by Marko Kloos
The major gives me a puzzled look. For just a heartbeat or two, I am convinced he’ll tell me that Halley was ordered off to active duty, or that she’s on leave down on Earth, or that he has no fucking idea who I am talking about.
Then the major looks over to one of the other flight suits, this one a first sergeant with a steel-gray buzz cut.
“Where’s Lieutenant Halley right now, First Sergeant?”
“Pretty sure she booked the last simulator slot for her class,” the first sergeant replies. “They’re in the simulator berth on sublevel three.”
I am past them and running for the hangar’s access hatch before he has finished speaking his sentence.
It takes me a little while to find the staircase to the lower levels. I take the steps four, five, and six at a time. I have no idea which room down here is the simulator berth, so I look into every open hatch as I run down the hallway. Overhead, the base alarm starts warbling, and the lights flicker once and then shift from white to amber.
A door opens down the hallway, and people in flight suits start pouring out of a room to my right and twenty meters ahead. They rush toward me, but I’m wearing battle armor and carry a PDW slung across my chest, and the group parts like water against a ship’s bow when I rush through them to go the other way. I reach the room with the open door and step inside.
The simulator berth is at least twice as large as even the generous CIC on Regulus. There are simulator cockpits set up in rows along both walls, and there’s an instructor platform with a control station on an elevated platform in the middle of the room. Over by the last simulator in the left row, Halley is helping a student out of the cockpit of his fake drop ship, unbuckling fasteners and undoing straps. She turns and sees me, and the expression on her face is equal parts irritation and concern. I notice that she has put her hand on the shoulder of the student who was just about to climb out of the simulator.
“What the hell is going on?” she shouts from the back of the room over the noise of the alert klaxon.
I realize that she doesn’t recognize me even with my visor raised. I pop the fast-release locks on my helmet and pull it off my head.
“I’m early,” I shout back, feeling relieved and happy enough to burst, and more than just a little smug and heroic. “Told you I’d be back on time.”
Halley exhales with a shaky cry when she sees me, and I can see the tears welling up in her eyes. She covers the distance between us at a quick walk.
Then she slugs me in the face, hard.
The hit is such a surprise that I can’t even think about blocking it. Her fist connects with my cheekbone, and I see stars for a moment.
“You asshole!” she shouts.
Then she grabs me by the straps of my armor, pulls me toward her, and kisses me on the mouth, roughly and with intensity.
“What the fuck,” I say when she lets go.
“I thought you were dead,” she shouts, and moves her arm to punch me again. This time I raise my armored glove to be ready to deflect, and she doesn’t follow through with the punch. Behind her, the flight student still in the simulator looks at us as if we’ve started growing tentacles from our foreheads.
“I sent you a letter!” I protest. “A month ago!”
“That’s why I thought you were dead,” she shouts. “What the fuck, Andrew? You said good-bye to me in that letter. Why the hell would you do that if you were planning on showing up here and being alive? Did you know I grieved for you?”
She raises both fists and holds them up, as if she can’t decide whether to punch me, herself, or the nearby bulkhead. Then she lets out a very angry-sounding sob, reaches for my harness again, and kisses me, even more roughly than the first time, a salty and wet kiss that feels like she wants to drain the life from me.
Behind us, the flight student has decided to continue his climb out of the cockpit after all. Halley disengages from me.
“Can’t you hear that noise, Stillson? That means alert stations. Get the fuck out of here and topside, will you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” flight cadet Stillson says. He unfolds himself out of the cockpit and rushes past us and out the door.
“We need to go,” I say. “Things are really bad. The Lankies are coming to Earth.”
“After you,” Halley replies.
We rush for the door. My cheekbone is throbbing, but I’m happier right now than I’ve been since I left Gateway in that shitbucket Midway over four months ago, even if the whole world is coming apart around us.
“Give me the short version,” Halley shouts from behind as we run up the corridor to the staircase.
