“Check the scopes–– check the calibration–– I––“ Faith’s jaw worked soundlessly. No Way.
Tarsis 12 stood out among the stars, a rich smudge of purple and blue with the system’s sun shining yellow and basic beyond the faded edges of its soft lavender halo. Faith stared. The scope refreshed. The same result played across the display again, the same string of blue letters flickering across a dull stretch of green-black.
Nothing.
No sign of the Coralate. No sign of anything. An orbital marker satellite sent back a tiny IFF blip. Welcome to Tarsis Colony, population: 3,578. Have a nice day.
Muscles tensed in the Admiral’s shoulders. This is wrong. Something’s... She shook her head. This is wrong.
“Where are the blueskins?” That was Harrison. Faith’s gaze flicked to him–– he stared at the display, shook his head quickly. “I don’t get it.” He turned in his seat, eyes flicking from the Admiral to the Captain and back again. “Didn’t the Von report that there was at least one cruiser in the system when they took off?”
“That was over two full days ago.” Captain Lazar reminded him. “Maybe the Cygnans jumped the system. Maybe the Von spooked them and they slipped back out right about the same time Virek did.”
Faith blinked, her eyes sliding past Harrison and Lazar. “Get closer, Anderton. I want us in a high orbit.” Her eyes flicked back to meet the other officer’s gaze. “Harrison–– try to get a reading on anything that could be a piece of a Seindrive or a chunk of hull from a cruiser–– anything at all. Get Horus and Osiris Squadrons out there and send Anubis tailing as an escort–– have them spread out and fly alongside the ship in a tight recon pattern with their sensors tied directly into ours. If there’s even a scrap of metal from a Blasterchild or a Coralate rig out there, I want it logged.”
Faith paused, drew in a quick breath. Her eyes flicked back to the display, back to Tarsis 12, steadily growing in its nest of white-speckled night, and lingered there for a moment before she continued again. “...and let them know that we need full sweeps, Harrison. Slow and steady, long and short, by the book, got that? I don’t want to see any shortcuts.” Faith’s eyes darted to the left, meeting those of another officer. “Kerrigan–– put all weapons on warm standby with confirm-deny on the AI targeting. Shunt just enough power to the tactical banks to keep them warm, but not too much–– If the Coralate still has a ship here, I want us to be able to take the first shot, but I don’t want it to cost us anything we’d have to have replaced in dock.
There was a pair of “yes ma’am’s” and a quick “roger” that echoed in the wake of her orders before uniformed backs turned on her, quick fingers coming alive, threading neon lines through projection control matrices and weaving her orders into the fabric of the Hok’s systems. Captain Lazar gave her another careful glance. She swallowed, forced herself to ignore it, kept herself from glancing back. It took an effort to keep the steel in her expression, to keep the hard, resolute confidence she didn’t feel slathered thick and visible through her every movement. I know, I’m doing your job. Sorry, Jared. I guess I really am as bad as Virek. Just another backseat-Captain, queen of the Blackpants.
The Comm officer glanced tentatively at the Admiral and other woman met her gaze immediately, grateful for the distraction. She was mousy and small, with a sheaf of feathery platinum hair that played across her forehead and brushed idly at the edges of her ears. The dark lines of a skingraft headset threaded their way down the side of her face, bending along the curves of her jaw and showing up in cold, pulsing veins of indigo under her smooth, clear, cappuccino skin. Pale green eyes peeked out at Faith, wavered under the other woman’s sudden attention–– her gaze was so uncertain, so reluctant, refusing to light on the faces of any of the other operations officers for more than the barest fraction of a second and utterly avoiding the Admiral’s eyes altogether, preferring to bounce warily off the Captain’s steady blank stare instead. Her voice came quiet, timid, the soft tones of someone used to being wrong whenever she opened her mouth. “Uh–– Admiral, Captain–– should I put out a call to Tarsis 12 control?”
“No, not yet.” The Comm officer all but quailed at the steel in Faith’s voice–– it was probably the response she had been expecting, but Faith gave the officer the barest of reassuring smiles anyway, something to soften the blow to the younger woman’s already negligible confidence, to show her it was still okay to speak up. “It feels too much like we’re walking into a trap–– don’t signal until we know what happened to the Coralate.” The Comm officer’s nod was immediate, emotionless. “I don’t want to risk giving away our position if there’s still a ship in the area.” And if they don’t already know exactly where we are... Faith swallowed, looked away. What the hell is going on? This isn’t right.
Tarsis 12 grew steadily in the display, now a fist-sized blotch with a spot of dull grey where one of its moons slid in a slow arc across the largest continent, stark against purple haze. Faith squinted at the stars around it–– any one of those bright points of light could be one, could be a Coralate cruiser just floating out there, running silent, a tiny silver dot against all those white pinpricks––
“Captain–– I’m–– I’m picking up a signal,” The Comm officer paused, jaw working in tiny twitches as she pressed her thumb and forefinger against the side of her head, index finger playing across a glowing subdermal nodule. She looked up, and her eyes darted away again immediately, unwilling to meet the questioning eyes of Faith or Lazar. “It’s coming from the far side of the furthest out ––uh, from the planet, that is–– of Tarsis 12's, uh, two moons. It sounds like––“ She looked up, forced herself to meet the Captain’s eyes. “I think it’s binary–– yeah, it’s binary, it’s a–– it looks like some kind of repeater–– but definitely a Cygnan energy signature.”
