Season 2: Command and Control

EPISODE 2-1: Movement to contract

“BattleMechs.”

The ComStar agent at the Mercenary Review Board wasn’t quite what I was expecting. Reina and I had been waiting patiently in his office when he threw open the door with a bang and strode in, wearing one of those terry-towel robes of theirs that looks like they juuust stepped out of the shower.

The office itself was 31^st century Inoffensive Utilitarian. Big glass windows overlooking Galaport, wide wood-paneled desk with a black top and built-in terminal, beige carpets and eggshell-colored walls, two stuffed leather armchairs facing the desk. Digital 2D image frames on the walls showed short video loops of Terra: red maples waving in the wind, waves rushing ashore along a white-sand beach, sunlit filtered through the stained-glass windows of a Medieval church, Buddhist prayer flags fluttering above a Nepalese stupa.

The agent had copper-brown hair turning grey, slicked straight back from his forehead. A close-cropped beard and a million-kilowatt smile. He looked like the kind of guy who would try to sell you an ’02 Gienah he insisted was in mint condition, despite being so full of rust holes it looked as though a JagerMech had used it for target practice.

He winked and pointed finger pistols at me and said, “Ah, praise Blake, here’s my nine o’clock. What can I do for you, big guy?”

I just aimed a thumb Reina’s way, and she held up a data crystal. Our digital resume, if you like, with a list of assets, organization, personnel files, unit history, carefully edited guncam highlights of some of our better engagements, as well as requested terms of employment: money, missions, command and salvage rights.

“Secretary?” he shone his smile at her as he plucked the data crystal and carried it to his desk.

“Unit commander,” she said through half-gritted teeth.

“Well, isn’t that something,” he said patronizingly, his plastic smile never melting. I wondered if he’d had his lips glued to his gums, or he was just congenitally incapable of any other expression. “Let’s see what we got here.” He slotted the crystal into a terminal on his desk, and skimmed through the content.

“Aerospace fighters?” One arched eyebrow indicated what he thought of that idea. “BattleMechs are what you want, my friends. Get you top C-Bills for BattleMechs. Blake knows, every Lord and Lady Nobody from Nowhere Special wants BattleMechs. Even if they can afford a battalion of Demolishers, they’d still prefer a lance of moldy, multiply-salvaged, malfunctioning BattleMechs.”

Reina exhaled slowly. Threw me a look of infinite patience being tested to its limits. Looked back to the agent. “We don’t have any BattleMechs,” she said mildly. “We have aerospace fighters, experienced pilots, and a winning record.”

“Hey, hey, you know best,” said the agent in a tone that suggested we definitely did not know best, indeed, that it was likely we knew nothing at all. “See what I can do. I’ll put it up on the boards, see who comes calling. No guarantees though. Standard handling fee for the posting, plus five percent of any contract. Sound good?”

Reina gave a minute shrug. “Not like we have any choice.”

The agent gave a false laugh and tapped a few keys on his terminal. “BattleMechs,” he murmured as though to himself, but loud enough for us to hear.

“When does it go up?” I asked, hoping to head off any verbal or physical violence from Reina.

“Just did, my friend.” He pointed at the screen as if this was a silly question, even though the screen was facing him so we couldn’t see.

Maybe Reina wouldn’t be the one committing violence, I thought. “And when do you think we’ll get a response?”

“Depends on the market and the unit, you know?” Indicating mild amazement that even such basic principles were beyond our feeble grasp. “Aerospace fighter unit now, jeez, I don’t know guys, could be a while, weeks, if you get any response at all. Might want to think about trading in the fighters for Battle—”

He paused, squinted at the screen. “Huh. Okay. One offer. House L … Three offers. No, four. Five. Six. There’s only five houses, how the hell did you get—it’s Wolf’s Dragoons.” I was delighted to see the smile slip a bit, though a little disappointed my lips-glued-to-gums theory was proven wrong. “Who the hell are you people?”

I looked at Reina and grinned. Guess it was infectious, since she mirrored it back. We stood, and the agent handed a stack of printed-out offers to me, still open mouthed. “Haven’t you heard,” I said, nodding at Reina.

“That’s Hard Reina, the Amazon Ace.”

House Liao

We met the Capellan negotiator, Gansukh Zhao, at the walled Confederation diplomatic compound in Galatea City.

The compound was done in Capellan brutalist style, all bare ferrocrete and 90-degree angles. The four expressionless guards who escorted us to the meeting room wore green parade uniforms with knife-edge sharp creases, but the auto pistols at their hips looked well-worn and ready to use.

The meeting room was also largely bare, the only furniture being two metal-tube chairs, an imposingly solid steel-grey desk, and portraits of Max and Elias Liao hanging on the walls. Each corner of the ceiling was pimpled by the bulge of a spy camera.

Gansukh Zhao stood as we entered, a thin man with straight black hair and a narrow moustache, dressed in a baggy, green mandarin-collar jacket. He motioned for us to sit in the chairs. Mine had a leg that was too short, and wobbled slightly when I sat.

“Paradis Reina,” he said, putting her name in the Chinese order, surname first. “I have followed your career on Poulsbo with great interest.”

Politeness. He’d probably only been briefed on us by the Liao hiring hall agent that morning. “You are too kind,” Reina murmured.

“Not at all. House Liao’s respect for aerospace forces is well known. Why, Chancellor Maximillian Liao’s own great aunt, Ingrid Liao, was famous for her love of flying.”

Well, yeah, okay. Also famous for getting 40 fighters shot down during the ‘Great Lee Turkey Shoot.’

“We’d be delighted to continue this tradition of course,” Reina smiled politely. “How can we be of assistance to the Capellan Confederation?”

Zhao steepled his fingers. “We would like to hire you on retainer, to supplement the aerospace forces of one of our other mercenary contractors, and you will operate under their command. Primarily for raiding, though there may be some garrison or defensive duties as well. Remuneration will be commensurate with the risk.”

“Which unit would we be working with?” 4^th Tau Ceti, I figured, or maybe McCarron’s crew.

“That is confidential.”

“Location?” I asked.

“Couldn’t tell you at this juncture.”

“Type of targets?”

“It would be premature to speculate.”

“Opposition?”

Zhao shook his head. “I’m not at liberty to say.”

It figured. “Figured,” I said.

We took an autocab back to the temporary mercenary lodgings close to the Hiring Hall. Reina brooded, staring out the window, watching the people swirl by like sand suspended in a river. Or maybe just watching her own reflection. “What do you think?” she asked at last.

“Too early to tell.”

She turned away from the window to look at me. “Is that a joke?”

“Wouldn’t care to comment.”

She punched me then, in the arm, but it was worth it for the look on her face.

House Kurita

Chu-sa Mamoru Akechi invited us to a private room at the I-Ro-Ha restaurant. Techno-naturalist Japanese, myomer-fiber tatami mats and sliding transparent faux-paper doors, letting us see out but nobody in. Table almost flush with the tatami, with space underneath for our legs, the table itself a raw length of Kagoshima oak, unvarnished, sinuous and unshaped.

Despite the name, Akechi was almost Vikingly Caucasian, with platinum blond hair almost as colorless as his dress uniform, white eyebrows and grey eyes. He ordered for us, then talked of the weather, zero-G acrobats, ComStar communication fees and aerospace racing until we were done eating.

When the table was cleared, Akechi placed a printout on what I was sure was the mathematical center of the table, first facing himself, then slowly turned it so it faced Reina. “Now, to business. Paradis-sama, in light of your battle record on Poulsbo, we are pleased to offer you very favorable conditions. These are our terms. A six-month contract, for planetary assault, in a system to be named by us upon arrival in Combine space. Your unit will be divided into individual flights, each of which will work directly under the operational Combine commander, and will answer to the chain of command. Repair and resupply will be at your own expense, purchased from preferred suppliers selected by the DCMS.”

Favorable conditions, huh? Reina looked down at the paper for a minute, collecting her thoughts. “For a planetary assault, we’d appreciate a little more leeway on command rights,” she said.

“This offer is non-negotiable.”

She frowned a little. “It’s less than the Capellans are offering, you know.”

There was a little twitch in Akechi’s mouth, of a sneer not-quite suppressed. “If you do not mind fighting on the losing side. This offer is non-negotiable.”

“At the very least keep our squadrons—”

“This offer is non—”

“—together as one unit.”

“Negotiable. Seriously, ‘Poison Paradis’ san, we admire your prowess, but you did murder your own commander to obtain your current position. Command independence is quite out of the question.”

“Salvage rights?” Reina asked suddenly.

Akechi blinked a little, then looked down at the contract, scanning. Up again after a moment. “All salvage rights remain with the Combine.” He saw me open my mouth. “This offer is non-negotiable.”

As we walked back to our quarters, Reina observed, “Tough customer.”

I grunted. “Probably a diversionary raid,” I said. “Hang us out to dry while they hit the real target. I notice he didn’t even bother to think about salvage until you mentioned it.”

“No,” she sighed. “No, he didn’t.”

House Marik

The Free World League negotiating team consisted of three members: Katarzyna De Graaf, Arshad Ram and Helena Serrano. The meeting room overlooked the cargo landing pads of Galaport, the windows periodically rattling with the basso boom of landing DropShip engines.

“You are a fellow Oriente native, are you not Mister Glass?” Serrano gave me a bright smile. The best kind of lie is the truth. My faked personnel file says I was born on Oriente, which is true enough. The spec ops stuff I leave off. “I’m sure you’d be happier playing for the home team, wouldn’t you?”

“Wing Commander Paradis is from Ozawa, in the Federated Sun,” De Graff interrupted before I could do anything more than return the smile. “Perhaps we should not try to play the origins card too strongly.”

“Oh stuff and nonsense, De Graaf.” Serrano sniffed, then turned her smile back on me again. “Once an Oriente native, always an Oriente native, right Mister Glass?”

“After their excellent service on Poulsbo, I’m sure both he and Commander Paradis are aware of the values the Free Worlds League represents,” said De Graaf stiffly. “Values like democracy, tolerance, and freedom, which are surely more important than any short-sighted loyalty to the planet you happened to be born on.”

A decade earlier, she might have been right. I had fought for democracy, freedom, all those good things. It had been a little crushing to learn democracy was unwilling to fight for me. It had taken me a long time to rediscover a purpose, a belief in something other than myself.

Ram sighed loud enough to drown out any further rebuttal from Serrano. “You’ll forgive my colleagues, Commander Paradis. We Leaguers are a passionate people. Too passionate, perhaps. Our emotions are sometimes easy to inflame. There is, for example, currently unrest on one of our Periphery rim worlds which we would like you to help us with.”

“The Lesnovo contract?” De Graaf looked surprised. “I thought we’d agreed on the Park Place cadre duty, to help train the air wing of the 4^th Militia?”

Ram made a great show of very deliberately not rolling his eyes. “Park Place is an interior world, under no threat, De Graaf. The Militia can look after their own training—”

“I still say if we’re going to have them work cadre, Hassad and the 2^nd Militia would make more sense,” Serrano put in, swiveling her chair 90 degrees to look at the other two. “It’s right there on the Capellan border.”

“And the fact that the 2^nd is posted near the Duchy of Oriente is just pure coincidence, is it?” De Graaf turned to face her. “You represent the League here, not the Duchy, Serrano.”

“I don’t care for your tone, De Graaf.”

Ram tried again: “Look, can we get back to the—”

“Don’t act like you’ve got the moral high ground here, Ram. You started it by bringing up Lesnovo, when we’d already agreed on Park Place.”

“You agreed, maybe, De Graaf. I assure you Serrano and I made no such promises.”

“Well it’s the only—”

Ah, the League. Deep down, I think we Leaguers all dream of living in some sleepy seaside village, closing up our shop at five sharp and gathering in the town square to gossip, drink and dance, going to bed late and waking up at noon, spending our days in pleasant, indolent idyll. Nothing done in a hurry, everything done on its own time.

Too bad it’s no way to run an interstellar empire. A trillion people who all think they’re living in their own little village, that’s a recipe for parochialism, myopia and infighting. In a democracy, legitimacy flows from a common purpose, not from the barrel of a gun. What was the League’s purpose? To put a Marik on the throne of Terra? Yeah, no. That’s not a dream to inspire the masses.

As the three of them bickered, Reina tapped me on the shoulder and nodded in the direction of the door. I scribbled a note asking them to contact us later. We stood up quietly, and left.

House Steiner

Sofia Hoffmann presented her business card to us outside the Thirtieth Interstellar Infantry Fighting/Combat Transportation Vehicle Trade Show (IIFCTVTS 30): A neat, Steiner blue card with neat edges and neat white printing, ‘Sofia Hoffman, Director, Private Military Contractor Recruitment, Galatea Branch.’

Hoffmann herself was short, stocky, blond and businesslike. A short grey jacket and long skirt piped in blue over an eye-achingly white blouse. A VIP pass hung around her neck, and once the introductions were done she gave Reina and I yellow guest passes.

After navigating security, we threaded our way through the trade show floor, Hoffmann keeping up a steady but impersonal patter as we passed booths displaying the very latest infantry carriers, amphibious assault vehicles and scout cars, over which scantily-clad booth babes and boys draped themselves in artful poses.

“It’s one of the few fields of military hardware that still sees any innovation, yes?” Hoffmann was saying over her shoulder. “BattleMech, main battle tank, even aerospace fighter designs, they’ve all fossilized, yes? Stuck where they were centuries ago.” She nodded at one of the bigger booths. “Ceres Metals, yes? Jararaca 4x4 scout car, now with increased ground clearance to defeat anti-tank mines after that business on Quentin, yes? Over there, a next-generation Cascavel-6, in response to mercenary requests now available in LRM, SRM, yes, or triple-barreled MG versions for greater mission flexibility.”

“Yes,” muttered Reina.

One of the Ceres girls, dressed in nothing but a network of transparent tubes filled with liquid that changed color in time with the music blaring from overhead speakers, saw me looking and blew me a kiss. I went to wave back, caught Reina watching me from the corner of my eye, and ran the hand through my hair instead.

“Ceres sells to the Confederation, yes, to us, to the Houses, to mercenaries like the Dragoons. War is a business, yes, and business is booming,” said Hoffmann, as we arrived at the private Lyran Commonwealth booth in one of the far corners of the floor. The Ceres Metals music was mercifully dampened to a half-remembered tremor in the diaphragm. We perched on high chairs around a small table, not much over half a meter in diameter. An aide brought tree tall glasses of something clear and fizzy which, I discovered to my distress, turned out to be sparkling water.

“And so, to business, yes?” Hoffmann smiled, as she did everything, professionally.

“Yes,” agreed Reina.

“We are suitably impressed by your victories against our forces on Poulsbo. I hope we can convince you to use these talents for us, rather than against us, yes? We offer defensive operations along our Combine border, six months, automatic extension during combat. Virginia Shire, where we anticipate a Combine counteroffensive after our capture of Port Moseby. Standard garrison pay scale, rising to campaign scale in the event of enemy action, yes? You will be under the direct command of the senior ranking general on whichever world you are posted to, yes?”

“No,” I said. “You’ll forgive me, but your generals have not inspired great faith in their abilities of late. Perhaps a liaison officer, and more deployment flexibility?”

Hoffmann threw up her hands in a placating gesture. “For your first contract with us, under a new commander, I think direct control would be best, yes, at least until we get to know each other better.”

Reina grimaced a little. “The Combine rep said much the same thing.”

A narrow vertical line creased her forehead as a thought trickled its way into her consciousness. “You have spoken with a representative from House Kurita, yes?”

Reina gave a palm-up, well-you-know gesture. “A little.”

The line deepened. “In that case, I am sure we can work something out.”

“Yes.”

House Davion

Federated Suns envoy Brett Anderson invited us up to his sky penthouse at the top of the DeChavilier Tower. There was an exclusive elevator up, gold-plated inside, voice-activated.

Anderson met us as we stepped off. Auburn hair, black suit, white shirt, open a few buttons at the collar. Fashionable stubble, calculated smile. He led us to the living room, a sun-drenched expanse of plush carpeting, looking out over a patio deck and Olympic-sized swimming pool.

He ignored me, fixated his gaze on Reina instead. Kissed the back of her hand and only let it go with great reluctance.

“The Amazon Ace, huh? Saw the gun cams, fantastic, just fantastic stuff. And so beautiful too. Listen, here’s what I can do for you: Retainer. Yeah, that’s right, free-floating retainer in the Capellan March, one year minimum, with option to extend for up to two more,” he said. “Rotation to New Syrtis every three months for R&R. Generous remuneration. Transportation and resupply costs all borne by the Federated Suns. Full salvage rights, independent command.”

“That’s very—” said Reina.

“Fantastic, fantastic, knew you’d agree. You’ll join me for dinner, to celebrate? Maybe for breakfast too?”

“Well I’m not—” she tried again.

“Wing Commander Paradis. Reina. Mind if I call you Reina? Reina, this is a limited-time offer. You know how it is, right? Got a lot of other units competing for these contracts. There are no guarantees once you walk out that door. Hey, I’m pulling for you here, but I’m going to need a sign of good faith. Look, I know it’s a big decision, so why don’t you take some time, maybe have a dip in the pool out there, water’s great, got a spare bikini in the guest room, I’ll order us up some Italian—you like Italian, great, knew you would—we can talk through any doubts you have. Your friend can wait at the temp quarters, catch up with you later.”

“I need to discuss—”

“Hey, I get it. It’s a lot to take on board. You need some time to think it over.” He snapped his fingers, as though a brilliant idea had just occurred to him. “You know what, you should come down to my summer villa, on the coast. I can have my ‘copter pick us up on the roof, we’ll be there by dinner-time. Very peaceful, very exclusive, very private. We can talk about this as much as you need … all night, if you want.” He winked.

“Mister Anderson—”

“Brett, please.”

“Mister Anderson. That’s very generous, but there is no way, No Way, I’m making a decision without talking it over with the unit.”

He sighed, as though tragically wounded. “Reina, Reina, I’m only looking out for your best interests. I’m hurt, I’m very hurt you can’t see that.”

“You’ll recover,” said Reina, then she stood and marched back towards the elevator.

“I can stay all night, if you like,” I offered brightly.

Anderson ignored me, turned away to look out the windows. Waved me away, dismissive.

The elevator sank down through layers of uncomfortable silence. “He seemed nice,” I said finally.

Reina laughed shortly.

“A generous offer,” I added.

“Very. It’s everything we were hoping for,” she agreed, sadly. “All it will cost is my soul.”

Wolf’s Dragoons

Faith Celik, the Wolf Dragoons recruiter, was waiting for us in the lobby of the mercenary lodgings when we returned. About my height, steel hair pulled back in a tight bun, dark grey pant suit, discrete red and black pin on the breast, simple but timeless. Reina shook hands, invited her up to our room. Celik sat on one chair, Reina on the other, with me perched on the bed.

Celik pulled a small black box out of her bag and set it on the table beside her. A glowing red light blinked, then turned green. Celik nodded, then looked at Reina. “Perhaps we might speak alone, Miss Paradis?” she said, her hand making a gentle, open gesture in my direction.

“He’s my XO,” Reina said. “He stays.”

Celik smiled thinly. “You’ll, sorry, you will forgive me, but we have certain. Reservations. About Mister Glass’s background, given the sensitive nature of the offer we wish to make. You’ll, ahem, you will understand, of course, as a general rule we do not conduct business in front of Great House special operations soldiers. Particularly. Hm. Dead ones.”

I was impressed. “I’m impressed,” I said.

Celik tipped her head, accepting the compliment.

“What’s so sensitive about your offer?” Reina frowned.

“Well, to be blunt, Miss Paradis, your unit does not impress us much.” Celik held up a forestalling hand as a storm gathered on Reina’s brow. “You, on the other hand, impress us very much, Miss Paradis. Our offer is, how shall I put it? Exclusive. To your person.”

Reina blinked slowly, digesting it. “You want to hire me?”

Celik beamed, arms spread in a welcoming gesture. “Precisely. We feel your initiative and flying skills would make an excellent addition to our Aerospace Operations Group. I can assure you, pay will be almost double what any other outfit would offer you, plus there is—if I may be so bold—a certain cachet to working for the most famous mercenary organization in the Inner Sphere.”

Reina was dogged. “You don’t want my unit?”

“Alas, but no.”

“And him?” Reina looked over at me. “He’s, not with the uh, I mean, he’s reformed you know.”

