Whoops.
A distant voice calls me back. “Are you dead? God, I’m in here with a dead man. I should have stayed home. Or left on a full moon and not a new moon. Pa was right; the tea leaves weren’t right.”
I listen to Henna ramble on and on about different superstitions, and finally I can’t contain myself. I burst out into laughter.
“You asshole, Jager!” Henna punches me with a gloved hand.
“Ouch! I save you, and you do that?”
I’m alive. It takes a moment to sink in. Henna’s emergency locator blinks on her shoulder. That signal will have no problem penetrating through the thin hull of Bertha. Relief washes over me, and I know we’ll be saved.
After everything that’s happened, I’m clear. On top of that, a good deal of the crew of the Orca must be clear too. All except Captain Hallverson. My excitement drops away like a set of worn-out boxing gloves.
“Magnus,” I mumble.
“Can you reach the display?” Henna says. She scoots her suit a bit and gives me enough room to roll over.
I barely squeeze onto my other side. My fingers fumble until I find the power button. A moment later, a tiny screen, normally only used to verify the feed, pops on.
“Sweet Jesus,” I mumble.
At our range, I can’t make out any details. Normally on the bridge we’d have friend-or-foe identification on every single large contact. Without that, you can barely pick out a starship by eye. But in front of me is a massive clash. Explosions rack both sides of the line.
Reactors pop left and right; nothing quite burns like a fusion core gone rogue. Trails of missiles mark where one ship is and the final arc when they collide with another. It’s the most massive display of firepower I’ve ever dreamed of.
“What’s happening?” Henna says.
I explain to her and give her a blow-by-blow rundown as well as I can make it out.
“Are we winning?”
Are we? Without any reference as to up or down, I’m not sure which side is which. “I don’t know.”
“Can you see the Orca?” Her voice trembles this time as she speaks.
I feel a twinge of guilt. I could have saved Hallverson. Good God, what could I have done different? As I search the dark space on the screen, I try to think what could have changed. Did I fail him as an officer? Was the camaraderie missing? If I had followed his orders to the T, would this have all been different?
Or maybe it didn’t matter a single damned bit.
A single flicker of flame blinks on and off, just for a moment. My heart skips a beat; the Orca is burning. The heat sinks are failing, and now the hull itself is absorbing that massive load from the reactor. How long can the cloaking gas contain that sort of energy?
“I…I think I saw it. The hull is glowing.”
“My God,” Henna whispers.
Explosions ripple along one line. A sense of dread rolls through me. If the fleet fails, we’re dead.
Then I see the White Queen, a tiny outline charging straight at the ConFed line. It has to be the White Queen. What other starship would stick out like that? Behind her, I see missiles flare. Explosions rock her, but still she charges. Pinpricks of light signal more Tyrolean ships following with her. It’s a full-fledged charge right at the ConFed line.
I can picture it. All of our forces grouped up nice and tight right in the center of those magnetic inhibitors. No time to escape. If the Tyroleans get in close, they can maul us just like they did the day I lost my missile boat.
“What’s happening?” Henna asks again.
I can’t say a word. All I can do is watch for the Orca as she goes in for the final kill.
An iridescent light flashes into space. A thousand tongues of flame erupt from a single point and dance like only a zero-gravity fire can. Then from beneath that shroud of rage emerges a white-hot bullet of light. The entire rear of the Orca glows an intense forge white. Heat streaks its way forward. It looks like something out of a blacksmith’s furnace.
Like a phoenix reborn, the Orca plows out from the expanding cloud of burning cloaking gas. I have no sense of depth in that tiny monitor, but I can tell the Orca is almost on top of the Queen.
I hold my breath and watch, unable to tear my eyes away. Hallverson has to be dead by now. The ship is nothing but a reactor dumping all of its energy into the hull of the Orca.
Hundreds of missiles expand out like a terrible flower and drive right toward the white-hot Orca. Then my tiny viewscreen goes white and bristles with static. The inside of our little coffin is suddenly bright, and then the display simply shows a maintenance alert. Our external cameras have just burned out.
“What happened!” Henna says, louder. Her voice is almost frantic.
I clear the lump from my throat and speak slowly. “The Orca just rammed the White Queen.”
The Orca was my ship. My home. My first real command. I lost the woman I loved on that ship. I learned more about duty, pain, and madness than I ever would have in the university. It was the ultimate school of hard knocks. Like a lifetime in a boxing ring where you never see the punches coming.
“Captain Hallverson is dead.”
“May God save his soul,” Henna responds solemnly.
I don’t know if God can save his soul; Magnus already sold it to the devil for his revenge.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
With Henna’s help, I manage to patch into another set of inspection cables. But by then, the fleet battle seems to be over. Starships burn like tiny fireflies in the viewscreen. But no new fires are kindled.
“Is that it?” Henna says.
“Looks like it.”