“We’ll all be dead by midnight,” I shout back.
The Combat Flight School’s hangar deck is noisy with frenzied activity when Halley and I arrive. At least a dozen Wasps are already lined up on the deck facing the hangar doors, and more are being shuttled into ready spots by half-dressed deckhands and pilots working together. Sergeant Fallon is over by the tail ramp of the Regulus’s drop ship, speaking into her helmet headset and pacing. She sees Halley and me as we come trotting across the hangar, and gives me a slight eye roll and a gentle shake of her head. Several of the flight instructors spot Halley and come running toward us.
“Who’s here?” Halley asks one of the pilots when they’ve all gathered around us.
“Everyone but Ricardelli, Carini, and Horner,” the pilot replies. “And the major is putting on a vacsuit, too.”
“God help us all,” Halley says, and several of the pilots chuckle.
“We have a dozen of the senior flight suiting up. I don’t feel good about putting them into the command seats, but we have way more birds than pilots.”
“They’ll be fine,” Halley says. “It’ll be a milk run. Okay, here’s what we’ll do.”
She points to the ships on the flight line in turn.
“The instructors take the four Dragonflies and half those Wasps. Garner, you take Whisky Nine. She’s a bit twitchy when she’s cold, so watch the lateral boosters. We don’t want to give her to a cadet. The other cadets get the Wasps starting with Whisky Thirteen. The boss can pick from whatever’s left. No shortage of ships tonight.”
“Please tell me you have pilots for every last one of those ships.” Sergeant Fallon comes trotting up, rifle bouncing against the chest plate of her armor.
“We can get twenty-four off the ground,” Halley replies. “We have thirty-six Wasps, but six are grounded for maintenance, and I’m flat out of qualified pilots for the rest.”
“I thought this was Flight School?” Sergeant Fallon asks.
“I’m not putting cadets with ten solo hours behind the stick for a combat drop,” Halley says. “And you don’t want to be in the back of the bus with one, trust me.”
“First Lieutenant Halley, Master Sergeant Fallon,” I interject. “Master Sergeant Fallon, this is my fiancée.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t break her,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Pleasure, ma’am. Now let’s get these birds in the air. We have three hours and fifty minutes until we are in the middle of a planetary-level shitstorm. Excuse me.”
She walks off again, listening to whatever transmission just got her attention in her helmet’s headset. Halley looks at me and raises an eyebrow.
“My old squad leader,” I say. “Combative is her default setting.”
The HD troopers are gathering at the tail ramp of the Regulus drop ship for boarding. I look over to the ride in which I arrived, but Halley sees me and shakes her head.
“You are coming with me, mister. You think I’ll let you skip town again out of my sight, you are mistaken. Come and watch the door while I change into my vacsuit.” She points to one of the Dragonflies the ground crews are rolling into position on the flight line.
“Yes, ma’am,” I reply. “It’s the apocalypse, and you are worried about propriety? Just change on the flight deck.”
“I don’t care if it’s the apocalypse, Andrew. I’m not about to bare my ass in fron
t of my students, even if the world ends in three hours.”
CHAPTER 24
For only the second time in my military career, I am riding in the copilot seat of a drop ship, with Halley behind the controls. There’s nobody else to claim the second seat in the cockpit, and the cargo compartment behind us is empty. We have seventy tons of spacecraft all to ourselves.
“Remember Versailles?” I ask. “You were barely out of Flight School then.”
“And you were a green network-console jock,” she says. “Yeah, I remember Versailles. The good old days.”
We’re in formation behind the Regulus’s Wasp, and there’s a chain of twenty-three more drop ships behind us, all empty except for one pilot. Ahead, the position lights of the Fomalhaut joint battle group are blinking in the distance. Earth is a mostly cloud-covered half sphere to our starboard.
All these people down there, and nobody knows what’s coming, I think. When I sent my letters off to Mom and Halley a month ago with Sergeant Williamson, I told my mother to get the hell out of the PRC and into the countryside somehow, but I suspect she didn’t need the encouragement.