“Perhaps,” Celik’s smile withered slightly. “That’s, ah, that is not a risk we are prepared to take.”

Reina promised to think about it.

“Well?” I asked after Celik was gone, taking her little black box with her.

“I’m thinking about it.”

“Opposite of the Davion offer, isn’t it?” I mused. “Give up yourself for the unit, or give up the unit for yourself.”

“A choice made under duress is no choice at all,” she said.

In the end, the choice was simple.

“It is good that we could come to a mutually-agreeable arrangement.” The House rep shook Reina’s hand, then stepped in and gave her an impulsive hug. “This is the beginning of a long partnership, yes?”

“Maybe.”

EPISODE 2-2: Total war

Why do they call me Sunny? Well, kind of a long story, but if you want to know.

Picked the name up about a year after I joined the ACES, well before I met Reina, when we were on a counter-insurgency op on Cronulla, one of the League/Capellan border worlds way down near Andurien.

Cronulla has this series of deep trenches, anywhere from 5 to 10 kilometers deep, 1 to 2 wide, and the cities are built right into the sides, either bored into the rock walls or on convenient outcroppings of rock. The ACES base was on one of the latter.

Although the rebels weren’t too heavily armed, the vertical geography made ferreting them out kind of tricky, since they were so deeply dug in. So the militia hired mercs to do their dirty work for them.

Aerospace fighters are kind of overkill in these situations unless you’re planning on carpet-bombing your own cities, and hey, this was the League, not the Combine.

The contract didn’t pay much, which got Edwards worried about the ROI (return on investment: equals profit divided by cost of doing business) of the op. Worried we couldn’t kill the insurgents quite profitably enough.

So he stowed the F-10s and all our other toys, and talked the FWLM into loaning us these captured Capellan Mujikas for us to fly instead. Officially known as the Guardian, they’re these light S/VTOL jets that can hover like a helicopter, carry 90 micro-missiles in the belly and burst into a ball of flame if you so much as say anything mean to them.

Actually, this crappy little fighter was kind of useful for maneuvering in the canyons and blasting the rebels out of their hidey-holes—schlock and awe if you will—but damn, it felt like flying naked. Instead of armor, the damn things had two defensive systems: “chaff” and “flares.” Can you imagine? Defending yourself with confetti and fireworks. These things were not so much bargain-basement as bargain-planetary core.

Still, the People’s Revolution for an Independent Cronulla (or PRIC—Unity, who comes up with these names?) didn’t have much in the way of AA ‘cept for a couple of shoulder-fired missile launchers, so there was pretty much only one way they could get to us: on the ground.

So that’s what they did.

It was late at night, one of Cronulla’s little blue moons half-visible in the narrow strip of sky above the canyon. I was walking back towards the pilot lounge, whistling a merry old tune, when I saw a black lump sprawled across the ground, right next to the crew quarters building. Drawing closer, I saw it was one of the base security guys, a big hole burned right through his chest. I knelt down and felt for a pulse. Wasn’t surprised when there wasn’t one.

Then there was a jab as something cold and hard was pressed against the back of my neck. Wished I hadn’t had quite so much Double Tap right then, or I might have heard whoever it was approaching.

“Know what this is?” said a nasty voice. Yeah, I knew. Laser pistol lensing crystal. Same thing that shot the security guard, of course.

“You’re happy to see me?”

“Funny man,” he jabbed the crystal into the back of my neck again. “This is a Sunbeam laser pistol, funny man, and in two seconds it’s gonna burn a hole right through your skull unless you put your hands where I can see ‘em.”

The Sunbeam is less of a laser pistol, more of a laser blowtorch. It would indeed blow a hole in my head, and through the wall in front of me, quite possibly through every wall in the entire building and punch right through to the other side.

I raised my hands, very slowly. Truth is, up in the air is a far better place for them when a laser is pointed at your head than down at the waist. This guy was an amateur, an untrained revolutionary maybe, a home-grown guerilla. You don’t press your gun right up against your hostage, for example: take a few steps back so they can’t grab you, and even if they make a sudden move they’re still in your field of fire.

Two figures came creeping over as I stood there, dressed head to toe in black, hooded and masked. One held a shredder, what they call a needler rifle, the other a short-barreled submachinegun.

“We shoot him?” hissed one of the newcomers.

“Not yet,” said the one behind me. “Human shield, until we take the others.” The Sunbeam jabbed me in the neck again. “Walk. Slowly.”

So we took a nice little stroll over to the Revolving Restaurant, where inside I could still hear Groucho, Manny and Blue Max arguing loudly over five-card Drax.

“Open it,” Mister Sunbeam said, so I did.

We stepped inside and all conversation stopped. Three pairs of eyes came up, running through a range of expressions like one of those hand-drawn flip book cartoons I used to draw in the corner of my textbooks at school: Annoyance, surprise, anger.

“Everyone stand up slowly or this guy’s head is toast,” growled the leader.

“Oh no,” said Groucho, clapping a hand to her mouth. “Unity, no.”

“Take it easy. Just. Take it easy,” urged Manny, hands up in a placating gesture.

Blue Max just sat still and screwed his eyes as tight as they would go. “Just make it quick,” he said. “I can’t stand to watch people suffer.”

The man behind me laughed harshly. “Oh, your suffering is just getting started, mercenary scum.”

Max opened his eyes, looking really puzzled. “Wasn’t talking to you.” He looked right at me. “Not too much blood, okay Aric?” Max knew what my tattoo meant.

Mister Sunbeam was still trying to process that when I twisted, one hand clamping on the man’s pistol hand, the other palm hammering right up into his elbow, bending it quite the wrong way with a snap. Even as he dropped, screaming, the Sunbeam was in my hand and I was spinning towards the guerilla on the left.

He was blinking, mouth a round O of shock, when the Sunbeam torched a sizzling line across his neck as I spun. The body went one way, his head went the other.

My pirouette ended with me facing the last guerilla. Give the guy credit, he’d gotten as far as bringing the needler rifle up to his hip. The Sunbeam took his arm off just below the shoulder.

Poor sap just kind of stood there for a second, staring dumbly at the smoking hole of his shoulder and the gently barbecuing arm on the ground. Gave me plenty of time to adjust my aim, and shoot him right between the eyes. Laser beam flash-fried every liquid in his skull with enough force to blow the whole back of his head open and spray it across the far wall like ejecta from a meteor strike.

“On second thoughts, I am kind of happy to see you,” I told the guy with the broken arm, then torched him, too. “PRIC,” I muttered.

“Dammit Glass, I asked you,” complained Max, looking at the blood-splattered wall.

I just wordlessly tossed Max the needler while Groucho scooped up the SMG. “Stay here, barricade the door.” I told them. “Gonna have a look-see outside.”

I opened the door just a crack and saw another black-clad figure dashing by right outside. Guess he saw the light because he slowed, frowned, then eyes widened when he realized I wasn’t one of his boys.

Fired the Sunbeam, and his head jerked back. Legs folded. I crouched over him and found he’d been carrying another Sunbeam, so I picked that one up too and put it in my left hand.

No guesses where he’d been running to. I could hear gunfire, shouting and screaming from the direction of the married pilots’ quarters. It’s a terrible thing, hearing a child scream. I thought we were done with total war, done with it centuries ago, when (after nuking ourselves halfway back to the Stone Age) the whole species had finally figured out it was a shortcut to extinction. Guess some lessons need to be learned again.

I came around the corner and saw three of them trying to break down the barracks door while two more were shooting at the second-story windows. A Sunbeam in each hand, I shot those two before they knew I was there. Other three looked up, one of them dropped a sledgehammer, clawing for his SMG. Didn’t let him get it. Put neat, orange-white holes in the two others, then in the sledgehammer guy as he tried to run.

There were shadows in the windows above me now, people wondering why the hammering had stopped. I heard some people saw me take the insurgents down with the Sunbeams.

The last cadre had gone after the hangars: A demolitions squad, armed with satchel charges. The security guys there were on their toes more than the ones near the pilot quarters (taking better care of the hardware than the people, thanks guys) and had taken cover down the far end of the hangar.

Then along comes this madman with a Sunbeam in each hand—that would be me—who starts torching the bandits left and right. Guys at the rear, Sunbeam to the back. Satchel charge guys—Sunbeam to the chest. Set off one charge, blew him and his buddies to hamburger filler. Their leader, the traitor who’d let them into our base—Sunbeam to the head. Sunbeams, Sunbeams, Sunbeams everywhere.

So yeah.

It was very sunny the next day, so that’s why they called me Sunny.

EPISODE 2-3: Meeting engagements

After combat losses on Poulsbo, and loyalty losses on Galatea, we were three shy of two full squadrons.

“Put together a flight. See if you can find some likely candidates. Make yourself useful for a change,” Reina said with a wink. “And while you’re at it, help me think of a new name for the unit.”

“Reina’s Raiders?”

“Ugh. ‘Somebody’s something’ are the UrbanMechs of mercenary names: Cheap, cheerful and cheesy. Wolf’s Dragoons, Hansen’s Roughriders, Barrett’s Privateers, blah blah blah. We need something to stand out, not blend in. Something with gravitas.”

“Ok. Gravitas Force, G-Force for short?” She looked at me funny. “Hey, it’s got gravitas.”

“Go,” she pointed at the office door. “Shoo. Va-a-a t’en.”

So I made a list, checked it twice. Tried to guess who was naughty or nice, then dropped all the nice ones. Nice doesn’t cut it in the air.

Despite what the holovids like to pretend, being a great, or even a good aerospace fighter pilot in the 31^st century takes more than mirror shades and a shit-eating grin. A lot of it is technical—you’ve got to know your fighter, know what it can do both in an atmosphere and in a vacuum, know what the other guy’s can do, know how all those things are impacted by gravity, inertia, drag and a hundred other factors, know how to use them to your advantage—not just know, but know instinctively, without thinking about it.

Of course, there’s more to it than that. Luck helps, as does experience, plus a dash of aggression—the ingredients of a vodka pilotini, always stirring, never shaken.

I started with a list of 50 names, took out those with no combat experience. We were going to the Combine front, no time to learn the ropes. Whittled down the rest by looking at psych profiles, unit evaluations, and criminal records—yeah, I was aware of the irony of doing that in Reina’s unit—ended up with a short list of five names. It was time to get to work.

Gaurav “Lucky” Singh had an infectious grin, an unruly mass of curly black hair, and stubble that wasn’t so much five o’clock shadow as midnight pitch darkness. A Sikh from the Federated Suns outback world of Panpour, he skipped the traditional turban and the beard: Wasn’t his style, he said, with a careless shrug. I got the feeling this was a guy who lived life precisely the way he wanted, other people’s expectations be damned.

I met all the candidates in a meeting room at the Hiring Hall. More of a cubicle really, two chairs and a small round table, just enough space to prop up the noteputer and read through the personnel files.

Singh glided into the room right on time, with that trademark grin of his.

“Hey chief, what’s good?”

“War, wine and women, my friend.” I stood to shake his hand, then pointed to the other seat. “Pull up a chair if you’re sticking around.”

He grinned and sprawled almost bonelessly into the chair. “How do you want to do this?”

“Well, there’s a couple of questions I’d like to ask, and if that goes okay, we’ve got 30 minutes in the flight sims downstairs for you to show me your stuff. Two 15-minute back-to-back sessions, 600K upper thermosphere and 15K standard atmosphere.” The two places aerospace fighters see the most action: either intercepting an assault before it hits dirt, or over the battlefield once both sides are on the ground.

He waved his hand, in a go-ahead kind of way. “Sounds good, chief. So shoot.”

“Tell me about your last unit.”

“The Junkyard Devas,” he said with a rueful shake of his head. Good memories, it seemed. “Merc company from people down my way, Panpour, Jodipur, Basantapur, combined arms. Great unit.”

“So great that you got cut to pieces by the Dracs.”

“By the Dragoons, chief. No shame there.”

“And you say your nickname is Lucky?” Kind of cocked my head at him, put the weight of irony into his nickname.

“Hey,” he just gave a liquid shrug. “I’m still here, aren’t I? I call that lucky.”

The flight sims were these light beige, egg-shaped pods that kind of swelled out from the floor. The actual cockpit inside was mounted on a triple gimbal framework that could spin you faster than Hanse Davion’s PR department, and while the displays were a little low-rez they were slightly more realistic than Max Liao’s chances of becoming First Lord.

I configured the two pods to simulate the CNT-1D (confusingly called the Centurion, a name it shares with a BattleMech design—though pilots tend to call it something else which also contains the letters CNT, in that order). Started Singh and I at the same altitude, flying towards each other, and the fight was on.

Singh wasn’t bad. I won the low atmosphere fight, he won the high orbit one (yeah, well, he got lucky). Well, fair enough. Skill counts for a lot, but a little luck never hurts.

“The Para-demons?” I suggested to Reina. “You know, Paradis plus demons.”

Reina did a quick search through the database. “Bad luck, Sunny. Already taken. Some Stephen Wolf guy.”

Big hair, big moustache, big jacket, big belt buckle. Big voice. That was Zack “Hack” Unomwe.

“Trust me bud, I’m the best damn pilot that’ll walk through that door. So, where’s this Amazon Ace chick? She must be pretty wild, huh?”

“You could say that. You’re the best pilot, huh? And yet the Fighting Urukhai let you go?”

“Malkin’ ijets don’t know nuffin’ about nuffin’.”

“That so?”

“That’s right, I could fly circles around every damn one of them with my eyes closed and one hand holding my pecker.” He waggled his big buckle for emphasis.

“Impressive.”

“Got that right. Malking General Greenspan just too damn dumb to realize it. Greenspan, more like Greenhorn, am I right?”

“And the insubordination charges in your file are, what. A misunderstanding?”

“Greenhorn, ha ha. Or Green-spam. Green-ham. Sorry bud, what did you say?”

“Never mind.”

“You wanna take a spin in the sims? I’ll do loops around your ass so fast you won’t know what hit you.”

“Know what? I think I’ve seen all I need to see.”

“So, when do I get to meet this Reina babe?”

“Let me get back to you on that.”

Good pilots are confident, sure, but there is a limit. Save the cockiness for the bar. Overconfidence will get you killed as sure as a Stuka on your tail.

“Black Sheep? White Rabbits? Red Devils? Blue Jays?”

“I dunno, Sunny. Maybe something more, hmm, timeless and mythic maybe?

“Mythic. Gotcha. I’ll get back to you on that.”

Desmond “Dope” Ball was a short guy, clothes going at the seams, looking a little pale and sweaty. One knee bouncing up and down with nervous energy. Didn’t say much.

“You’ve got a fine record with Narhal’s Raiders, Dez, up until last year. Then there’s a blank. Fill it in for me?”

He was silent a long while, long enough to wonder if he’d heard me. Finally, he said, barely more than a whisper: “I can still fly.” He looked up at me then, with desperate conviction in his eyes. “I can.”

I sighed. Rubbed my eyes with the balls of my hands. Let them fall, carelessly. Man, this was not what I signed up for. Okay, so I kind of volunteered for this, but whatever. “Let me guess, Dez: Evoke? Racer?”

One of the downsides of being a pilot is getting too used to the adrenaline rush than comes with flying. Some guys, they get addicted to that, want that rush every day of their lives. And there are people quite willing to sell it to you in a bottle, in a needle, in a lifetime’s slow wasting away.

Evoke and Racer were just two of the more common ones—dopamine and serotonin boosters, feel-happy drugs that made you feel like you were flying when you were laying on the bare concrete floor of a rat-infested basement. Just as well, cos that’s where you’d probably be after taking either for long enough.

“Does it matter which?” Desmond asked.

“Nah, not really.” Guy needed help, and a frontline combat unit was not the time or place. “Look man, check yourself into a clinic. Get them to wire me, I’ll see what we can do to help you through the program. If you’re clean when we come back this way, we’ll talk again.”

A good pilot is reliable, this guy just wasn’t. Not right then. Guess some people got to fight their own wars. Hoped he’d win his.

Niall “Bulldog” Davis was tall, well-built, square-jawed with a shaved head and a short beard. Slightly stubborn but hangdog look to him. Must have been pushing almost 40, with the first signs of grey in his beard.

“Your last unit was the 12^th Star Guards,” I said. “Great unit, fine reputation. So what gives? Why quit?”

Davis had a solid record. Just. Well. The Guards’ evaluation was a little too generically nice, like someone was trying to write it just positive enough to get rid of him, without offering any specifics.

“Didn’t quit,” he said, kind of hurt. Like he’d known that question was coming, probably been asked it by every unit hiring, and was tired of answering. “Let go. They didn’t renew my contract.”

I let that sit in the room for a bit. Let him tell me on his own time.

“They hired a dozen new guys, fresh faces, right out of academies,” he said at last. “Said I was too old, I’d lost my edge.”

“Have you?”

His mouth set in a grim line. “Think I’d be here if I had?”

Got to admit, I’ve got a soft spot for an underdog. With my background the Confederation is the nearest thing I’ve got to an ancestral enemy, for example, but damned if I don’t cheer them on every time they scrap with the Suns.

“The 12^th is on station in the Ryde Theater. Any experience fighting the Dracs?” Maybe I was reaching for a reason to hire the guy, the underdog. When he nodded kind of ruefully—in an oh hell yeah kind of way—I followed up with: “So how should I fight, say, a Sholagar?”

He rubbed his chin for a second, thinking. “Well, it’s got a bad rep, because it’s unstable in the atmosphere. But that’s the thing—it’s meant to be unstable. Just means it’s brutal on novice pilots, like Akiro Kurita.” The Coordinator’s nephew had died in a Sholagar crash in 3002. “Your best bet is to mix up your maneuvering, scissors, yo-yoing, rolls, so the other guy has to concentrate more on flying than shooting at you.”

“Sound advice. Now, let’s see if you still know a few tricks, old dog.”

The two sim duels ended up in draws. Think I was the better gunner, but every move I made he saw coming a mile away and had a counter for, so I could never land the knock-out punch.

Good instincts and training are must-haves for a good pilot, but there’s no substitute for experience.

“You wanted mythic, so here goes: The Cat’s Claws? The Stormbringers? The Doom Givers? The Battle Friends? The Foe Hammers?”

“No, nah, nope, hmm, you might be on to something there.”

Irina “Nova” Desiderata. Spikey as a porcupine, quick as a viper, that was Irina. Thin, gaunt, all the ink on her arms and throat maybe doubled her body weight. Some kind of dark constellation made up of bones, spiders and daggers, marching up one arm and then down the other. Seemed unaware it was possible to buy clothing in a color other than black.

Kicked the door instead of knocking. “You him?” Hands on hips, tense, like she was ready to run if I said ‘No.’

“Possibly?”

“Reina Paradis’ new outfit?” Her eyes restlessly roaming the room, as though Reina might be somehow hidden inside the walls or under the carpet.

“That’s me,” I nodded, and indicated the chair. “Take a seat.”

“Prefer to stand.” She took two long legged strides into the room. “So?”

“You’re from Tortuga.”

“That a question?”

Had I every been that young, that brash, that full of myself? Actually yeah, bet I had. Bet the look on my face right then was the same look the recruiter back on Oriente had on his when I signed up: irritation warring with knowing amusement, irritation winning out. I closed the noteputer with one hand, massaged the back of my neck with the other. “Irina—”

“Nova.”

“Okay, Nova. Give the attitude a rest and grab a seat. Watching you prowl in here is giving me a neck ache. I’ve no idea what you went through to get from Tortuga to here, but believe me, I am not your enemy. So save your poison and talk to me like a fellow human being.”

Being an aerospace also takes respect. That’s one thing Reina had reminded me: You’ve got to rely on the people around you.

For a second, I felt Nova wasn’t buying it. She looked like she was about to split, took one step towards the door, then changed her mind and sat. I didn’t know it was possible to sit viciously, but somehow, she threw herself into the chair like she was attacking it.

“It took a lot.” She said. “You’ve no idea.”

“I’ll bet. So tell me, why does a deserter from a Tortugan pirate outfit want to fly with our unit?”

“Reina,” she said immediately.

I knew the feeling. “And what guarantees do we have that you won’t desert us like you did the Tortugans?”

“Reina,” arms folded, like that answered everything. Which I guess it did.

I won both fights in the sim, but neither was easy. Nova lacked finesse, but I could see the raw talent there, and the aggression, you bet she had the aggression, just needed to temper it with a bit of good judgement. With an old hand, perhaps.

