Accepting a glass from Antoinette Lopez and trying a cautious sip while the sergeant offered polite, well-informed, and sincere compliments on her record, Kris smiled, nodded, and regretted the heat that the punch and the praise brought to her cheeks. Lopez gave her arm a parting squeeze, and Kris gravitated toward Huron, who was talking to Troy Anders, Min’s executive officer, and Robyn Gomez, one of her company commanders. Anders, a short man with beer-colored hair, light eyes, and the lean build of a gymnast, had his arm around his fellow captain, who looked both absurdly young the youngest person in the room, Kris thought and absurdly pretty; pigeon plumb and rosy cheeked with the sparkle of a suppressed giggle in her eyes. The couple had recently become engaged, Kris learned as she walked up; so recently, they were still in that first flush of dazed exhilaration which, no doubt, accounted for the sparkle.
She had never met either of them before and Huron made introductions before excusing himself to caucus with Yu and Colonel Lewis. Calling on what social graces she could muster (substantially more than in former times), Kris offered her sincere congratulations and, infected with their cheerfulness and abundant good humor, found herself chatting quite sociably within a very short space of time. Anders had known Min from the very beginning of their careers, when they were both stationed on Outremeria, a planet so remote, its name was said to be “the Greek for ass-end of nowhere”. Kris was acquainted with it, it being a favored crossroads for mercenaries, smugglers, slavers, and those who dealt with them. Those memories had lost enough of their potency that she could listen with interest to Ander’s story about an op Min had led them on there, which involved improbably enough, though it was perfectly true gigantic fur-bearing centipedes.
Exactly how the centipedes figured into the op, and where and why, Kris did not find out, for Ander’s story was suddenly interrupted by a loud clamor announcing the guest of honor. Vasquez entered what could only be described as the adoring throng, accepting the many thumps and backslaps of well-wishers whose shoulders she rarely reached with a look of pleasure that also held a touch of shyness.
It was a look Kris had never seen, or considered it was possible to see, on the corporal’s face. If it was incongruous (which is was), Kris found it even more endearing. As Vasquez walked over, half-guided, half-impelled by the crowd, Kris detected an admixture of awe in the slightly ruffled aplomb that her people would go to all this bother for her.
“Happy Birthday,” Kris said, extending her hand.
Vasquez took it with a firm squeeze. “Thank you, ma’am. I much appreciate it.”
“Aren’t we over that, Corporal?” Kris said, ribbing her teasingly. It had taken some effort on Kris’ part to convince them to stop calling her “ma’am” when she was their house guest, but time and being back in uniform had clearly revived that habit.
The color in Vasquez’ cheeks showed half a shade brighter. “Yes . . . I suppose we are, Kris.”
“Glad to hear it.” She released Vasquez’s hand. “I think you gotta task ahead of ya, though” with a nod at the monumental cake. As if on cue, others took up the cry and the bulkheads shook with calls for the corporal to blow out her candles. That would call for a herculean effort, but stepping up to the cake, Vasquez took three deep breaths and, her face set with powerful resolve, exhaled powerfully. Rank after rank of candles extinguished in a rush, all but one in the lee of the upper tier, which the colonel, nothing loath, calmly leaned over and put out with a deliberate puff.
Vasquez cocked an eyebrow at her. “I had that, ma’am.”
“Teamwork, Corporal,” Min returned with a wink.
“We’ll see about that.” Those finely curved brows drawing slightly together.
“I sure hope we do” with a grin that radiated happy expectation. “Now I think I’ll have some of your cake.” Min swept her hand in a broad gesture. “Let ’em eat cake.”
The cake was doled out, and more punch, and the gunroom filled with a fine convivial din. Kris, nibbling her second piece, noted that Min, Rafe and the sergeant major were clustered in corner, heads together. Curiosity overcoming her, she eased through the press toward them, only to be brought up all standing by a delighted cry in an unmistakable voice:
“Oh! A purple one!”
