Mairin looked at Tally’s eyes and felt flushed all over. “I was, um, thinking about getting something to eat. Care to join me?”
A warm smile spread across Tally’s Styrah features. “Do you like jazz music?”
Whoever Dave Brubeck was, he was a genius. The dark, smoky club thumped and shook with the bass and reverberated with the horns of every song. The holoband played anything requested, though Mairin didn’t know any Miles Davis, and though she’d never heard of Brubeck until tonight, she’d already loaded her neurals with everything Brubeck ever recorded. Dining on filet oscar with creamed potatoes and asparagus, they followed the meal with a bottle of Wolcian Malbec and her first cigar. Mairin smiled and swayed side-to-side feeling every bit as good as she’d ever thought possible. So far, this imprinting business isn’t too bad. She closed her eyes, her senses following the music and the music filling her and soothing her. Her heart swelled as the music faded and she felt the warm touch of Tally’s hand on hers.
I should be worried about this. I’ve never been attracted to anyone like this, much less an alien who was so much more than human, but looked like the most beautiful woman in the universe. She trembled a little, smiling wider to try and shake off the anticipation. Tally’s hand squeezed hers and Mairin clasped it, not letting go as her mind rebelled. I really shouldn’t be doing this. Why the hell not? She couldn’t possibly be thinking about this Styrahi as a lover, could she? What am I thinking?
“What’s wrong?” Tally leaned in close, her breath tickling Mairin’s ear.
“Nothing.”
Tally leaned back and chuckled. “That’s not what traveled across your face.”
Damn. “What do you mean?”
“You stopped swaying and smiling. You’re thinking about something. Most likely what you’re doing sitting in this dark, smoky bar holding hands with a Styrahi. That you’re going to end up in big trouble. Something like that?”
Mairin blushed, but did not respond for several accelerating heartbeats. “You’re right.”
“And is it your sense of duty that’s causing this?”
“I don’t even know what duty is yet, Tally.” Mairin drained her wineglass and motioned for a refill. “I’m terrified.”
Tally’s green eyes glittered in the darkness. “Terrified of what?”
Mairin looked at their clasped hands. “This.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve never.”
Tally smiled. “Never been with a Styrahi?”
“Never been with anyone.”
Tally wrapped her other hand around Mairin’s. “And if I told you I’d never been with a woman before, would that make a difference?”
“Yes.” Mairin smiled nervously. She could feel her heart thumping in her chest, could hear her pulse in her ears, and she felt flushed even above the warmth and sultriness of the jazz club.
“I nearly asked you home with me that first night.” Tally grinned. “But I wasn’t sure what you would do.”
Neither was Mairin. Suddenly tired of it all, Mairin sighed. “I can’t do this, Tally.”
“What do you mean, cariad?”
Mairin frowned across the table. The band launched into another flawless Dave Brubeck song and for the briefest moment, Mairin allowed her thoughts to drift along the beat of “Take Five”, so much so that she needed conscious effort to meet Tally’s eyes. “I can’t keep doing this, Tally. What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to be true to yourself, cariad.”
Mairin squeezed her eyelids together. “I was scared that first night. Scared to think what would happen if I woke up in the same bed with you panicking that I’d made a huge mistake. Can you understand that?”
“Worrying about your new career in the Terran Defense Force? How quaint. Not a shred of thought for me at all, was there?” Tally snorted. “Don’t you think I know your regulations as well as you do?”
“It’s not that!”
“Then what, Mairin? What kept you from staying out with me the other night? There was something there. You felt it. I felt it, cariad. But you said you had other plans. You ran away. How am I to know that you’re not going to run away again?”
Mairin felt tears stinging her eyes. “Because I don’t care about stupid regulations. I don’t care about anything anymore.”
“That’s a lie. You want this new path that’s been laid out for you.”
Mairin thought for a long second. Tally was right. She wanted something much different now that she’d had the imprint. There was an honor that came with it. Looking across the table and into Tally’s green eyes, Mairin discovered the most pressing belief of those who stand up to fight for their neighbors. I will fight with you and for you, Mairin thought. “I do. And you know that I do, but there’s much more to it than that. Until I met you, I didn’t know what it meant to stand up for something.”
“And you’ll do that how? By telling your commanders that you screwed a Styrahi on your leave time?”
Mairin flushed. “No, Tally. By telling them that I fell for one.”
They said nothing for a long moment. The music faded until just the piano twinkled through the bridge of “Take Five.” Mairin reached across the table for Tally’s hand. “I mean that, Tally.”
Tally smiled. “And just what are you planning on doing about that, Captain?”
“Taking you up on your offer, Tallenaara.” Mairin grinned and looked up into Tally’s eyes. “I’ve loved you from the moment we met.” There was nothing from the imprint. Maybe it was being quiet, or maybe it knew better. Mairin enjoyed it however it had happened.
“Then I suggest we do something about that.”
Mairin leaned close enough to smell Tally’s perfume, and as she did, she closed her eyes and hoped that there was a kiss in the warm air. Their lips brushed together, then clasped upon each other tightly. Mairin could taste the wine and cigar on Tally’s tongue as they kissed. She flushed again and felt her breath hitching in her chest. The desire so forceful, the need so great, she wanted everything that Tally was as a part of her. The kiss ended, and they smiled at each other for a lingering moment, saying volumes without speaking.