“Hey Reina,” I knocked on the door, threw her a wave when she looked up. “Got the new recruits for you to meet’n’greet.”

The three were waiting outside. My new wing: Lucky slouching comfortably, Bulldog standing at ease, Nova trying very badly to hide her excitement.

“Welcome, warriors,” said Reina, smiling. “Welcome to the Black Arrows.”

EPISODE 2-4: Friendly fire

Yeah, there’s more to being a good pilot than quick reflexes and accurate shooting. Take brains, too. For example? Huh, well, you remember I was telling you about Cronulla, right? Counter-insurgency op on the Capellan border. Planet with a crust like old leather.

One time I had to think on my feet—or on my wings, if you will—was in this place called the Cavern of the Kings, a massive karst and limestone cave system leading off one of the main canyons, maybe 300 kilometers long, with the main cave around a kilometer high and two kilometers wide. Damn thing was big enough for its own river system, which spilled out into the canyon in a two-kilometer high waterfall. It was dotted with skyscraper-sized stalactites and stalagmites explorers had named after ancient kings: Jackson, Elvis and Bowie.

Oh yeah, and at the very back of this titanic obstacle course was the PRIC theater operations headquarters. The PRICs were wedged in there good, in a bunker guarded with enough guns and missiles to take out a DropShip: Quad medium lasers, octuple machineguns, SRM-way-too-many racks. Couldn’t just starve them out, ‘cos the cave system had thousands of exits in addition to the main one, most unmapped, which the PRICs used to slip in and out like a sex toy covered in petroleum jelly.

Going in and blasting them out was a suicide mission.

“Glass, I’m empowering you to put together an agile team that can achieve mission-critical deliverables,” Edwards waffled to me.

“You want me to fly in there and take out the HQ? Hanzo, tell him how crazy that is.”

Hanzo smiled sympathetically and put a hand on my shoulder. “Aric, let me explain: We want you to fly in there and take out the HQ.”

I’ve heard of guys getting shot down by friendly fire before, but this was the first I’ve heard of it happening while you were still in the briefing room.

Eight hundred meters of height might sound like a lot, but that’s a rounding error for aerospace pilots. The F-10s couldn’t do the job, obviously: They’d just slam into the cavern walls on the way down if they were unlucky, or if they were very, very lucky, they’d slam into the cavern wall once they reached the end of the tunnel. VTOLs would have been better for this mission, but we didn’t have VTOLs did we? The Guardian would have to do. Only one way to do it: Slalom down the cavern, hit the brakes and fire off a clutch of missiles at the bunker, then flip around and run like hell before the AA got you.

I couldn’t, in good conscience, ask anyone I liked or respected to join me on this mission. So I ordered Manny, Groucho and Blue Max to do it instead.

“Did you tell Edwards how crazy this is?” Manny had both hands in his hair after I told him.

I just gave him a look.

“Oh right, yeah. Okay, well then did you tell Hanzo how crazy this is?”

“I did.” I said. “He’s behind this Charlie Foxtrot 100%.”

Blue Max whistled appreciatively. “Wow Glass, just wow.” Sarcastic clapping. “Way to get us all killed.”

“Hey,” I blew him a kiss. “The least I could do.”

The approach run was easy, since we could just fly way above the canyon, rather than along it. Then we’d dive down, pull a 90-degree turn into the cavern mouth, fly single file and slow enough that we didn’t smear ourselves across the geography, before actually hitting the target.

The approach run should have been easy, that is. Guess nobody told the PRIC that, ‘cos they had a welcoming committee waiting the minute we showed.

Groucho was the first to spot them “Contact! A dozen bandits, two o’clock low.”

Sure enough, a swarm of gnat-sized black dots were pouring out of the cavern mouth beneath us. Had a quick glance down at one of the multi-purpose displays in the cockpit to get a sensor reading and saw what we had.

A squadron of Angel light strike fighters. It’s the cheapest, shoddiest piece of machinery you’ve ever seen, with twin nose booms make it look like a metal crab—and it’s only marginally more aerodynamic. Only people on Cronulla who used it were the militia, which meant a dozen of them had switched sides without anyone telling us.

Outnumbered three to one, we did what we do best: Attack.

“Split right, Groucho. Max, with me,” I ordered. Each pair tipped up a wing and began to dive down towards the Angels, my section curving left, Groucho’s right. That way one pair would get a shot at the Angels tails, regardless of which pair they went after first.

The PRIC air force split half and half and climbed straight towards us. I thumbed off a salvo in front of the lead fighter’s nose from beyond range—an old trick, make the other guy flinch before you get into effective fighting distance. Worked like a charm. He swerved, giving me and Max a shot at his side as we dove past. Four micros slammed home and blew the fighter apart.

Then we were through their formation, heading right for the six fighters closing with Groucho and Manny. Tails towards us. Too easy. Picked a target, waited ‘till it filled the scope, fired. Whoosh as six micro-missiles leapt from the racks and corkscrewed right into the Angel. Wasn’t much left but scraps of armor, falling like black rain.

There was a shrill warning in my helmet as an Angel locked on to me. Pulled back all the way on the stick and went rocketing straight up, a flash of exhaust beneath me as the Angel’s missiles flew past. Then I cut power and flipped the Guardian. The Guardian is vectored thrust, just like the F-10, means you can point the exhaust lots of places that aren’t directly behind you, making your fighter nimble as a ballerina. When I say I flipped the fighter, that’s pretty literal—like a kick-flip or somersault, one second the nose was pointing straight up, the next almost straight down.

Pointing right at the Angel on my tail. Thumbed the big red button on the control stick and watched the missiles roar right into the fighter: one nose boom blown off, bowling-ball holes punched in each wing, engine guttering out. The fighter spiraled away, more smoke than fuselage left, before its missiles cooked off and took out the rest of it in a burst of flame.

Got a moment to look down and see the cavern we were aiming for. Just in time to see the second wave of eight more PRIC fighters launch from the cavern.

“Aw, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Boss—” Max had seen them too. Someone had screwed up the intel on this op, and bad. Definite case of friendly fire.

It was time for a change of plan. “Groucho, Manny, try to keep them busy here. Max, on me. We’re going down the rabbit hole.”

We dove past the slow-climbing second wave, firing off missiles wildly to make them scatter, dumping fistfuls of tinsel and popping flares as we cut straight by them, never slowing, then throwing our fighters into a skidding turn into the cavern.

Half the PRIC squadron kept climbing, going after Groucho and Manny, but four Angels looped around and followed.

What a ride that was. Almost pitch-black after the first couple of kilometers, switching to night vision so everything glowed a ghostly green around me. Colossal pillars of stalactites suddenly lunging at me from the blackness. Angels hot on my tail. Scissoring back and forth, trailing a whole stream of flares and twinkly-silver chaff, the air pulsing as near-misses slammed into the rock wall behind me.

“I’m hit!” Max shouted on the comms. “Losing fuel.”

“Get clear,” I told him.

And then it was just me and four Angels.

Big stalactite coming up, called Cornell, close to the cavern wall. Stood the Guardian on one wing and went for the gap. Scraped through, meters to spare. Two Angels tried to follow at the same time, flew together and then blew out in a blinding ball of light, briefly turning the cavern night into day.

No time to celebrate. Another hard turn around Lennon, the biggest pillar in the whole cavern, then fired a full spread at Harrison, the pillar just beyond. Fountains of flying rock and debris blasting out from the surface just as I flew past—right into the path of the Angel sitting right on my ass. Fist-sized chunk went right through the cockpit ferroglass and took the pilot’s head off.

Then I slammed on the air brakes and set thrusters to hover, standing the fighter almost still, letting the last Angel shoot right past me as it pulled around the stalactite. Six micro-missiles stitched into its underbelly, blowing it almost cleanly in half.

Thought I’d done it, then. Thought the ending was a foregone conclusion—I felt invincible.

Then I saw the web of AA fire the PRIC were putting up in front of the bunker. Like a deadly rainbow, a wall-to-wall killer lightshow. No way to fly through that, and live.

A word about the modern micro-missile, the ‘mimi.’ Short-range missiles are the shotgun of the battlefield these days, not the sniper rifles they used to be. ECM got so good any ordinance with any brains and maneuvering power could be turned against its owner, so for the last couple of centuries they’ve just been a quick-burn thruster with a big ‘ole HEDP warhead strapped to the front, and a micro-hamster brain that goes after the last thing it was pointed at.

Any soldier will tell you these babies have an effective range on the battlefield of a couple hundred meters. After that, the rocket runs out of fuel and gravity and atmospheric drag take care of the rest. Now, let that sink in for a sec. If you’re only 10 meters off the ground, like the ’Mech jocks, running out of fuel means the mimis hit the ground pretty quick. It’s a different story when you’re 500 meters up. The mimis don’t spontaneously combust or fly up to missile heaven. They keep on going, falling, dropping to the ground until they hit something and go ‘boom.’

So, I was heading straight towards a solid curtain of multicolored AA laser fire just waiting for me to fly into range. I nosed down, screaming right over the cavern floor, then yanked the stick back into my crotch and pulled into a near-vertical climb. And fired as the nose tipped up.

Just outside of range, I fired, with the Guardian pointed at the cavern ceiling. Dumped off the last of my mimis, two clusters of six.

Turned my climb into a loop, flying inverted just under the cavern roof. Rolled and hit the afterburners, kicked back in my seat as the Guardian zoomed away from the bunker.

Bet they thought they’d scared me off. Panicked me so bad I’d taken wild shots and run for my life.

A dozen contrails arced through the cavern. Mimis are built for random course changes so they’re harder to shoot down with AA, so it was like a nest of wispy, billowing snakes racing through the air. Up, up, then leveling out as gravity took hold, flying flat and straight. Then the contrails spluttering and disappearing as the rocket fuel ran out.

Did they wonder, then, did they guess? A dozen mimis still in the air, no longer powered, but still up there, falling now, falling back down to ground. Did they see it coming? The invisible hand of physics gripping the missiles now, the cold arithmetic of velocity, mass and resistance. Pulling them back down, towards the ground.

Red-black fireballs erupted on the cavern floor, the shockwaves visible as bows of white light pulsing outwards from each hit. An AA gun hit, pieces of men and machine tossed high into the air. A missile rack, cooking off its own load of mimis in a chain reaction. Three hit the bunker, one impacting on a viewport and incinerating a room full of cadre commanders peering outside. The other two smashed into the armored front doors, then the dual-purpose warheads filled the air with shrapnel and punched holes in the center of the door, filling the rooms beyond with twin jets of volcano-hot liquid metal.

Not much left of the PRIC high command after that.

My luck finally ran out on the way back when some lucky grunt on the ground hit me with a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile. Punched a hole in the wing and forced me to crash-land in the middle of that frigid little river running down the middle of the cave.

But that’s a story for another day.

EPISODE 2-5: Battle drills

Port Moseby was nice. The word ‘nice’ has a certain connotation doesn’t it? It’s the lukewarm tea of adjectives. Slightly pleasant but not too exciting, that was Port Moseby: Mild temperatures, mild geography, mild weather. Bland. Boring. Nice.

Mind you, after Poulsbo I was in the mood for a bit of boring. It was nice, for example, to know that the continent I was on would be in more or less the same place when I woke up the next morning, and that the number of local fish species which could conceivably kill and eat me was in the low single digits.

Back in 3022, the Lyrans had surprised the Dracs—and probably themselves—by retaking the planet after generations of Combine occupation. The people had been under the Combine boot for the last two, maybe three centuries, and had the fastidious politeness and uncertain joy of a population just learning that it would no longer be a capital offence to bow at the slightly wrong angle. The people were inoffensive. Nice.

The most impressive thing about it wasn’t on the planet at all, but rather its big emerald moon, Kiwi, a shade closer and larger than Terra’s own Luna, giving the oceans some impressive tides.

As a border world, we were on high readiness at all times. Spent a lot of time in the air, even a little in low orbit, putting the Black Arrows through battle drills. All the same, Reina and I still found a little time to rent a little cabin by a white sand beach, lie together in a big ol’ hammock beneath the pom-trees, looking up at that moon, hanging right over our heads.

That was nice, too.

Which, of course, meant it couldn’t last. Unity, I’d learn to hate that moon.

First sign of trouble was a grey-and-blue groundcar pulling up in front of the hangar, with a request-slash-order for Reina to get down to the 20^th Arcturan Guards CP in Feintuch City, ASAP. As the only ’Mech unit on the planet, the CO of the Guards was the de facto commander of the planetary defences. The invite was for Reina and the liaison officer, Anya McBride, but Reina pulled me into the back of the car, too.

The whole party was in attendance when we got there. Colonel Jurgen Petersen, with his saturnine face and black hair and beard spiked with grey. Duchess Joan Welman, back on her ancestral home after eight generations of living on handouts in exile on Tharkad. Prime Minister Simon Teltra, a Combine-era bureaucrat who’d been senior enough to be useful to the Lyrans, but not so senior that they’d had to purge him. The militia commander, the colonels of a couple of conventional armor and infantry regiments, plus a double handful of communications techs and intelligence officers rounded out the audience.

Most of them ignored us when we arrived: Teltra started to bow, then went for a handshake. Everyone else was glued to a huge monitor, on which there was an image, something in the low-pixel count, showing the long thin needle of a JumpShip. Timestamp in one corner showed earlier that day, digital letters in another spelled out: PTMB-OLY-SCAN:Z:001.

Colonel Petersen nodded to one of his intelligence officers, who stepped forward so he was directly under the center of the image. “At 0300 Feintuch time, the Olympus recharge station at the zenith jump point detected the arrival of an unscheduled JumpShip. Analysis of gravity waves and the video images suggests it is Star Lord class, tentatively identified as the DCMS vessel Soaring Crane.”

The image jumped, zooming in and losing even more definition. Mottled grey blobs—four rounded, one more linear—detached themselves from the needle and were haloed with the pixelated fire of thrusters. “The JumpShip immediately deployed six DropShips: One Vengeance-class, one Intruder-class, four Mammoth-class.”

Reina and I looked at each other. “What the hell are they thinking?” she said. Pretty much everyone in the room was echoing the sentiment, if not quite so succinctly. The Vengeance was a fighter carrier, with maybe two full squadrons and change on board, the Intruder an assault ship, heavily armed, with space for a reinforced company of marines.

So far, so what you might expect from a Drac raiding force.

“Perhaps a merchant convoy and escort?” Teltra said hopefully. Nobody bothered to correct him.

The Mammoth, you see, is a cargo ship. Correction, the Mammoth is a malking gigantic cargo ship. Nearly 20 times bigger than the Intruder, capable of hauling 40,000 tons of cargo. Each. Four of those on a trading mission would be excessive. Four on a raiding force would be idiotic.

“All six DropShips began a high-G burn towards Port Moseby. The Intruder made a high-speed pass by the Olympus station, targeting sensor arrays.”

There was a brief flash of cobalt light, and grainy image on the screen cut out in a wash of static.

That was another surprise. By unspoken consent among the Great Houses, attacking recharging stations like the Olympus was generally considered unsportsmanlike, gauche, a Very Naughty Thing Indeed. Those stations were vital to keeping the scattered web of humanity knit together. Knocking out its sensors came verrry close to crossing that rather sensitive interstellar Rubicon. Had to be something the Dracs were pretty desperate for us not to see. Took us a few days to find out what.

With the intel briefing over, Colonel Petersen took the floor.

“Your grace, Mister Prime Minister, gentlemen,” he intoned like a funeral parlor undertaker. “High G approach means we may have as few as three days to prepare. I’m declaring martial law and authorizing an emergency call up of all reservists. Wing Commander Paradis—” He turned to us. “I want one squadron in high orbit at all times, the other on standby. Let’s nail as many of these Snakes as we can before they hit dirt.”

Five days later, I was orbiting Port Moseby about 2,000 kilometers up with Lucky, Bulldog and Nova in tow. While refitting on Galatea, my flight had swapped the F-10 for the heavier HCT-214 Wildcat, a Hellcat variant with the engines mounted on either side of the fuselage rather than over the cockpit.

“Ah, this is the life,” said Lucky.

After sitting in a cockpit for six hours with the flight suit’s vac-seals making the seat about as comfortable as a Marik family reunion, I was thinking a lot of things, but the joy of flying in space was pretty far down that list.

“Yeah, it’s got everything,” I agreed. “Numbing boredom, freezing death on the other side of the glass, burning death down the gravity well. What’s not to like?”

“Well,” Lucky gave it some thought. “It’s quiet.”

When aerojocks joke we should be making double what the ’Mech jocks do, it’s the cold darkness of space we’re talking about. A BattleMech handles pretty much the same in any environment its in. Buddy, you’d better believe that flying in the air is different from flying in space. It’s a whole new, frictionless, weightless, a million-ways-to-kill-you ballgame. Mercenary aerospace units tend not to negotiate about salvage rights ‘cos if you get shot down out here, then only thing they’ll be salvaging is a microscopic layer of dust spread over half the planet.

If you’ve seen that new holovid about the fight over Stein’s Folly, you might assume that defending fighters are always scrambling to get spaceborne as invaders come ploughing through the atmosphere like comets. That only happens if a very large number of people have screwed up in a very large number of ways. No, what you want to do is have your fighters already up in orbit, with enough velocity to meet the invaders wherever they try to land.

You could post your fighters right at the jump point, I guess, but since there are two in any system, plus Unity-knows-how-many Lagrangian pirate points, that would be way too easy to either overwhelm or bypass altogether. And since each jump point can be connected to the system’s inhabited world by an infinite number of routes on parabolas of varying length, the only other option is to try to catch the blighters right over the planet. Otherwise, you’d find yourself hundreds of thousands of kilometers out of position, as the invading force whizzes merrily past you.

Which is precisely what happened.

“Parsifal one, this is Camelot Home,” a voice interrupted our banter. “Drive signatures detected. Bandits inbound.”

“Copy that Camelot Home. Give me some digits.”

“Azimuth one-one-zero, altitude oh-six-five, range two million kilos,” came the crisp reply. I narrowed the sensor scan in the direction indicated, and picked out the faint flickering of the approaching DropShips’ drive flares as they decelerated, preparing for the attack: The tiny little flicker of the Intruder, the irregular blobs of the outboard thruster units on each Mammoth.

Down on the surface I knew Reina and the rest of the Black Arrows would be taking off, rocketing skywards to reinforce us up here. The heavier fighters from the 20^th Guards’ air wing would follow soon after. Our job would be to clear the fighter escort provided by the Vengeance, giving the Lyrans a clear shot at the DropShips.

Bulldog came on the taccom. “Trajectory looks a little odd to me, chief.”

He was right. I punched the Lyran channel again. “Camelot Home, this is Parsifal one. Drive sigs are confirmed. We got a reading on their target zone?”

“Wait one,” came the terse response. “Calculating.”

We waited. Waited some more. Then, just for a change of pace, we waited.

“Still with me, Camelot?”

“Maybe they got sleepy?” Lucky suggested.

“Parsifal one, this is Camelot Home, inbound DropShip trajectories confirmed,” the other guy said at last. “Bogies are not headed for Port Moseby, repeat, not on course for Port Moseby atmospheric entry.” A pause. “It’s Kiwi.

“The Dracs are heading for the moon.”

Which put us a couple hundred thousand kilometers out of position to intercept them. Groans from Lucky and Bulldog. “You mean to say I’ve been stewing in my own fluids for the last two days for nothing?”

“We can still intercept over the moon,” Nova suggested.

In my cockpit I was shaking my head. The Vengeance had 40 birds, more than enough to wipe my 16 without breaking a sweat. We’d have to wait for Reina’s squadron and the Lyrans, and by then it would be too late.

“That’s a negative, Parsifal four,” I told her. “Might be something else we can do, though. Parsifal six,” I signaled Pepper, leader of the F-10 Recon flight. “This is Parsifal one. Anyone in the mood for some sight-seeing?”

We ramped two F-10Rs up to fly-by speed by slinging them around the planet a few times, then hurled them out towards the moon. It’d take them days to slow down and head back after their pass, but they’d also be going way too fast to engage.

It’s 300,000 kilometers from Port Moseby to its moon. Even at the terrific speeds the two F-10s were going, it took six hours until they whizzed by Kiwi like shooting stars, giving us a glimpse of what the Dracs were up to down there.