She turned, as everyone turned, to see Vasquez up on tiptoe, peering into the large white container that lay across the head of gunroom table. The top was open, container’s opaque front wall had retracted, revealing glass behind, and through the glass, a miniature Terran forest, right out of a fairy tale, complete with miniature fairytale castles. But what caught and held her attention was Vasquez, who’d reached within and was now turned to back to the room, cradling something with the utmost care in both hands, a look like the break of day overspreading her lovely features.
“They’re hedgehogs! Whose hedgehogs?”
Looking closer, Kris saw it was indeed a hedgehog she was holding, not much bigger than a large fist, its glossy spines a rich deep amethyst. Kris knew that hedgehogs were popular pets on Terra and had long been bred into a variety of exotic colors, but she’d never heard of purple ones.
“Dammit, Troy!” Min called in exasperated tones across the suddenly quiet room. “You were supposed to keep the fuckin’ lid on that!”
Anders, caught full on by Min’s glare, blinked several times in obvious guilt, but Robyn interposed herself, giving his arm an affectionate squeeze. “Well, y’know he’s terrible with surprises. He ruined our engagement surprise, too.”
Vasquez’s eyes snapped up from her adoration of the hedgehog. “Engagement? What engagement?”
Robyn’s full cupid’s-bow lips rounded into a silent O as the import of her statement crashed home.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Min growled as grins spread like wildfire around the room. “I give you two an op, and you’re on it tight as a virgin’s . . . whatever” in sudden awareness of her eagerly listening audience “but ask you to keep a simple fuckin’ secret . . .” She stalked across the room with that exaggerated, rolling-hipped gait and indicated the hedgehog. “Can I see, for a sec?”
Vasquez held out the animal. Min bent to inspect it. The hedgehog, its beady black eyes glittering and small black nose twitching, returned the favor.
“Nope,” Min muttered and searched in the enclosure. “Now, where’d he go?” Few seconds of soft clicking noises, clearly audible in the dumbfounded stillness, and then she said in triumph, “Here you are, little fella,” and brought out a twin to the hedgehog Vasquez held. This one wore a ribbon around his negligible neck, from which a simple band of gold dangled.
With a grunt, she sank to one knee before the corporal. “I guess I better do this before these idjits screw it up anymore.” The good-natured grumble was loud in the compartment before Min lifted the ring-wearing hedgehog and her tone changed and smoothed.
“Where I grew up, we said hedgehogs knew ‘one big thing’. This little guy knows one big thing: I love you with all my heart and soul. So . . .” She paused to draw breath. “You would make me the happiest of persons by doing me the honor of becoming my spouse. Maralena senn Vasquez Montero y Domanova, will you marry me?”
Vasquez clapped one hand over her mouth as her eyes suddenly misted. Then, bending to put her lips close to Min’s, she answered, “Yes, Minerva Rhiannon Lewis. I will marry you.”
“You had to say that,” muttered Min as she removed the ring from the hedgehog. Now the whole compartment knew her detested middle name, and therefore the ship. Of course, they probably already had known, but it was the principle of the thing . . .
“Yes. I did,” murmured Vasquez impishly, brushing her lips across her fiancé’s.
“Figured as much” returning the errant kiss and sliding the ring on the corporal’s finger. “Here.” She handed the hedgehog up, and both were ceremoniously returned to their enclosure. Their time in the spotlight over, they shuffled into the largest of the miniature castles, where the rest of their spiny family awaited them, without a backwa
rd glance.
Min watched them go and made a satisfied sound. Then she glanced up at her betrothed. “Mind giving me a hand? Old bones.”
Vasquez replied with an elevated eyebrow. “I’m the one turning seventy-five, dear.”
Taking the proffered hand, Min lifted herself to her feet as the cheering erupted. “True,” she said through the jubilant noise. “But they say you’re only as old as the woman you feel.”
