“Right. Good flights, all. Debrief is at 1300. See you then.” The commander’s voice clicked off. Delia blinked as the arrays settled in front of her. She was no longer seeing Ops, but the blue and white curve of a planet hovering in space. A triad of purple numbers pulsed to the right of her vision; underneath the planet was an array of virtual controls. She moved her left index finger to the right. The coordinates pulsed and a small window opened above them: a white, five-story building with a blue-roofed tower on one side, the windows just slits of smoked glass like black lines painted on snowy walls. A Ghastly building like any other. She wondered what it was: weapons manufacturing facility, a planning headquarters, research laboratory? Something of military importance, certainly. Hopefully. Though she would never, could never know. She felt the gloves tighten around her fingers and the spectral display at the bottom of her vision brightened as the image of the planet shuddered slightly and slid to her right. “B5, confirm,” she heard a voice whisper.
“B5 is away,” she confirmed. “Burn commencing.”
She did nothing, but two lights flickered off on the floating console and number began flickering above the display: altitude and speed. The AI controlled the craft; Delia was there as backup if the AI failed. Redundancy. Someone for Control to talk to and blame if things didn’t go right.
The planet seemed to fall toward her. She glanced back over her shoulder once; the headset display gave her an image of Revenge in orbit, the huge cruiser now just a thumbnail-sized collection of spires and tubes, glinting in the reddish sun of the Ghastlies. Turning back to the planet, she saw flailing ribbons of yellow and orange flame tear away from the center of her vision as she hit the outer edges of the atmosphere, brightening until she could see little else through the glare. She moved a finger: the display shifted from visible light to ultraviolet and vision returned. The first streaks of Ghastly counterfire came at her and the others; even before she could move her thumbs to trigger the decoys, the AI had already done so. An explosion overloaded the screen to her right, then another, though she felt and heard nothing. The world swayed as the AI extended the craft’s atmospheric wings and Delia toggled back to visible light as the craft slowed to supersonic speeds.
For the next hour and a half, there was nothing but the routine defenses of the Ghastlies and the AI’s counters. Once, she saw a huge fireball below and to the left of her and heard one of the flight crew in Ops curse and slam his helmet back against the seat rest: shot down. A quick sunset burned the horizon behind her and she switched her view to infrared night vision. Control chattered in her ear; she answered back and listened to the others on the flight channel. The world slowly resolved itself into landscape, and now she was hurtling over low hills and past villages that were little but green-white blurs—all the Ghastly buildings used the same exterior plaster, made, according to the intelligence she’d heard, of crushed seashells. Her craft bobbed and weaved through the landscape, always a bare hundred feet or so above the dusty ground.
The coordinates pulsed violet, then green. A city appeared on the horizon. “Control,” Delia said. “We have target acquisition.”
“Understood, B5. You are go.”
The city raced toward her, and she began to see individual buildings. She was paralleling a road filled with strange tri-wheeled vehicles; she could see Ghastlies looking up as she streaked past, some just staring, others running for the ditches alongside the roadway. Delia looked for a dark-capped tower: she could see it now, directly ahead, one of the tallest buildings in the city. The windows were lighted in the night: she could see figures moving behind the glass. There was a brief burst of anti-rocket fire, but it was already too late: neither the AI nor Delia bothered to respond. There was a click as either she or the AI armed the explosives; she didn’t know which. The building plunged toward her, growing larger as she inhaled.
The display flared and went white. Static roared in her ear.
She exhaled. “Control, this is B5,” she said. “We have successful contact with our target.”
“Ye never worry that you’re not going to come back, do you now?”
She shrugged the sheepskin belt of the sword’s sheath around her shoulders, feeling the comforting weight of the blade settle across her back. She cinched it tight, grimacing as the belt tightened around bruised ribs and old scars, the leather vest she wore creaking underneath. She shook her head. “Aye,” she told Padraic. “Ye know I don’t. If you’re worrying about coming back, you’re not thinking of the fight. If you’re not thinking of the fight, then you’re not coming back.”