The Vengeance was in orbit, like a mother duck trailing a line of little aerospace fighters. The Intruder and four Mammoths were on the surface. The latter were unloading machinery, lobster-like things with diamond mandibles.

Drills.

The Dracs were drilling a tunnel into the moon.

EPISODE 2-6: Prepared positions

Why make rules for war? Like, ‘Don’t blow up the recharge stations,’ for example. Surely, ‘Do whatever it takes to win,’ is the only rule. Lot of people think that way, think they’re being all tough, Hard Men, not like the rest of us weak-kneed babies. Brother, I want to tell them, those rules are there to save you, not your enemies. Stop you from doing something you’ll regret, something you can’t take back. Ever.

The people who think that everything is a weapon, that nothing can be excluded lest your enemies use it first, those are the people who find too late they’re right. Use everything like a weapon, and everything becomes one. Use a nuke first, you can’t change your mind later, tell everyone they can’t use them anymore—you’ve already shown them they can. Can’t put a gun in someone’s hand, then tell them they can’t ever fire it. Doesn’t work that way.

There are other weapons, you see, just as deadly and long-lasting as a nuke, but just take a little longer to get around to killing everyone. Like insurgencies and civil wars. Like fanaticism. Learned that on Cronulla.

I’d just hit the local PRIC headquarters, turned their high command into bubbling pools of sizzling fat after knocking on their front door with a pair of high explosive armor-piercers. I was heading home, unbelievably still alive. I felt lucky, so very lucky. Then a kick, like someone hit me right in the tailbone, pain shooting right up my spine, and half the condition lights on my display turned red. Surface-to-air missile had taken off half the wing. Didn’t feel so lucky then.

Not enough headroom in the cavern to eject. Managed to get some thrust under me, just enough to make the belly-up landing bone-jarring instead of life-ending, the fighter coming to a splashing stop in the middle of the narrow river running down the cavern.

The pitch blackness saved me. Everyone in the whole cavern must have seen the plane go down, but once I popped the canopy and jumped out, it was just me and the shadows.

Didn’t have much on me: my custom Sunbeams, one on each hip, a medipack, GPS locator, timepiece and a communicator. Figured my best bet would be to make for the cavern wall, see if I could find one of the side tunnels leading to the surface, call for S&R when I got there.

The hunter squad found me just as I reached the wall. Half a dozen pairs of feet crunching through the scree and faintly bioluminescent lichen, throwing out pale beams from tac lights slung under their guns. One guy at the back with night vision goggles and a laser rifle, the rest dressed in civilian clothes and carrying submachineguns.

Ducked behind a boulder until they were almost on top of me. Then burst from cover, a Sunbeam in each hand, first shot punching a hole right through the heart of the night goggles guy, the second through the closest grunt. Confused shouting, lights jiggling and waving randomly as they tried to see who was firing at them.

Moving, shoulder roll, trying to stop them from getting a bead on me. Aimed for the lights, no sound but the hiss of superheated air around the laser beams, and two more guerillas went down, solid body shots, each drilled right through the chest.

Almost on top of the last two. Bullets spraying through the air over my head. A laser bolt torched one right through the neck. Last one. Point-blank range, so close I could see his face in the glow of his light.

A kid. A malking kid. Couldn’t be more than 14, 15 years standard. SMG pointed right at me but I froze. Couldn’t shoot a kid, not after, hell never mind after what. Hell if he didn’t pull the trigger. Hell if he didn’t try to kill me.

Click, click, click. His gun jammed. Locally-produced, cheap little thing, abused from being dragged through the dirt and mud, never properly cleaned. Damn thing jammed and the kid stood there, finger on the trigger, looking stupidly down at his gun.

A roundhouse kick sent it spinning from his hands, and then I had the two Sunbeams right in front of his face. “Not a word,” I hissed.

“Long live the People’s Front!” He shouted defiantly, and closed his eyes. Fumbled for something at his throat. I hit him with the butt of one pistol, knocking him off his feet. Holstered one Sunbeam and tore the thing from around his neck—a small clear vial, with a white capsule inside. Malking suicide pill. Threw it away as far as I could into the blackness.

“You want to die, I can shoot you in the gut,” I told the kid, brutally hard. “That’ll kill you sure enough. Take you all day, maybe. Nasty way to go, trust me. Option B is you keep your voice down and show me a way out of these tunnels.”

Kid looked mad but scared, all his courage gone with that little white pill of his. “The decadent League puppets and their mercenary running dogs are doomed,” he muttered, sullenly. “The people’s will cannot be denied.”

Ah, teenagers. You can always tell when they’re parroting somebody else’s words. He was so good at repeating meaningless blather, he would’ve felt right at home in the ACES. Hell, would probably have made squadron leader before me.

“Well, good for them.” I grabbed the night goggles off the leader, then hauled the kid up by the scruff of his shirt and half-dragged, half frog-marched him towards the nearest tunnel. More search parties would be headed this way, homing in on the sounds of our gunfight. “Though last time I saw your high command, they were looking pretty damn denied. If not deep-fried.”

“You will suffer for that.”

“Oh no, please, anything but that,” I said deadpan. Slipped on the goggles and adjusted the band. “Now move, before I show you how much suffering is involved in getting both your legs blown off.”

“Your cause is doomed,” the kid recited, but he shuffled along the tunnel all the same, a white blob in the goggles. “The corrupt nobles cannot resist the might of the righteous proletariat.”

“Sure, sure,” I agreed. “Keep moving. And Max Liao, the hereditary ruler of the Capellan Confederation and the Duke of Sian, will fix aristocratic corruption, will he?”

“What Cronulla needs is a strong leader.”

“Oh Unity,” I shook my head in the darkness. “Kid, a strong leader is literally the worst thing that could happen to you at this point. You never wonder why you never hear about successful revolutionaries on other planets? First, because 99% of rebellions fail, and in the incredibly unlikely event that they don’t, the first thing the arriving Capellans will do is round up you and your friends, and every other revolutionary cadre or green brigade they can find and liquidate you. Understand? Shoot, execute, murder you. Being a ‘strong leader’ is about control, kiddo, and the last thing a strong leader wants is a bunch of civvies who have learned they can overthrow any government they don’t like.”

“I hate you,” he sniveled to himself as he shuffled through those tunnels. Over and over again. “I hate you. I hate you.” Somehow, I don’t think my little speech had much effect on him.

So we trudged on. Darkness does strange things to your vision, you know? Like staring at yourself in the mirror for too long, your eyes get bored of looking at the same thing, you start hallucinating, start seeing that face warp and change until it’s unrecognizable. Same with pitch nothing. Inky shadows start to move, making shapes out of memory. Of other kids, other dark places, places you’d rather not think about again.

Two hours later we stopped for a break. Me slumped on a big, slimy rock, goggles pushed up on my forehead and a Sunbeam held loosely in one hand. The kid huddled in the fetal position on the ground. Blue-green glow of lichen all around. The GPS was pretty useless this far underground, but the compass stopped me from going in circles and the auto-map feature could at least show where I’d been, if not where I needed to go.

“Are you going to kill me?” The kid asked, voice gone real quiet. All the revolutionary fervor drained.

“I dunno,” I said, careless and tired. “You want me to?”

“I will be a martyr.” Poor sap, trying to convince himself. Tears running down his face giving the lie to his bravado.

“You will be forgotten,” I corrected, shaking my head. “Some nameless kid dead in some nameless tunnel on some nameless border world. Hell kid, you’re still a teenager. Live a little. Plenty of time to die, later, if that’s what you want.”

Hell of a thing, taking a kid like that an turning him into a killer, a fanatic. Everyone likes to talk about how the Ares Conventions saved the race from extinction, but you’ll notice they’re silent on the issue of child soldiers. Others worry the Conventions made war too palatable, too easy to use as an instrument of policy. Unity. Look at insurgencies like the one on Cronulla. Look at them, look at this kid, barely old enough for pimples, and tell me banning nukes was the reason we had so much war.

Hard Men, patting themselves on the back for how Hard they’d been, how ruthless, leaving no weapon untouched, not even little kids like this one. And there was the real war crime. Huddled in the blue-tinged blackness at my feet.

People sometimes ask me why I became a mercenary, why I didn’t believe in anything other than myself, my wingman and my paycheck. Well, really. Look what belief gets you.

“I’m not gonna kill you, kid,” I said, heaving myself back to my feet. “Not gonna let you go, either though. For your sake. Only survivor of a patrol that let an enemy pilot escape? Kid, you’ll be facing a firing squad before sundown. Fact is, escaping with me is pretty much the only chance you’ve got.”

That was cruel, but it was the truth. Kid knew it. Did start crying then, silent heaving sobs, rocking back and forth, all his friends gone, his family gone, nobody to go back to until this whole damn stupid bloody pointless revolution was over and done with. Hell of a thing, making kids fight. Some lines, we just shouldn’t cross.

We broke the surface an hour later. So good to feel sunshine on my face again, throwing off the goggles like a lizard shedding its skin. A dozen uniformed figures waiting for us outside the cave mouth. Camouflage fatigues, assault rifles, grim faces. Rotors of two VTOLs behind them slowly stirring, like restless dragonflies.

“Glass!” shouted a voice I knew. Max’s. One of the figures pushed back its helmet, and there he was, my old wingman. He frowned at the kid. “Who’s this then?”

“Tour guide.”

“Oh.” A puzzled shrug. “See anything interesting?”

“No, not really,” I admitted. “Just a lot of darkness.”

EPISODE 2-7: Unconventional warfare

An uneasy peace followed the Drac landing on Kiwi. They had 42 fighters to our 50—18 Guards, 32 Black Arrows—but although we had the numbers, Colonel Petersen held back. Pretty typically conservative Lyran of him: Their first thought when threatened is to circle the wagons. Petersen was sure this was a diversion, an attempt to weaken our aerospace forces before the real assault arrived in-system.

So we waited and watched. Hours turned into days. Days slid into weeks.

After a brief lock-down, merchant trade had warily resumed. One fine day, about six weeks after the Dracs touched down, a Mule-class freighter called the Other People’s Money blasted off on schedule, rose high above the planet, then rolled and reoriented itself towards the nadir jump point. The main drive kicked in again, plowing the DropShip forward at a steady 1G. The crew relaxed maybe, loosened up, settled in for the nine-day trip to the jump point. A routine run.

Lyran sensors trained on the Drac base on Kiwi detected a spike in electromagnetic energy.

For about the next two hours, nothing happened. The energy surge was not repeated. The Other People’s Money plowed steadily along through space.

And then.

The Other People’s Money shattered. Like a slow-motion holo of a bullet going through an apple, the hull peeled and buckled away from entry and exit holes suddenly blown straight through the fore and aft superstructure. Atmosphere, deck plates, machinery and crew were violently blasted out either end before the entire hull buckled and split into jagged shards that were flung in every direction.

Which was how the Dracs let us know they’d built a capital-scale railgun on Kiwi.

At the war council, Colonel Petersen’s always-somber face had gone sepulchral. Head bowed, he addressed the 3D holo-display table as much as anyone in the room. A wireframe outline of green Kiwi waltzed slowly about Port Moseby on the display.

Reina and I were at the back of the pack, watching over the heads of the assembled brass and civilian leaders.

“We’ve received a communication from a General Goshi Tengwan, commander of the 2^nd Sword of Light,” Petersen intoned. “Demanding the immediate grounding of all commercial DropShips in the system and the removal of all Commonwealth troops from the planet within three days.”

“Or?” asked Duchess Welman, clutching a jeweled pendant at her throat, looking positively sickly despite her name.

“Or the railgun will be turned against the planet,” Petersen finished.

“Sword of Light are fanatics,” said Teltra, the Prime Minister. “I don’t doubt he’ll carry out his threat.”

“Can he? Is this weapon so powerful?” Welman sounded horrified.

Petersen sighed, and tapped a button on the holomap. The sketchy outline of Kiwi expanded to fill the display, an angry red dot burning at the equator. “Looks like the Dracs have built a railgun capable of firing a 10 to 20-meter projectile at about 60 kilometers per second. That isn’t faster than light, so any ship en route to or from the jump point that makes irregular course changes should be safe. The greater danger is to the planet.” The holo zoomed in on the red dot, resolving into a thin red line below and almost perpendicular to the surface of the moon. “The cannon is buried here, in an excavated tunnel. Since Kiwi is tidally locked with Port Moseby, that means the gun is always facing towards the planet, though not always at the same hemisphere. So yes, given time they could theoretically use it to bombard anywhere on the planet. It would be like being hit by an asteroid strike, perhaps equivalent to 200 kilotons of TNT or more.”

A bit like a decent-sized nuke, in other words.

A railgun wasn’t new technology, but nobody had built one in hundreds of years. Even this one was so big and unwieldly it would’ve been useless anywhere but a microgravity environment like the moon. Turned out the Dracs had broken it down and loaded it into the Mammoths, then drilled a tunnel to serve as a mounting and assembled the pieces on-site. It was powered straight from the reactors of the four DropShips, and since aerodynamics don’t mean spit in a vacuum, the rocks they’d excavated for the hole became the ammo. Being buried almost totally underground meant it couldn’t be traversed more than a few degrees, but when the closest target is a couple hundred thousand kilometers away, that was enough.

“Launch an aerospace strike,” advised the Guards’ air wing commander.

Petersen sighed. “The cannon is buried underground. It would take a miracle to sling a bomb down the hole. We could target the DropShips, but I doubt we could take out all four.”

“A ground assault?” one of the ’Mech battalion commanders suggested.

Petersen pursed his lips, then shook his head. “We still haven’t seen the four ’Mech battalions from the 2^nd Sword yet. This could still be a diversion. Too risky with two DropShips and almost four dozen fighters flying cover.”

There was uncomfortable silence around the holotable.

“So, what, we’re just going to surrender?” Duchess Welman asked, disbelieving.

And then Reina spoke up.

“Nuke it.”

A dozen pairs of disbelieving, outraged eyes swiveled to face Reina and me.

“The Ares Conventions—” Teltra was spluttering.

“Prohibit the use of nuclear weapons against civilian targets or military targets within 75,000 kilometers of an inhabited world,” Reina interrupted. “There’s nobody up there but Drac soldiers, and Kiwi is four times further away than the minimum.”

Petersen cocked an eyebrow. “There’s the precedent to consider.”

Reina crossed her arms over her chest. “They’re already setting precedent: First they fired on the recharge station, now they’re threatening orbital bombardment. They want to prove how ruthless they’re willing to be? I say we give them a taste of their own radiation.”

Ah, our old pal the nuclear bomb. Talk about crossing a Rubicon: This was The Big One. Humanity’s fatal attraction, one we keep being drawn to and then pulled back from, each time cresting just that little bit closer to an apocalypse. And yet, what’s the difference between a 200 kiloton nuke and a 200 kiloton asteroid strike? If you’re standing underneath: Not much.

See what I mean guys? Once a line is crossed, it stays crossed. Can’t uncross it.

“You back down now, they’ll only come at you that much harder next time,” Reina said.

“But this could cause an escalation—”

“Have you been listening?” Reina shouted. “They have a cannon that can wipe out any base or city on the planet. They’ve already upped the ante. Only question is, are you going to raise the stakes or fold?”

Trust Reina to suggest we use the nuclear option. New Avalon Tong, she knew all about how to use threats and violence like tools, like levers to move people the way you want. No time for chivalry and fair play and all the other grand lies the Great Houses liked to tell themselves. What does interstellar politics have in common with gang violence? Everything. Only difference is the number of zeroes on the casualty lists.

This Tengwan guy, wanted to be the Hard Man. The toughest kid on the block, like those guerillas on Cronulla. He should’ve spent some time on the streets of New Avalon. There, they know there’s no such thing as ‘escalation.’ You either go all in right from the start, or you go home.

Teltra was going to argue more, but Petersen raised his hand. The movement stopped the conversation. Petersen just stared at the holo of the moon for a little, then turned to his aerospace commander. “Well, can we?”

Give the guy credit, he was ready for the question. “Yes sir. We have six ALMO-1s in storage.” Aerospace-Launched Multipurpose Ordinance, a milquetoast name for a 5-kiloton nuke, like the makers were afraid of what they’d made. Better known as an ‘Alamo.’ “Either launch them from the surface or they can be fitted to the W5s. Wouldn’t have to hit the cannon, just take out the power source: the DropShips. They’re close enough together that just one would be enough to do the trick.”

Petersen nodded, turned back to Reina and me. “What do you think, commander? Your men up for a little escort duty?”

It took more than three days to dig the six warheads out of long-term storage, check that each was still in one piece, and fit them to torpedoes that could be slung beneath the Lyran fighters.

On the third day, the dragon flame of a fireball streaked across the sky with a bone-rattling boom that shattered windows for kilometers in every direction, before arcing down over a commercial spaceport on the Java continent. The cannon-launched asteroid finally exploded about half a kilometer overhead, releasing a sledgehammer shockwave that flung DropShips about like toys and flattened every building, followed microseconds later by a wall of fire that incinerated everyone at the port.

A warning shot.

The torpedoes were ready to go the next day.

Six CHP-W5 Chippewas, each one fitted with a single, fat cigar of an ALMO-1 missile strapped to its belly.

Hats off to those pilots, some of the bravest men and women I’ve ever met.

Heavy fighter pilots actually have the shortest life expectancy of any aerojocks. It works like this: After analyzing millions of hours of combat footage, statisticians have calculated that 3% of all shots that land hit the cockpit. Now, the bombers are in combat the most, get thrown against the most heavily-defended targets and are the easiest to hit due to their slow speed, which means they get hit more than anyone else. And so the brutal law of averages says they’re gonna get hit in the cockpit the most, which means they’re the ones most likely to get flash-vaporized by some lucky punk with a particle cannon strapped to the nose of his fighter.

Take a second to remember them, pilots of the 20^th Arcturan Guards: Alex Ferguson, Eric Liddell, Nicola Sturgeon, Annie Lennox, Robert Stevenson and Muriel Spark.

We’d learned the lessons of Poulsbo, though. The Black Arrows would go in first, draw off the Sword of Light fighters, keep them busy while the Chippewas made their attack run. They could have fired the missiles from thousands of kilometers out, but Petersen was worried the Dracs might detect them and shoot them down. So, point-blank range it was.

Wasn’t looking forward to it, not a bit. Elsies and second-rate mercs over Poulsbo were one thing, but the Swords were the elite of the elite, some of the best the Dracs had anywhere. Even though we had the numbers, smart money would probably have bet against us.

We lifted off in the planet’s shadow, set a looping course that would keep us away from the cannon’s mouth, and watched that big green ball grow bigger and bigger in the forward glass (We found out later another asteroid was fired in the meantime, flattening the old Guards CP where we’d had the briefing, along with a sizable chunk of Feintuch City). Nowhere to hide out here. They knew we were coming.

And then hours of waiting were over. Helmet display coming alive with targets, so much red my whole facebowl was rose-tinted. Clicked the safeties off, laser cannons hot and ready to rumble. Lucky above and behind my port wing. Bulldog and Nova off to starboard. Eight more F-10s behind us, Reina’s F-90 and the other Black Arrows squadron out there too, faint pinpricks against the backdrop of stars. Maybe fifteen minutes behind, the Guards aerospace wing carrying the six big ol’ atom-smashers.

I clicked the mike to get everyone’s attention. “All right, listen up Parsifal squadron. Only two orders today: Stick by your wingman, and kill Dracs. Any questions?”

“What was that second part again?”

Lucky. Take more than nuclear annihilation to make him take anything seriously. “Just watch my tail and leave the difficult part to me, Singh.” No time for more chatter. “Here we go. Party time.”

A flight of Sholagars on full afterburners, trying to punch right through our formation and get to the Guards behind us. Going so fast they couldn’t maneuver, made it easy to just put the targeting dot right on the nose of the lead one and squeezed the trigger. Armor held for a microsecond, then slagged, buckled. Turned the forward third of the fighter into a melted lump of metal, what was left of the pilot smeared inside. The fighter kept going, dead weight now, just hurtling on forever until it hit a planet or was pulled into the sun.

Sholagars whipped by, couple of laser hits scorching the armor on my wings.

Flipped 180 without killing my forward momentum—in space, where you’re heading and where the nose is pointing are two different things—and hosed the tail of another one. Hit one of the attitude thrusters, suddenly venting propellant like an aerosol can and throwing the fighter into a carousel spin. Rest of them were out of range still hurtling towards the bombers.

