Shulkin’s mouth twitched, as if the effort of studying the map caused him physical pain.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but most of our luck has been bad.” She tapped her foot on the deck. Cleared her throat. Refrained from snapping her fingers in Shulkin’s face, as much as she wanted to.
“Do you have an opinion at all?” she asked him. “You’re supposed to be the expert here. Old as you are, you must have seen plenty of wormholes before, and—”
“Huh,” Shulkin said. He reached over and expanded the map further, until the three possibilities filled most of the view. Then he sat back again.
“Huh,” he said, once more. He coughed, sounding like he was bringing up a great quantity of phlegm. “That one,” he said, eventually. He pointed at one of the three.
“That one,” Bullam said. “You—you can tell just by looking at it?” Maybe he’d actually been here before. Maybe the Navy had secret maps, and—
“No. Just picked it at random. Like you said,” Shulkin told her. “There’s no way to track a ship in wormspace. So you just pick one and go with it.”
Bullam gritted her teeth. “Thank you,” she said. “You’ve been spectacularly unhelpful.” She waved at her drone and the display blanked out. A blue light glowed on its top, however—meaning that her big surprise was almost ready. “Fortunately for us both, here comes some good news.” She stood up on the deck and shielded her eyes with one hand as she scanned the horizon. “Our reinforcements are dropping by for inspection.”
“Hmm?” Shulkin said, not looking up. He had pulled a packet of nuts from a pocket in his suit and he crunched one between his teeth.
“There,” she said, and pointed. A line of black dots had just crested the horizon and was growing steadily larger. She counted them aloud. “ … four, five, six new fighters, each with a certified Centrocor-loyal pilot. More than enough to replace the ones we lost.”
Shulkin threw a peanut shell over the side. He rolled a nut back and forth in his mouth as he squinted into the glare off the water. Held the nut between his teeth. “Seven. Eight,” he said. “I count eight fighters.” He closed his teeth and the nut shattered in his mouth.
“Six fighters,” Bullam said again, nodding happily. She gave the incoming ships a cheery wave. “Look. Notice that the last two have a different silhouette? M. Cygnet thought we could use a little extra help.”
Out over the waves the dots had grown in size as they approached. The last two were now visibly different from the others. Different, and bigger.
“A space battle is a game of chess,” she said. “A very odd man told me that once. The pieces matter.”
“Hellfire,” Shulkin said, rising to his feet as the last two ships came to hover right over them, their shadows blocking out the sun. He bit into another peanut shell and spat pieces of husk into the ocean. “Checkmate.”
Chapter Twenty
She knew she would have to let him in eventually.
Ginger had ignored Bury the first six times he pinged her. The cryptab on the front of her suit buzzed and a green pearl appeared in the corner of her eye and her minder softly unrolled itself next to her in the bunk, but each time she simply looked away or just ignored the call and eventually it would just go away.
The seventh call came over the Hoplite’s intercom system. There was an electronic crackle and then his voice emanated from the walls around her. “Ginj. Come on. We need to talk.”
She sighed and shoved herself into one corner of the tiny bunk, thinking if she didn’t respond he would just give up. She should have known better. Bury had never been any good at taking a hint.
“You’ve been there for me, as long as I’ve known you,” he said. The intercom system was designed for waking up sleeping pilots when they needed to scramble for battle. It was loud enough to make her teeth vibrate. “You and I were study buddies in first year, remember? You basically carried me through our avionics lecture. Then there was that time I got drunk the night before we learned how to do barrel rolls. That … was not pretty. But you got me cleaned up. Ginger, you were my damned second at that stupid duel! I owe you. I owe you so much. Let me return the favor. Just talk to me. Maybe I can help.”
When she didn’t answer after thirty seconds, he tried again. “I’m not giving up,” he said. “You’re going to have to talk to me eventually.
“Ginj.
“Ginger?
“C’mon, Ginj.
“Ginj.
“Ginj.
