by C. Gockel
My strength is the soldier beside me; I shall not abandon him.
For all of Lineao’s admonishment of Decca, the words still rang true. She would not permit her son’s body to remain here to rot under alien suns. He would go back to the ’King for burial in space. As Volunteers, they were afforded that privilege.
Sela felt them watching her. Valen and Rheg. Simirya. Even Lineao. They were waiting for her to speak, to move. Time was not an ally. The rest of the team was a blur of activity, prepping for the extraction. This time, Sela was the impediment.
She leaned over Atilio and etched his face into her faultless memory. Even now, she was astonished by how much he resembled his father, a man she reviled. But Atilio was also part of her.
I have failed you. She removed the ident tag from his neck.
“Boss.” Valen was at her elbow. He did not have to say more. Time was up.
She nodded, not trusting her voice. It would not do to have them hear it break.
Valen and Rheg moved with quiet efficiency. They bundled Atilio’s body into the large, heavy bag.
After they trundled her son away, Sela remained with Lineao in the silent, ruined room. Her numb fingers toyed with Atilio’s ident tags before she strung them next to her own.
How very much like his birth. Swept away by strangers.
“I am sorry for your loss, Commander. No mother should see her child die,” Lineao said.
“He is not mine. Not anymore,” she corrected, turning to face him.
This is why there is Decca. This is why it is dangerous for a mother to know her children. We are soldiers, not families. I was foolish to think this would end any differently.
This grief, this pain she felt was self-indulgent. She could not afford the luxury of it. Her team needed her.
“And what of me, Commander?” Lineao folded his hands against his waist.
“What about you?” She felt drained and raw.
Only one other man in the world made her feel as if her thoughts were being broadcast: Jonvenlish Veradin. In her captain, a man she trusted, it was a comfort. In Lineao, it evoked a poisonous unease.
She regarded him, measuring. The priest had more reasons to stay behind than lighting candles or burning incense. Whoever or whatever he was hiding in the compound had not threatened her team, and she was willing to overlook it.
Her own words surprised her when she said: “We’re leaving. My team still has active kill orders. Stay out of sight. Do you understand, Lineao?”
He nodded slightly. “Understanding is the quest that drives us all, Commander.”
His patient tone made her want to throw a rock at his shaven head.
As she crossed the threshold, she heard him say, “The Path before you is a new one this day, Sela Tyron, if only you can see it. May the Fates guide you until we meet again.”
She paused and inhaled a stilling breath.
May the Fates guide me off this ball of dust and back to my rack.
A strange hollow feeling had invaded her. There was no word to truly describe it. Not in Regimental. Not in Commonspeak. It was a sensation that told her nothing was going to be the same again. The thought filled her with dread.
Chapter Four
The runner was a welcome sight, abused-looking though it was. It graced the field in the riot of rust-colored dust kicked up by its engines. Nearby, a single stryker flitted down like a fragile insect. It had also seen better days.
Sela helped Valen carry Atilio up the ramp, the bag sagging into a boneless crescent under his lifeless weight.
He had been such a tiny infant . She ground her molars.
The runner’s interior was jammed. The craft was meant to hold far fewer personnel and their gear. Gaining altitude would prove interesting.
Why just one runner for a nearly complete team? It didn’t add up, but exhaustion told her to be grateful.
Sela turned to Valen and shouted over the roar of the engines. “Overfull. I’ll take the jump seat on the stryker.”
“Stay, sir.” Her sergeant nudged her back up the ramp of the runner. “I’ll go. You need to be with them.”
He was right, of course. Valen was always good at reading such things. The team still needed her, as impossible as that felt at the moment.
She nodded. Her sergeant disappeared into a swirl of dust.
Exhausted, she slogged back up the ramp into the belly of the runner. It felt as if the gravity of this hot, dusty world had increased ten-fold and would not permit her to leave. The ramp whined closed behind her. She rounded the corner past the ops station and gave the pilot a quick nod. All set.