They stood and left the club hand-in-hand, catching an autocar in the rain.
* * * * *
Eight
Mairin woke as the bus stopped and opened its doors to let in the cold Kentucky darkness. Outside she could see light fog masking a long thin valley. A few buildings and a tall watch tower crowded into the neck of the valley behind a large flat area covered in ankle-twisting gravel. The other officers around her murmured with excitement, and she could see why.
The swinging doors of the bus opened to a gravel parking area and twenty M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks. Weeks of maintenance classes, simulated tank gunnery, and an introduction to tactics would conclude today with the first actual firing range. They clustered in their three-person training crews and waited for their instructors to arrive. The tanks arrived first, driven onto the range by enlisted soldiers who would make up the fourth person of the crew.
Driving a seventy-ton tank on a crowded range is not something lieutenants should do. Mairin snorted at the thought, but realized the truth in the statement. One of the tanks spun almost three hundred and sixty degrees on its tracks and backed into position at the loading dock.
Sergeant First Class Lopez walked up to Mairin’s crew and smiled. “Good morning, everyone.” There was no saluting on the range, and Lopez’s casual demeanor helped to calm some of the nerves she felt.
“Good morning, Sergeant,” they responded like trained privates.
Lopez smiled. “All right, we’re going to be the first tank on the firing line. We’ll have our own driver, Specialist Parks. The three of you will rotate through the loader, gunner, and commander positions. We’re going to load two rounds, first one sabot and then one HEAT round, and boresight the tank. While everyone else is boresighting behind us, we’ll load our rounds for Table Six.”
Lopez looked at the three officers for a long moment and settled his eyes on Mairin. “Shields, you’re the commander for boresighting. Murray will be the gunner, and Vrasky is the loader. Let’s get your steed ready to ride.”
Mairin practically strutted to the tank. Angular and sleek, the massive seventy-ton vehicle looked like it was going forty miles an hour standing perfectly still. Powered by a fifteen hundred horsepower turbine engine, when a tank powered to life it sounded just like it’s aircraft brethren with the same engine technology. The Abrams carried a 120mm smoothbore cannon and was accurate to three thousand meters. Longer if she really believed the instructors and their stories from Iraq. Mairin clambered up the right front skirt and onto the front slope. She took a high step and walked across the turret to the tank commander’s hatch. She watched as Murray and Vrasky climbed in through the loader’s hatch. Murray, the consummate party animal, looked decidedly serious today, and the wise-cracking nasal voice of Vrasky was quiet. The realization of putting steel downrange sobered many of them, some to the point of quitting. Mairin wondered how many of her classmates would still be in the Army in five years. Not many, she decided. Her imprint agreed with silence.
Mairin eased into the tight, oblong commander’s hatch and felt the back of the seat with her feet. She flipped the seat forward with her toes and slid deftly all the way to a sitting position. Just like the simulators, she thought. The turret and vehicle power switches sat at her right hand, the communications switch just behind them. The Gunner’s Primary Sight extension sat in front of her. She connected her dual coils of communications system, her “spaghetti cords,” and slipped the heavy combat vehicle crewman’s helmet onto her head, positioning the boom microphone so she could talk. She flipped the ear switch to intercom and spoke, “Crew report.”
“Driver ready,” Specialist Parks called from his position in the vehicle’s hull.
“Loader ready.” Vrasky’s New England accent failed to cover a nervous waver in his voice.
“Gunner ready.” Murray sounded almost normal again.
“All right, let’s go get some ammo. Driver move out.” The tank lurched forward past the other staging tanks and the jealous stares of her classmates. She was going to do something first for a change. Mairin stopped the tank at the ammunition staging point and helped Vrasky get the two boresighting rounds aboard. She watched Vrasky press his knee against the ammunition door switch and slide the first round, then the second, into their holding tubes.
Sergeant Lopez leaned over the loader’s hatch and held out a black permanent marker. “Vrasky, label the HEAT round H, and the sabot round S. Makes it much easier to figure out which round is which.”
Once the rounds slid into their tubes, the only way to tell them apart was to remove them and look at their warheads. Without the letters scrawled on the firing caps, the likelihood of them taking way too long to load and fire the gun was high. The sabot round looked like a dart, with the exception of its shoes—concave pieces designed to hold the round centered in the gun tube and then separate from the projectile once the round fires. Mairin hadn’t won any points with her classmates by pointing out that the name sabot was in fact French for shoes. The sabot round’s dart-like appearance wasn’t designed to explode, but to kill the enemy vehicle using negative pressure, blowing completely through one side of armor and then through the second fast enough to create a massive low pressure zone. This would create a vacuum force that would pull everything in the turret of the vehicle through a four-inch hole—a gruesome way to die.
The HEAT round looked decidedly different. High Explosive Anti-Tank rounds resembled a soup can with a thinner cylinder sticking up from the centerline. Basically designed as a shaped-charge weapon, the HEAT round killed by explosively tearing armor into bits, which would bounce and ricochet inside the turret like the blades of a food processor.
