lookin’ good . . . That’s it—now, go . . .”
“They were on to us from the beginning, ma’am,” Jeffers said a few moments later without taking his eyes from his work. “They knew we’d hit engineering first. Right off, we get caught in the nastiest fuckin’ crossfire you ever saw. Damn near all our lead section bought it in the first two minutes. We cleared the junction alright, but there weren’t half of us left by then.
“The Doms kept pushin’—we’re holding—and Vasquez says she’s gonna go for Engineering and we’re to keep the Doms off her back. We didn’t much like that idea—she’d already been hit—she and the color sergeant almost had words. But she’s right—we needed pretty much everybody that’s left just to hold that junction.
“So in she goes—just her and her fireteam. Hart gets cut in half, right off. Terrill, she gets a leg blown clean away. Lucian takes one right in the eye and the corporal gets hit again—twice. But she . . . she just—would—not—stop, Captain. She just went right through them—like . . . Like a . . .”
He shook his head and swallowed hard. “Sweartogod, I never seen anything like it.”
* * *
With solemn thoughts and prayers, well-wishing or just silence, according to the faith and feelings of her attendants, LSS Polidor went to final rest at the stroke of midnight, consumed by a thermonuclear blaze that left nothing but the miniature star of her stasis bottle shining in the infinite night to mark her passing.
That was not her only monument, however. As Min might have put it, had she been able to: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice—“if you seek her monument, look around”.
The most obvious thing to see, looking around, was Bolimov (IHS Bolimov no longer), lying dark and silent in tribute to her conqueror. It would take eyes with a god-like range of vision to see the rest: the fragmented remnants of the Mosul harbors, the glowing stasis bottles of Thalestris, Melanthe, Orithyia (who had finally succumbed while Iphigenia, luckier than her namesake, survived) and their defeated foes; and even more remote, the retreating Halith fleet with its burden of mauled ships and broken men, many in spirit if not in body. Summing it all up, true monument, far greater than these mortal remains, became apparent: a miracle.
So many said, and so Huron said when he joined Kris in the captain’s stateroom of Osiris after the ceremony. (The crew had insisted she take it and Kris was too tired to argue.) Boots up on the low table in his accustomed posture, while Kris hunched on the opposite side, elbows on knees and her chin on her fists, a cup of celebratory coffee gone cold in front of her.
Cold is what she felt, and despite Huron’s presence, alone. She doubted she’d ever forget him emerging from the hatch of an admiral’s gig with a megawatt grin, leading a fleet that had been sent into the High Holy without much more than a hope and a prayer, their drives running so hot everyone on board had suntans. Somehow he’d managed to bring four huge tenders with him (the “battleships” that had finally broken Caneris’ will, as they learned from intercepted comms), and even a hospital ship (the “carrier”) more welcome than all the rest put together.
Huron, who’d lost five kilos, was radiantly pale from lack of sleep, and—far from being late—had charmed or coerced or bribed whatever deities ruled hyperspace into letting him arrive three hours early. Which was to say, not a moment too soon. Privately, she half-wondered if he’d ever be forgiven for it.
He’d brought news as well: first, that the Ionian force sent to Nicobar had achieved the total destruction of the slaver fleet without loss on their side. Next, and even more surprising, they had rescued the Trifid Frontier Force. Someone—LSS Kite, Kris assumed—had forged an order to have the captured fleet sent to the Acheron junction with a small escort to rendezvous with Caneris, who wished to keep them at the capital. The order was promptly obeyed and the fleet arrived, its token escort of three destroyers and a light cruiser, amazed to find themselves under the guns of the grinning Ionians. The TFF, restored to their ships, was heading back to Eltanin, while the Ionians were on their way home, filled with joy and possessing three new and efficient Halith warships.
The glow of these triumphs had been dimmed by Polidor’s passing, and was now no more than a weak flicker. But that wasn’t the whole or even the prime cause of Kris’s funereal mood, and frankly, she didn’t grasp what was. So when Rafe told her, “Kris, you pulled off a miracle here,” her reply held a bitter edge that surprised even her.
Rubbing her palms against her eyes, she said, “If it was a miracle, it wasn’t my fuck’n miracle.”
True enough in the sense it wasn’t only hers: miracles were always a team effort, and this one had an especially long litany of people who’d made vital contributions, right down to an irrepressible gun crew, and including a nonhuman (though no
t, Kris thought, nonperson) who’d been recovered and now occupied a place of honor at the head Osiris’ gunroom table, adorned with an appropriate sign.
But Kris had been the heart of the miracle; its soul or perhaps guiding spirit was the better term. Predictably perhaps, everyone could see that but her.
Huron didn’t argue but remained as he was, hands clasped across his middle. “Well . . . Congratulations anyway. Sincere congratulations.”
“Thanks.”
Allowing Kris her wooded reaction, he maneuvered to a new tact. “Those eagles look good on you.”
Kris, starting from her brown study, touched one of her captain’s insignia distractedly.
“Any thought of keeping ’em?” he added. “You had quite the crew of supporters when I left.”
Dropping her hand, Kris dropped her head too and shook it, the hair falling forward to obscure her eyes. “Fuck it, Rafe. I’m a fighter pilot. I’m not cut out for sitting my ass deciding who’s gonna buy it and who might not. I’m fuck’n sick and tired of it—that’s not me.”
He sat still for a minute, until Kris raised her head and flipped the auburn strands out of her face.
“Kris . . .” he began gently. “You’re the best fighter pilot I know. Better’n me, when you come right down to it, and no bullshit added. But what we’re good at—even if we’re the best—isn’t the same as what we are. Sometimes we get so wrapped up in what we do, we forget how to be. We have to give ourselves permission to be who we are. And we can’t even find out who we are until we do that. It’s not a hunt, Kris. It’s not a fight. No one ever fights for their freedom. They fight for the opportunity to be free. But whether they find it—if it finds them, really—depends on giving themselves that permission first.”
“So what’re you sayin’?” A bleak mutter. “I gotta give myself permission to not be a fighter pilot? To wear eagles and sit on my ass?”
“Kris . . .”—venturing onto this dangerous ground—“Your gut knows what it wants your head to give it permission to do. It’s known for years. It’s just waiting for the rest of you to catch up. Once that happens, whether you’re a fighter pilot or an eagle-wearing ass-sitter won’t matter a damn. ”
Loralynn Kennakris 4: Apollyon's Gambit Page 61