by Jay Allan
The two men nodded, and satisfied, Trajan turned to Captain Titus, the sly smile returned to his face, though the gaping eye-socket had the effect of corrupting the sly into sinister. “You looked confused when I referred to the Fidelius as our chess piece, Captain.”
“I admit, sir, I didn’t think the diplomatic contingent had any part to play in this whole affair.”
“On the contrary, Captain, they are perhaps the most important part. It might not be obvious to you but one of the unintended effects of the Dallas affair was to create popular backlash against the Empire, enabling the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. People across the thousand worlds were outraged on a scale the Empire hasn’t seen since the Belen incident. Now, three years later, the Emperor and I have studied the board more thoroughly, and we figure what is good for the goose, is good for the gander.”
“Sir?” said Titus, not understanding the phrase.
“An Old Earth term, Captain. What goes around, comes around. We lost a rook last time, removing some of our mobility. But this time, we take their queen. And when you take the queen, the king soon follows.”
“Yes, sir,” said Titus, still not quite understanding.
“Soon, Captain, soon. The fruition of all my plans will be a sweet thing to see, indeed.”
-o0o-
Jake studied the board in front of him and sighed. Since their first game, he’d met with Alessandro Bernoulli every morning before their shifts, and eight games later he found he’d made steady progress in his chess skills. He lasted far longer this time, getting in perhaps twenty-five moves against his new friend, but the inevitable stared him in the face. Bereft of his queen, his rooks, and a knight, along with half his pawns, he was in a tight spot and he knew it.
“Well, friend. Until tomorrow, then?” Alessandro said, starting to stand up.
“Hold on, buddy, I’m not finished yet.”
Alessandro laughed, but sat back down, stroking his half-mustache and grinning at his opponent.
“You forget that I don’t like to lose,” Jake said, studying the board with intensity.
“Ha! Then why do you keep coming back? I thought you would have given up a week ago.”
“That, my friend, is not how I operate.” He moved his hand to a piece, hesitated, then withdrew it.
“Good choice,” Alessandro nodded towards the piece. “Would have been checkmate in two. As it stands, it’ll be checkmate in five if you play things just right.”
Jake frowned. There must be a way. There simply must be. Jake would not let the smug Italian win every single game. He’d teach him a good lesson at least once. But how to get to him?
“So Alessandro, tell me about the new gravitic field emitters. You seem quite knowledgeable on the subject.” Perhaps if he could get the man talking, he’d become so distracted that Jake would have a chance.
“Of course. You know about the effect that metamaterials can have on the gravitic field, no?”
“A little. Remind me.” Jake didn’t take his eyes off the chessboard as Bernoulli stood up and began writing on the chalkboard.
“E equals M C squared, of course,” he began, scrawling the familiar equation on the board so fast it was nearly illegible, not that Jake could read it anyway with his eyes fixed on the chess pieces, lost in thought.
“And in a metamaterial, energy becomes your best friend. The regularly spaced features of the metamaterial influence the electromagnetic field surrounding it in interesting ways, not least of which includes the effect on the gravitic field. When neometamaterials were discovered in the twenty-first century and we found that we could dope the crystal structure of the substrate with a light concentration of anti-matter without blowing ourselves to hell, we also discovered…”
Bernoulli droned on, and Jake studied, occasionally moving a piece, keeping his finger on it, then moving it back, careful to let Alessandro see him do it every time.
“ … which of course led us to try doping the metamaterial with neodymium, which, as you surely must know, is one of the rare earths. Unfortunately, the rare earths are difficult to separate completely from one another, leading to a few unfortunate accidents during the initial stages of experimentation when the impurities disrupted the symmetry of the field and interacted unfavorably with the anti-matter. Unfavorable in the sense that a gravitic field generator exploded, taking an entire laboratory building with it. Poor bastards.” Alessandro glanced back at Jake. “Are you even paying attention?”
“Sure—”
A voice over the commlink interrupted him. “Lieutenant Bernoulli, engineering. Where the hell are you, Lieutenant?” It was the Chief Engineer, and he didn’t sound happy.