We had a channel to talk with the Guards, but they were filling it with headache-inducing constant chatter, so I left it off. Only people who could cut through would be Camelot Home back on Port Moseby. No way to warn them. I’d just have to hope they saw the Shos coming, and would figure out what to do.

And then chaos as we flew into the heart of their formation.

Lucky singing out targets as fighters flashed by, space coming alive with a dance floor of multicolored laser beams and micro-missile trails. “Shill, two o’clock high!” My Wildcat shuddering as a Shilone took a swipe at me before diving past. Swung the nose after him even as we slid past each other without changing trajectory, letting inertia strafe the lasers across him, gouging lines of melted armor along one wing and the fuselage, before I slammed the stick all the way to the right and rolled to avoid an answering salvo of missiles.

No chance to follow up. Another pair of Shilones diving right down at Lucky and me. “Break left!” Then ramming the throttle full open, kicked back in my seat as the engine roared to life, sending me at right angles to my last trajectory. Swinging the nose around at the diving Dracs, trigger finger working almost spasmodically, fire, fire, fire. Weapon-ready indicators on my HUD flickering like strobe lights as they fired, cycled, fired. Red holes burned deep into the other fighter.

Tough mothers, not like the novices on Cronulla who flinched if you shone a flashlight at their nose. Drac just flipped to show me his undamaged side, without ever letting up the return fire. Left him open to Lucky coming towards the other side, triple lasers carving his fighter apart like Sunday dinner.

Sensors flashed a warning as a Slayer settled on my tail. Rear-firing auto-turret kicking in, spewing out kilojoules of energy at the fighter. “Some help here, Lucky.” Spinning through three axes to avoid a hail of lead from the thing’s nose cannon.

Then the Slayer seemed to jerk and writhe as it was pounded by laser and particle cannon fire. Glanced back to see Reina’s F-90 spinning in a donut around the stricken Slayer, shattering each wing then punching a line of holes through the fuselage. Left the fighter a burning, tumbling wreck. Pilot in the cockpit probably praying he’d be picked up when this was all over.

Reina’s voice in my headphones. “Sunny, the bombers!”

Looked at the long-range scan, saw what she meant. Dracs had figured out what we were trying to do, and started throwing themselves at the bombers like wasps defending their nest.

“Parsifal squadron, protect the bombers. Maximum burn, now. Ignore everything else.”

Came up behind a damaged Shilone trying to slow down enough to get a decent shot at the lead Chippewa. Fired a seven-gun salvo, everything I had right into his back. Hammered through the belly, lasers zipping right through, punching through the back of the cockpit, through the back of the seat, through the back of the pilot.

“’Preciate the save,” said Sparks, the Chippewa pilot, on a direct channel to me. “Now let’s—” A stream of armor-piercers from a Slayer ripped through her cockpit, splattering red across the inside of the ferroglass. Her fighter seemed to hesitate for a sec, then blew apart, and I had to kick in the ABs again to avoid shooting fragments.

Three minutes to the torpedo launch point.

Liddell’s was the next to go, a crippled Slayer deliberately plowing headlong into his fighter, annihilating both in a blinding flash of light. Then Sturgeon, torn apart by a swarm of Shilones.

Bulldog shouting something incoherent right down my eardrums. “Say again Parsifal three?”

“The carrier!”

Mass detector on my sensor scope pinging like crazy, then a shadow fell across the cockpit as something came between me and the star, blocking it our entirely.

The Vengeance DropShip. Dracs had committed their carrier, risked their ride home in an all-out bid to stop us. Close-range AA batteries opened up on everything around it, surrounding the ship in a web of green fire. Missile tubes starting pumping out salvos of 90 micro-missiles at a time, swarms of murderous fish racing down towards the Chippewas.

Stevenson banking, too late, caught in the middle of a missile salvo, the white bloom of impact, another impact, hit, hit, hithithithit, they just kept coming and coming, eating through the fighter, almost sanding it into nothing.

Two minutes to launch. Two bombers left.

“Lucky, Bulldog, Nova,” I sang out. “Follow me. We’re taking out that ship.”

Crackle of mikes as each pilot clicked acknowledgement. Felt rather than heard the thrum of the twin engines roaring at maximum.

Dove into the web the DropShip was weaving, curling around fingers of killing light, approach from behind, then skimming along the hull surface, almost close enough to touch, blasting gun ports and missile launcher blisters. Other three following behind, burning livid orange gashes along the hull.

One minute.

Wildcat shuddering as a particle cannon found me, burst of energy smacking into the left wing weapons pod. Three lasers out. Then I was past the hull, out in front. Flipped, full reverse thrust, coming back towards the nose of the DropShip. Aimed right at the bridge.

Full magnification, I could see their faces. See the captain screaming something, ship beginning to turn as my finger caressed the trigger. Four laser bursts, right through their front window. Melted ferroglass ran like water then webbed and burst outwards, unable to hold back the air inside any more. Explosive decompression, bridge crew picked up by an invisible giant and hurled outside, into the vacuum of space. They were suited up, so the ones that didn’t get cut in half by jagged glass or flying machinery would live, for a while.

With the bridge gone, the ship lost fire control. Some gunners still firing, but erratic now, uncoordinated. Drives still obeyed the helmsman’s last orders, a hard turn to port. DropShip started going in circles.

Torpedo launch.

Two silver cylinders dropped clear of the bombers, then sparked to life, their rockets hurling them forwards.

Dracs gave up shooting at the bombers, focused everything on the missiles now.

A Sholagar tried to ram one, missed, flew straight into the side of the Vengeance and detonated. Another got behind one torpedo, fired, once, twice, scored a glancing hit, torpedo corkscrewing wildly off course, headed for deep space. Last torpedo.

I dove behind on the Sho, started hammering at him with all four remaining guns. Like a bristleback with its jaws locked around a bone, he wouldn’t let go. Engine redlining. Spine felt like it was going through the back of the seat. On full afterburner, I’d get one more shot before he was out of range. Breathed. Concentrate. Fire. Hit. His drive engine flickered, flared. Exploded.

Reina yelling in my ears again, “Pull up, pull up, pull up!”

Too close to the detonation zone. Flipped, maximum thrust again. G-suit working overtime to keep me awake, felt like a family of elephants sitting on my chest. Wildcat slowed, came to a relative stop. Began to accelerate away from the moon again.

Flash.

Like a newborn sun suddenly appearing over the moon for a split second. Stark, hard-edged shadows flung across the cockpit. Then dark, like that little kernel of brilliance had sucked all light in the universe into itself.

Then boom.

The four Mammoths gone. Blown down like bowling pins. Shattered and cracked, eggshell shards sent flying into space. Their crews nothing more than flash-burned memories on stone, and an expanding cloud of molecules billowing from the surface of the moon.

The ragged remnants of our three squadrons regrouped, unpursued by the Dracs.

“Looks like they’ve got their hands full getting the DropShip under control.”

“We should finish them off,” argued Nova.

“More likely they’d finish us off,” replied Bulldog. “Live and let live, just be happy you’re alive and this is over.”

I’d just punched up the Guards channel to give them a verbal pat on the back, which is how I heard it when Camelot Home overrode the channel.

“All fighters, return to Port Moseby. Repeat, all fighters, return to Port Moseby,” the controller was calling, over and over. “DCMS DropShips inbound. Repeat, all fighters, return to Port Moseby.”

Wasn’t over. Not yet.

EPISODE 2-8: Presence Projection

I: The Plan

Why do I get so worked up about kids? Huh, well. Guess it’s time to tell you about the time I left the Corps.

This is all fiction, of course. The Directors of SAFE and ISF will swear to Butte Hold and back that it never happened, and if you can’t trust the heads of two of the galaxy’s most secretive organizations, then who CAN you trust? Sorry, seem to have dripped some sarcasm on the floor there. Mind you don’t step in it; it stains.

I said earlier running an interstellar empire is like running a gang. Right? When you’re the leader of the gang, you can’t take any insults to your pride, ‘cos that makes you look weak, and if you look weak, you’re dead. Same goes for House rulers, only more so.

So three of these interstellar gang leaders got together in a little mountain resort on Terra called Schloss Elmau. They’d agreed to help each other, but one of them felt the other two needed his help far more than he needed theirs. Now, I won’t name names and say who the arrogant one was, except that it was Takashi Kurita and I lied just now. Sorry.

Anyway, that arrogance rankled, and one of the other two gang leaders’ lieutenants decided to do something about it.

One of the things Lord Kurita had said was that ISF wouldn’t share intelligence with SAFE, since SAFE “leaked worse than an origami umbrella in a typhoon.” Gang leaders can’t let comments like that slide. Something had to be done to put our pal Kurita in his place.

So it fell to the leader of the Eagle Corps at the time, Colonel Stanislaw Yildiz, to do that ‘something.’ Yildiz was a bear of a man, solid as an Awesome, warm as a shot of bourbon, serious as a PPC to the reactor. He was a king among men. For this story, let’s call him Arthur.

I once heard him ask a captain what he thought of the M4T pulse rifles. Captain in question said something along the lines of they’re fine, thank you sir. Arthur looked him in the eye, and verrrry quietly asked him the same question again. Now, the M4T was okay, but overheated in any sustained firefight. But the captain just gulped a bit, said no problem sir, we’re getting along fine. So Arthur said that wasn’t what he’d heard at all, in fact he’d heard they were shoddy pieces of junk, and when he asked his officers a question, he expected an honest answer.

Captain in question was gone by the end of the week, and the Eagles were immediately issued the new, more rugged and accurate Austen Vale ERS-302 rifles. A King.

This King Arthur then, he was the one asked to put the Dracs in their place. On the grey and white moon of Wendigo, overlooking the planet Atreus, was an underground complex called the Eyrie, which is the kind of name you get when hoo-rah commandoes are allowed to name things. In the innermost room of the Eyrie, King Arthur assembled a group of seven men about a round table.

Their leader was Ezekiel J… call him Gawain. Brave, bold if short-tempered. Guinevere was the demolitions expert, Merlin the intelligence specialist. Lancelot handled the heavy weapons, Morgana navigation and fire support. Tristan was the marksman, Percival the pilot.

King Arthur told them what he wanted. Some eyebrows were raised.

“Sir, but aren’t they our allies?” asked Percival. The newest member of the squad, he was young and keen. Anyway, Arthur was the kind of commander you could ask these questions—who you’d better ask these questions, or he’d think you a fool.

“Not yet,” replied Arthur with a grin. “And not on their terms, but ours. You do this right, we tweak their noses, nobody gets hurt. Do you think you can do this right?”

A chorus of seven voices: “Sir! Yes sir!” Which is the kind of reply you get when you ask hoo-rah commandoes if they can do something.

The squad grabbed their gear. ERS rifles, sonic stunners for non-lethal work, flashbangs, breaching charges, laser saws. They were calm, professional, talking and joking as they worked. As the newest member of the squad, Percival was given the roughest ride by the rest.

“Step it up, Percival. Ain’t in the provincials any more,” called Tristan. Percival had transferred from the Fusiliers of Oriente, but might as well have been deep Periphery militia for all the respect it got him.

“Think Morgana’s got his sensors all cluttered,” laughed Merlin. True enough, watching her change had driven the pilot to distraction. To Percival, Merlin said: “Give it up now, hick. She’s out of your weight class.”

Morgana overheard, but she just smiled and gave Percival an appraising look. “I don’t know boys, he looks maneuverable enough. Bet he handles well at all speeds.”

The next morning (Atreus-time) the delta wing of a heavily-modified ST-46 shuttle—bearing the skull-and-bullet hole insignia of a pirate gang that hadn’t existed until six hours before—slipped quietly away from Wendigo. The brief flare of its drive was soon lost in buzzing in-system traffic and the cloud of stars, before its faint firefly dot discretely looped away from the major shipping lanes and was swallowed by the long shadow of a Scout-class JumpShip.

What the seven didn’t know, indeed only one of them ever found out, was that King Arthur’s reign would soon be ending. A few weeks after their briefing, he returned by shuttle to Atreus. On approach to the landing strip, a confused novice in another shuttle waiting at the end of the strip thought he’d been given clearance to take off. Arthur’s shuttle slammed into the other, ripping straight through the dorsal plating and smashing into the fuel tanks. The two shuttles sat in a confused tangle of burning metal in the middle of the landing strip for a few minutes, as fire crews raced to the scene—only to be caught when the fuel tanks finally went up in a pillar of burning light.

Some said sabotage, but no: Just plain, dumb, stupid luck. Not everything is a conspiracy.

Arthur’s successor as commander of the Eagle Corps, Baz Vukovic, was an altogether different kind of man. We’ll call him Mordred, for reasons that will become apparent.

In the meantime, a JumpShip carrying the shuttle and its seven crew members—running dark an unaware of these events—emerged several weeks later at a pirate point in the shadow of the moon Olgar, orbiting the planet Altair V in the Draconis Combine.

II: The Assault

Altair was a pretty miserable excuse for a planet, a blisteringly hot desert with tiny teacups of surface water at either pole, skin-scouring winds, industrial-grade air pollution and a species of subterranean crocodiles called sand sharks. The only thing of real note in the system was the floating wreckage of the ancient Izumi Shipyards in orbit around Olgar, where JumpShips had been built and repaired in happier times before being merrily pulverized into scrap metal by every House within reach—which, as it turns out, had been all of them.

The yards were not completely abandoned, however. A small (and supposedly unarmed) team of Combine techs and astechs, engineers and planners and supply chain managers were said to be on board, repairing what they could, planning for the eventual rebirth of the station. Among the many things these people did was run simulations on travel and repair times needed for the Combine’s JumpShip fleet, and it was this data the seven in the shuttle had been sent to retrieve.

The pirate shuttle passed out of Olgar’s shadow into the stark blue-white light of Altair’s star, and Percival saw the shipyards before him. The shattered metal ribcage of leviathan building docks that had once launched ships that sailed at impossible speeds through invisible dimensions, still trailing twisted and strangely delicate cranes and robotic welding arms, twisted as though in agony, reaching out in mute supplication. Light spilled out into darkness from narrow windows in a rotating torus at one end, but the rest was as silent as a graveyard.

“’Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.’” Pecival quoted.

“You’ll be despairing if you don’t keep the docks between us and the crew quarters,” grunted Gawain. He’d made a reputation for toughness, and had no time for poetry. In the seat next to Percival, Morgana threw him a flickering smile of sympathy, then bent back to her scopes.

Percival cut the drive and they coasted in on hydrazine thrusters, avoiding sensor detection by hiding behind the station’s mass. On passive sensors only: he flew almost without instrumentation, by instinct, almost. In the cargo hold, Tristan and Lancelot shouldered heavy thruster packs, a laser saw and the collapsed hemisphere of a polymer boarding bubble.

With a flick, Percival sent the shuttle over the last piece of cover—the long, bulky cylinder of the old ammunition magazine—and Morgana switched on jammers, flooding the station’s sensors with digital shadows and drowning their communications in static.

Percival matched velocities with the rotating torus, bringing the shuttle gently against the docking port. Tristan and Lancelot exited out the cargo airlock, jetting on thrusters to the opposite side of the ring, where they unfolded the hemispherical boarding bubble around themselves and epoxied it in place.

The clock was ticking. It’d be a matter of moments before those inside the shipyard noticed something was wrong. Everyone suited up, in deliberately mismatched combat zero-G suits, stiffened with reflective ceramic plates over the chest, abdomen and upper arms. Checked seals and air supply. Grabbed their rifles, the new Energy Rifle System, ERS-302. Short and blocky, with a thumbhole stock that also housed the energy cell.

Gawain put a finger to his lips, like they needed reminding. Pointed to Guinevere, then the airlock door. Waved Percival and Morgana to one side, Merlin the other. All three crouched, rifles ready and pointed at the airlock. Guinevere pressed shaped plastic explosive charges along the outer edges of the airlock, and wired the detonators. She crouch-walked back to the others with a crooked smile and a red-buttoned detonator in one hand.

Gawain glanced at the timepiece set into his suit’s wrist. Tristan and Lancelot should be in position. He waved towards the airlock, once, twice. Attack.

Guinevere pressed the button. There was a loud hiss of primer followed by a muffled crump, and the airlock door fell inwards, landing on the station deck in an echoing metallic clang and thick haze of smoke.

Waiting for the smoke to clear. Eyes down sights. Merlin too eager to go, already rising from his crouch.

At the end of the entry corridor, two figures standing. Not techs or engineers. Black-uniformed men holding Seburo-12 subsonic assault rifles, a favorite among the Combine’s TSG, Tokushu Sakusen Gun internal security special tactics units. “Ute!” shouted one, and fired a clattering burst down the corridor.

Merlin’s helmeted head jerked back, the visor inside splattered with red, and he pitched over backwards. The Eagles were firing, filling the corridor with the snap-hiss of laser shots, catching the first man in a fusillade, kicking him back in a half-somersault as the laser bolts punched right through him.

The other man fired another burst, and ducked back around the far end of the corridor.

Morgana slithered over to Merlin while Guinevere, Gawain and Percival kept the corridor covered. She grabbed his armpits and pulled him back into the shuttle compartment. At the far end of the corridor, there was the ping of laser fire. Once, twice. The second Combine soldier slid into view, looking stupidly down at his chest, where there were two smoking holes, exposing the burnt skin beneath. He took a tottering step, then fell forward on his face.

Tristan and Lancelot had arrived, having cut their way through the hull (the boarding bubble prevented the entire hub from decompressing), sneaking up behind the soldier and putting two laser bolts through his back.

No time to celebrate: Gawain waved them on. Morgana stayed with Merlin in the shuttle, the others formed three teams—Gawain and Guinevere, Tristan and Lancelot, then Percival on his own. They split up and stormed wordlessly through the hub, sweeping room after room, the only sound the smack of their combat boots on the deck plates, gunning down a few bewildered TSG men without even slowing down.

Lancelot, Tristan, Guinevere and Gawain found more TSG barricaded in the central command hub, who they flushed out with flashbang grenades and cut down with accurate laser fire, but let’s follow Percival as—alone—he swept the outer modules of the station, the storerooms, recycling tanks and greenhouses.

The Kurita subsonic rifles saved his life. Edging around a corner, he heard the bark of a Seburo-12 and threw himself to the deck, as the shots hammered into the hull above his head, puffs of metal and plastic detonating out from the wall and showering Percival in white dust. Any other gun, he’d have been dead—but the Combine special tactics teams like the low recoil and lack of muzzle flash of the subsonic, which gives you that fraction of a microsecond to react.

Prone on the deck, Percival spotted two TSG men crouching by metal storage boxes piled in front of one of the storerooms. He fired, rolled, firing as he rolled, blowing out a haze of metal fragments as he slagged long lines across the boxes. One guard screamed as a swarm of metal fragments flew into his face, slicing one side to red ruin. He staggered out from cover—and Percival hit him with the laser rifle twice, once through the eye, once through the heart.

The second guard rose into a crouch, something in his hand, cocked back to throw. Percival’s shot took him through the armpit, pitching the man violently backward to lie, sprawled on the deck amid a growing puddle of blood.

Percival cautiously approached the door they’d been guarding. Heard hushed voices from the other side. He sidled up along the wall, kicked open the door and rolled through, coming up in a combat crouch, weapon ready.

A startled swarm of white eyes stared at him in terror.

The storeroom was filled with people. Young, old, children. Mostly women, a few men. Most wore grey or olive jumpsuits, many threadbare, torn or stained. A baby cried. Cots and stacks of plastic cabinets were strewn about the room, and dirty plastic sheets had been hurriedly strung at intervals partitioning the space into rough rectangles, creating the impression, if not reality, of privacy.

Percival rose slowly, relaxing slowly. His helmet radio crackled with Gawain’s voice: “Camlann secured.” Code for the station command hub. “Lancelot is down. Other teams report.”

Morgana replied first. “Merlin is alive but unconscious. Helmet absorbed most of the energy, bullet just creased the silly bugger’s scalp.”

“Acknowledged,” Gawain said curtly. “If he can be moved, bring him down here. Need you to access the system while Merlin is out. Percival?”

“Two rats down, and, uh.” How to explain? “Found a room full of civilians, sir.”

A beat. “Say again Percival?”

“Civilians, sir,” Percival repeated. They weren’t supposed to be there, of course, just like the there weren’t supposed to be any guards. “Estimate about fifty.”

“Who are they?”

“No idea, sir.”

