Threshold of Victory

by Stephen J. Orion

  “Out here the risk is real, and bravery is a lot harder to implement when the rounds aren’t computer generated. I think you still want to take all the same risks you took at the Academy, but the only way you can convince yourself to wade into that kind of danger is to believe you have some kind of edge.”

  I want to make her believe me.

  His hand was halfway to a card before he arrested the motion. He hadn’t really expected her to believe him, but to hear her say it aloud had hurt more than he’d expected. He trusted her opinion, and if she thought he was a fraud, then it forced him to accept the possibility that he might be.

  But to leverage a future just to change her mind. To do it for no better reason than his own insecurities… it felt wrong. There’s a line here, he decided, a point where you go from trying to play things out the best possible way to controlling people, like puppets. Three quiet and fearful cheers for Tarek.

  He let the cards fade away and, as flippantly as he could manage.

  “So what you’re saying is you actually already thought I was crazy, so being a little more so doesn’t make any difference.”

  “I worry about you but…” She stopped and changed tracks suddenly. “Let me ask you something.”

  “Have at it.”

  “You’re already a hero, straight up. If you did nothing else for the rest of the war, they’d still be talking about the shit you pulled on Box Grid. Both times. Do you feel like you’ve accomplished anything?”

  Tarek started to answer then paused and gave it a little more thought.

  “Back at the Academy I think I envisioned a single act would make me feel better about myself, yeah. I think that’s always how we see it, one simple and dramatic sweep to make everything better.

  “Thing is I wanted to be someone different, and one action doesn’t make that change. It’s about every action after you make the choice.”

  “You missed your calling as a philosopher,” Kelly pointed out.

  “You missed yours, as a shrink.”

  “Oh, I’m billing you for this,” she promised.

  They fell into silence and watched the black satin of hyperspace swirl by in its peculiar eddies and currents. The only light for an unknowable gulf of kilometres was the Arcadia’s own running lights, reflected back in playful patterns like an aurora. Shifting subtle hues in the dark.

  “So I saw a Snowhawk yesterday with feathers on the wings,” Tarek said after a while. “Is that one of ours?”

  “Wraith,” Kelly answered. “Apparently quite the painter, and after she got away with giving Aristide’s Sabrecat a makeover, she took to her own.”

  “I heard the Sabrecat was a group effort.”

  “Effort is right. We had to strip it and redo the base coat and labels and serials which was like pulling out your own hair, one strand at a time. None of us have anything like the talent to pull off the hawk decal though. That was all Adai.”

  “So I guess we all missed our true calling.”

  “Actually she gave it up. Apparently had a small name for herself on Solace before she came out here. Now that she’s found an outlet for her pent-up creativity, she’s probably going to have painted half the air wing by Christmas.”

  “Well I could ask her to put a mane on the Warhorse. Figuring out which part would qualify as the neck ought to keep her busy until winter at least.”

  Kelly laughed again. “You’re funny.”

  It was a relief to hear it: the laugh and the redundant explanation she appended to it. It reaffirmed that, despite her doubts, she still treated him like… well, like him.

  “Speaking of girls though,” she said with no shortage of insinuation, “tell me about Kyra.”

  “Are relationships the only thing people talk about on this ship?” Tarek said.

  “Andrew, relationships are the only thing people talk about anywhere. People form relationships by talking about their other relationships.”

  “Alright, I give in to your artful logic. What do you want to know?”

  “Well, you’ve rescued her from imminent peril twice now,” she said. “I smell a crush.”

  “What are we, cupid’s space carrier? You know I’m not looking, and I’m pretty sure neither is she.”

  “Pretty sure, huh? Just how long have you spent studying her then?”

  This time Tarek laughed. “Look, I won’t say she’s not fascinating, but word is she’s also crazy.”

  “Look who’s talking.” Kelly paused to run her thumb over one of the last unhealed bruises from Operation Catchphrase. “Maybe crazy is what we say about anyone who tries to make a difference instead of just keeping their head down.”