She let the smile slowly lift the corners of her mouth, until Padraic too started to grin. He was a huge man, with a waist easily twice the span of her, so big that sometimes she wondered how he managed to carry his weight. Yet he was a tremendous fighter and a good companion, someone she wanted by her side in battle. He rubbed at the scar that interrupted the ruddy beard along his left cheek: his nervous habit. She remembered when he’d received the scar, three years ago at the battle of Belach Mughna. One of Cormac mac Cuilennáin’s own gardai had inflicted the wound, when they broke the shield wall around the king and took him down. She’d half-hoped that with mac Cuilennáin’s fall the wars would cease, but there were many kingdoms and many rivalries and there never seemed to be an end.
If it kept her people safe, back in the achingly green pastures near Lough Sheelin, that was all that mattered. That’s what she told herself. If one day she didn’t come back, then that would have been worth it. She remembered best that awful day that the nasty Uigingeach had come raiding out of Dubhlinn and swept over the land around Lough Sheelin. They’d laid waste to the village and burned the cottages, and her family ... Her immediate family had all died: her parents, her husband, her daughter. But not her. Somehow, they’d left her alive. She had taken up the sword then, knowing it was the only way she could pay them back for what they’d stolen from her.
She had been taking that payment now for five years, and it never, never seemed to be enough.
She still carried a lock of her daughter’s hair with her, wherever she went. It nestled on her breast under the protective leather, under the cloth of her shirt: a packet of red curls sewn into a soft, sheepskin pouch. She touched it now, remembering.
“It’s time,” she said to Padraic. Already they could hear the sounds of the advancing army just beyond the drumlins ahead of them.
His large hand touched her face once, and she held it there for a moment. “We’ll both come back,” Padraic told her. She was no longer sure of that: if not this time, then soon she would face someone and she would be slower or tired or outnumbered, and he would kill her. She’d see his face as he tore the life from her; his features would be the last she’d see. She wondered what he’d look like, whether he would smile as he slew her, or if there would simply be relief on his face that it was not he who fell. Until that happened, though, until she met that nameless soldier, she would continue exacting her red-hued payment.
“We’ll come back,” Padraic said again.
“Aye,” she told him, hoping he couldn’t hear the lack of belief in her voice, or her weariness. “Aye.”
“A successful mission, Delia?”
Ajit was leaning on the wall across from Debrief, smiling at her. She forced down her irritation as the rest of the pilots shuffled past her, heading toward Ops. “We’ll know more when we get the next set of recon photos, but yes, it appears so. Eighteen of twenty made it through.”
“You were decimated.”
“Huh?” she said, puzzled, then lifted her chin. “Ah, the old meaning. I guess we were. I doubt the Ghastlies think of it as a victory, though.”
“No, I’m sure they don’t. Do you?”
“Look, Dr. Sulamin—”
“Ajit.”
“Dr. Sulamin,” Delia continued. “I don’t have any problem with my job. If you think I’m all of a sudden having second thoughts about killing Ghastlies, I’m not. They brought this
on themselves when they attacked us. I don’t know why you’re following me around like I’m an ambulatory lab specimen, but I really don’t appreciate it, and ...”
“I’ve spoken to Cailin.”
She couldn’t keep the anger from her voice then. “What right do you have—?” He pushed himself heavily away from the wall, groaning as he lifted his hand and placed a thick finger to thicker lips.
“This isn’t something we should discuss here,” he said. “If you’d like to go to my office ...”
“Are you ordering me there, Doctor? Do you have the clearance from Commander Esposito?”
“No.” He stared. There was too much empathy in his eyes.
“Then this conversation is over. My next appointment with you is in, what, ten days? I don’t expect to see you again until then.” Delia glared at him a last time and stalked off. The soft soles of her boots made disappointingly little sound on the deck plates.
“I’ve made supper for you, Mama,” Cailin said. “It’s on the table.”
