The Ides of Matt 2017

by M. L. Buchman

  Thankfully, these people had installed a universal docking collar on the side of the instrument delivery shell. He let Karina bring the ships together. Letting his hands ride on their linked controls, he could feel the incredible subtlety of skill she achieved as if it was second nature.

  There was a hard clang as the hulls came together, but the connection showed all green and was holding pressure. He left the problem of station-keeping to hold the ships together with the flight computer.

  “Come on,” he signaled Karina to unbuckle as he did the same. “This can be the hard part, but it can also be so good. And just in case…” he tapped his sidearm.

  Karina checked her own then nodded her understanding.

  They floated back to the belly hatch where Warwick waited. Vetch had the medical station warmed up.

  “Do it,” he gave the command to proceed.

  Chapter Six

  Karina forgot to breathe while the hatches were opened.

  How could Brody not remember that night? It had shaped so much of her flying ever since. He’d shown her a new way of conceptualizing orbits that had rocked her mental world. With a simple screen of calcs, he had revealed a level of mastery behind his easy-going exterior that had humbled her. He had made her a different pilot, a better one.

  She stole a glance over at him, but he wasn’t watching the hatch, he was watching her. He looked aside quickly.

  Felice had said that Brody was mooning over Queen Bitch Rostov. What possible reason…

  Then she remembered something else about that long-ago night. She’d kissed him in thanks. It had been an unthinking gesture that she’d felt mostly embarrassed about. A senior pilot had been waiting for her that night and yet she’d kissed another man. Now, she couldn’t even remember the pilot’s name.

  She’d also forgotten that kiss. Apparently Brody Jones hadn’t.

  What sort of a woman was she that she’d blocked all that out? Easy answer: Queen Bitch Rostov. Yet somehow Brody always saw past that. She now knew that was part of why she kept being drawn back to him. Because only Brody Jones saw her differently than everyone else did—even herself.

  “I—” she turned to him, but his attention was now riveted on the first of the Lifters emerging awkwardly from the hatch that joined the two ships—unused to the zero-gee of space. A man, a woman, two teenage girls, a small boy. They were emaciated and weeping. They kept touching Brody’s crewmates as if to make sure they were real. They arrived in a cloud of smells she couldn’t separate. Salt tears, body odors, and something she didn’t recognize that reminded her of the hydroponic farms but was a hundred times more powerful. It made her wonder what humanity had lost in leaving Earth.

  More people followed and the ritual was the same. A broken arm was routed over to Vetch’s med station. There were any number of black-and-blue marks that they’d feel later. Soon there were forty people crowded in the Mod18’s bay. No more followed.

  “Stay here,” Brody told her before leveraging himself down into the Lifter’s hatch.

  She ignored him and pulled herself through the hatch too.

  The odors were different in here. The sharp tang of fear and human waste—released in fear or…

  A woman stared at her from a mattress on a steel deck floor. Her eyes were wide and her jaw slack. She looked as if she’d died while screaming.

  Brody was checking each body. Occasionally, he’d nudge one free and float it toward her. In the zero gravity, it didn’t take much for her to push them up toward Warwick waiting on the Mod18. Some were merely unconscious, others conscious but immobile with shock.

  She looked around. The Ariane’s equipment bay was barely three meters across and five tall. In that space they’d built mattressed tiers that had impossibly held fifty people. She counted seven of them who would never leave.

  Brody was grim as he double-checked each one left behind.

  “I had no idea,” her whisper sounded overloud in the cramped space.

  He nodded. “Out of choices, they take the only chance they can get.”

  She waited for him in the ill-lit stinking confines of the pod while he arranged a young boy’s body so that he almost looked natural.

  “He could have been my brother. Was almost me,” Brody’s voice was a whisper as he brushed the boy’s hair gently into place. “An ICBM was never meant to carry people. We didn’t know how hard the Minuteman missiles boosted. Three families totaling twenty people. I begged to ride at the top of the cone—I so wanted to be the first one into space—it was the only thing that saved my life. Dad built a small platform at the nose, just big enough for me. Everyone else packed in below, with only room to stand during the launch. They crushed one another under that awful acceleration. The only other survivors were an aunt, who ended up raising me, and the technician’s wife who killed herself just a month after losing her whole family—that was all out of twenty people. This is how I pay back.”

  His voice was even, calm, steady, though she could feel the pain surging from him into the close air.

  Karina wondered if she’d ever really known Brody Jones.

  She had always thought of him as a slacker. He’d been a top flyer at school. Not as good as she was on the actual piloting, but truly exceptional in the mechanics, and an outstanding leader. Then, when she’d suggested that they go military together—with some lame image of the two of them blazing paths of glory throughout the system—he’d just shaken his head.

  “Lift Rescue,” was all he’d said. That was a flyer level below Patrol, Cargo, or even Salvage.

  It hadn’t made any sense. But she’d been so hyped on the chance of a highly prestigious future that she’d been afraid to ask. His blue eyes had been so sad that she’d backed away rather than stepping forward. Was that what had kept drawing her back to him all these years?

  Hope that she would change his mind?