“Coming, Commander.” He turned to Jake. “Well, friend, it was fun. Until tomorrow then?” Alessandro set the chalk down and began to walk to the door.
“Hey wait. I made my move. Just get this over with for me.”
Bernoulli glanced at the board, grabbed his knight and plunked it down near Jake’s king. “Checkmate. Again.” He strode over to his desk, picked up a data pad, and made for the door.
“Hold on a second, buddy. That’s not checkmate. Watch this.” Jake put his fingers on a bishop, pushed it slowly across the board right into Alessandro’s knight which he removed with his other hand, and looked up with a lopsided grin. “Suck it, Bernoulli. Checkmate.”
Alessandro frowned, and sat back down, studying the board for a moment before saying, “Very good, friend. Your plan was to distract me, to get my head out of the game, and it worked. Congratulations. You won’t be so lucky next time.”
“What can I say? I like to win.” Jake replied with his grin still firmly plastered to his face. He got up and followed Alessandro out the door.
“Correction. You like to win eleven percent of the time. The rest of the time you prefer to lose badly.” He sounded peeved, but Jake had been around the man long enough to see through the show he put on.
“Tomorrow then?” Jake said.
“Do you have to ask?”
-o0o-
Lieutenant Commander Megan Po decided, before she ever stepped foot aboard the Phoenix, that she wouldn’t become attached. Not again.
Over the past three years she’d felt closer and closer to her squadron and its young men and women, pilots and gunners, and had eventually come to see herself as their mother, of sorts—the one person in the squadron who could take care of them when they were feeling down, or sick, or pissed off.
And now, somehow, her perpetual bun of slightly graying hair and her easy, age-lined smile signaled to her new crew that she had a listening ear and a shoulder to cry on.
And she loved it.
And she hated it.
It reminded her of them, and the memory was still too close. Too raw. Too unthinkable. Even six years on.
Walking along the corridor of the Phoenix, she stopped suddenly, grabbing for the wall and clutching onto the edges of a viewport for support against the memory, the memory of them—it lingered there constantly, just under the surface, and it had nearly broken through. She dared not let it through again. The last time she’d let it happen was when her pilot died on the floor of the Viper hangar at Eglin Space Fleet Base. She’d lost it, and as a result, Dallas burned. Charring millions more just like her own…
She shook her head. No. She knew, intellectually, that Dallas was not her fault. She knew—of course she knew—that there was no way she could have done anything about that last one. That warhead. The one that made it through. The one that got away.
“Commander?”
She jumped.
“Yes, Anya, what is it?” Po recognized the pilot from her scant two days on the flight deck rotation.
“You ok?” The usual smirk had been replaced by more of a semi-concerned look.
“Fine, Anya. Just fine. Why do you ask?”
The younger woman eyed her, an eyebrow rising slightly. “You looked like you were about to be sick. Or maybe go batshit craz
y. Either one, the look in your eye was a little unnerving, even for me.”
Ah yes, the one Jake had been complaining about. The woman fighter pilot, who acted just like a fighter pilot. “No, Anya, really I’m fine. How are you? How’s life down on the flight deck—I’ve been assigned permanently to the bridge, you know.”
Anya Grace blew her hair out of her face with pursed lips and flashed a lopsided smile. “As crazy as ever. Still going through all those new tactics Mercer came up with for the next-gen gravitic drives. You know, for being such a tight-ass, he’s actually got a knack for that stuff.”
Po lowered her chin at Anya before turning back to the viewport, watching the steady stream of shuttles flit between the various freighters, cruisers, and capital ships in view, set against the slowly rotating Earth below. “Anya, Jake is the least tight-ass person on this ship. I think you’ve mistaken him for Commander Jemez.”
“Yeah, him too.” Anya sidled up next to Po, looking out the window at the shipyards, which still held three of the nine Freedom-class starships. “So Commander, what the hell is going on?”
“Excuse me?”
They paused as a pair of technicians hurried past.