Mairin watched the ammunition door slide closed and wriggled back into her seat. “Everybody ready? Let’s go, Parks.” She stood up on the back of the seat, watching as Parks guided them to the range safety point and then onto the firing line. SFC Lopez positioned the tank behind the firing berm in a place where Murray could see the range, but from the front the rest of the tank was hidden by an earthen berm.
“Okay, Shields. You’re clear to fire,” Lopez spoke through the intercom. She looked over her shoulder and gave him a thumbs-up, wondering how in the world he’d be able to sit there when the main gun fired.
Gulping a breath, Mairin keyed her intercom. “Gunner, index sabot.”
Below her, she saw Murray move the ammunition selector switch to sabot. She felt Sergeant Lopez tapping her shoulder. She looked into his smiling face. “You have to stand up for the first one, Shields.”
Mairin stood up in the seat, completely clear of the turret above her navel, and looked at the black and white marked board. A chill ran down her spine as she spoke. “Gunner, sabot, boresight board.”
The tank rolled forward. Murray leaned over to the gunner’s auxiliary sight, mounted alongside the gun tube, and made sure the tube cleared the firing position berm.
“Identified!” Murray yelled. The excitement inside the turret was palpable.
The ammunition door slammed open behind her and she saw Vrasky manhandle the sabot round from its tube and into the breech of the main gun. He slammed the round forward and pulled the arming handle from the safe to fire position. Clear of the main gun’s recoil, and plastered against the radio mounts, Vrasky called “Up!”
“Driver move forward, gunner take over,” Mairin said.
Parks engaged the throttle and rolled the tank slowly up the berm. Looking through an auxiliary sight, Murray checked to make sure the gun tube was above and clear of the berm. The second it was he called, “Driver stop!”
Mairin rocked forward as the tank stopped. She caught herself with a hand on the base of the M2 machine gun mounted in front of her. “Fire!”
“On the waaaay!” Murray yelled as he squeezed the trigger.
WHAM! Mairin felt the heat from the muzzle as the round fired. Millions of grains of cordite swirled around her, some hitting her smiling face. She saw a cloud of dust from the concussion of the round rising around the tank as she focused on the glowing base of the tracer round punching through the boresight board. Oh my God! She yelled at the top of her lungs and heard Murray and Vrasky whooping in the turret.
Mairin directed the tank to back up, and when they stopped, she went through the liturgy of the crew report again. All of them were beaming. “Index HEAT.” She tapped Murray on the shoulder.
“Damn straight.” Murray grinned, and they got ready to do it again. This time she’d stay in the turret to see how it felt to watch the big gun recoil almost all the way to the rear wall. She wanted to hear it, feel it, taste the cordite in her mouth, smell it on her skin.
As she leaned up to the Gunner’s Primary Sight to identify the target, Mairin realized more than anything that she wanted to fire at something more than a board. “Gunner, HEAT, boresight board.”
“Identified!”
“Driver move forward, gunner take over.”
“Up!” Vrasky screamed and got out of the way again.
“Driver, stop!” Murray yelled and moved to the primary sight.
“Fire!”
“On the waaay!” A flash of light and unearthly sound caught her in the chest.
* * * * *
Nine
Munsen sighed. “In conclusion, given the staggering losses of three platforms, sixteen
vessels, and more than fifteen thousand souls, there are two possible courses of action I see for the Greys advance into our ring of the solar system. The first is both the most likely and most dangerous. Were I the enemy commander, I would feint my forces at the next largest colony. In this case, I would project a major attack on the shipyards of Rayu-Four while deploying the majority of my fleet to Libretto. From there I would control the major lanes to Earth, Styrah, and Vemeh, and could literally put my forces in orbit around any of our core planets within days.”
“And your proposed second course of action?” Admiral Chen rubbed a hand through his white hair. At seventy-four, his hawkish nose dominated his weathered and wrinkled face. A singular voice in Naval strategy, Chen relished being widely hailed as the best theorist since Alfred Thayer Mahan.
“In my opinion, the least likely course of action is that the Greys are going to continue to attack the Outer Rim planets and colonies. From Narrob they would proceed to Wolc, and then Eden before making a sweep against Rayu-Four. Either way, they must recognize the threat of our shipyards, but the question of the time the Greys will take to get there is a major contention.”
Chen snorted. “What about continuing from Eden straight to Earth? That is a major interstellar passage lane. They could be here in Earth orbit within weeks.”
“I sincerely doubt that, sir.”
Chen sat forward. Blue eyes blazing, he jabbed the air with a finger. “What do you mean by that?”
“That kind of thinking isn’t rational, sir. This is a conflict fought over the last ten thousand years, long before we even thought seriously about spaceflight. To say that the Greys are hell-bent on attacking Earth above Vemeh and Styrah is selfish and ridiculous. The Styrah possess the greatest strategic threat to the Greys and the Vemeh hivemind’s technological advantages are staggering by comparison. To say that Earth is their target is foolish and irresponsible. Sir.”
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