The Bonds of Orion

by Owen R. O’Neill

  Zooming in on the first encounter, he froze the action as the fighters’ engagement volumes began to overlap. “First thing,” he said, highlighting them. “When you have numerical superiority, don’t crowd your engagement envelopes. You don’t need to interlock your chain-gun fields-of-fire” showing them in red “what you need to do is maximize your kill-power on target. As you can see here” he ran the plots ahead slowly “you’re masking each other, cutting your firepower by almost thirty percent while two of you are in my gun envelope at the same time and Fighter 6 is here, just an ace away. I trust you recall how that turned out.” The plot ran forward, and the three fighters winked out as each met their doom.

  “So open up your formation in a situation like this. After all,” he winked at Kris “the very best defense is kill the other son of a bitch first. Jump in here anytime, Commander . . .”

  Chapter 14

  Vicinity of Frunze (Capital)

  Amu Daria, Epsilon Aquila, Aquila Sector

  The flames of the small fire fluttered above the mound of glowing coals, not burning steadily as any Earthly fire would, but capering in mad, erratic dances and sometimes leaping into the air in spiraling sheets as if seeking escape, only to vanish; extinguished in the blink of an eye. Unearthly colors, too, the weird shifting greens and violets and deep magentas of an aurora, and as the flames cast this strange chancy light across the circle of faces about the fire, each in an attitude of deep mediation, it gave them more than a touch of the fey, almost insubstantial, the wavering shadows on the cave walls seeming more alive than they were.

  Colonel Yeager watched each of these faces silently, the strain of that silence showing in the hard muscles around her mouth no deep mediation there. The hiss and crackle of the fire had long since died, ever since the local woods they were burning had resolved themselves into this radiant pile, leaving no sound but the soft noise of own her breath, exaggerated in her ears.

  Dropping her gaze to the flames, she tried not to count the seconds passing by with infuriating slowness. The alien fire had been a curious spectacle when they first landed; the source of much wonder and comment. It had taken a month to figure out how to light the stuff (you needed a fuel cell), but when it started to burn, a few kilos would give off a scorching heat for a couple of days. That had its drawbacks, of course, and they had to be careful where they lit them.

  That feeling of wonder was long since gone, and Christina Yeager struggled to remember it; struggled to remember anything before they abandoned their starclippers and dropped into this majestic wasteland that was perpetually trying to kill you.

  PFC Obadiah Smith hawked and spit into the fire. The saliva exploding into little puffs of steam before it got anywhere near the coals. “I got nothin’,” he grumbled, wiping the back of a callused hand across his mouth.

  “Anyone?” Colonel Yeager asked as the spell broke and eyes opened, faces yawned and shoulders flexed. One by one, each of them shook their heads.

  “I think he’s gone, ma’am.” Gunnery Sergeant Lyrabeth Wilkins, still frail from her fever, turned her thin hands palm up. “I had him good until day before yesterday. But not a hint now.”

  Major Sutton, she meant. Ever since he’d left, they’d been tracking him. The group he’d gone to contact that night had taken him to Frunze, the capital on the shore of Amu Daria’s equatorial ocean and site of the planet’s main starport, about sixteen hundred kilometers southeast of where they’d been. As the seat of the Halith colonial government, that could only mean they were taking him there for interrogation. Relations with the Amu Darian separatist groups was one of the things they hadn’t seen eye to eye on, and this was why. Now Sutton’s optimism had cost him his life.

  Or maybe worse.

  Probably worse. Christina Yeager hid a clenched fist behind her other hand. Delete “probably”.

  “What now, Colonel?” spoke up Warrant Officer Ebenezer Hitch, giving voice to the question in everyone’s mind. The note Sutton had left behind, explaining he was going to barter for much needed supplies and get some current news, insisted that they not come after him if he failed to return. They might have been following the letter of his request, but at the expense of the spirit. Yeager had been taking them steadily southeast, away from their previous haunts, but toward the capital. Their progress had been halting, as they’d taken to avoiding the local people, as well as anything that smelled of Halith patrol, and now they were eight or nine days away on foot, but only a matter of hours using the mule. What exactly she’d hoped to accomplish with this cross-continent trek had never been clear in her own mind. Springing Sutton from a military prison was absurd. Abandoning him entirely was unthinkable. This peripatetic compromise she’d dragged them all into was dangerous.