Delia sighed. She kicked off her boots and placed them by the door before going to the tiny kitchenette. It was small; everything on Revenge was small. On the table a plate steamed. Delia sat and sniffed as Cailin sang to herself in the other room. “Smells good,” she said.
The voice stopped in mid-verse. “Thank you, Mama. I borrowed some spices from Stores.” She began singing again: a nursery rhyme. There were two cats of Kilkenny . . . Delia took a forkful of her dinner, savoring the unexpected bite: almost like curry, she thought. But it couldn’t be. She hadn’t had curry in four years now.
“Dr. Sulamin told me he spoke with you.”
A pause. “Uh-huh,” Cailin said, then took up the song once more. So they fought and they fit / And they scratched and they bit ...
“What did you tell him, Cailin?”
“Mama ...”
Delia sighed. She set the fork down on the table, grimacing at the percussive clack of the plastic. “Cailin, I know. You just want to help. But ...” Another sigh. She pushed the plate away from her. “If he tries to talk with you again, you tell me first. Do you understand, Cailin? Tell me first.”
“I will, Mama. I will ...”
She was a warrior, but she could never see “war.” War was too big a term, too large a concept. There was only the endless sequence of battles and—most important—the person you faced who wore the enemy’s colors. That was all she needed to know, all she needed to concentrate on. Winning the war didn’t matter, winning the battle was of no consequence: all that mattered was survival. And to survive, you had to kill those who would otherwise kill you.
War, by that definition, was simple enough. It didn’t even give her time to remember why she was here.
She could see his face: spattered with gray mud and brown flecks of blood, a stubbled growth of hair on his cheeks and chin, blue eyes narrowed and teeth gritted with the effort of swinging the iron weight of his water-tempered blade. In the instant before she raised her own blade to parry the blow—the shock of the impact traveling all the way down her arms as she grunted—she could see him in terrible clarity. He was young, maybe two years younger than herself, and the boiled, studded leather of the armor he wore fit him badly, as if it had once belonged to someone else.
The steel of their blades rang, the sound harsh in her ears, though she could still hear her breathing and the clash of the individual skirmishes all around her, the screaming of the wounded, the shouts of the officers, the blare of the signal trumpets. The boy shouted, an exhalation of white in the cold air; she could smell the rot in his teeth and feel the warmth of his breath. He pulled his blade back to strike again. Too far back: Stupid, she thought: as she thrust her sword two-handed and hard into the opening he’d created, feeling the point penetrate leather, skin, and tissue; ripping it out again with a cry and a sideways twist that shed streams of red gore as the blade tore from his abdomen.
His mouth opened; his sky-colored eyes widened in surprise and shock, his sword still swinging forward reflexively but already falling from suddenly nerveless hands, mumbling words in a language she didn’t understand, dead already but not yet realizing it. She wondered who he called to—mother, wife, friend—but there was no time for wonder, only time to react to the soldier who rushed at her from her left side even as the boy went to his knees on the ground, hands cradling the ruins of his stomach.
She didn’t see the lance the new attacker held until it impaled her just under the rib cage, skewering her like a piece of meat, the daggered head burrowing up through lung and heart ...
The missile-craft—she was B9 this time—arrowed away from Revenge toward the Ghastly homeworld.
The Ghastlies had beefed up their defenses following the initial rounds of attacks. The orbital cruisers themselves came under fire from Ghastly fighter-craft, attacks that had sent sister ship Fukushuu spiraling down to a fiery death in the atmosphere and left Bijesan adrift under emergency power. Revenge, Zhànzhêng, and Représaill had suffered only minimal damage. It hadn’t been much of a battle: a wave of drones, either under automatic control or perhaps remotely piloted like the ones that they were using themselves—there was no way to know, and it made no difference in any case. There’d been little warning, little time to defend: the drones were destroyed or hit, and it was over—from first sighting to final explosion—in less than three minutes. Done.