* * *
A thousand kilometers to port, the sound of a muted chime caused Admiral Sabr to look up from reams of documents neatly arranged around his desktop in his day cabin aboard LSS Athena Nike. With his ferocious reputation and looks to match, many failed to appreciate how much his victories owed to adept administration and painstaking staff work. For inveterate risk-taking and sheer no-holds-barred audacity, one would do better look to his wife, a former privateer, and the CEF’s only permanent commodore. Her favorite orders had had the phrase “Raise unrestricted hell” in them, and her greatest disappointment might have been that her own efforts, which were close to heroic, prevented her from exercising that clause.
Yet her joy in the hunt had a purity to it, as does that of a tigress, or rather a Jaguar, there being more than an echo of that predator’s beauty and grace in her own. And she was not without her softer side, especially when she sang, which she did quite well. There were other, more private, occasions, too . . .
Sabr’s narrow black eyes flicked the chrono, noted the time, and he answered the alert.
“Artemisia is signaling, sir,” his Flag Lieutenant announced from the small window that appeared above his desk. “Green running lights.”
“Very good.” The admiral’s gruff voice was a blunt instrument, ill-suited to expressing the finer shades of emotion, and it held little hint of the smile that hid behind the dense curling black beard that obscured the lower half of his face. “Is all in readiness?”
“Yes, Admiral. The roman candles are all primed and set to go.”
“Then my compliments to Captain Watanabe, and he may commence anytime he pleases.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Sabr tapped to kill the link with a nod. Standing, he activated the bulkhead screens around the compartment and felt the subtle vibration as the first salvo went off from Athena Nike’s launchers. Moments later, the screens began to fill with color as the roman candles detonated; great spirals and whorls of color in every hue the eye could perceive shot through with sparks like meteors and explosions like tiny novae and blooms of plasma like fiery chrysanthemums.
The rest of the ships in the fleet started answering, and to Sabr’s amusement, some captains were having fun with their shields, trapping the detonations so their ships glowed deep noble crimson and searing blue and burning gold before releasing the plasma in magnificent swirling eruptions.
A whisper of movement behind him diverted his attention from the display, and he turned to see his spouse exit their sleeping quarters, wearing a short, loosely belted robe of flame-colored silk that set off her fine, tawny skin to perfection. Yawning with a smile like a drowsy cat, Yasmin Shariati swept her lustrous black hair back from a proud forehead.
“I would have suggested fireworks, but you were ahead of there” draping a casual arm around his neck as she came to stand beside him. “They are quite lovely.”
“Quite” fondly stroking the long fall of midnight hair. “The Fleet was overjoyed at the news.”
“I don’t wonder. It has been a long time coming.”
“Truly.”
“I’m so happy about the hedgehog. I confess I had some real concern about them finding a purple one.”
“Fred’s people are nothing if not resourceful.”
“Indeed so,” she agreed in a warm, laughing tone.
Outside the ship, the fireworks display built to its glorious crescendo, filling the compartment with cascades of dancing light, all the more moving for the absolute silence. As the last flares faded to black, bringing the infinite night with its vast wealth of stars back into view, Yasmin gave her husband a squeeze.
“Very nicely done.”
Sabr considered her lively expression and placed his hand on the small of her back. “It was very nicely done. However . . .”
She dropped her snapping black eyes to meet his. “However?”
His hand moved lower. “I think perhaps we might do even better?”
“Really?” with an arch look.
“Yes” with unmistakable emphasis in that simple affirmation. “What do you say?”
She slid her hand down his arm to his, mating their palms there. “Yes. With all my heart.”
Chapter 16
Vicinity of Frunze (Capital)
Amu Daria, Epsilon Aquila, Aquila Sector
The ten men seated around three sides of the rude square table, with their long hair, full beards and heavily lined faces with dark, disapproving narrow eyes and grim mouths pulling down at the corners, had the look of Old Testament patriarchs. So Colonel Yeager thought, although she also thought the term might be a bit misleading: regardless of their weathered, craggy looks, most of them were about her age. All but one of them were the “young guard”, who’d come of age after the Halith reconquest which followed the last war. Fired by a sense of betrayal at what they saw as the League’s abandonment of them and nursing that grievance through the long, dark years when the movement was nearly snuffed out, the fruit of their convictions silently matured into a singularly bitter crop.