  Or the unanswered question of why he never would?

  Now she knew the answer. And as she slowly eased from the small pod, which was now just a coffin, she knew why she’d been afraid to ask. Her own life suddenly looked trivial and privileged compared to this.

  Chapter Seven

  After kicking loose the Ariane, they rode in silence down the gravitational slope: thermosphere, mesosphere, stratosphere. He had double-checked that the Lifters were quiet and safely strapped into acceleration hammocks before he’d aimed the Mod18 down the path of Karina’s flight plan. They slid within fifty klicks of the Aussie dome: the shining silver that shrouded any view of the nations within and meant instant death to any who approached.

  Brody had never told that story of his own Lift to anyone. Only his aunt and the man who’d rescued them with his cargo vessel, flying well into range of the I-Beam to pull them out, knew the whole awful truth.

  The Mod18 skipped off the upper atmosphere at barely fifty kilometers above ground. At this low of an altitude—due to the curve of the horizon—they were flying below the I-Beam Zone. Barely.

  The mass of the northern Himalayas lay spread beneath them. He’d never thought he would see them in his lifetime, especially not so close. The jagged peaks, holding some of the world’s last few glaciers, glittered like corridor signs guiding their way.

  The Mod18 was never designed for an Earth reentry and definitely not a landing. He kept the spacecraft in a slow roll so that no one area took the brunt of the massive overheating. Alarms were triggering every few seconds. It took both of them working as fast as they could to deal with them.

  Overheated nose plate, he rolled slower across the back to give it a few more seconds of cooling.

  Primary computer core shut down, Karina force-fed the flight plan into the backup.

  At the bottom of their passage, they were little more than a meteor across the Tibetan night, a herald in a land where no one and nothing survived to interpret their passage.

  Forever and nineteen minutes later they clawed back up into Low Earth Orbit over the Hawaiian volcano that had fina
lly made sure there was no more Hawaii.

  He checked in with the crew and passengers. They hadn’t lost anyone in the blazing passage.

  Karina didn’t speak once on the long flight back up to Luna’s L2 and the British habitat can. Medical and immigration took the passengers from them: shock, limping, tearful thanks.

  Soon it was just the two of them and Mod18 at the end of the long, quiet row of Stinger-60s.

  “She’s a good old girl. She’s fits in better now,” Karina patted the nose of the Mod18. She had a soft smile that he barely recognized. He turned away because it hurt to see it, knowing it would never be for him.

  Brody looked down the row. Five immaculate, well-maintained, stealth-black Stinger-60s. And his reentry-scorched Mod18. The NAS logo was long gone and the last of the white paint showed through the char only in a few well-protected spots.

  He nodded in agreement, not sure of what to say next. What to do. Karina the Queen Bitch who had started on the flight with him wasn’t the woman who now stood close beside him. A lot of crews had quit before he’d learned that he had to be the only one to go down through a Lifter’s hatch—there were some things that were too hard to ask others to face.

  Yet Karina hadn’t hesitated. But neither had she spoken afterward. She hadn’t been his to lose, but still he wondered if he’d lost her anyway.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Karina’s voice was soft and he couldn’t read anything in her dark eyes when he risked looking at her once more.

  “I suppose that’s better than running away from me as fast as you can,” which is what he’d been waiting for. He leaned back against his ship because it grounded him in what was important. If she ran, he might just run after her, all the way to the Night Stalkers, and Lifters be damned. He crossed his arms over his chest, the only thing that kept him from reaching out for the impossible.

  Chapter Eight

  Is that what she’d always done? Run away? Maybe it was. Unable to face his choices, his hidden sorrow, his eyes that hid so few of his thoughts now that she knew how to look.

  Yet she had kept coming back. Now she truly knew why.

  Whatever Brody had done, he’d done with a single reason and a single passion more pure than she’d imagined possible. Certainly better than any of her own motivations had ever been.

  “I was thinking about the Night Stalkers.”

  “I like my job just fine. Same answer I gave you after flight school, Karina. Lift Rescue,” and again she saw the sadness in his eyes. But it was different from the sadness she’d seen in the Ariane’s capsule. That had been about the Lifters who hadn’t survived their dream; this was personal.

  “I know that, Brody. You’d be less than who you are if you did anything other than LR. I get that now.”

  “So, why are you thinking about the Night Stalkers? If you’re suddenly talking about leaving them, I’ll never speak to you again.”

  “You’re not getting off that easy.” But actually, she had thought about that for a big piece of the flight back. What it would be like to fly with Brody? There was an immediacy to what he did. He saw the deaths, but she could still see the damp places where the men and women who he had saved had wept their thanks onto his shoulders. Lives he had changed, including his own.

  “Then…what?”

  “I thought about the similarities of what we do. There are a lot of soldiers who are alive because of what I do.”

  “Damn glad you see that.”

  “I’m not stupid, Brody.”

  “Nope,” he still leaned back against the Mod18. No qualifications, just simple agreement. As if he simply knew things about her that she sometimes doubted so deeply.

  “So, here’s the deal.”

  “There’s a deal? Like I said, if you’re thinking of leaving the—”

  “Shut up, Brody.”