With those magnetic inhibitors up, there’s no way anyone can bounce out. This was a fight to the death. No brawl, no boxing match, no choreographed dance of admirals. It was a bare-knuckled fight where the only thing that mattered was survival.
The smell in our little capsule is getting awfully ripe. After a few hours, my sense of smell burns out. It’s the smell of fear, terror, and a half-patched-up liquid reclaimer gone bad.
“What if they don’t come?” I say, suddenly afraid that we’d survived so much only to die in the capsule.
“Keep your fingers crossed,” Henna responds. Her voice is sure, solid, and it gives me hope.
I crane my neck to look over at Henna. Well, at least to look at her heavy engineering suit. There is no conventional face mask, just a few cylindrical cameras. From the angle of her suit, I know she can’t see me. So I picture her inside: those dimples, her close-cut hair, the almost comical look of anger, and of course the engineer’s eye for precision.
“Thank you.” It’s the only thing I can think to say to her.
Henna just grunts. “Wake me up when they pick us up.”
An hour later, a ship comes close and then passes us by. I scream into my commset and hammer against the side of Bertha. This, in hindsight, is a ridiculous thing to do. They can’t hear anything; it’s space.
“Shaddup,” Henna grumbles. “I told ’em, they’re coming back.”
I come to find out later the little frigate was busy scooping up everyone else into the airlock. Without my face mask, my suit didn’t register as holding anyone alive in space. My emergency beacon was showing me as dead. Luckily Henna’s was still on.
There’s no sense of relief like knowing you’re rescued. I hope that everyone else made it out. A certain dread comes over me, and I realize I’ll have to tell someone exactly what happened. My heart beats a bit faster; I don’t look forward to that debriefing.
They pull us into an empty service bay and pump the air inside. Then I hear voices, and someone knocks on Bertha. The latches are frozen tight, so we wait another twenty minutes while two maintenance techs argue with Henna about the best way to open it up. Finally, someone hits it with a big hammer, and that is that.
I crawl out first. Both of the maintenance techs back away like I’m a horrid swamp monster.
Ahh, the smell. I am kind of a ho
rrid swamp monster.
Henna stands inside of Bertha and releases the front half of her suit. It falls away like a clamshell, and I stifle a gag. She’s just as ripe as I am.
“Oof!” Henna says as she waves her hand before her. “Jager, you stink.”
I just grin back and follow after the maintenance techs. One part of me wants to plant a big fat kiss on her, but she smells too bad for even that.
My grin drops off once I’m in the main hall of the frigate. It’s about as wide as the Orca itself. And the whole thing is filled with wounded sailors in spacesuits, medical gurneys with the horribly injured, and finally some with just sheets pulled over them.
The butcher’s bill is a terrible price to pay.
Henna and I pick our way down the line and try to find a face we recognize. Finally, I see Sebic’s spacesuit. Stretched out next to him is Hauptmann, fast asleep.
Down from both of them are the rest of the survivors of the Orca. I see Raj with Katzen at her side. Dr. Mohammad is crouched over a sailor with wicked burns on one arm.
What can I say? There are no words that can express to them how I feel. Pride. Anger. Sadness. Relief. What speech can convey that? I like to give a good toast, but this feels more like a funeral.
So we just slide down against the wall and let the moment wash over us.
Hartford finds me a minute later and hands over a list scrawled on a piece of shredded space suit. “It’s all of the crew.”
He looks down at me like a father that has lost his child once again. The crew of the Orca are his children, and to see them lost again…well, it looks like too much for him. Revenge can’t fill that void. Not for any of them.
I look at the list and thank him. I feel guilty that I don’t know everyone. Almost all of the names have a check beside them. A few are question marks, including Henna and I.
The dead are crossed out. At the bottom is Captain Magnus Hallverson, a dark swath across his name.
The hours stretch on, and the shock of it all ebbs like a bad hangover. Conversations spark up. A lieutenant from the Hebrides, the frigate that picked us up, comes down the line and checks us all in. The only thing he has to add was that we’ve won.
Barely.
Huttola stomps down the hall and stands before me. He looks down, almost sullen. “Well, how did the captain die?”
I stare back up at Huttola and realize it isn’t a challenge. He needs to know. Heads turn down the line. Others stand and come closer. I was the last one to see him alive.
It takes me a moment to get to my feet. “He took the bridge and set a course for the White Queen. He was himself then, I think.”
Revenge. It’s what he wanted and exactly what he got. Even though it cost him everything. Though the cancer would have torn through him soon enough. Maybe it was better he died like that instead of in a military hospice where all he’d get was a lonely burial.
“Well, he didn’t have long to live anyway,” I say. “Right, Doctor?”
Dr. Mohammad looks up from Katzen. “What do you mean?”
“The cancer,” I say. Have I violated his oath? Maybe the doctor can’t tell me.
Dr. Mohammad stands slowly and shakes his head. “Captain Hallverson didn’t have cancer.”
I give a nervous laugh. The crew looks at me and then at the doctor. “What do you mean? He said he was dying.”