“Well find out. Lock them in and report back here.”

Percival clicked the mic twice to acknowledge. Then reached up, released the seals on his helmet and eased it off. A hundred eyes watched his every move warily. He sat down with a sigh, on a big metal case, something that had been used to store missile warheads. The red lettering that said THIS SIDE UP was upside down.

“You got a spokesperson?” he asked the crowd.

A chatter among them, fast, in Interslav or Esfinn, too fast for him to follow. A kid stood up. Early teens, maybe, shock of pale blond hair over a wide face. Reminded Percival of his own brother, back on Oriente. Nervous, but defiant, too.

“Guess I am.” The kid said. “You gonna kill us? Sell us into slavery?”

Right, the squad was dressed like pirates, see. Pirates on Altair wasn’t as surprising as you might think—these days people assume pirates only live out beyond the Periphery. Not so. Look at a star map: What you see are only the known, inhabited systems. The whole network is interpenetrated by thousands and thousands of uncharted, supposedly uninhabited systems that were home to innumerable fly-blown colonies of extremists, outcasts and ‘antisocial groups.’ Heck, even the outer edges of a lot of inhabited systems could hide fair-sized populations of bandits, pirates and slavers, dug into some distant gas giant moon.

So the kid had figured out pretty quick the newcomers didn’t look like Steiner or Davion regulars, combined with the skull patch of the ‘Black Hole Sons’ on Percival’s shoulder plates, meant his guess that the invaders were pirates was a pretty good one.

“Don’t plan to do either, no,” Percival said. “We’re just here for the data. We get that, we’ll be on our way, no trouble to you. So sit tight, stay calm and everything will be fine.” He cocked his head at them. “Who are you people anyway? Where’s your dad?”

“On ‘sabbatical,’” the kid said grimly. Combine colloquialism, meant his dad was a teacher or professor who’d voiced some unorthodox opinions, shown dangerous signs of original thought, and been ‘invited’ to attend a retraining camp. “Mom’s an aerospace engineer.”

“She got a name?”

“Nadia.”

Percival nodded. “Okay, I’ll see if we can get her down here in a bit. Maybe we can trade. I help you, you help me. Sound fair?” The kid nodded, guardedly. “All I want to do is ask some questions,” Percival reassured him. “Like, what are you folks even doing up here?”

The question was dumb enough that the kid actually managed to crack a half-grin. “Have you ever been to Altair?” he asked. Yeah, the blistering desert with polluted air thing. “Everyone brings their family, if they can.”

“You allowed to do that?” Percival asked in surprise.

“No,” the kid said simply. “Mom had to bribe the shuttle pilot. That’s why the Toku-saku are here: Somebody found out. They were going to take us back.”

See, not a conspiracy, just more dumb luck. Dumb luck we … uh, they hadn’t known civilians were on board the shipyards, dumb luck they arrived just when the TSG was sent to bring the families back.

Percival scratched his head, said “Huh, well,” or something intelligent like that, when the kid’s eyes suddenly darted to a point beyond Percival’s right earlobe. He grabbed his rifle and spun, and saw the second TSG guard, the one he’d shot through the armpit, standing there, swaying, splattered in blood from chest to chin.

“Omae was mou,” he grinned redly, “Shinde iru.”

And he tossed something into the room, a careless underhand throw with the last of his strength, before his legs gave way and he slid wetly down the side of the bulkhead. Glass-eyed. Dead.

The thing he’d tossed rolled to a stop at Percival’s feet. A small black cylinder, rimmed in red at one end. What the League called a Red Tag, on account of the big red tag the Combine fitted to one end so uneducated troops would know where to pull the pin.

A frag grenade. In an enclosed space like the storeroom, enough to kill or maim half the people there.

“Grenade!” Percival yelled, acting on instinct, kicking the case he’d been sitting on over on top of the grenade, and then throwing himself face-down on top of it. Confused screaming—some who’d seen the guard throw the grenade, some who’d just seen the blood, some who just screamed so they wouldn’t feel left out.

A detonation like a thunder clap. Percival felt as though an Awesome had kicked the case he was lying on. Five pieces of shrapnel burst through the top of the case, three smacking into Percival’s body armor, a fourth grazing his arm with an acid sting, the last narrowly missing an eye. That case—an ammunition carrying case, made of heavy duty plate, designed to protect the warheads from abuse. Only reason I’m talking with you today. If that had been me, which it wasn’t. Of course.

Percival shakily got to his feet, counted arms and legs, and was pleasantly surprised at the result. He tottered over to the kid. “THANKS BUDDY,” he said (his ears were still ringing from the blast), and clapped the kid on the shoulder. “I OWE YOU ONE.”

“WHAT?”

“FOR SAVING MY LIFE.”

“CAN’T HEAR YOU, BUT THANKS FOR SAVING OUR LIVES.”

“YEAH, THANKS FOR SAVING MY LIFE.”

“I DON’T HAVE A WIFE. I’M FIFTEEN.”

Percival sighed, gave up talking, just gave the kid a thumbs up. Shut and locked the storeroom door, and made his way to the hub’s command center.

On the way, he passed the medical bay. Guinevere was folding Lancelot’s hands over his chest. He looked peaceful, but for the neat round hole in the collarbone. Merlin lay beside him, head wrapped in white gauze.

In the command center, Morgana was at a bank of computers, frowning over the displays, poking and prodding keys at irregular intervals while Gawain hovered over one shoulder. Half a dozen black-clad TSG guards lay torn and bloodied about the room, their Seburo-12 guns stacked in one corner. Tristan stood watch over about two dozen jumpsuited techs, astechs and planning staff huddled on the floor. One of the prisoners clapped a bloodied bandage to his ear, where Gawain had shot off his earlobe for being too slow to cooperate. Tristan’s laser rifle slung across his back and a fat, stubby sonic stunner in his hand.

“Sir,” Percival was about to salute, but checked himself. Pirates, remember, pirates. “Outer modules secure.”

Gawain acknowledged him with a brief nod, went back to watching the displays. From the corner of his mouth, he asked, “The civvies?”

“Family of the station crew, sir.” Percival threw a quick glance at the prisoners. “They say the Tokushu Sakusen Gun were here to remove them, take them back to Altair.”

Gawain grunted. “We found their shuttle. One of the other airlocks.” Gave a little tut of frustration. “Charlie Foxtrot, start to finish.” Then, to Percival. “Think they’ll give us any trouble?”

“No sir, don’t think they have much love for the Combine.” He answered. “Give me one of the prisoners to take back to them, I think I can arrange they stay quiet.”

“Do it,” Gawain waved him away.

“You all right, Tristan?” Percival asked as he walked over.

“Never better,” Tristan twisted around as Percival approached, frowned and pointed at Percival’s face, then touched his own cheek just below the eye. “This is new.”

“Shrapnel. Grenade. Could’ve lost an eye.”

“Sould’ve let it,” said Tristan. “Would’ve improved your appearance.”

“Hey, got to handicap myself someone, otherwise you guys would have no chance.” Percival scanned the prisoners, then asked loudly, “Which one of you is Nadia?”

There was some minute shuffling as the other prisoners created a kind of negative space around one woman, flaxen-haired like the kid in the storeroom. With a grimace and an accusing glance at the others around her, she said: “I’m Nadia Saar.”

Percival nodded to her. “Ma’am, you have a fine son. I’d like to take you to him, you can make sure he’s all right. In return, we’d like your cooperation keeping everyone calm until we’re gone.

She blinked a couple of times, wiped away tears of relief with one hand. “Until you’re gone? You won’t kill us? You’ll let us go?”

Percival nodded again. “That’s right ma’am.” He looked around the room. The dead guards. Lancelot’s white face. “Been enough killing for today.”

III: The Betrayal

Back on Atreus, Mordred was being briefed on all the missions his predecessor had put into motion. Much as I hate the guy, let’s try to be understanding: the new guy in the office, under pressure to put his thumbprint on everything the Corps did—otherwise people would start asking why he’d be put in charge. Regional loyalties also played a role I bet: Mordred was a blueblood from Atreus, Arthur a jumped-up nobody from the Rim Commonality. Well, why not scrap the uppity colonial’s plans?

This op, here for example. On Altair. That sounded like a foolish risk to Mordred, and for what? Just to show the Coordinator that SAFE knew where all his JumpShips were? It was like a high school prank. Too much chance they’d get caught, captured, leaving SAFE with egg on its face. But he couldn’t recall the squad, they’d gone dark. What to do?

Well, this Mordred was a sly old dog. He figured a way to cut his losses, and still make it look like SAFE had a leg up on the ISF. He called a meeting with one of the ‘cultural attaches’ from the Combine embassy on Atreus. That’s diplomat-speak for a spy.

They had dinner, drinks, somewhere nice I bet, a sky lounge with a view of the city, cocktails that cost a month’s paycheck served by supermodels in superstring bikinis. I don’t know, I wasn’t there.

The point is, that at the end of their little soiree, Mordred turned to his dinner companion, agreed how lamentable SAFE’s performance has been recently. Why, for example, his organization has only just learned of a plan by the Black Hole Sons pirate gang to raid the Altairian shipyards—but surely the ISF already knew that and had taken steps to defeat it?

His dinner companion smiled nervously, said why yes of course, they were well aware of the situation, and would Mordred excuse him, he’d just remembered he’d left something vital at the office. Sorry to rush, must do this again sometime, toodles.

He rushed to the ComStar HPG facility, dictated a hurried message which was promptly squirted off to Altair.

Up in the sky lounge, Mordred smiled to himself, picked up a napkin and wiped his hands clean. If the squad on Altair succeeded, well and good, but if they failed, now the League was covered: He’d been the one to warn the Combine about the attack, so he couldn’t very well have been the one to order it, now could he? Either way, SAFE came out of it looking good. Pity about the squad on Altair, but that was the price you paid to play in the big leagues.

The first Gawain, Percival and the others knew of this betrayal was when the shipyard sensors detected a flight of six Sholagars rocketing up towards them from the planet at a spine-crushing 9Gs acceleration. The remaining team members—except for Merlin, still unconscious in the infirmary—had gathered in the command hub, with the station crew and civilians all locked in the storeroom.

“Hail them,” ordered Gawain.

Morgana clicked open a channel. “Incoming aerospace fighters, this is Izumi Station,” she said with forced levity. “You guys sure are going somewhere in a hurry. Where’s the fire?”

The hiss of interstellar radiation was the only answer, as the range to the fighters rapidly decreased.

Gawain shifted, his jaw clenched. “Try again.” Looking to the others, each one slowly in turn, he said: “Those fighters would’ve had to have launched as soon as we arrived, if not before.”

“Say again, aerospace fighters, this is Izumi Station. Respond, please.”

“A traitor?” asked Tristan, one hand on the butt of his sonic stunner the other resting lightly on his laser rifle.

“We’ve all been together the whole time,” Guinevere pointe out. Then paused. “Except Percival.”

All eyes slowly turned to face Percival. “Whoah, now, wait guys, for all we know those fighters are just making a friendly—”

Outside the station, six pairs of lasers smashed into the team’s parked shuttle as each fighter strafed it, punching holes through its lightly-armored hull. The whole station shook, and air leak alarms began to blare. A strong gust of wind shoved them all as atmosphere began to pour out the now-broken airlock, until emergency doors slammed shut inside the station, sealing off the airlock corridor.

“A friendly what, Percival?” asked Tristan, eyes narrowing.

Percival felt his face growing hot, took a step back and clasped his own rifle.

“Incoming transmission, LT,” Morgana said to Gawain, interrupting the argument.

Gawain gave Percival a long, hard look, then turned to Morgana and nodded. Morgana punched the video feed up on a monitor. A black man with a sharp-edged, bony face, in a stiff black uniform: “This is Keishi* Kuroyama Susumu, Altair Tokushu Sakusen Gun. You are trapped, pirates. Surrender at once, or we will show no mercy.”

[Editor’s Note: “Superintendent”, security forces rank roughly equivalent to Lieutenant Colonel.]

Gawain was shaking his head. “I don’t think so, Kuroyama. I’m holding two dozen of your personnel, plus about 50 civilians hostage on board here. The moment we detect any attempt to board, I will begin executing them. Furthermore, you will order all your fighters to the surface within an hour and allow us free passage on the remaining shuttle, or I will begin executing them. Am I clear?”

The figure in the viewscreen stiffened. “We do not negotiate with terrorists.”

Gawain frowned a little. “I see you don’t think I’m being serious. Very well, a demonstration then.” He turned to Percival. “Time to prove yourself. Bring the woman, the one with the son. Natalia or whatever her name is.”

Percival hesitated. “Sir, I don’t think that’s—” He was young and keen, but mostly young, and could still remember his little brother back on Oriente, the one that looked like the kid in the storeroom.

“Told you there was something fishy about him,” muttered Guinevere. Tristan nodded, beginning to slowly circle around Percival, eyeing him the way the wolf eyes a sheep.

“Gave you an order, Percival,” said Gawain.

“I can’t do that, sir.”

“Fine. Morgana, give me the data and get the woman. Percival, give me your rifle.”

Morgana shrugged, tossed a clear data crystal to Gawain and started to move. Percival moved to block her way. “Sir, I must—”

Gawain said one word: “Tristan.”

Percival’s ears filled with pounding white noise and his vision went black.

Tristan had turned the stunner on his squadmate. Percival must have hit the deck hard, dropped his rifle or had it stripped from him. Next thing he knew he was being dragged by the arms between Morgana and Tristan, with a head that felt like it had been crushed in a vice and a mouth that felt like stale vomit. He could hear the other two talking—they must have thought he was still out. He let his neck hang, kept his eyes closed save for narrow slits.

“Think he’s really a traitor?” Tristan was asking Morgana.

“Nah, probably not,” Morgana said after a few paces. “He’s from Oriente, they’re sentimental about the women and children thing. Old-fashioned.”

“Just as bad,” opined Tristan. “No room for sentimentality in the Corps.”

“You sound like Gawain.”

“He’ll get us out of this,” said Tristan. “Just you see.”

“Here it is,” said Morgana, and the two let Percival fall unceremoniously to the deck. From his vantage point with his cheek against the deck plates, Percival recognized the corridor outside the storeroom, with its burned storage boxes and the bodies of the two TSG men still crumpled on the floor.

There were confused shouts when the two opened the storeroom door—the prisoners had felt the station shake, and heard the air alarms when the shuttle was destroyed.

In the corridor outside, Percival could see the sprawled corpse of the TSG man, still cradling his Seburo-12 rifle. He tried to lift himself on his forearms, but they felt cold and inert, and just twitched a little.

“Quiet!” shouted Tristan. “QUIET! Which one of you is Nadia Saar?” A muffled reply, Percival couldn’t hear. “Taking you to the command center. Our commander wants a word.” More voices. “No, just her.”

Percival tried again, gritting his teeth as the numbing sensation retreated and was replaced with the porcupine sting of returning feeling. One arm moved. The other. He began to drag himself towards the downed Combine soldier.

And then the boy’s voice, piercing and clear. “Where’s Percival? Why didn’t he come?”

“He’s busy son. Now stand aside.”

Inching closer and closer. The gun almost in reach. There, his hand around the stock, give it a tug. Wouldn’t move, trapped under the dead body. Tug again. Little bit of movement. Again.

“Well, make him un-busy and bring him here. Mom’s not going anywhere until we see him.”

“Already told you once, son.”

Rocking the gun back and forth, easing it out from under the body. There, got it. Percival checked the magazine, safety. Head still pounding, tunnel vision. Looked okay. He tried to stand, got one knee under him. Used the gun as a crutch, pushed himself up, leaning against the bulkhead.

The crack of metal on skin. Screaming from inside the storeroom.

With a final shove, Percival threw himself around the doorway, bringing up the Seburo-12 to his shoulder. Tristan and Morgana with their backs to him, kid lying on the floor, head cradled in his mother’s lap. Bloody gash down one side of his face. Tristan’s laser rifle aimed at Nadia’s head. Morgana leaning casually against a storage box, glancing around at the sound, staring when she saw Percival.

“Tristan, don’t.” Percival managed to rasp, though his tongue felt two sizes too big in his dry mouth.

Without turning, Tristan said, “So, you are the traitor.”

“No,” Percival said flatly. “Just the reverse: I’m the one trying to stop you guys from betraying our mission.”

“Morgana?” Tristan said inquiringly, still looking at Nadia. “Is there a reason he’s still talking?”

“He’s got a gun,” Morgana explained.

“We can’t kill these people over, over, over someone’s hurt pride,” Percival urged. “That isn’t what we stand for.”

“What we stand for?” sighed Tristan. “We stand for absolute loyalty to House Marik, the Corps and the League. In that order.”

“Tristan,” Morgana said, warningly, eyeing the prisoners. “Our cover. Saying the malking League, Tristan.”

“What?” asked Tristan. “Not like we can leave witnesses anyway.”

“The League means something, Tristan. It means we’re better than the Combine, because we don’t stoop to their level.”

“There’s a battalion of Combine troops about to break in here, and what are you going to do Percival, debate them to death? If the League survives, it will be through loyalty, honor, unity. Strength.”

On the word ‘strength,’ Tristan pivoted away from the woman, spinning around towards Percival, raising his laser rifle. There was the crack of a laser and a dull thudding burst of rifle fire.

Tristan looked down, frowning at the blood running down his chest as though it held one of the great secrets of the galaxy, then looked back up at Percival. “Nice shooting,” he said, admiringly. His legs slowly folded, as though kneeling, and he pitched sideways to the deck.

Percival turned warily towards Morgana, who watched impassively. “And you?” he asked.

She smiled sadly, but before she could answer Gawain’s voice interrupted them. “Breaching pods! Tristan, Morgana, forget the woman, get back here! Prepare to repel boarders.”

Morgana smiled grimly. “Moot point, I guess.”

“I’m not a traitor,” Percival repeated. “I’ll help fight.”

Morgana just shook her head. “Gawain will kill you the second he sees you,” she says. “You want to be useful, keep these people safe. If we win, I might be back to kill you later. Who knows?”

She picked up her rifle, and slipped by him without a backwards glance.

IV: The Escape

Did I betray the mission? Short answer is ‘Yes.’ Long answer is more complicated, the way long answers tend to be. Does loyalty to what you see as your true mission admit, allow or excuse disloyalty to your orders or commanding officer? Old question. No easy answer to that one, and I don’t expect we’ll solve it here.

I think I’ve explained how I felt, but to recap: The Free Worlds League must stand for something more than Thomas Marik. If that’s all it is, an engine for one man’s ambitions, then it’s no different from the Combine, the Confederation or the Federated Commonwealth. And if one House is much the same as any other, well, why not back the biggest and strongest one? Might as well crown Victor Steiner-Davion First Lord now.

But. But. What if the League was genuinely different from the FedCom? What if the League said, ‘Sure, you can be the servants of a warmongering, mega-rich nobleman—but have you considered the alternatives?’ Who would join the League then?

Diversity is strength, not weakness. Consider: The armies of Alexander the Great, of Rome, the armies that defeated Napoleon and Hitler, were diverse, multinational, not unified. Debate makes us stronger, by testing our ideas, not weaker.

That’s what the League should be. A beacon for humanity—of freedom, tolerance, justice. Protecting the weak and innocent. Striking fear into the hearts of the cruel and ruthless. I think every soldier in the Free Worlds League had a duty to uphold those ideals.

Not to murder some poor woman and her child on some floating garbage wreck because some cold bastard with more gold braid than brains two hundred light years away decided to play office politics.

Or maybe I’m just trying too hard to justify my actions. Maybe it was just cowardice. Hell if I know.

The fight for the Izumi Shipyards was a brutal one, even if the conclusion was foregone. The Tokushu Sakusen Gun are the elite of the internal security forces in the Combine, but they’re no DEST. I missed most of it, but found the shipyard security camera footage, much later.

They sent a wave of breaching pods—big cousins of the boarding bubble Tristan and Lancelot used during our attack—egg-shaped containers with room for seven men, with a thruster at one end and magnetic clamp at the other. The team clamps onto the target ship, saws open a section of hull (the pod is pressurized, so there’s no explosive decompression), and drops into the enemy ship.

It works well provided the defenders don’t spot the laser saw carving into the hull. If they do, it, hmm, doesn’t work quite so well.