Turning, she collided with Captain Jonvenlish Veradin. The deck lurched with the runner’s burdened ascent. He grabbed her by the upper arms to steady them both.
“Captain,” her voice pulled into a low warning. He shouldn’t be there. It was not protocol. Having him personally oversee an extraction was too dangerous. She would never have allowed it, and he knew it.
“Sorry I’m late,” he replied with a lopsided smirk. “Got distracted.” It was his attempt at a joke.
Sela’s scowl was half-hearted. “Here just the same, sir.”
Another jolt shook the runner. He reached for the frame of an equipment bin to steady himself as she collided with his chest.
Sela righted herself and grabbed a handful of cargo webbing for support. He extended his hand, and she clasped his forearm, holding on perhaps a little too tightly.
“The casualty…” he began.
“Atilio, our meditech,” she said, barely audible over the protest of the engines.
“I’m sorry.” He squeezed her forearm once and let his hand drop. Of course, Veradin did not know. To Sela’s captain, the young meditech was one of many under his command.
“It’s worse than we know. Isn’t it, sir?”
There was a final lurch as the runner escaped the grip of Tasemar’s grav.
“That’s the unofficial motto, right?” Veradin allowed his lopsided smirk to re-emerge. He had a way of looking proud of himself and guilty at once.
Valen had said the vox code was an old one. The Storm King had sent only one troop runner and one stryker for air support. Things had gone wrong, vastly, if Veradin chanced his own life in this overloaded runner.
“What did you do, sir?” Sela pressed.
“I did what I had to, Ty.”
The moment the runner alit on the Storm King ’s hangar floor, the ramp unfolded to reveal two waiting officers: a lieutenant colonel and some Fleet skew. Sela had never seen either of them before. As they led Veradin away to the XO’s office, he gave Sela a glance over his shoulder. She sighed and shook her head.
She had gotten the story from Veradin—or his version of it— on the brief flight back on the runner. He had told her that the Hester , the Storm King ’s sister ship, had been delayed for an engagement in the Denor system. The Storm King ’s captain, a crester skew named Silva, had decided to abandon his post at Tasemar in favor of glory-seeking at Denor. After all, delivering breeders to take care of half-assed rebellions among the primitives of a fringe world was not going to carve his name in victory and raise his station. Silva had gauged, incorrectly, that the ground detachment he had essentially abandoned there could hold its own while the ‘King attended to this new, more interesting call.
But Veradin had refused to leave them. Her captain had “borrowed” a troop transport and a stryker to effect their retrieval. Of course, he’d had help. Quadra team, his security escort during his initial extraction, had taken control of the flight deck while Veradin and some Volunteers had commandeered the craft. It was impossible for a carrier to spool up with a hangar bay still active. So Veradin made sure it stayed that way.
Captain Silva then had no choice but to delay the departure of the Storm King . It would have been tantamount to political suicide for Silva to jeopardize a fellow crester, even a peasant Kindred like Veradin.
It explained why everyone on the fligh
t deck seemed so enthralled with her team’s arrival. Yet even after Veradin and his escorts had disappeared into the bustle of the hangar, Sela realized they were still watching her.
She and her team had been given up for dead. Yet there they stood, immortal as the Fates. She didn’t feel like one, standing stiffly at attention as Atilio’s body was rolled out of the bay.
Ignoring the obvious stares of the Fleet skews, she made sure her two other wounded personnel were herded off to medical, despite their protests. The entire time, she sensed a nearly electric charge in the air. It was as if a storm had blown through, leaving not destruction, but disorder and edginess in the carrier. She sensed Veradin had been the harbinger of that storm.
Captain, do you realize what you have done?
“Valen!” Sela bellowed, staring down the few remaining onlookers, consisting of mostly Fleet techs. It worked. They went back to their duties and found less obvious means to stare.