  “Oh I don’t know. I haven’t heard Colonel Cormento called crazy.”

  “Too distracted by his hotness probably,” Kelly looked up at the ceiling, or perhaps through it. “Mmm….”

  “I can go, if you need some ‘Colonel’ time.”

  “I’m considering it.” She paused for effect. “But no distracting me. Tell me all about this extremely platonic relationship you’re forming with the woman you kissed in front of half the ship.”

  “Skipping right over the part where she kissed me, I have nothing to tell. There isn’t a lot of time for deep and meaningfuls when you’re pulling someone out of a warzone.”

  “Alright then fine. I’ll tell you what I know about the legendary Luperca, but next time I see you, you’d better have some gossip for me.”

  “I’m not sure I want to be part of this exchange.”

  “She’s from Cadence,” Kelly continued as though he’d agreed wholeheartedly. “It snows there all year round, except winter, when it’s too cold to snow. So you can bet she knows some good ways to keep warm.”

  “Did this come from Jackson?”

  “Some of it,” Kelly admitted. “But I canvased the flight deck, and he can smell someone talking about a girl.”

  Tarek rolled his eyes.

  “Anyway she used a fake ID to join when she was seventeen, fought in some of the very first battles, and hasn’t rotated home since the war started. She’s never mentioned any family or friends back home and has apparently never taken more than a week’s downtime.” Kelly said. “Sounds lonely to me.”

  “Given the male-female ratio in the fleet, I can’t imagine many women are lonelier than they want to be.”

  “Hey some of us have standards, you know?”

  “It’s a big carrier.”

  “Well if Rease has gone this long, you can bet she’s a wildcat, and if she’s waiting for something special, well a knight gallant who whisks her away from certain death by seeing the future might just be that something.”

  “Okay, but what does she actually like?”

  “Aha! So you are interested.”

  “Don’t be like that.”

  “You’re no fun,” she sighed theatrically. “Rease interests, according to my survey, include lots of things. She’ll play sports, cards, table tennis, whatever. She’s good at all of it of course.” There was an undertone of genuine resentment there. “She puts most of her downtime back into work, but when she does take a break, it’s always something new and with some new group. I think she hasn’t found anything she truly enjoys yet.”

  “Or she’s trying not to form close bonds,” Tarek said.

  It was more than a guess. He recognised it because it was the same thing he’d been doing, except Rease had made it as much an art form as she did with everything else. Everyone knew he was standoffish, but most people thought Rease was just short on time and into everything. Even Kelly hadn’t jumped to the wrong conclusion.

  “There’s not much on her personal life,” she said. “But the stories about her in combat. It’s unbelievable stuff. Can’t be caught by surprise; can’t be hit; never misses, even at distance. She’s apparently killed more Maulers than some entire battalions. Besides Luperca, she’s also called the Mobile Nuke, the Air-Droppable Shitstorm, and the Fubar Cannon.” Kelly smirked. “Tru
th be told, the stories make your antics at Box Grid seem mundane.”

  “Now that is interesting,” Tarek said sitting up.

  “You think she can do your…” Kelly wiggled her fingers vaguely. “…future-pants thing?”

  “I know a way to find out.”

  ****

  Tarek found Lieutenant Rease in the gym, instructing some of the ship’s crew in hand-to-hand combat. By virtue of the card he held in his mind, it had not been much of a search. It was, in fact, the first place he had looked, if not the first place he had visited. In his hand was a small white table tennis ball he’d collected from the enlisted mess on the way here.

  The trainees were paired off, sparring while Rease watched and commented on their technique and progress. Tarek waited until she stepped in to demonstrate something, staying out of sight until the moment her attention was focussed entirely on the person in front of her.

  That was when Tarek pegged the tiny ball at the back of her head.