“Ginj.”
The cruiser’s bunks were tiny, not a lot bigger than coffins. It didn’t take her long to find the speaker mounted next to the miniaturized display. She tried shoving a zero-g neck pillow over it, holding it in place with her foot while she covered her ears with her hands.
It didn’t help much.
“You still in there, Ginger? You didn’t sneak out while I wasn’t looking? No, the ship’s manifest says you’re in your bunk. Ginj?”
She wanted to scream at him. Instead she pulled up a display on her wrist and sent him a quick message.
WILL U PLZ SHUT UP!
“See,” he said, “now I know you’re in there.”
She scrubbed at her face with her hands. She fought down the urge to kick the speaker until it caved in—if he’d been there, if she could have seen his stupid shiny Hellion face right then she would gladly have kicked that in, too.
WHERE R U? she messaged.
“I’m floating outside your bunk. Are you going to open the hatch?”
She roared in frustration. But then she reached over and slapped the hatch release.
He pushed his head inside. “Hey,” he said. She could not stand to see the look of pity on his face. She didn’t want to kick him anymore, though. There was part of her, a very big part of her, that wanted exactly this. For someone she knew and trusted to come inside and try to make her feel better. Sympathy was exactly what she needed, and she knew it.
She also knew that everybody on the ship was probably talking about her. Calling her a coward, or worse—saying she’d lost her nerve. If she ever wanted to show her face outside her bunk again, if she ever wanted to be part of the Hoplite’s crew and act like an officer and not let Lieutenant Candless down and everything else she truly, really, wanted, she knew she had to be tough now.
“I was just taking a nap,” she said. “You woke me up.”
“Uh-huh,” Bury said.
She brought her knees up to her chin and pressed her mouth against the hard metal of her ring collar. Stared at him. “Okay,” she said. “Okay?”
Bury frowned. “I’m sorry—okay what?”
“You’ve checked on me. I don’t know if it was Lieutenant Candless or somebody else who sent you over here. But you can tell them you did your job. You checked up on me and I’m fine. Okay?”
“Ginj, look, nobody sent me, I—”
“Okay?” she asked again. “Are we done?”
His face fell. His eyes drooped, those stupid shiny eyes. He didn’t exactly look like he was going to cry, no, not a Hellion like Bury. But he definitely looked like a dog that tried to lick its master’s face and had gotten hit with a stick for it.
It was that look more than anything that changed her mind, that made her open up. Or at least, she would tell herself that later.
He turned around and reached for the release pad of the hatch, and she just couldn’t take it. She rolled her eyes and sighed and then she said what she needed to say.
“I can’t do this.”
It came out much smaller than she’d intended. Softer. He heard her, though, and he turned to give her an expectant look.
“I saw his face,” she told him. “The guy I—I killed. I was close enough that when I pulled the trigger I could see right into his canopy. I saw his face and … he knew. He knew he was going to die. He must have been terrified. It must have been awful.”
“We’re warriors, Ginj. We kill people.”
She shook her head. “Bac
k at Rishi they talked about being aggressive. About taking the initiative—if you don’t shoot first, the other guy will. I get that. Shooting at virtual ships in a display, sure, that made sense. Then in the live-fire exercises we did—well, that was just a game. This was real. I killed somebody, Bury. I killed a human being. Do you think his family even knows yet? Do you think they know he’s dead? Maybe Centrocor hasn’t even told them. Maybe they’re still waiting for him to come home.”
He had the decency to at least not lie to her and say it wasn’t her fault. Or that she’d only been defending herself. Or anything like that. Instead he tried to be practical.
“Hellfire, Ginj. After two years of schooling, after all the money your parents paid to send you to Rishi—”
“Do you even know my last name?” she asked him.
He looked confused. “Yeah, of course. It’s—Holmes, or—”
“Holz,” she said. “My name is Tara Holz.”