Guinevere attached a shaped explosive to the hull where one pod was cutting. When it blew, the charge threw razor fragments of hull up into the pod, where the fragments pinged merrily around, bouncing off the interior walls at a couple hundred meters per second, turning the seven guys inside into very messy piles of hamburger.

Another pod. Another charge. Boom. Bubbling, gurgling screams that didn’t last long.

She got too late to the next one. The TSG had already sawed open the hull, and promptly dropped a trio of Red Tags down the hole. Blasted Guinevere right off her feet, quite literally. Both legs gone from the knee down. When the squad went to check her body, they rolled her over and discovered her weight had been holding down a dead-man’s switch on a pair of incendiary charges. They probably had a second or two to realize their mistake, maybe offer half a prayer, before the entire corridor was turned into a blazing inferno.

More holes were being cut. One squad dropped down to the deck, got ready to move out when Morgana rolled a flashbang around the corner, blinding them with its intense light, before she popped around with her laser rifle and wasted all seven of them.

She ambushed two more squads before getting caught shifting position. TSG at either end of the corridor. No hesitation, she had her sidearm in one hand, the ERS in the other, arms in a T, firing both ways up the corridor before a stream of bullets cut into her and she went down.

Don’t know what happened in the command center. One of the first things Gawain did was shoot out the internal security cams.

Percival was trying to shepherd the shipyard crew and their families towards the remaining shuttle—the one the original TSG team had used to reach the shipyards. They’d hear the echoing crump of explosions as Guinevere placed another charge, or the crack of laser fire as Morgana mowed down another boarding party, and they’d crouch down, tense, before slowly getting up and moving on.

A TSG man with a burnt hole instead of one eye came staggering out from a side tunnel. One of Morgana’s victims. People screamed, threw themselves flat on the deck. Percival trained his Seburo on the man, but he paid none of them any attention. Just went tottering down the corridor, mumbling to himself. “Shouldn’t have happened,” he said. “Shouldn’t have happened. Should’ve been more careful. Shouldn’t have happened.” Percival watched him warily until he turned a corner and was gone.

They picked their way gingerly past the corpses of the other six men in the man’s squad. A fire alarm started to wail, driving everyone to the deck again. Somewhere, a TSG squad was regretting turning Guinevere over, if only very briefly.

The corridor to the TSG shuttle airlock was blocked by a heavy security door. Percival slammed his palm on the emergency override, while trying to keep an eye up and down the corridor. Nothing happened. Turned to face the controls, punched the release again. Nothing. They were trapped.

Crump. Muffled bangs. Growing louder, it seemed.

“Percival, what’re you doing? Where is everyone? What’s going on?”

At the voice Percival spun back, bringing up the Seburo. A lone figure standing shakily at the end of the corridor, ERS rifle held loosely in both arms, a white bandage around his head. Merlin.

“Merlin!” Percival shouted. “Get over here! Dracs are boarding, we’re getting off on the shuttle. Can’t get the door open.”

Percival felt a little guilty for taking advantage of him. Poor guy had been out since the team first boarded the shipyards, but Percival wasn’t about to explain the whole “mutinying” and “shooting one of the squad” thing to him.

Merlin stumble-ran up, punched at the door controls. “Depressurization alarm, it’s locked out the manual controls,” he said.

“Can you override it?”

“Hey, who you think you’re talking to?” asked Merlin. “’Course I can.”

Another distant blast. The whipcrack of rifle fire. Merlin frowned as he worked, punching in a series of diagnostic codes into the door controls. “Where’re Gawain and the rest?”

“Holding the command hub.” Percival guessed.

“Who are these people?” Merlin’s eyes flicked to the civilians, huddled in a line on one side of the corridor.

“Prisoners,” said Percival. “High-value. Possible intel. We’re bringing them with us.”

Merlin shrugged, then took one step back from the controls, brought up his rifle and sighted. Fired a long burst right into the bulkhead beside the door controls. The door hinged open.

“See?” said Merlin. “Nothing to it.”

Then his chest and abdomen erupted in flaring light as a dozen laser bolts punched through him. He fell, with a look of mild surprise on his face, blood running from his mouth.

“So, the two of you planned this together.”

Gawain. At the end of the corridor, behind Merlin. The armor plates of his zero-G combat suit were cracked, a spider web of fine white lines radiating from divots where bullets had failed to penetrate. Face dirty and smudged, but eyes filled with hate.

Percival grabbed for the Seburo but Gawain’s first shot blasted it spinning out of his hands. The next shot burned a line across his thigh, another scored along the side of his abdomen. Percival sank to his knees on the deck, clutching at his stomach.

Gawain stalked down the corridor. “First, I’ll kill you,” he promised Percival. “Then, I’ll kill the rest of these damn Dracs you love so much.”

There was a cry and the boy, Nadia’s son, was charging at Gawain. Gawain barely shifted, just twitched the barrel of his laser rifle slightly. Fired. Just one shot.

Kid’s legs carried him another couple of staggering steps, then the rotating torus’s gravity kind of took over, tipped the boy right at Gawain’s feet. Gawain didn’t even look down, just kind of smiled grimly at Percival and said: “Taste of things to come.”

There was a laser shot. Another. Gawain’s eyes went wide with surprise. Another shot. Percival could hear screaming in his ears. Took him a moment to realize the voice wasn’t his own. Gawain seemed to be having trouble standing. He reached out one hand blindly fumbling for the bulkhead, couldn’t seem to find it. Ping. Laser shot. Ping. Ping.

Nadia Saar walked past Percival, holding Merlin’s dropped ERS rifle. Awkward in both hands, firing from the hip, missing almost as much as she was hitting despite the point-blank range, not that it mattered. Face a frozen scream, mouth wide open, a single long incoherent howl. Firing at Gawain as he went down. Firing, firing. Until the energy cell beeped politely to show that it was empty.

She dropped the rifle, as though sightless, and held her boy’s body. In the end, the other shipyard crew had to carry them both together—she wouldn’t let go. They strapped Percival into the pilot’s seat, then tried to brace themselves as best they could in the cargo compartment. It was a squeeze to get everybody on board the TSG’s Kawasaki Mark VII landing craft, a blunted cone with paper-airplane wings at one end. Passenger compartment built for a dozen men, now filled with over 70.

It was heavier and better armored than the team’s shuttlecraft, which was good because the Drac Sholagar pilots tried to strafe it several times before they believed the panicked hails that the shipyard crew was on board. Luckily, the craft had a good—if mildly burned—pilot, so most of the shots missed.

The landing craft was swarmed the moment it hit dirt. Cargo bay doors opened and people began pouring out, shouting, crying, meeting a rising tide of white-clad doctors, nurses and paramedics, on which floated a confused foam of candy-striped civilian cops, shouting at everyone to keep calm, and being generally ignored. Even the news media was in attendance, holocameras whirring as families clasped each other and wept in relief, whirring as a small body was stretchered away, trailed by a grey-faced woman.

The pilot undid his harness, and quietly walked through the crowd. Old trick, nobody stops a man who looks like he knows where he’s going. By the time anyone thought to ask who the pilot was or where he’d gone, he had vanished.

So that’s how I left the Corps, learned to suspect anyone with a cause, and despise anyone who treats children as tools of war.

EPISODE 2-9: Sustained Bombardment

People used to ask me why I never paint the number of kills on my fighter. My stock answer is, “Because the fighter didn’t shoot anyone down; That was all me.” But sometimes I wonder. When you see those BattleMechs marching across the geography from a few thousand meters up, you’d be forgiven for forgetting there are people inside. Like the BattleMechs and war machines are the ones in control, not the fragile silly little people inside.

Sortie 1-01: Landing Zone

The Dracs had foxed us pretty good, no doubt about that. Even though we’d nuked their railgun, they’d slipped their four Mech battalions and supporting regiments past us, popping out at a pirate point near L1 and landing on Port Moseby before we could race back. Four battalions of the 2^nd Sword of Light plus armor and infantry against three in the 20^th Arcturan Guards. Normally, that’d be pretty good odds for the defender, but they were Sword of Light, and no offense, but the Lyrans were just Arcturan Guards. Nobody thought this would be easy.

Nobody was right.

Of the 32 fighters the Black Arrows started with, after Kiwi we had 20. Two of those were in no shape to fly, including Lucky’s—the techs couldn’t figure out how he’d managed to land from orbit on only one engine. Just lucky I guess. Six more had holes of various shapes and sizes, including mine missing half its weapons pods. We had a couple of replacement birds, plus the techs sweated grease and lubricant to fix the rest up as best they could in the next eight hours, bolting on new armor plating, ripping out and replacing wiring, fitting new guns.

We were back in action the next day. Eight fighters: my flight flying cover for four G15 Lightnings. Target was the Drac landing zone, where they were still unloading supplies. Hit them hard, before they could organize, that was the theory.

Screw the theory, they were organized.

The surviving Drac fighters were still on Kiwi, but the DropShip gunners didn’t need much help. We flew fast and low, but as soon as we cleared a line of hills at the edge of the plain I started to see the comet trails of autocannon fire flying past the cockpit, the searchlight pulses of laser fire.

Our job was fire suppression, so I tipped a wing up and dove, streamers flying from the wingtips, heading right at the nearest DropShip, thumbing the trigger, the hull plates erupting with glittering light wherever I pointed the nose. One second, two. Hurtling past the target, zooming up, then slamming the stick all the way over, pulling a kind of aerial 180, skidding hard around and zooming back down towards the DropShip, plastering the other side with fire.

Distracted the gunners enough for the G15s to take a run. They’re beasts, those things are, Luxor 20 under the nose goes through anything smaller than a 40-ton BattleMech the way Janos Marik went through children.

Metallic zipper sound as they strafed the cargo piled up at the feet of the DropShips. It’s like the ground suddenly becomes alive, hurling itself into the air in geysers, sparks showering from wherever the Luxor shells hit something solid.

One of them must have hit a fuel depot: Sudden pulse of air rocked my Wildcat, octopus arms of smoke shot out everywhere before a roiling ball of flame rose into the air.

Two passes, that’s all you get before the gunners start to get your altitude and land some serious hits. We pointed our noses for home and hit the afterburners. Left one of the G15s behind though, a smoking wreck smeared across the plain.

Sortie 1-02: Landing Zone (Again)

Went back for another swing, this time with the F-10s acting as dive-bombers. Flak was pretty accurate, forcing the Cheetahs to rush their dives. We didn’t hit anything important. All four F-10s came back more holes than aerospace fighter.

Sortie 1-03: River Bridges

After the raids on the landing zone, we grabbed coffee in the pilot’s lounge. Lucky was telling a joke, as usual.

“A cop’s working the night shift in Solaris City. Stumbles onto a crime scene, there’s a dead body and a Drac with a bloody knife in his hands. Cop says: Why’d you do it? Drac says: For honor! Next night, same thing, only this time it’s a Feddie. Same question: Why’d you do it? Feddie says: For glory!—”

Bulldog was already laughing. “Lemme guess, the Elsie says, ‘For profit!’.”

Lucky grinned. “You’ve heard this one before?”

It was good to see the team laugh “Cappie says: Do what? What’re you talking about?” I offered.

Bulldog snorted, “Yeah, grasp of reality not their strong suit. Either that or he stabs himself and then says: It was self-defense!”

Nova asked, “And the Marik?”

“Oh that’s easy,” said Lucky, with a wink at me. “Soon as the cop sees it’s a Marik, he immediately lets him go. Nobody would ever believe he’d be competent enough to actually kill someone.”

Which hurt the way only a true joke can.

Later that same day, we flew out to blow up three road bridges across the Phoenix River before the Dracs could take them. Hoped to slow the Sword of Light advance down a little. No opposition, plenty of time to line up our shots as we flew along the river, brought the central spans crashing down into the water.

Sortie 1-04: Armor Column

Fourth sortie of the day. When Mechjocks complain about aerojocks getting the same pay despite only working an hour a day, they aren’t thinking of campaigns like Moseby.

Late evening take-off, sky fading to purple-black as we took to the skies, switching over to low-light vision. Went to find a battalion of light armor spotted moving down one of the highways.

Caught up to them where the highway ran through a deep forest. Heat of their engines made them glow like torches. Single file of 12 Scorpion tanks, like little ducklings in a row, all with their turrets rotated to the rear to give the drivers unobstructed views.

First pass, we took them head on. Flying right down the highway, nose down, finger on the trigger. Asphalt erupting into the air in excited gouts wherever the lasers touched. The three big cannon on my Wildcat instantly turned the lead tank into a blazing wreck. One second motoring along, then blam. A pillar of smoke and bits of armor and turret raining down like black hail.

Easy to forget there were three men inside.

Sortie 2-04: Pontoon Bridges

Up at first light, shaken awake by Reina. “Rise and shine, sleeping beauty,” she said.

“Let me guess: The Dracs have surrendered and we all get medals.”

“Even better,” she grinned sarcastically. “They’ve put up pontoon bridges across the Phoenix River. Colonel Petersen wants us to take them out.”

“I thought we already did that.”

“Yup,” she nodded. “Now go do it again.”

Zipped up my flight suit, grabbed my helmet. Briefed the others in the flight on the way to the hangar.

My baby waiting for me there. Patched up as best the crews can do in less than six hours.

Kept my locker key on a chain around my neck. Before I’d get in, I’d toss it to Nicolai, the chief tech. You know. In case they have to clean it out. Without me. A little ritual, like I don’t want to jinx myself with overconfidence: Admitting I might not come back ensures that I do.

Climbed up the ladder, opened the canopy, slid into that familiar narrow space that would be home for the next two-three hours. Connect the oxygen and suit coolant feeds, link the helmet to the HUD. Hitting the switches, reactor online, sensors online, weapons online.

Taxi out to the runway. Wait for the signal. Then punch the throttle, kick in the pants, pressed to the back of the seat. The arc of the ground falling away, finding myself wishing I never had to come down again. That I could just fly forever.

Following the silver gleam of the Phoenix River, back to the thin black ribbons of the Dracs’ new scratch-built bridges, prefabricated sections of steel and carbon-fiber composite. Defended this time, company of BattleMechs. Spread out along either river bank (they just waded across without waiting for a bridge). Bunch of Panthers, a Jenner or two, couple of Trebuchets and Whitworths, a Dragon and a Rifleman.

“Bulldog and Nova, get on that Rifleman,” I ordered. “Lucky, follow me, let’s hit those bridges hard so we never have to see this damn river again.”

Roaring in low, just above water-level, blowing up a wake like a supersonic speedboat, avoided giving the Mechjocks and easy target. Geysers of water vomiting up around me as the Trebs tried to lock on with their micro-missile launchers. Bridge coming hurtling up, saw the beetle silhouettes of tanks racing across, then thumbed the trigger. No time to check the results, vertical climb before I pasted the fighter across the side of the bridge. Shudder as something hit the undercarriage, but my baby held together.

“Aw, hell,” said Bulldog. Like he’d just noticed he’d forgot to lock his front door that morning.

Glanced down, over the rim of the canopy. Saw Bulldog’s fighter, back half in flames, arcing down.

“Eject, Bulldog, eject!” I shouted. Nova shouted. Lucky shouted. “Eject, you silly bastard, eject!”

And then his fighter plowed into the ground and spread itself into a long line of flames and roiling smoke.

No grey ejection seat, no white parachute. Just lots of orange and black.

Rifleman locked in place on a high cliff by the water’s edge, arms raised as though in exultation. Overheated, reactor shutdown, air shimmering in waves all around it. Nova was on him like a wolverine, hit him with everything right in the back of the center torso. Ammo explosion turned it into a 10-meter high blowtorch.

High-altitude flyover by Pepper’s recon flight a few hours later showed we only taken out one of the three bridges.

Sortie 2-05: Phoenix River Bridgehead

“Lyrans want us to hit the bridges again,” said Reina. Then reached up, ran her fingers through my hair, just like she’d done, way back when on Poulsbo. “Sorry about Bulldog.”

“Shit happens,” I shrugged. Still too raw to talk about it. Tossed my key to Nicolai on the way to the fighter.

Pretty pointless target, now that the Dracs had BattleMechs on the other side of the river. Whatever. Just fly the mission. Three of us—me, Lucky and Nova—went in at high altitude, three 500-kg bombs under each wing. Early evening sun reflected in a thousand rippling coins by the waves, half-seen beneath a veil of thin clouds.

Dive down when we were almost directly above the target, then rammed ourselves in the stomach with the control column, hauling all the way back, and climbing away again. World going grey as blood pooled in our legs and feet, flight suit swelling and squeezing to keep us awake.

Took out the other two bridges this time. Didn’t make any difference—most of a Mech battalion was on the other side already, then the Dracs drove a whole hovertank regiment straight over the river.

Sortie 2-06: Bridgehead

Ground support, trying to dislodge dug-in tanks around the bridgehead, help the Lyrans push the Dracs back into the water. So much smoke over the target by then visibility was down to nothing. Think we might have hit a few. Hard to tell.

Sortie 2-07: Bridgehead

Back to hit the tanks again, with much the same results. As in, bugger all.

On the return approach to the airfield, some trigger-happy Hauptmann in charge of a flak company ordered his men to open fire on us.

As mercs, we Black Arrows didn’t have a direct channel to the Lyran troops. Got on the horn to Camelot Home, the air group commander. “Tell your men to cease-malking-fire!” I shouted.

“Sorry, the air group doesn’t control the flak regiments,” came the indifferent reply.

“Then find someone who does!”

“Well, I don’t know…” Meanwhile, the over-excited crew of a double-barrel 20mm self-propelled cannon filled the air around me with two tons of screaming death. Well, okay, those pea-shooters couldn’t do much more than scratch the paint—it was the principle that counted.  “…I can try and see…”

With a scream of rage, Nova flipped her fighter inverted, and dived straight down on the company’s mobile headquarters. Shot away their radar and antenna. And nothing else. At night.

Suddenly cut off from their commander, the guns cut short.

“Nice shooting, Nova,” I said, but I knew there’d be trouble.

Sortie 3-08: Bridgehead

Morning briefing with Reina and the Flight Lieutenants. Which is a fancy description for a bunch of half-asleep, unwashed, unshaved pilots staring at a marked-up paper map together.

“Dracs are constantly reinforcing their toe-hold on our side of the Phoenix River,” Reina tapped the map with a red-colored pencil. “Commonwealth command reckons they’re going to try to break out today. We’ll be rotating flights on station above, so the Lyrans can call us in to hit targets of opportunity.”

Door to the conference room banged open, revealing a Commonwealth Kommandant with the black and white armband of the military police. A pale face, with a luxuriant fat caterpillar of a mustache. A private stood behind him, a submachinegun held across his chest.

The Kommandant thrust a folded-up piece of white paper at us. “Where is pilot Irina Desiderata? I have a warrant here for her arrest for treason: A deliberate attack on Commonwealth forces.”

We all just kind of looked at him—Reina, me, the other three Flight Lieutenants. Can’t have made for an appetizing sight. All of us carried at least one sidearm, me with a Sunbeam on either hip, couple of guys with Kukris or other big knives. None of us looking friendly. Soldier with the SMG gulped a little, his knuckles going white.

Reina’s slowly tilted her head towards our Commonwealth liaison, Anya McBride. Nice woman. About as effective as a Cicada in an Assault Lance, but. Nice woman. “A-a-nya,” Reina said slowly, in a dangerous tone. “Who is this?”

Anya smiled weakly, turned to the Kommandant. “Wing commander Paradis requests your credentials.”

Seeing the man’s pale face turn interesting shades of red was one of the few things that gave me real pleasure that day. The man reached for his holster, and pulled out a Grey and Mauser autopistol. “Fetch the pilot at once! That is an order!”

Anya looked at Reina. “Herr Kommandant wishes to be introduced to Flying Officer Desiderata.”

“Does he,” said Reina, flatly. Nobody moved.

The Kommandant cocked his pistol. “I said, that is an order!”

Reina sighed, looked at Anya again. “Tell whiskers here that if he doesn’t put his gun away in the next three seconds, I’ll shove it so far up his arse that he’ll be shooting bullets every time he sneezes.”

“Wing commander Paradis suggests that you holster—”

“I heard what she said, you imbecile!” The Kommandant’s lips were flecked with foam. “This is—”

“Three.”

“—mutiny! I’ll have the entire unit—”

“Two.”

“—brought up on charges before the Mercenary—”

“One.”

“—Board and GET OUT OF THE WAY YOU DAMN WOMAN!”