“All Mercer will tell us is to prepare for the battle of our lives. That’s all they told us on Earth during the underground Resistance meetings I attended. Is this shit for real? Are we actually going to liberate Earth? Won’t the Imperial bastards try to stop us?”
“Of course they’ll try to stop us, Anya. The plan has been classified top secret, for obvious reasons. If any details of the plan were to get out, it’d be over before it started. But yes, your wing commander is right,” she turned to the other woman. “Prepare for the dogfight of your life.” Po studied Anya’s face, which had dropped its sassy veneer and now looked genuinely troubled. “Anything you want to talk about?”
Oh hell. And there it goes. Why do I do this? Why am I mothering someone who obviously doesn’t need a mother?
“No.” Anya said, to Po’s relief. She stared out the window at another squadron of fighters performing maneuvers. “I mean, not really. It’s just … you ever get the feeling that we’re not coming back from this thing?”
“All the time, Anya. Every time I went out with Mercer as his gunner, and before that.”
“Well, honestly Po, I’d feel death knocking every time I went out with Mercer too if I were his gunner.” Anya spoke about him as if she’d known him for years—Po wondered about that. Had they met before?
But she just chuckled, and shook her head. “It’s normal, Anya. Everyone feels it. That we might die on any given mission is pretty much a fact of life in the military. You knew that when you signed up.”
“Yeah, I did. In fact, I signed up to die, actually.”
Po did a double take. She said nothing, knowing that Anya would continue when she was ready. Turning back towards the window to give Anya time to open up, she noticed a pair of ships shifting into view several kilometers away—a smaller imperial cruiser, escorted by a far larger capital ship, which looked strikingly like the Fury. Po sighed wistfully, thinking of the old ship and her brilliant Admiral, gone.
“Anything to get away from home. I mean, I wasn’t living with my parents anymore, but I had to get even further away from them all. All of them. Parents, brothers, town, Alaska, all of it.”
Po watched the NPQR Raven—one of the Nine still in dock at the shipyards—begin to release its mooring clamps in preparations for launch. Two more to go, she thought. “You wanted to get away badly enough that death was preferable to them?” she asked, trying not to sound skeptical.
An ensign passed them in the hallway, lazily saluting at them as he passed. Anya waited for him to turn the corner.
“Yeah, sounds like a crazy-ass plan, right? And I probably was crazy.” She blew another stray strand of hair out of her eyes again. “Anything to get away, though.” Po nodded as if she understood. In fact, she did understand. After that happened, after she buried them, those were her thoughts. Before she gathered her wits and focused herself to her real goal: to destroy the Empire. What the hell was she thinking? Who was she to stand up against such an inexorable force?
“Were they bad parents?” Po asked, trying to get her mind off her own situation. As she asked it, she thought of Jake’s own father, wallowing in his filthy apartment in Florida.
“Not in the traditional sense, no.” Anya breathed deep. “But they were becoming more and more devoted to the Empire’s fake religion they foisted on everyone. The emperor worship. Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Ceres. The self righteousness. The guilt. Everything. They guilted my brothers into it, and now they’re priests-in-training. They said I was some dirty whore for wanting to go off and have my own life, as if it were a crime to have ambition for myself.”
Po nodded, and reached out a hand to Anya’s arm. “Sounds rough.” She tried to show her a warm smile—to let her know she was on her side.
“But the thing is, right before I left, my dad, he well…” she trailed off. Po braced herself for what Anya might say. “He left the religion. Cold turkey. Threatened to divorce my mom if she kept trying to make him do all the weird rites and stuff. We got close those last few months before I joined the fleet.” She paused again, taking another deep breath. Why am I doing this? I don’t need her baggage, Po thought again. She watched as a shuttle left the bay of the newly arrived cruiser escorted by the Fury’s look-alike, and wondered why it was aimed right at the Phoenix.
Anya breathed deeply again, as if preparing to say something she didn’t want to say. “And then, one day when I came home from work, she was gone. My mom. Just gone. Disappeared. No one knows where she went. Dad was pretty quiet about it—wouldn’t say a thing. My brothers sneered at me when I asked, accusing me of killing her and hiding the body. I finally decided that I had to get out of there, or I’d end up as batshit crazy as the rest of them.”