  He harrumphed and shut up.

  “The deal is: you ever need a backup pilot, I’m your first call. I’m going to talk to my commanders and make sure they know. I’m also going to take a couple weeks leave until Felice’s arm heals. After that, unless I’m on an active mission, I’m your Number One call. Clear?”

  He studied her for a long moment, then hit her with one of those big smiles of his.

  She didn’t know how a man who’d seen so much could smile like that, but she’d like to find out. Very much.

  “That’s huge, Karina. Do you have any idea how huge?” In his excitement, he grabbed her hands, squeezed, let them go, grabbed them again. “You were always the best pilot I ever flew with. And I can’t afford a permanent backup. Every time any of my team gets so much as a stubbed toe I break out in a cold sweat. It’s such important work. I can’t let anything—”

  “I know,” she freed a hand and rested it on his arm to stop him. “I know.” She liked the way it felt to touch him. And oddly, that simple contact was enough for her to now remember the kiss that he’d never forgotten. After that kiss, she’d made myriad post-graduation plans—all based on the assumption that, of course, he’d fly with her. But when he’d chosen Lift Rescue, she had backed away, unable to understand why a man with his skills would ever make such a “low” choice. Worse, she had locked her heart away—safe from everyone…including herself.

  Now she knew.

  It was because she’d never met a better man than Brody Jones. She also understood that she never would. Maybe it was finally safe to let her heart back out.

  “There is something else we need to talk about,” she freed both hands and stepped back. She needed some distance from him if she wanted to get this right.

  He eyed her cautiously.

  “A little comm told me that you spend a lot of time mooning over some Queen Bitch named Rostov.”

  Brody groaned, “I’m going to kill Felice as soon as her arm is better.”

  “Your option. But what if I gave you an excuse to stop mooning?”

  “Like what?”

  “What’s your operational base, Brody Jones?”

  He shrugged those nice big shoulders of his, “Same as yours, Brit Habitat One.”

  “Same as mine,” she nodded. “Let’s go.” She slipped an arm through his to tug him off where he was still leaning on the Mod18.

  “Where’re we going?” The back of his flightsuit was black with the char from the Mod18. There was a marginally cleaner imprint of his body on the hull. It made it very easy to imagine what imprint he’d leave upon her body.

  “We have to check something, very carefully.”

  “You’ve lost me, Karina.”

  No. No, she hadn’t. She had found him. She’d found him long ago, but her eyes hadn’t been open to see that. They were now.

  Karina had always simply flown, being best was all that mattered. But now she knew why she flew. The best man she’d ever known had taught her. Brody helped Lifters arrive—she made sure the place they’d given everything to reach was safe once they made it.

  “What are we checking out?”

  “We need to know whose quarters, especially whose bed, is more comfortable. We need to test them both very thoroughly because I’m planning on us using whichever one we choose for a long time.”

  Brody looked down at her with those smiling blue eyes as they walked from the Mod18 and down the line of Stinger-60s. It was a walk she was looking forward to taking together—for all the years to come.

  If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy:

  Circle 'Round

  Chief Warrant Officer Lola Maloney never expected to lead the Night Stalkers of 5th Battalion D Company. But when Beale and Henderson left, they put her in charge.

  Now the 5D’s first mission under her command is going all to hell. Only she can salvage it—her team’s very lives depend on her.

  Lola reaches back to every trick they ever taught her and finds the answer in a most unexpected place, as they Circle ’Round.

  Introduction

  Leaving heavy themes behind for now, my third tale of the year was a
revisiting of old friends.

  In late 2013, my heroes Emily Beale and Mark Henderson departed the Night Stalkers 5th Battalion D Company. For the reason why, you’ll have to read Take Over at Midnight.

  They placed the 5D in Lola LaRue’s hands but we never quite saw that transition of power. I wanted to see that for myself. I also wanted check in and see how she was doing as a commander. This story was originally written shortly after Take Over at Midnight but saw only a very limited release in Fiction River: Last Stand.

  It was roughly two years from sale to publication. I reread the story after the rights finally reverted to me and I was very pleased that the story’s interest to me as a reader hadn’t diminished at all with the passage of time. I still love checking in with my characters. I love the contrast between Lola and any other character I had written to that time. She was more dynamic and, in many ways, freer than any prior character of mine. I so enjoy that about her and I’m still proud to include this fun tale.

  Chapter One

  Chief Warrant 3 Lola Maloney stared at the tactical display of the DAP Hawk helicopter Vengeance projected on the inside of her helmet visor. Against the pitch dark of night outside the windshield and the soft glow of console instruments, the display revealed the rough terrain of the southern Ukraine and her broken flight formation.

  The commander always knows what to do.

  She tried it again as a mantra, The commander always knows what to do.

  Along with a thousand plus hours of officer training, none of it meant shit at the moment—she didn’t have a goddamned clue what came next.

  “Kara,” she called to the drone operator tucked three hundred miles away on the USS Peleliu helicopter carrier, though her drone was circling somewhere six miles above Vengeance. “You’re my eyes.”