This last because Anya McBride had just stepped directly in front of the man’s pistol. “Herr Kommandant,” she said sweetly. “Refresh my memory, what does the rank of Leutnant Colonel look like?”

“It’s a silver diamond, what does that have to do—”

“A silver diamond. Like this one?” McBride tapped her collar. Standard mercenary relations practice: give the liaison one rank below the merc commander. Authoritative without being threatening, unless you happen to be a short-tempered military police major.

“What? Of course but …” The Kommandant realized what he was looking at, and fell silent.

“Private,” McBride said, not taking her eyes from the man’s florid face, now quite drained of color. “Escort Herr Kommandant back to his vehicle. His superior and I will be discussing possible disciplinary measures which may be required for an officer threatening a superior. Later. For now, there is a war to win.”

Huh. Not so useless after all. Though, to be honest, I was a little looking forward to Reina sticking his gun where the sun didn’t shine. Pity that.

In any event, three nights later Herr Caterpillar and his driver drove into the back of a stalled food transport truck at 80 kilometers per hour. A world in flames and this man ended up being killed by potatoes.

When we were walking out to the fighters, Nova asked me if there had been any trouble about the business with her shooting up the flak HQ. “Nothing McBride couldn’t handle,” I shrugged away her questioning look. “Tell you later.” But I never did.

The dawn strike on the bridgehead was almost anticlimactic by comparison.

Sortie 3-09: Bridgehead

On station overhead for less than 15 minutes before we got a panicked call for support. Wedge of Drac armor threw itself against dug-in Lyran tanks. Approached from behind, tried to hit the Dracs through the deck armor over their engines.

Sortie 3-10: Bridgehead

Rotated back to base for a rest, top up on fuel. Then back out to the bridgehead. Dracs were hitting the Lyran armor again, only with BattleMechs this time. Tough nuts to crack, ’Mechs are: You can pound them for hours and they still keep coming.

Sortie 3-11: Bridgehead

Pepper’s recon flight spotted an artillery battery on the far shore. Protected by high berms on three sides, only good angles of attack were either directly above or from behind.

Turned out, Pepper’s kids had missed a lance of Partisan tanks guarding the arty. We opted for the rear approach. First sign of danger was the sudden crisscross of livid, glowing tracers that sprang to life in front of my cockpit. Only time for one quick burst of laser fire, blowing the back off one Long Tom, then I was skidding, turning, diving back for the river, trying to put some landscape between me and sixteen 30mm cannon on full auto.

Control column shaking in my hands, like we were flying through air turbulence instead of four tons of explosive armor-piercers trying to turn the fighter into a sieve.

Nova held course too long, flew level and straight trying to line up her shot. Streams of firefly tracers from all four AA tanks converged on her fighter, punching into the fuselage, tearing off a wing. Her Wildcat spun wildly, there was a flash and then her seat was rocketing away, moments before the fighter kind of sighed, dropped like a stone and slammed into the river like one of the Poulsbo Megabites doing a belly flop, then sank out of sight.

Poor Irina. On foot, alone, behind Combine lines. We’d heard they’d taken to beheading captured pilots with their katana. Last we’d ever see of her, we figured.

Sortie 3-12: Bridgehead

Saw Nova’s chief tech, Lim, standing by the runway, looking anxious, fidgeting with a cigarette—in his mouth, out again, in again, never remembering to light it. He saw me starting to walk towards him. Knew what it meant. He threw the cigarette away before I reached him and stalked away.

Left him be.

Reina didn’t say anything this time, just squeezed my hand. Three days in, and a feeling of unreality was starting to set in. Like these things couldn’t upset us, because there was no way they could really be happening. We were losing a fighter or two a day. We started with 20. Cold hard statistics said we’d all be dead by the end of the month.

Lucky and I went back once more that day, with two G15s in tow. Kept the flak tanks busy as they turned the rest of the Long Toms into twisted, burning heaps of metal.

Reina and I made love that night with desperate, clawing intensity. She kept saying, “This is real, this is real, this is real.” The whole time.

Sorties 4-13 to 5-19: Bridgehead

Sword of Light BattleMechs made a concerted effort to break the ring around the bridgehead. The Arcturan Guards were in position now, so it was ’Mech on ’Mech. Guards had the weight, Sword of Light had the skill and experience.

With bombing of enemy infrastructure and industry now largely verboten in the rules of war, aerospace fighters’ only real strategic use has been space superiority to enable or deny assaulting forces a landing zone. A task that modern fighters are ridiculously undergunned to achieve, even if they were available in anything approaching the numbers required to actually bring down a DropShip. The one or two successes fighters have actually, by some miracle, managed to achieve only obscures how laughably unequipped we are. As a result, something close to 99% of any invasion force will reach the ground.

And when it does, there does any pretense at using fighters as anything other than a prop for the BattleMechs. Second-fiddle to the ground-pounders, divided up into penny-packets, too few to do more than cause an annoyance.

Can’t even do that when two ’Mech forces are going eyeball to eyeball at the knife-fighting ranges those boys tussle at—too much risk of catching your own side in the blast of any bombs.

Fly out to the bridgehead. Look for the target. Fail to find it. Bomb something else instead. Buzz them like the multimillion C-Bill insects that we were. Back to base. Rinse and repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

Sortie 5-20: Bridgehead

That was it. I should have been dead. We’d lost an average of one fighter every twenty sorties. Law of averages said I was a dead man. Certainly started to look the part: disheveled hair, three-day beard, black circles under the eyes. Maybe I did die, but like the restless dead, I was doomed to keep flying, forever.

Sometimes, it felt that way.

Sortie 6-21: The Retreat

“Yesterday, the Sword of Light managed to punch through the center of the cordon around the Phoenix River bridgehead. The Arcturans are pulling back, but they’re moving slowly. They’ll be surrounded if we don’t slow the Dracs down.” Reina sighed. “It’s a mess. Wish I had some good news for you, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to make our own.”

I pressed the key into Nicolai’s palm, the same old ritual. “Maybe, just keep it for now,” I said. I was half-convinced I’d already died. Maybe half-wishing I would die, just to get some rest.

Sorties 6-22 to 7-26: The Retreat

In the ready room, Lucky was saying “—so he asks, ‘How do you know he’s a Drac?’ And she says, ‘Because he had a great big sword and a tiny little—’”

Nobody laughed.

I patted his shoulder. “Tell us that one again some other time.”

First mission was macabre. Reports of Drac infantry in the village of Salem. Turned out to be villagers, settling scores. Combine loyalists getting even with ‘collaborator’ neighbors who’d worked for the Commonwealth, or who they just didn’t like much, dumping them in a mass grave outside of town. Keep that in mind some armchair general tells you how clean modern warfare is. They scattered when we flew overhead, and it wasn’t worth wasting ordinance. There’d been enough revenge down there.

Lucky and I pounded a couple of hovertank companies, a BattleMech recon lance, a mechanized infantry battalion. That last one turned out to be a column of refugees. Luckily we did one pass over them before strafing, averting a massacre. Another one, at any rate.

Shouldn’t have been made a target, though. People were getting sloppy, making mistakes.

Sortie 7-27: The Retreat

Speaking of careless mistakes. Coming in to land after the second mission of the day, an overinflated tire in Lucky’s undercarriage burst when it hit the tarmac. The fighter suddenly swerved, trailing ribbons of black rubber and a shower of sparks as the wheel rim began to tear into the surface. The wing clipped the ground, spinning the fighter in a circle, off the side of the runway and into a crash barrier.

Lucky slid back the cockpit ferroglass, and staggered shakily away. A white-clad medic rushed to throw a blanket over him, followed closely by a water truck with fire crews in reflective silver overcoats. They were still a hundred meters away when the fuel tank caught, throwing tendrils of flame and chunks of burning aerospace fighter across the landing strip.

“Lucky” Singh walked away with nothing more serious than a couple of bruises. Ground crews changed his nickname to “Singed” after that. Of the four in my flight, I was the only one with a fighter left.

Sorties 8-28, 8-29: The Retreat

Flew wingman with one of the surviving F-90s. Only managed two sorties. Hit a heavy BattleMech lance, with two JagerMechs giving AA fire. My Wildcat bucked like I’d been kicked, and we limped home. The third time I climbed into the cockpit, I hit the reactor switch and nothing happened. Had half a dozen techs climbing inside its guts the rest of the day, trying to figure out what was wrong.

Day 9

Nicolai just shook his head. “Power transfer bus is blown. We’ll have to tear it out, replace the whole thing. It’ll take eight hours, minimum. Not going anywhere today, Sunny.”

I watched Reina’s F-90 and the other eight fighters take off from the runway, fists clenches in frustration. Had a shower, the first in a week. Played cards with Lucky, or Singed, or Singh, or whatever his name was now. His face was drawn and grey and he didn’t make any jokes. I tried to sleep. Couldn’t. Paced outside, watching the sky every five minutes, watching for them to come back.

Only thing worse than flying was not flying.

Reina and seven others came back. Pepper’s F-10R never did—went into a cloud, never flew out. We found out why the next day.

Sorties 10-28, 10-29, 10-30: The Retreat

The 2^nd Sword of Light’s aerospace wing signaled its return to battle by jumping the F-90 wingman and me on our first sortie of the day. Guess they’d finally plugged most of the bigger holes in the carrier, and limped it into orbit around Moseby. A Vengeance can’t land, so they’d be flying from airfields on the ground.

Pair of Shilones swooped down on us en route to hit a Sword of Light company that had managed to take a crossroads in the path of two retreating armor battalions. The armor on my wingman’s F-90 suddenly buckling and blistering as laser beams and missiles lanced down from the sky.

Immelmann turn—half-loop until I was inverted, then rolled the right way up, flying the opposite direction. Bore down head-on at the two Shills on the F-90s tail. One instinctively tried to dive, but we were too low. Couldn’t pull up in time. His crashing fighter left a line of crimson across the hills. His wingman tore away, and we were too short on fuel to pursue.

Spent the next two missions flying high cover, ready to jump any Drac fighters in the sector. None showed. Night fell. Returned to base, flying on fumes.

Saw grey flashes on the horizon, tracers hosepiping across the sky. Checked the map—yup, right direction to be the Black Arrows base. F-90 and I both hit the throttle against the stops without needing to say a word. Grey resolving into red and orange as we got closer, fires burning across the base. HUD picked up two fighters, still circling.

“Bandits, bearing oh-one-one, altitude 5K.” Coming up behind and below them. Dagger profiles silhouetted against the moonlit sky. Crosshairs over the rear wingman, now identified as a Slayer. Range, speed info scrolling down my visor. Closer, closer. Their sensors blinded by ground clutter and the haze of their own attack. Brought the nose up sharply, close range pass from below and to port. Lasers give you a two-second beam before the capacitors need to recharge. Tore open his belly, leaving long claw-marks in vivid red. The F-90 behind me made his own pass, blowing off whole sheets of armor as his particle cannon hit home. The Slayer rolled, trying to throw off our aim.

Then I was diving back down on him from the other side, punching holes in his rudder, ailerons, taking off half the wing. The Slayer continued its roll, almost lazily, like it was in no hurry to pull out despite the altitude it was losing. Seeming to almost welcome the ground as it buried itself at over 800 kilometers per hour.

The infernos had made a charnel house of the hangars and crew quarters. They found Nicolai a few steps from the landing strip, a curled, blackened and charred little thing that broke when they tried to lift it. Melted blob of metal where a key had hung around its neck.

Never needed it anyway. The pilot’s ready room and lockers had taken a direct hit, nothing left of my locker but a smoking crater. They found “Lucky” Singh, or what was left of him, in the hallway outside. Guess his luck had finally run out.

If that seem callous now, it was. That’s the real horror of war, folks: Not that war is horrible, because everyone knows that, but rather that horror becomes normal. You get used to it.

Sortie 11-31: Outskirts of Automata City

Reina and I sat in a temporary bubble tent by the new temporary runway the Arrows were flying from. Too drained to even undress. Just kind of lying there, not quite seeing anything despite the turquoise light filtering through the thin tent fabric.

“Break contract?” I said, finally.

Reina just kind of pulled her hair up into a bun, let it go. “We’d be finished as a unit.”

I laughed without humor. “Only nine fighters left, Reina. Out of 32. We already are finished.” I ran a hand over my eyes, like I was wiping away something I didn’t want to see. “Lyrans have pulled back as far as Automata. If they can’t hold the Snakes there, Moseby is as good as lost.”

“Can’t give up now,” she said automatically.

Maybe she was right. Everything seemed inevitable. We would continue to fight and fly until we were all dead. It seemed impossible to imagine any other future.

Just before I put my foot in the ladder up to the cockpit, one of the techs came sprinting up. “Squadron Leader, urgent call from the gate guards. Someone needs to see you immediately, sir.”

At the front gate? “Who?”

Tech was already starting to jog away, turned over his shoulder and said, “Says her name is Irina Desiderata, sir.”

It was her. Standing next to a Draconis Regional Arms Company (DRACO) Model 18 jeep, with the Combine insignia laser-scored off. White-shirted body in the back seat with a hole in its temple and a red waterfall-splatter of dried blood across the back seat and footwell. Stylized kanji numeral three at the collar—a Tai-sa. Turned out he was the leader of a labor regiment—fancy term for conscripted civilians digging anti-tank ditches and pouring concrete for bunkers.

I crushed Nova so tightly in a hug it’s a wonder she didn’t break. “Nice to see you too, sir,” she said, awkwardly patting me on the back.

“We thought you were dead,” I said. The stupid, obvious thing to say. “Who’s sleeping beauty?”

“Jeep’s former owner,” she said. “He and his driver were kind enough to get stuck in the mud while I was walking by. Objected a little when I offered to take it off his hands.”

“So unchivalrous,” I tutted. “Well, we don’t have any spare birds for you to fly, but maybe Reina can find a spot for you on her staff. Desk job, but—hey…”

Nova rolled her eyes and mimed getting back into the jeep. “All right, all right,” she said. “Guess it’ll have to do. I should feel lucky, really.”

I smiled, hugged her again. “I know I do. Look, got to go. We’ll talk when I get back.” Funny, now I was sure I would be back.

Sorties 11-32 through 16-40: Automata City

Automata City was a sleepy little place that had the bad luck to sit astride the main highways and maglev lines between the capital, Feintuch City, and Variegate City, near the Sword of Light drop zone. Before the invasion, its only notable industries were holo display emitters, processes food and artisanal candles.

Fighting started by accident there—a Drac recon battalion bumped into a Lyran mech regiment. Both called for armor reinforcement. When the tanks smacked into each other, both called for BattleMechs. The BattleMechs called for yet more BattleMechs.

In the space of five days, the battle would eventually pull in 80% of the forces committed by either side.

In the meantime, in the air exhaustion had set in. We'd been through fear and despair, and out the other side, still alive. No sense in risking your neck now. Our fighters were spending less time in the clouds, more in the repair shed. When you ran into a Drac fighter, there’d be some desultory dogfighting, then both sides would peel off and head for home. Nobody pursued.

That left plenty of time to watch the Tin Cans slugging it out below, levelling whole city blocks every time they missed, which seemed to be most of the time. Turning the whole battleground into a treacherous, shifting layer of rubble, making it that much harder to advance over the next day. Just digging themselves deeper and deeper into a mire they couldn’t pull themselves out of.

Day 17, Reina woke up, looked at me and said, “It’s time someone started looking at the big picture.”

Sortie 17-41: The highways

Reina had tacked a map up on the wall of the new briefing room inside a prefab building. “Pretty much every BattleMech, tank, artillery piece and infantryman the Dracs have on-planet is here,” she said, tapping a yellow blob labeled Automata City. She traced the blue line of the main highway back across the plains, past the town of Salem, back over the Phoenix River, to a black cross-hatched circle labeled ‘DZ.’ “Three hundred kilometers from their original landing zone.”

There were twelve of us gathered, standing around the map—eight of us that still had fighters, plus four with no rides, like Irina—all of us beyond tired, emotionally abraded into drone-like robots in just three weeks of constant flying. All of us not quite daring to hope Reina might have found a way out of this.

“That means every nut and bolt, every sheet of replacement armor, every actuator and gyroscope, every bullet, shell and missile the Dracs need is being ferried from their supply dumps.”

I shook my head. “Those dumps are right in the shadow of their DropShips. That’s enough AA firepower to shoot every one of us down the minute they spot our wings.”

Reina nodded, then held up one finger. “True. But once those supplies leave the dumps, they’ve got to motor across three hundred klicks of empty landscape before they reach the forward units. And that, Arrows, is where we’re going to cut them off.”

The Commonwealth liaison, Anya McBride frowned. “Colonel Petersen won’t like you taking the pressure off the front-line troops in Automata.”

Well, of course he wouldn’t. To a BattleMech regimental Colonel, the answer to any military problem was more BattleMechs.

“Come on Anya, you know we aren’t making a dent in their forces out there,” said Reina. “Time the air wing started making its own strategy.”

The supply convoy was easy to find. Skimming along at treetop level, I could see the long caterpillar line of vehicles inching its way along the highway: heavy cargo trucks, coolant tankers, ordinance carriers, even a fleet of civilian delivery trucks pressed into service.

I put the crosshairs over the lead truck and fired. The ground erupted, like a titantic subterranean worm was tunneling just beneath the surface, arrowing its way straight towards the truck. Then the laser light and truck intersected and it disintegrated, chassis blown clear into the sky in a searing blast of light.

Flashed over their heads as the column stopped in confusion, watching on the sensors as my wingman going after the last vehicle, an ammo carrier. Its detonation took out the entire highway surface, leaving a ten-meter wide crater. Trapped between the two burning wrecks, some vehicles tried to go forwards, others back, crashing into one another, snarling the road into a confused tangle.

Easy pickings as we circled, blew apart another truck, circled, destroyed another one.

Finally headed for home when we hit bingo fuel, leaving the whole horizon red with flames reaching into the sky, the lifeblood of an army slowly leaking away.

Sorties 17-42 to 24-58: The highway

The Dracs tried everything to shake us. Drove at night; we found them with our sensors. Had their few remaining fighters fly cover. We sent one section to draw them off, while a second section blasted the supply trucks. Pulled back their mobile AA guns to act as escorts. We just did the undefended forward dumps. Retaliated with night bombing of Feintuch City. We ignored them, let the Lyran AA handle it, and hit their convoys all the harder.

And then, one day, with a sigh that was almost audible, they quit. Packed it in. No glorious, desperate last stands, no valiant charges, nothing you could ever put in a song or on a poster or in a holovid. Just an entire army running on empty, no ammo, no fuel, no morphine or bandages, no bolts or rivets. For the want of a nail, a kingdom was lost. Sorry Dracs, but there’s no samurai spirit that can withstand the terrible juggernaut inevitability of maintenance schedules and metal fatigue.

So they pulled back from the smoking ruins of Automata City and the bodies buried under piles of rubble, back past Salem where the citizens had murdered each other for a lost cause, back across the bridgehead they had bled so hard to hold, back across the river where Bulldog had died, back into their DropShips, and back to the Combine.

Defeated not by bravery or cunning or skill, but by the implacable necessities of war. By logistics and statistics. By machines.

That night, I went down to the hangar with a can of black paint, climbed up to the tail of my fighter, and painted my first silhouette: The dagger shape of the Slayer I’d shot down over our base, the one that had helped to kill Lucky and Nicolai and so many others.

On the way out, I patted the old girl on the nose. She’d earned it.

EPISODE 2-10: Developing the situation

Life moves in echoing patterns. It exists as its own dark reflection. Consider.

In the past: On the moon of Wendigo, in a based called the Eyrie, a man name Baz Vukovic, sometimes known as Mordred, entered his private office. He turned the lights on, hung up his jacket. He admired his reflection in a mirror hung on the wall and ran his fingers through his hair. Opened a minibar set into the wall and poured himself two fingers of scotch.

Turned around and walked towards his desk. Saw the man sitting there.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked.

In the present: On the planet Port Moseby, I landed my fighter at the new Black Arrows base. It was confirmed, the Sword of Light had turned tail, gotten back into their DropShips, and were now making high Gs back to the pirate point where they’d appeared.

I tossed my helmet to the new chief tech, shucked my jumpsuit, wandered over to the commander’s office. Stuck my head in. She was looking out the window, her back to the door. “Hey Reina, celebration’s in order. The Snakes are running!”

The woman spun around with a jerk, a laser pistol in her hand.

“Who the hell are you?” she asked.