  And stupid.

  Thinking about the personal postscript he’d left her, she shook her head, a barely perceptible private movement. What now, indeed . . .

  As she drew breath to answer Hitch, still not precisely sure what she was about to say, Sergeant Russ appeared from the shadows, materializing with a look both nervous and perplexed. “Ma’am?” he murmured in the strange, awkward whisper of one trespassing on a sacred service. She let the breath go.

  “What is it, Russ?” The way he was rubbing his hands wasn’t helping her strained nerves at all. Russ was never this fidgety.

  “Well, ma’am . . .” He hesitated, clearly unsure of the reception he’d get to his perhaps importunate interruption. She kept her face expressionless, waiting for him to out with it. He did. “The patrol’s come back. They got someone I think you wanna see.”

  Someone? The few locals in the area didn’t go blundering about in the woods in the middle of the night. One of the separatist groups on the prowl? That couldn’t be good.

  Russ jogged his head side to side when she asked, “It ain’t the Amus, ma’am. It’s a marine.”

  Chapter 15

  LSS Artemisia, in orbit

  Karelia, Karelian Republic, The Perseids

  “Got beat by a rock.” Tech-Corporal Arno Watkins of Covert Action Team 5 chuckled as he chalked the tip of his pool cue.

  “A big fuckin’ rock,” elaborated PFC Kyle Argento, lining up for the break. He sent the cue ball into the fifteen-ball rack at the foot of the table, scattering them with a ringing crack.

  “Nice break,” Watkins commented, surveying the table critically. “For me.” Having drawn the solids, he laid his cue on one outstretched hand and took aim at the red-7 near the head rail. “She hasn’t lost a step. Shit!” as the red-7 bounced off the cushion and the cue ball ricocheted into the left-side pocket. As one of the unit’s demolition experts, Watkins’ skill with a cue was not to be compared with his skill at “blowing shit up”. That in no way dampened his enthusiasm for the game, however.

  “I’d say she’s gained one,” said Argento, claiming his ball-in-hand and placing it by the right-hand long-rail diamond in the kitchen. They were playing Antiguan billiards, which had come down almost untouched from the old established Brazilian game. LSS Artemisia, in whose gunroom they were playing, was the only combatant in the CEF to boast a billiard table (a distinction the crew was quite jealous of), and being the command of Commodore Yasmin Shariati, Admiral Sabr’s Antiguan wife, even suggesting playing by other rules would land you on the defaulters list; actually doing it might get you spaced in a leaky suit. Or so the Antiguan crew members (of which there were many) liked to tell newcomers.

  CAT 5, half of whom were Antiguan including Argento and Corporal Vasquez, the subject of their discussion were certainly not in that category; indeed, quite the opposite. Owing to Vasquez’s stature, they owned an open invitation to the battlecruiser’s gunroom, which they took full advantage of anytime the opportunity presented itself. Two day-cycles ago, it had, when the commodore’s roving squadron came in from patrolling the transit lanes linking the Republic to Syrdar and Rho Ceti Principate.

  “Takes more than having a leg blown off to slow her down,” declared Wa
tkins as Argento pocketed the red-7, followed rapidly by the green-6 and the orange-9 in a neat split. Attempting to sink the gold-1 with a tricky bank shot, he scratched.

  “You can say that twice,” Argento agreed, with a resigned look.

  “Okay,” said Watkins, taking his turn. “I’d say she’s gained one!” grinning like a grig. Argento shook his head. Few people derived greater satisfaction from a smaller store of wit than Arno Watkins. Not that the reiteration wasn’t deserved. The corporal had lost her leg and the use of one arm leading the assault on IHS Bolimov’s heavily defended engineering spaces at Apollyon Gates. “Leading” became “singlehanded” when the rest of her fireteam rapidly became casualties. Unstoppable in spite of being hit three times, she cleared the spaces alone and turned the tide of a touch-and-go battle.

  It was, as she said, a “piece of cake” or, as they all said later, “all in a day’s work”. The citation for the Senatorial Cross the corporal had subsequently been awarded qualified the action in rather different terms. But none of CAT 5 would dream of speaking those aloud.