She saw her sergeant turn away from what seemed to be an intense conversation with a female Fleet tech. He jogged around a pallet lifter laden with the munitions crates that had never made it to Tasemar’s surface.
“Who’s the tech?” she asked.
“Cade.” Valen canted his chin. “Our stryker escort. She’s actually a deck pilot, sir.”
“Incredible,” Sela muttered in disbelief. Veradin had somehow convinced or coerced a Fleet tech with rudimentary skills into piloting a stryker to land on Tasemar. Were it not so risky or stupid, she would have been impressed.
There was going to be fallout, she guessed. How bad and how far it reached was up to Veradin and his seemingly unparalleled ability to talk his way out of trouble.
Around them, the flurry of the hangar bay was increasing. The Storm King was prepping for spool-up. Velo drive spool-ups were big maneuvers, often requiring hours of prep time. Fleet relied on mapped flex points– specific locations, invisible to the naked eye, where the fabric of space stretched thin over a conduit passage– for travel between planetary systems governed by First. At flex points, velo drives enabled ships like the Storm King to punch a hole through that thinness and propel itself along the conduit. It required a great deal of energy, but reduced travel between systems to days or hours, instead of decades. It was a tedious and dangerous business. Calculations had to be perfect, with everything in precise order. Otherwise, the vessel could end up on the other side as so much debris.
Fleet techs and other support personnel were buttoning up in the hangar and in a hurry to make up for the delay. Infantry was definitely unwelcome to linger here.
She turned back to Valen. “Make sure D Company get some rack time. Once the captain is done getting jawed at, we’ll debrief with the team leaders. I’ve no doubt there’s going to be mop-up on this one.”
Valen shifted, raking a hand over the back of his bare head. “Sir, about that…”
“What.”
“Captain Veradin mandated down time…for everybody. Next twenty hours. No exceptions.”
“He did what?” She glowered at Valen. The captain had said nothing to her before he was led away. Why would he subvert the chain of command? But she knew the answer. “When?”
“Just before…you know.” He jerked his chin in the direction of the XO’s office. It was plain Valen found the reaction to the captain’s stunt just as worrisome.
Her hand went to her vox: “Captain Veradin. Acknowledge.”
There was a long pause, then Veradin’s voice answered: “You need a break, Ty. Not just your team. You too.”
“Sir, you—”
The vox line went silent.
Sela roamed the Storm King for nearly three hours—an easy thing to do on so large a carrier. Her course took her through the hab levels meant for infantry. The outer sections were the realm of tactical, engineering—places she had seldom needed to venture. A soldier could spend entire tours and never see anything more than the hab level and the hangars.
She did not exactly disobey Veradin’s order to take down time. After all, the captain had never specified how she was to take it. In truth, she was reluctant to return to the squadbay that she shared with her team, no matter how badly her body needed the rack time. She would not be able to bear their attention, feeling—despite their calls of gratitude and praise—that she had somehow failed them.
Of course, if she were actually hungry, she could eat. The commissary would mean more stares or worse, blatant questions from the other platoon commanders. It would mean talking about Veradin’s stunt, or about Atilio. She could seal herself in a rec suite to sleep. But she knew the moment she lay down and shut her eyes she would see Atilio’s face, or hear the priest’s voice.
So, she wandered.
Finally, Sela found herself lingering in the passage that led to the officer’s hab level. It was as close as she dared get to the restricted area that belonged to the cresters. She leaned against the wall of a shadowed alcove. Absently, she worried the sets of tarnished ident tags strung about her neck and very specifically avoided thinking about what had happened on Tasemar.
Two techs passed. They granted her a wide berth, but she did not miss their secretive, awe-struck expressions. One of them had the nerve to stare too long.
Sela drew her shoulders up and glowered back. He quickened his pace and looked away. The techs were frail things: pale with shaven heads, large dark eyes. Never had she witnessed a Fleet tech set foot planetside. It was rumored they were forbidden to do so, for fear of ‘tamination from simple air and soil.