“I guess—I mean, the first week I knew you, everybody was already calling you Ginger, and I just never … You never used that name, and—”
“I made sure everyone called me by my nickname,” she told him. “I insisted on it. You don’t recognize the name Holz? You’ve never heard of Sergeant Holz?”
His eyes went wide. Apparently he did know it.
Sergeant Efram Holz had been a hero of the Establishment Crisis. A marine, of all things—very few of them ever got their names in the videos. Holz had died in battle, a casualty of the fighting on Adlivun. He’d gone down after being shot a dozen times and having one of his arms blown off by a grenade. Not before he single-handedly rushed a bunker full of Establishmentarians and slaughtered more than a hundred enemy marines with just a particle rifle and a combat knife.
The propaganda officers of the PBM had a field day with that story.
“He was my grandfather. My mother was the IO on a battleship, back when they still built battleships.”
“That’s some family you’ve got,” Bury said.
Ginger couldn’t look at him. “There was never any real question I was going to be Navy,” she said. “Before I was born, that was already decided. When I took the entrance exam for Rishi, though—I failed it. I didn’t make the cut.”
“But—”
She groaned in frustration. “I was so ashamed. I wanted to die, when I saw my results. But then a very nice lieutenant took me aside and said he would see what he could do. Next thing I knew I was headed to Rishi, for flight instruction. I wasn’t supposed to be there. I only got in because of my grandfather. I thought maybe it was just fate, you know? Fate pushing me to become a fighter pilot. But Lieutenant Candless saw the truth. She knew I would never make it. Just a couple of weeks ago, back on Rishi, she sat me down and explained that I was going to wash out of the program. I’d let my family down again. Do you understand how that feels? I begged her to let me stay. To let me be part of the Navy. If she just sent me home … I don’t know if I could have looked my mother in the eye, ever again. Lieutenant Candless took pity on me. She said she would get me into training to be a staff officer. Some job where I didn’t have to fight. I could see how disappointed she was, but still—she was kind about it.”
“A staff officer,” Bury said. She could tell he was trying to restrain his natural impulse to laugh at the idea.
“Then, all this happened.” She gestured at the cruiser around them. “When Commander Lanoe insisted that I fly in his squadron … Bury, that’s not who I am. It’s not what I’m supposed to do with my life. I can’t pilot a fighter, not anymore.” She buried her face in her knees. “I won’t go out again.”
“Okay,” Bury said. “Okay. Not everybody is meant to fly a cataphract.” She peeked at him and saw him nodding, his face set and determined. He was trying so hard. “Okay. So—so you’ll be a staff officer, instead. That’s still a respectable thing, I mean, there’s honor in serving all different kinds of ways—”
“Maybe staff duty is an option. But not now. You know Centrocor is going to attack us again, and when they do, Commander Lanoe is going to demand that I go out there in one of those BR.9s, and shoot back.” Her head felt like it was buzzing. Like it was full of bees. “He’s not going to take no for an answer. But I don’t know what else to tell him. Bury—I—I don’t know what I’ll do. I mean, I can fly out there, I can fly just fine, but when the shooting starts …” She shook her head. “I won’t pull the trigger.”
“So you’ll fly the cruiser; somebody has to stay behind and—”
“I’ve had a couple of lessons with Lieutenant Candless leaning over my shoulder. You’ve tried it; you know we’re not ready for that!”
Bury started to say something else. She knew it wouldn’t be what she needed to hear. He couldn’t tell her that it was okay, that she was excused from the fighting.
“Well, then maybe—”
“Stop trying to solve me like an equation!” she said.
“I’m just trying to help,” he said, and his face fell again.
“Just shut up. Shut up.”
He nodded and started moving toward the hatch again.
“I didn’t say leave,” she told him.
“Here,” Ehta said. “Take a slug of this. It’s almost nontoxic.” She held out the bottle and waggled it, its bluish contents not so much sloshing as turning into fat droplets that bounced around inside the glass.