“No. He didn’t have cancer. He suffered from posttraumatic stress; that is all.” The finality in Dr. Mohammad’s voice settles it.
A cold chill settles into my soul and doesn’t let go.
I’ve been manipulated since day one. Hallverson used me to get exactly what he wanted. Revenge. When he knew Yao was failing, so he set me up in his place with the skills I’d need. When he saw my support wavering, he lied about dying, about having cancer. All to get him the one thing he wanted. Vengeance.
I sit down hard.
My mind plays over the tour, from the moment I was picked up to the moment I left Hallverson on the bridge. Was he ever honest? Can I trust anything he did? I’d seen it in him a few times, that thin veil of lies, but he never pulled it back to show me who he was.
“Karl?” Henna says. She sits up and rests a hand on mine.
“His desires consumed him, drove him, made him exactly what he was. I respected him as a human being once, but never again. As an Orca captain, absolutely, he taught me more than anyone could have in the worst possible conditions. But all he taught me was how to kill, how to maneuver, how to be a machine with one goal.”
“Revenge,” Henna says, her voice a whisper.
“Even after all of this, I don’t know how to be a good officer.”
Hartford steps closer. I hadn’t even noticed him. Gone are his soft edge, the paternal eyes. He’s shaking with anger. “Karl, look at you. Look at yourself! Wipe off that self-pity and stand proud, son. How many lives are here today because of what you did? Eh? How many? Sometimes life gives you hard things. But by God, Karl, don’t waste it on anger and hate. Don’t do what we did. Learn from it, put it behind you, and move on.”
Hartford exhales loudly. A tears run down the creases in his face. He wipes them away and walks off.
“He’s right,” Henna says. She squeezes my hand. “He’s right.”
It doesn’t feel right. It just feels like what it is: a shitty situation. No amount of talking about it is going to make it better. It is what it is.
For the next two days, they feed us ConFed sandwiches, a fancy word for shelf-stable bread, yeast-protein bologna, and something yellow that is definitely not cheese. At any other time, it would be horrible, but for us, after living so long on reduced calories, it’s like beef Wellington.
The frigate lieutenant brings down a tablet with the tactical replay of the battle. About half of the crew watches over my shoulder as we replay the fight. Once the Orca took out the White Queen, and she absolutely took her out, the Tyrolean line broke.
It isn’t over, not right away, but with that big bastard in the middle gone, a few of our heavies barge right in and lay waste to the hostiles. Once those cruisers make the hook, the Tyroleans are done. It almost doesn’t feel real in my hands, like it’s a simulation.
But it’s real.
Finally, the navy comes to and breaks our crew apart. I have no tablet or personal data pad, so instead they deliver my transfer orders the old-fashioned way.
A petty officer walks down the hall, calling out names. Hartford is off for the Gandes. Raj, to the Wyoming. Katzen, Sebic, and Hauptmann, to the Tripoli.
“Jager? Jager?” the petty officer calls.
I stand and wave at him.
He runs over and hands me a wispy thin printout. “Airlock D. You’ll be heading to the Normandie.”
The Normandie. Admiral Roberta Klaus’s flagship. I look down the line and give a nod to the crew. Henna is gone to the mess to bring back another batch of sandwiches. Good-bye doesn’t seem like the right thing to say, so I just set off.
I’m as afraid of what the future might hold as I am of the past catching up with me. The halls of the Hebrides pass me by, and suddenly I’m standing at airlock D. Waiting.
How will I tell this story? Because it’s one hell of a story. They have the logs: all of that is encapsulated in the drives in our suits. But it isn’t just what happened—it’s just the truth. And that’s the hardest thing to tell.
I decide the first thing I’ll do is get smashed drunk. Then I’ll finally write that letter back home and pray that Mom won’t give me a thrashing.
An elbow nudges me. I jump and snap out of my moment. Henna stands at my side and gives me a little smile. “Normandie?”
I smile back at her. “Normandie.”
She nods and looks straight ahead at the airlock. A shuttle is coming in to dock. “Whatcha gonna tell ’em? They’ll want to know what happened.”
“The truth.”
END
NOTES FROM THE AUTHOR
Thank you for reading my eigh
th novel. Hopefully you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it. Molding a madman and charting his descent into rage and revenge was one part Ahab and one part Wolf Larsen. Gifted, intelligent, cunning, manipulative, and a damned flawed individual. By the end we don’t know exactly who he really is inside.
Three days after I finished writing this novel I was diagnosed with colon cancer. It’s taken me over a year to publish it. Six months of chemotherapy. Two heart attacks. A return of the cancer and eventually an experimental treatment that offers me hope for a cure. That’s a lot of crap for a guy who’s in his mid 30’s.
This hopefully isn’t my last novel, but it’s probably my last novel for a while.
I want to thank all of you who have reached out during my treatment. Your words and encouragement mean a great deal to me.
Casey, 2017
Cloak of War Page 26