Turning, she caught her ghost-like reflection in the darkened glass of the portal. Little wonder the tech had stared. Her dark blonde hair stood up in unruly spikes. Dirt coated her utilities. Her son’s blood had dried on her hands in maroon patches. She supposed that to them she appeared as some battlefield wraith.
She had already heard what the Fleet personnel had taken to calling her: Sela the Immortal. If she had not found it so pitiful, she would have laughed. As if she were some kind of legend. Hardly. A legend is supposed to take care of her soldiers. A hero would not watch her son die. Or have these alien thoughts swimming in her head.
Every soldier longed to be a hero, but the incident at Tasemar had brought her unwelcome attention. The stories of the daring retrieval launched by Captain Jonvenlish Veradin for his lowly breeder soldiers had spread quickly through the carrier. And now, just has she had predicted in the hangar, Sela waded through the fallout. There were whispers and stolen glances. There would be the inevitable rumors to circle about her taking rec with her captain. But they were just that—rumors. Decca forbade the pairing between soldier and commander and specifically against breeder and crester.
Sela was beginning to lose her resolve. The niggling voice of doubt had spread further, feeding her exhaustion and grief. She moved away from the wall, ready to slink back to the squadbay. Then she saw Veradin round the corner to the habs. Incredibly, he did not present like a man who had just gotten the reaming of his career. In fact, he looked almost proud of himself. She knew from experience that this most likely meant one thing—he had managed once more to talk his way out of a near-catastrophe.
“You have downtime for the next eighteen hours,” he said. “Are you planning to spend it wandering the hallways, Commander Tyron?”
“Captain.” She saluted. “A word?”
“Is it your turn to reprimand me?” he said with a brief chuckle, returning a lazy version of her salute.
Sela did not do well with his jokes, not often. He had poor timing, used analogies or terms only another crester would have understood. It didn’t stop him from trying. Cresters were difficult for her to gauge. They joked, told falsehoods and embellished. It was the same with conscripts, the non-breeders who sometimes found themselves forced into service with the Regime.
Weary and raw, she had lost whatever patience she could sometimes call upon. “As your second, it is my duty to point out actions which are deemed strategically unsound, sir.”
&nbs
p; “Oh, Fates. You too?” He rolled his eyes. Veradin had once pointed out that strategically unsound was her favorite thing to say and went so far as to suggest she have it tattooed somewhere on her body. An observation that, had it been delivered by anyone else, would have resulted in bodily harm.
“Captain, our extraction from Tasemar—”
“I’ve already been formally reprimanded by the fleet XO. But he came down on my side. Silva was wrong to make the call for infantry. He never had formal orders to withdraw—”
“Captain,” Sela blurted. “I don’t care.”
Veradin gaped. He seemed startled that she had interrupted him. “Then speak, Commander.”
“You put yourself at great risk, sir. No other Kindred would have done what you did today.”
“Ty….” He put up his hands in a staying gesture.
“You challenged a Fleet Captain. And we are not even conscripts…we’re only—”
“Essential members of my team that I would never be able to replace.” He forestalled the word she was going to use. Breeders. Sela had never heard him use that word around her or her team. It was as if he found it offensive.
Veradin stepped closer. “Commander—”
“If you do a foolish thing like that again...sir.” Her voice threatened to break. She jabbed at his sternum with an accusing finger. “I will shoot you myself if just to teach you a lesson.”
Veradin gave her a bemused grin. Somewhere beneath the heavy, dull ache heaped upon her by the past twenty hours, she felt that lovely glimmer of warmth.
She stepped closer, peering into his brown eyes. “There are those who would find losing you a great tragedy. There are those of us who could not bear it. Do you understand me, sir?”
His grin disappeared. “I would never want to disappoint those people.”
She allowed her shoulders to sag.
“What’s happened, Sela?” Veradin asked quietly. He could always seem to read her mind, guess her moods.