“I’d be wasting it,” Valk told her. In the tight space his knees were up against his shoulders, and his feet were all but in her lap. “I can’t actually, you know. Drink it.”
“I’m not drinking alone,” she told him.
There wasn’t much privacy on the cruiser, especially now that its front third had been shot off. The marines’ wardroom had been taken over as the ship’s new bridge. The engineering section was off-limits and anyone trying to break into the vehicle bay would set off an alarm.
So when she needed to get away—from the stink-faced looks of the XO, from the way Lanoe always looked at her like she was a child who’d disappointed him, from the constant unanswerable questions of her own people, from the buzzing in her own head—she had to get creative. There was an old saying that a marine could make her home in a bomb crater, and before it was time to move out she would have put up curtains. She discovered early on in the voyage that there were no alarms on the ammunition magazines in the gunnery decks. Why would there be? Human beings were never supposed to worm their way into the unheated, unventilated spaces, and anyway they were normally filled with the big 75-centimeter projectiles. One of those had been fired now, leaving just enough space for two people to curl up if they were friendly enough. Hellfire, the empty chamber was slightly bigger than one of the cruiser’s bunks.
Valk took the bottle and stared at it for a minute. Then a tiny opening appeared in the front of his opaque helmet, just wide enough to plug the bottle’s mouth into. He sucked in a small amount of the liquor and handed it back.
He even had the decency to fake coughing and sputtering, as if he hadn’t been ready for the burn when the liquor hit his hypothetical throat. “Smooth,” he said.
She smiled and took a swig of it herself. It tasted like engine coolant, which, well, wasn’t too surprising. Then she closed her eyes and let the warmth of the alcohol flow through her.
Valk and Ehta had shared a moment of intimacy, just once, back on Niraya, back when everybody—including Valk himself—thought he was a human being. At the time they’d both thought they were about to die, so there had been no reason not to share a little comfort. It could have made things very awkward when they survived long enough to see each other again. When she’d first seen him onboard the Hoplite, they’d both vowed never to speak of what happened that night.
Strangely enough, they both stuck to that plan. And because of that shared secret, now they could talk about pretty much anything else.
“Ship of the damned, huh?” she said, her eyes still closed.
“What?”
“It’s a ship of the damned. Even if Centrocor doesn’t kill us all, half the people on this tub never want to go home, not if they don’t have to. I was thinking about it the other day. My marines’ll be okay, but every officer on this ship … I only came along because otherwise they were going to cashier me, did you know that? Send me home on a medical discharge.”
“I seem to remember people used to shoot themselves in the foot to get one of those,” Valk said.
“Yeah, but I’m not one of ’em. I’ve got nothing beyond the Marines, you know? What am I going to do, go work in a factory, for one of the polys? No thanks. When Lanoe asked me to come along on another of his crazy adventures, I figured, hellfire, I could at least delay the inevitable. But I can’t put it off forever.”
“You’ll land on your feet,” he said. “I have faith in you.”
She hadn’t been fishing for comforting words. She rolled her eyes and took another drink. “Then there’s you. This is your last voyage, buddy, one way or another.” She pointed the neck of the bottle at him. “You know that, right?”
“Yeah,” Valk said. “If we get killed out here, it saves me the trouble of going back to civilization so I can be executed.”
She nodded. “Candless and the kids—well, they know too much, don’t they? Lanoe told me they were going to be locked up if he didn’t bring them along. You think that the Admiralty is going to let them go free once they see … whatever it is we’re out here to look at? No, they should be in no rush to go home. Damn. It just occurred to me—that probably goes for Paniet, too. And I’m the one who dragged him into this. Hellfire.”
“Lanoe will think of something,” Valk suggested.
Ehta snorted in derision. A bad idea since the fumes of the liquor were still swirling around in her throat. She coughed until she could see straight again. “Lanoe doesn’t want to go back, either. He can’t.”
Forgotten Worlds Page 30