“Do you regret anything?” Halley asks me. “I mean, now that we’re looking at the end of it all. Anything you wish you hadn’t done?”
I think about her question for a good while and look out at Earth and the stars beyond.
“No, I don’t,” I say. “Got off Earth. Got to see what’s out there. Got to be with you. I wish we could have spent more time together. But I wouldn’t undo anything.”
“Not even Detroit?”
“Not even Detroit,” I say. “Well, maybe I would check the color code on that fucking MARS rocket if I had to do it all again. How about you?”
“Nothing,” she says without hesitation. “I wouldn’t have changed a thing. Except maybe proposed marriage a few years earlier.”
“Sorry,” I say. “Looks like we’re not going to make the six-month waiting period.”
“One last time the military gets to fuck us over and ruin our plans,” Halley says, and we both laugh.
We dock at Regulus fifteen minutes later, two stop-ship wings hitting the clamps at the same time and getting hoisted into the flight deck simultaneously, a feat that only a Navigator-class supercarrier can pull off.
Halley turns off her engines as we pass through the airlock and get deposited on the flight deck. In front of us, Tent City is mostly gone, and two full battalions of Homeworld Defense soldiers are standing in battle order, waiting for the command to board their rides home.
“Refuel, load up, turn around,” she says. “Figure we have thirty minutes.”
We step out onto the flight deck to stretch our legs. A few rows down the deck, the Regulus’s drop ship settles in, and the tail ramp lowers onto the flight deck.
“Come with me,” Halley says. “I have a dumb idea.”
“I’m a sucker for those,” I say, and follow her across the flight deck and toward the exit hatch.
“First Lieutenant,” Colonel Aguilar says sternly. He takes Halley by the arm and walks her over into a corner of the CIC.
“We are three hours away from the biggest battle any of us will ever fight,” he says. “And you want me to dedicate some of my limited remaining time to what?”
“You’re the CO of a fleet warship,” Halley says, unflinchingly. “You have the legal authority. It’s not going to take you more than five minutes.”
Colonel Aguilar rubs his forehead. “Don’t you think that the situation calls for you to have a different set of priorities, Lieutenant? Is this of any importance right now? I mean, look around you.”
Halley meets the colonel’s gaze with a firm expression, and I’ve never admired her more than right this moment.
“Sir, I have my priorities straight. I’ll go and fight and die tonight just like everyone else. But let us have at least this before we do, please.” She nods over to the screen on the bulkhead, which shows the external camera feed from nearby Earth.
“If that’s not important, none of it is,” she says. “That’s why we’re up here and not down there, right? For them, not for us.”
The colonel looks over his shoulder at the screen. Then he sighs, and his shoulders droop a little. He holds up his left hand and looks at the gold ring on his finger for a moment.
“All right,” he says. “De acuerdo. Flag briefing room, five minutes.”
“Thank you, sir,” Halley says, relief in her voice.
Instead of our dress blues, we are wearing flight suit (the bride) and CDU fatigues (the groom). Instead of family and friends, our witnesses are one of the Regulus’s SI guards—momentarily pulled off guard duty from in front of the CIC—and a Neural Networks sergeant who just happened to walk past the flag briefing room at the right moment. Our officiant is the very cranky commanding officer of the ship, and we don’t have flowers or rice or any of the stuff you’re supposed to have. As far as wedding ceremonies go, it’s as haphazard and informal as it gets. But Halley and I are here together, and that makes it as perfect as it gets.
“We are gathered here to join Staff Sergeant Andrew Grayson and First Lieutenant Diana Halley in their union,” Colonel Aguilar says. “Staff Sergeant Grayson, will you take First Lieutenant Halley to be your wife and legal partner?”
“I will,” I say.
“First Lieutenant Halley, will you take Staff Sergeant Grayson to be your husband and legal partner?”