The missions today were all targeted to installations Control felt were capable of directing such attacks. Delia’s own target was a small building in the center of a Ghastly town on the southeastern shore of the largest continent. She kept its image up on her display as the numbers rolled down and the last vestiges of the fiery entry into the atmosphere faded. The anti-missile fire was brutal; her vision swayed dizzily as the AI (or perhaps her own movements through the gloves—it was impossible to tell) directed the craft through evasive maneuvers, fired off decoys, and sent jamming transmissions. Delia was sweating, every muscle in her body tensed, her breath coming short and fast. Adrenaline buzzed in her ears. She grunted, leaning as she tried to send the craft left, then right as it hugged the ground. Fire erupted to her left; instinctively, she ducked. Around her, she could hear cursing as craft died.
A yellow flower bloomed directly in front of her, with petals of smoke. She yanked the craft left; another silent flower flashed into existence there in eerie silence, and her display went tumbling nauseatingly—sky/land/sky/land—before snapping off into furious white that left blobs of purple afterimages in her eyes as the display vanished entirely. Static snarled in her ears. The gloves loosened around her wrists and she slumped back.
Dead. You should be dead.
She sobbed once, her throat convulsing as she inhaled, as she took a breath that shouldn’t have been hers. “Control,” she said. “B9 is down.”
“Understood,” a voice whispered back. “Rough ride, eh?”
“Yeah,” Delia answered. “A rough ride.”
“Mama, what’s the matter?”
“I’m tired, Cailin. That’s all.”
“You’re sure?”
She waited a long time to answer, standing near the door with her boots still on. Finally, she reached down and took them off, listening to the soft plops they made as they hit the carpet over the decking. “Yes. I’m sure.”
“Good,” Cailin said. “Your supper’s on the table. Just cold stuff tonight, I’m afraid. The Ghastlies hit the main galley.”
Delia glanced toward the kitchenette, where on the tiny table a plate lay. She could see a sandwich on it, and some fruit. Delia ignored it; she walked through the main room—four strides—past to the small bedroom, filled mostly by the single bed. She sat, reaching across to pluck Cailin’s picture from her nightstand. She stared at the child’s face, her finger stroking the red curls on the paper under the protective plastic. She tried to remember what that hair had felt like and couldn’t.
“How many Ghastlies did you kill today, Mama?” Cailin asked.
“None,” Delia said. “They killed me.”
There was a silence where she imagined she could hear Cailin breathing, then her voice came again. “Oh, Mama, you’re making a joke.” A pause. “Mama, are you okay?”
She was crying, silently, the tears hot on her cheeks. She sniffed. “Cailin,” she said to the empty room. “Call Ajit and tell him I’d like to see him.”
“Sure, Mama,” the room answered. “I’m doing it now. Would you like me to sing a song to you?”
“Yes, Cailin,” Delia said. “I’d like that very much.”
The room sang quietly to her, and Delia cradled the picture to her chest as she listened.
TOKEN
by Anna Oster
This is Anna Oster’s second published story; her first appeared in Assassin Fantastic. A former student of journalism, she abandoned the truth in favor of fiction some years ago. After studying abroad, she returned to Sweden, where she lives in a tiny apartment with a large number of hedgehogs.
JUN-LI was sleepy, and her feet ached in the new sandals. Her cousins were pushing and giggling at each other like all the other girls in Four Petal Square, their thin faces bright with excitement. Jun-li wore her new star-patterned wrap that left her left breast bare. She wished she’d brought a shawl.
Sus-qa and Annele pulled each other’s hair, getting more angry than playful, but then the gong sounded out midnight across the square. Everyone quieted down, lining up with their bowls as the priests of the temple of Holy Defender brought out the huge kettles of sweetgrain porridge.
“I hope I get a rabbit,” Annele whispered. “Rabbit brings luck.”
“Luck in love.” Sus-qa snorted. “You won’t need that until the war’s over and the men come back. And the weaver’s daughter got a rabbit last year and chipped her tooth on it.”
Annele giggled again. “And Myri got a maggot and thought it was real and threw it away. Then she fell and broke her foot. Jun, what do you think you’ll get?”
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