  It was an absurd plan, but the absurdity was part of what would make it work. If her power was subconscious, then it would only activate if she felt imperilled and two things made people afraid: certain death and looking bad in front of their peers. Since he didn’t want to accidently maim her, it seemed better to go with the embarrassment, but embarrassing an officer could have serious repercussions.

  His saving grace was that they both had reputations, and more importantly they had a reputation together. Somewhere in that was the leeway to do something completely foolish and get away with it. It was the sort of thing you only got one chance at, but Tarek was pretty confident about small chances these days.

  The ball was halfway to her when the card in his mind, the one describing a future where she was struck in the back of the head, was suddenly torn loose and cast away to the time stream. With unbelievable economy of motion Rease blocked a kick from her opponent and then looked over her shoulder and caught the ball. Not only that, she caught it in her off hand and more than a foot short of her face.

  Tarek was stunned, even half certain of the result, it was quite another thing to watch it unfold.

  “It’s not that kind of training,” Rease said throwing the ping pong ball back to him. “Try the girls on Tau Ceti.”

  The class laughed and Tarek opened his mouth to speak but found himself pausing. Yesterday Phillips had made it quite clear that not everyone would consider the power of conscious foresight a blessing. Once he spoke, once he even suggested she might have this power, he would be forcing her to follow the same path that lay before him now.

  And if there was one thing he believed about the Luperca, it was that she had given enough.

  “Actually,” Tarek said somewhat lamely as he pocketed the ball. “I was rather hoping you might let me join your group.”

  Rease bowed to her opponent and stepped off the mat. “You have a rather unusual way of asking.”

  “I’m a rather unusual guy,” Tarek replied, earning another laugh from the class.

  “Well I’ll not refuse the great Silver,” she said waving him over. “But if you throw anymore ping pong balls in this class, my boot is going to meet your dinner via the out tray, understood?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Now committed, Tarek had to sheepishly concede that he hadn’t brought his gym clothes – something that earned several snide comments about his abilities as a seer. Because Rease refused to allow anyone wearing a rank device or patch onto her practice floor, he’d had to go back to his room and change.

  Starting in the middle of a sparing class with no worthwhile prior training left Tarek at quite the disadvantage, and he quickly learned something vital. Not about sparing, but about foresight.

  The flight technician he was paired against was stronger, faster, and more skilled, and though Tarek leveraged his cards to a shameless extent, he found there were very real limitations. Even if he knew exactly where and how his opponent might strike, he couldn’t necessarily avoid it, nor could he hope to keep his own hands out of any number of blocks and locks without the muscle memory necessary to pull off a decent strike.

  It was not that the cards failed. The incident with Lieutenant Rease notwithstanding, it seemed the future could not fail, but it was now apparent that he didn’t get cards for things he couldn’t do. Regrettably, it seemed he wouldn’t be wowing this class on day one with his abilities as a precognitive fighter, and the best he could do was not be the worst member. But he’d learnt a more important lesson.

  Rease had the same ability he did, and she didn’t even know it.

  ****

  Constellation Carrier CNS Arcadia

  Bryson IV Local Sector, Bryson System

  25 April 2315

  The hyperspace shore that Captain Pierman chose for the Arcadia to arrive through wasn’t the closest to Bryson IV, but it did put the system’s star at their backs. Against such a backing, the carrier would be almost undetectable so long as the enemy didn’t have wide orbit sensor probes designed to detect exactly this kind of incursion.

  The other side of the coin was that Bryson IV was a gas giant idly trying to achieve sustained fusion. It bled out a broad spectrum of radiation that would provide similar cover for anything approaching the Arcadia. ‘On the razor’s edge’ Jenson had described it in a rare use of metaphor during the arrival briefing.

  Cold Sabre Squadron was maintaining a 24-hour CAP and defensive reserve while the Undying made twice daily trips to the planet in paired search teams. The CAG had been vague about what they were looking for, but everyone had been quick to speculate that anything worth taking this kind of risk had to be important.