Well that was unexpected.
Po squeezed Anya’s arm. “You’ve got a family here, you know. I’ve got you covered, Grace.” She didn’t even know what she meant by it, but it sounded good. Anya glanced over at her and smiled. “Thanks, Commander.” Po smiled back and turned to see the shuttle from the newly arrived cruiser begin its approach to the Phoenix’s hangar.
“We’re in this together, Anya,” Po said as she watched the Raven, now clear of its moorings, begin to drift away from the shipyards, and fire its maneuvering thrusters to adjust its attitude. The telltale wavy shimmer at its tail, reminding Po of looking down a smoldering road on a hot Texas day, indicated the gravitic field disturbance from the firing of its gravitic drive, and the ship pulled away from the shipyards at an accelerating pace. Po spied another of the Nine begin its departure.
“And there goes the Roc. Only the Heron left. It’s nearly time.” Po looked over at Anya. “You ready for this?”
“Yeah. Bring the motherfuckers on,” said Anya.
Po nodded. It was a sentiment she agreed with. “There’s the Anya I know.”
Anya glanced at her sidelong. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, that’s just the attitude I’ve come to expect from you. No holds barred. Cavalier. Crass. I kind of like it, you know? I could never pull it off, but it suits you just fine.”
Anya chuckled. “That’s not really me, you know. I mean, a little. It’s me over-exaggerated.”
“Oh?” Po spied the shuttle enter the Phoenix’s fighter bay.
“Look, if you want to survive in a fighter squadron, if you want the boys to take you seriously, you’ve got to be not only better than them, you’ve got to own them. Overwhelm them. If I didn’t do this, none of them would take me seriously.”
Po turned and regarded her, wondering if she was serious. “You think that?”
“Yep. I—”
A person rounded the corner of the hallway in a sprint and nearly bowled into them. With a start, Ensign Ayala, the tattooed, white-haired Belenite from tactical pulled up to keep from running them
over, then stopped completely when she realized who she’d nearly knocked into.
“Problem, Willow?” Po asked.
“No, sir,” Ensign Ayala said, tentatively. “I, well, I was just on my way to the hangar to see the shuttle. I’m off duty now, sir.”
“That’s fine, I didn’t say you couldn’t—I’m not even the acting assistant XO today. That’s Lieutenant Commander Jemez.” Out of the corner of her eye Po saw Lieutenant Grace smirk at Ben’s name. Po wondered about that too. “Why do you want to see the shuttle? Someone on there you know?”
Ayala’s eyes darted down, then out the window before meeting Po’s. “Maybe. I heard the pilot might be another Belenite. It’s Senator’s Galba’s shuttle, and he often has Belenites as staffers. I thought he might also use one as his pilot.”
“Senator Galba is here? The head of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee?” Po thought that sounded awfully strange that the Senator was coming to the Phoenix.
“Yes, sir. I was just on the bridge, and he signaled that he wanted a brief tour.”
“Isn’t the Firebird the flagship? Why isn’t he touring them? Admiral Bates is on that ship.”
“Don’t know sir. The Firebird is still docked at the shipyards. Maybe they’re not ready to have official visitors?” she offered, looking still hesitant. Almost scared. Why would the Ensign be scared? Po pushed the thought aside—she was probably projecting her own feelings onto the young Ensign. In reality, Po was scared. People were probably going to die in the next few days. Either a few, or a lot, depending on how successful they were.
“Very well, Ensign. Good luck—” Po started to add, but stopped as she saw several more people round the corner. The hallway was starting to feel a little cramped. “Hello, Captain,” she said, saluting.
“Commander Po, please join us for the tour,” he said, putting an emphasis on the last word that suggested it was the last thing he wanted to be doing at the moment. Jake, Ben, and the old XO all followed Captain Watson. “Senator Galba is here and is insisting on seeing the ship before the commemoration and launch ceremony tomorrow.”