“I will,” Halley says, and squeezes my hand lightly.
Colonel Aguilar hands us a pair of rings. They’re unadorned, plain aluminum, and they look more like washers than wedding bands.
“Part of the captain’s supply chain,” he says. “Never needed any until today.”
I hold up my still-bandaged hand. “We may have a problem here.”
Halley touches my injured hand with hers and lowers it gently.
“We’ll just use our right hands,” she says. “I hear the Euros do it that way, anyway.”
We slip the rings onto each other’s fingers. They’re the same size, so mine is too tight on me while Halley’s is too loose on hers.
“By the authority vested in me by the North American Commonwealth, and as the master and commander of this ship, I now join you in a civil marriage,” Colonel Aguilar concludes.
He doesn’t say anything about kissing the bride, but I do anyway, and she kisses me back.
“Congratulations,” Colonel Aguilar says.
The buzzing of the shipboard comms panel puts an unromantic end to the affair. Colonel Aguilar walks over to the panel and picks up the receiver.
“CO,” he says. “Go ahead.”
He listens for a few seconds, acknowledges tersely, and hangs up.
“Back to work,” he says to us. “The Lanky ship is in visual range now. They didn’t decelerate as predicted. They are coming in under steam. We have less than an hour.”
“Combat stations, combat stations. All hands, combat stations. This is not a drill. I repeat: combat stations, combat stations.”
I am back in my armor, with my helmet on my head. My new wedding band is already gone from my finger because the armored glove won’t fit over it. I have it tucked into my personal document pouch, to put back on afterward if there is an after to this. Halley is in her flight suit, and we’re back in the cockpit of Dragonfly Delta Five. Behind us, the cargo hold is filling up with troops, and when I look back through the passage past the rear bulkhead, I see that it’s Sergeant Fallon and her inner circle, her platoon of Spartans.
“Our ride is on the way to the surface with a load of civvies,” she explains when I patch into her channel. “Hope your girlfriend is a crack pilot.”
“She’s my wife,” I say. “And she is a crack pilot.”
“When did this happen?” Sergeant Fallon asks.
“Five minutes ago,” I say. “She managed to rope the CO into doing the deed.”
Sergeant Fallon laughs. “Well, congratulations to the both of you
. Of course, this may set a record as one of the shortest marriages ever.”
“Attention, all hands.” Colonel Aguilar’s voice comes booming over the 1MC.
“The Lankies have changed our battle plan for us. The cruisers and escorts will shield the carriers while we move to the rear, to gain time for the drop-ship launches. Once the drop ships are away, the carriers will join the fight. Stand fast, and do your duty. When they land, do not give them a meter. We are the last line, the captains of the gate.”
Overhead, the warning klaxons sound, and a dozen docking clamps swivel into position above our row of drop ships.
“ ‘To every man upon this earth, death cometh soon or late; and how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods?’ ”
The clamps come down and lock onto our ship. The tail ramp whines shut and seals itself. Next to me, Halley is putting on the Dragonfly like a suit of armor, merging with her systems and letting the ship become an extension of her.
“Wonderful speech,” Sergeant Fallon says from the cargo hold. I look over my shoulder through the passageway, and she nods at me and puts two fingers to the browridge of her helmet in a jaunty little salute. She looks like she’s having the time of her life.
“Front-row seats to the end of the world,” Halley says when we’ve reached launch position at the bottom of the hull. There is nothing below us but the dirty blue-green sphere of our home world, and nothing in front of us but the darkness of space. Regulus is in a long starboard turn, and as we swing around, the other ships of the task force come into sight. They are forming a battle line between the carriers and the Lanky ship, nose to tail and tightly spaced, to concentrate their point-defense fire against incoming ordnance. Halley puts the fleet ship-to-ship channel on the comms and pipes the output through the speakers.
“Now with soundtrack,” she says. “I really wish we had some music.”