Traditional Amu Darian faith forbade bloodletting by women: their monthly bleeding, as a sign of their fertility, was held sacred and shedding blood in any other fashion was the sole province of men. A belief took root in many of the separatist groups that a softening (or betrayal) of this view within the old leadership, especially on the question of using women as soldiers (or worse, spies and assassins), was not savvy diplomacy or prudent compromise that allowed them to achieve a period of independence, but the principal sin which had weakened the movement, robbing it of purity and virtue.
Given an opportunity by a new war and a laxity born of the Halith colonial government’s growing corruption, they’d seized control and, determined not to repeat the sins of their fathers, imposed their own exacting views on every aspect of their operations most especially on the role of women. But these views were not universal within the separatist movement, and even those who embraced them did not always agree on the details. Inevitably, a narrow righteousness grew narrower for some, while the need for compromise pressed harder on others, and then there was the saying (which Colonel Yeager had often heard from those who’d dealt with the separatists during the last war) that whenever three or more Amu Darians gathered in a room, one of them would proclaim himself a general.
In short, Colonel Yeager, wearing the uniform of the betrayer and the face and form of Jezebel, probably could not have picked a worse moment to drop unheralded from Amu Daria’s skies with her band of survivors. Their ships, nearly out of fuel and lacking any means to retune their finicky grav plants, even they could have obtained some, gave them no other choice beyond sharing the vessels’ headlong rush to oblivion. This line of reasoning, had she chosen to employ it, would have found no welcome among the traditionalists: a whore and a betrayer would have offered exactly that excuse.
Scanning the ten men, their immobile visages cast in high relief by light of the oil lamp at the table’s center the flame of concord, lit for these occasions when heads of several groups came together, and burning with a sedate yellow flame, not the manic leaping blaze of the last time she’d surveyed faces by firelight she found herself missing Major Sutton.
Jon Sutton may not have approved of her methods, or even her goals, but he was a thoroughly professional officer of great experience. Captain Oberlin, his replacement, was also a thoroughly professional officer, but he didn’t have Sutton’s experience, particularly in ground ops, and while her people would follow Oberlin, they wouldn’t do it with the same unquestioned
faith they’d had in Sutton.
Her people. That was the crux. No longer was she leading a band of thirty-six ill-equipped survivors, but an armed group of four hundred ninety-three. The other four hundred fifty-six were escaped POWs, and that changed everything a sudden seismic shift that occurred the moment Sergeant Russ escorted a bedraggled CEF marine lieutenant to her fireside the night they knew Sutton was gone. The story the lieutenant unfolded, there by the fire, could have filled the pages of a sensational novel, though as fiction it might not have been quite believable.
The Doms had shipped in several large groups of POWs, the lieutenant said. He didn’t know how many. He guesstimated the camp he’d been held at housed a thousand or so, but based on what he’d heard and been able to observe, he thought there were at least five more camps, possibly six. Whether the other camps held more people than his, or fewer or about the same, he had no idea. He reckoned he’d been on-planet for barely over a year.
At first blush, it seemed lunatic to import so many POWs to planet with an active, armed separatist movement but Halith, they learned, had good reasons or what they thought were good reasons. The planet was home to a flower commonly known as Crimson Mirrowtip, and more colloquially by a name that translated from the local dialect as “devil’s saffron” after the Terran plant it only vaguely resembled. The Crimson Mirrowtip’s reproductive spores, analogous to pollen in a Terran plant, collected in anther-like structures deep in the heart of the cylindrical flower. These spores could be processed into a number of drugs, and these drugs were Amu Daria’s most valuable export.
The plant bloomed erratically, and only for a short time, in great explosions of color along mountain sides and in high, Alpine-like meadows. When a bloom was discovered, people would flock there by the thousands, if the bloom was big enough, to pick as many of the stamens as they could before the bloom faded. The delicacy of the flower required the stamens be harvested by hand, and the time pressure called for a multitude of hands.
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