  This new state of affairs left Tarek with a lot of downtime and no one much to spend it with. He kept himself busy as best he could until he finally had to face the problem he had been avoiding since arriving.

  Sitting on the floor in the empty support pilot’s barracks, he began to try the puzzle of Kelly’s fate once more and what he could do to change it.

  He knew he had to be careful. His last attempt to do this had become too emotionally charged, and he’d spun out of control. He needed rationality if he was going to find a solution, so he tried a different experiment, working his way forward instead of backwards. He created extremely specific scenarios that were time-dependant and required Kelly to be alive. Once he found something that gave him a limited number of cards, he started walking the timeframes out until the cards disappeared. The experiment told him that, according to the natural timeline, she would die at that point.

  It didn’t take him very long to find the fail point, but it took him a lot longer to work up the courage to explore it.

  ****

  Search Grid Charlie-One-One

  Bryson IV Local Sector, Bryson System

  “Eternity, I’m seeing a world of trouble here,” Kelly said, as they descended out of the electrical storm, and the turbulence eased to much more manageable levels.

  The pair had flown a half-dozen of these reconnaissance sorties to Bryson VI, four hours each and every one of them a dud. The planet’s tempestuous storm belt was thin, but it added to the radiation already spilling off the planet’s core to create an atmosphere that could have hidden anything from long-range scanners. Most frequently, however, it simply hid nothing.

  Until now.

  Perhaps two dozen Mauler fighters, a mix of Bugs and Scarabs, were flying a loose formation in the shadow of the electrical storm. Kelly marked the aircraft and sent the feed to Eternity.

  “I see them,” said the squadron leader, “but do you see that?”

  She checked her screen to see what he had highlighted in turn. Coasting along beneath the fighters was a Mauler ship the likes of which she had never seen before. It matched their bulky, tubular style, but it had a broad ring perpendicular to the hull and suspended on two spoke-like towers.

  As she watched, the ring began to spin, imperceptibly at first but gradually building up speed.

  “I don’t know
what it is,” she finally said. “But we need to call it in.”

  “We need to tag it first, if it disappears into this soup, we’ll never find it again.”

  “Do we have a plan for getting past all the fighters?”

  The enemy had noticed them now, and the full squadron were veering to intercept. There were several long seconds of silence.

  “Clumsy, I want you to hold here. I’ll zip down, pin a beacon on it, and then come back up to you.”

  Eternity always sounded confident, even arrogant. This time the words he used were still carefree, but his tone was hollow.

  “Like hell,” Kelly replied. “You’re a better shot. I’ll go lead, and when they come after me, you burn them away.”

  She didn’t give the squadron leader time to reply, rolling her fighter into a dive that used the planet’s gravity to build up speed before corkscrewing back towards the target. She approached them at a great rate while still commanding a small altitude advantage.

  “We’ll talk about this.” Eternity’s voice was cold now, but at least it wasn’t hollow.

  “I guess you’ll just have to keep them from murdering me so you can do it later, sir.”

  There wasn’t time for more, the first Mauler tracers began to stitch through the air around her. She switched a couple of missiles to airburst and sent them off dumb-fire before letting loose with her own guns, blazing at random across the Mauler formation. The latter had almost no effect, but her missiles detonated with an accuracy that surprised even her, scattering several of her targets with a mix of explosive force and plain intimidation value.

  As the fire around her intensified, Kelly held her nerve. She stayed straight as long as she could before cutting into another corkscrew power dive that pulled her below the Maulers just as they were coming up on top of her. The change in angle of intercept meant they too picked up speed and were forced to overshoot rather than come around.

  “Jesus…” Eternity’s tone was jovial, but there was a deep tension in his voice. “Did I teach you that?”

  “Must’ve.” It was the longest answer she dared give as she stayed on the power and tried to pick up a bit more altitude.