  Still grinning, Watkins choose his angle and shot the cue ball straight into the far-right corner pocket.

  Argento nodded solemnly. “Now that took skill.”

  “Piss off.”

  “Yeah?” Argento placed the cue ball and leaned over the baize. “Watch this.”

  Two minutes later, his last stripe walked into the called pocket and he casually sunk the 8-ball. Straightening, he regarded Watkins with a look of quiet triumph on his scarred face. “Pay up.”

  “Wanna go double or nothin’?” Watkins was looking at his accounts on his xel.

  Setting his cue aside, Argento gave the corporal a sidelong glance. “I think you’ve sustained enough damage for one day. Where are they, anyway?” adding the query as he noticed the time.

  “How should I know?” Watkins replied with a good-natured grumble as he stroked the winnings into Argento’s account. “Maybe they’re running late? Maybe they couldn’t find it?”

  “Not bloody likely,” Argento countered. “And Top’s never been late in her life” referring to Master Sergeant Andréa Burdette, who was CAT Second to Sergeant Major Yu and informally known as “Top”.

  “Right you are!” sang out a woman’s voice in the broad, rolling accent of New South Wales as Master Sergeant Burdette strode into the gunroom with a large case on her shoulder. Right behind her were Gunnery Sergeant Antoinette Lopez and Corporal Sam Perez, bearing a large, oblong box between them. A younger man, PFC Enos Brady, trundling a sextet of kegs on a float pallet, brought up the rear.

  “Ya got it!” caroled Argento, breaking into a wide, toothy grin.

  “Sam here made it happen.” Burdette indicated the corporal with a jerk of her thumb as she set the case on a sideboard.

  Argento tossed him a salute. “For you, I kill the bull.”

  “For your sister, I ride a porcupine bareback.” Perez lifted his end of the box onto the mess table with a grunt. “Goddamn, this thing’s heavy.”

  “Tell me about it,” Antoinette Lopez agreed, shoving her end onto the table. “But worth it!” a twinkle showing in her mismatched eyes: the one she’d been born with, bright hazel; the other, a shocking blue cybernetic replacement for the eye she’d lost to mortar shrapnel.

  “Y’know, they’ve got these things like giant porcupines on Pohjola,” said PFC Brady, rather at random as he looked for somewhere to stow the pallet. The unasked-for comment was greeted with a theatrical groan. Brady had been a member of CAT 5 for a year and a half now, filling the gunner’s slot that had belonged to Lance Corporal Benn Gergen until he lost the use of his hand. Brady was a good kid, but given to enthusiasms. His latest was xenobiology, which made him something of burden in the mess when he got going. “No, I’m serious,” he went on, ignoring the strong hint as he piloted the kegs into a vacant corner. “They’re close to two meters high at the shoulder, and they ”

  “They’re not porcupines, kiddo,” interrupted Lopez. This was verging on ‘getting going’, and they had no time to waste on enthusiasms.

  “No, they got ’em. They really do. They’re like . . . glypto . . . somethings,” chimed in Watkins, not helping at all.

  “You mean glyptodonts,” added Perez. “Those giant sloths . . .”

  “It’s an armadillo,” muttered Lopez.

  “They could stand upright had these humongous claws . . .”

  “It’s an armadillo.”

  “Huh?” Perez turned to Lopez, at last taking note of her demurral.

  “Glyptodonts were relatives of armadillos,” Lopez explained, a shade too sweetly. “You’re thinking of Megatherium. Those were giant ground sloths.”

  “And none of them were porcupines,” stated Burdette, with an air of finality. “And they all went extinct, ah . . .”

  “A really long time ago,” offered Argento.

  “The corporal would know,” said Watkins, feeling irrepressible this evening. It was quite true that Corporal Vasquez would know. Xenobiology and all things related (including extinct Pleistocene fauna) were a hobby of hers one might say almost a passion and no doubt Brady had picked up the contagion from her. But while CAT 5 would accept and even smile at practically anything from their most storied member, a youngster like Brady did not merit such license. And furthermore, this had been going on too long.

  .

  “Exactly. And we have better things to do,” the master sergeant capped the discussion. “Where is she?”

  “The Sergeant Major went to collect her,” answered Lopez.

  “The commanders?” inquired Burdette.

  “They’re coming with him.”

  “Fine.” Burdette bent to inspect some readouts on the otherwise anonymous box. “We got forty minutes to make this rocket-ready. Let’s get ‘er done.”

  * * *

  “How old is she?” Kris asked, tugging her tunic straight and smoothing her hair.

  “The corporal?” Huron replied, standing behind her. Kris nodded, running a discreet eye up and down his image in the lone mirror of the visiting officers’ quarters they shared. He looked as always immaculate. The corners of her mouth tightened ever so slightly. He could, at least, try to look like he put some effort into looking that good. Invited to Corporal Vasquez’s birthday party in LSS Artemisia’s gunroom, they were wearing their dress grays, the reversed dress uniform they normally wore downside, but had put on for the party as honored guests and, in essence, outsiders.

  “This is her seventy-fifth,” Huron answered, with that little quirk at the side of his lips that always made her wonder if he’d guessed her thoughts.

  Pulling her eyes from the mirror, Kris gave her head a private shake. She hadn’t seen the corporal since she left Iona, where she’d shared a domicile with her and Colonel Lewis while her paralyzed arm was being rehabilitated. Like Mariwen, Vasquez was a rejuvenant, but Mariwen was forty-two years younger, making her youthful appearance not that far out of the ordinary. In a woman old enough to be her grandmother, it took a lot more getting used to. And despite knowing the corporal for over a year and having lived with her for three months, Kris still wasn’t quite used to it.

  A muted chime sounded. “That would be Fred,” Huron announced, having no need to check it. “Fred” was Sergeant Major Yu Fyodor Tal Yu and Huron was one of the chosen few entitled to use his nickname. “All correct?”

  Kris thumbed off the compartment’s mirror. “Good to go.”

  The entry opened to reveal the solid block of the sergeant major, his broad mahogany-colored face lined with the many creases of an uncharacteristic smile. She hadn’t seen him since her graduation from the Academy, where he’d given Kris her first salute as a brand new ensign. Except for that smile, he hadn’t changed in the slightest degree.

  As they exchanged greetings (no saluting on this informal occasion), it crossed her mind that the corporal and sergeant major didn’t look so much ageless as timeless. Vasquez, with her short m
ink-rich hair, peerless complexion, and large onyx eyes in a heart-shaped face did not look a day over twenty, and probably never would. Yu, whose face and build resembled nothing so much as a basalt statue his ancestors might have put up to ward off demons, did not look a day under a hundred, and (as he’d celebrated his centenary last month) certainly never would. Yet, a mere 25 years GAT separated them.

  They spent most of the shuttle ride to LSS Artemisia in companionable silence. Huron and Yu exchanged a few pleasantries about mutual acquaintances, and Kris limited herself to speaking when she was spoken to. The memory of her failure on their mission while she was at the Academy, but serving briefly as a midshipman, still had enough weight to chain her tongue, and she was never inclined to be loquacious in Yu’s presence at any time. His air of vast quiet authority discouraged familiarity, the affable smile and relaxed manner notwithstanding. The smile and manner were not without effect, however, and by the end of the 90-minute flight, Kris, if still not exactly talkative, no longer felt positively rigid.

  Colonel Lewis greeted them on LSS Artemisia’s boat deck, along with Master Sergeant Burdette and their official host, a sturdy master chief petty officer representing Artemisia’s gunroom, whose name Kris instantly forgot. Burdette greeted Kris with genuine warmth, looking exactly as Kris remembered her, except her hair was longer now. Min hadn’t changed much either. Still with that same open handsome friendly face, wavy leonine hair, twinkling blue-gray eyes and a physique that would make a sculptor in search of muscular female perfection weak in the knees, she could not avoid comparison to a Valkyrie. And not just in looks: as a “chooser of the slain”, she had few equals.

  But as they entered the gunroom, the atmosphere was one of celebration, not martial prowess. This was accentuated by everyone but the invited officers being in their fatigues, and the presence of a three-tiered birthday cake fit for a dreadnought that had a table to itself and supported seventy-five candles, all burning brightly in a multitude of colors. And if that wasn’t enough, there were several gallons of punch, specially mixed by Artemisia’s gunroom steward to marine tastes, making it strong enough to be used as rocket fuel.