“Is it some kind of Nav beacon?” Faith crossed the command module to the other woman.
“N-No...” The Comm officer bit her lip, forced her eyes to the tangled weave of the comm station’s holographic console, glowing neon lines crossing, flicking luminescent numbers at her. “I mean, it doesn’t look like one, it––“ Her eyes focused, squinted. “Wait a second...”
“What is it?” Faith leaned closer.
“It looks like...” The Comm officer blinked, eyes darting. “It looks like the coding for a recursive fractal encryption algorithm... an algorithm that degenerates in complexity on the half-life of an unstable isotope of... of an unknown element––“ She looked up, face full of half-restrained excitement. “I remember working on something similar during my time at the Earthside academy” She gestured quickly. “A kind of time-relative coding line––“
“Spare me the technobabble, Lieutenant Baker.” Faith leaned close, glanced at the display. “I’d rather have it in English, if at all possible.”
“Yes ma’am.” The Comm Officer swallowed quickly, her excitement and the shreds of her confidence buckling. “It looks... it looks like a countdown–– a really complex one.”
“Any idea what it’s counting down to?”
“I...” Baker fumbled, forced herself to meet the Admiral’s eyes, then shook her head in silent defeat.
“If it’s Cygnan, it can’t be good.” Faith glanced quickly back at the central display. “Can we stop it?” The Comm officer watched her for a moment, pursed her lips, managed a timid shrug.
Faith breathed a quick sigh, turned back to the other officers. Lazar was watching her again–– his glance made her want to swear under her breath, but she resisted the urge. “Harrison, get a fix on the source of the signal. I want whatever you can get. Tell Osiris and Anubis Squadron there’s been a change of plans–– I want them in orbit of the moon as soon as they can manage it, but I want Horus to stay here. Get Bast squadron out there to cover them instead. Anderton–– get us in orbit pronto. Push the Hok up halfway to the barrier if you have to––“
Harrison cut her off before she could finish. “Admiral! I’m getting a lot of interference from the moon–– I’m picking up large amounts of Brahlanite and something––“
“Captain, the signal, it’s––!” The comm officer swivelled quickly in her seat, eyes darting for the display, face paling suddenly.
Anderton’s eyes widened incredibly. All at once he was shouting, jamming his finger at the display. “Great Goddess! The moon!”
Faith looked up and her mouth dropped open. Lazar choked. Someone tried to stifle a gasp, failed and sputtered instead.
Tarsis 12 dominated the display. The moon’s passing across the face of the planet had stopped, improbably frozen halfway through its arc and spinning slowly in place, grinding against the pull of gravity in a sickeningly unnatural fashion that sent dust and rock boiling up from the surface on harsh waves of vibration and crushing, visible distortions of gravity. The planet was getting closer, so close, the purple radiance blotting out the stars and moving to fill the screen with the pockmarked face of the defiant moon, centered amidst it all like a grisly front-page headline. Bits of grey debris hung hazy, undulating in broken waves like some stony vapor that steamed up from the moon, caught in gravity and concentrated near the center, spreading steadily outward into cold void. Each chunk trembled somewhere between freefall and rapid, blurring escape, tumbling end over end in place like fragments of broken pottery drifting through thick, syrupy mist.
Faith’s eyes were riveted to the display–– and then she realized the moon’s rotation was slowing, kicking off steadily larger and larger chunks of debris as it slipped toward its improbable, inexorable halt. A shiver passed through the Hok. Faith swallowed uneasily.
For one terrible instant, the moon seemed to quiver, shaken by lines of force so strong they bent light, bent the very fabric of reality in terrible ripples that raced outward in harsh and sporadic, pulsing cascades, blossoming up from a point somewhere deep beneath the surface of the moon, deep within the Brahlanite. For the briefest instant, the trembling moon shivered one final time and then quieted, almost obscured by the cloud of rock and ice it had shaken off as it spun down to a standstill, grinding to a sudden halt on its axis–– it was incredible, unnerving, a moment that sunk its claws into the soul, as if witnessing the moment when the very mechanisms of the clock of the universe had finally reached their zenith and stood waiting, ready to click over, ready to sound the chime that would herald the end, the end of it all and the beginning of something new, something terrible. The Hok was as silent as a forgotten grave, everything stilled, breath arrested by the cold fingers of shocked anticipation.
There was some kind of exchange between the frozen moon and the planet, neon flashing, burning rings of flourescent light that fell in insubstantial sheets like cascades of aurora light and bounced back, lost in the haze and the void.
And then the moon split across its equator and burst open like a ripe boil.
They felt the crack immediately, the shockwave blasting out like a vicious tide the instant the moon flew apart and scattered its ragged debris off into the endless night. Behind it, Tarsis was already glowing, lines of crimson and teal and shimmering gold threading viciously across continents and burning cruel colors into the sky–– Faith swore under her breath. Even the planet was going up. It was like watching the birth of judgement day. And we’ve got front row seats, courtesy of Virek and the Cygnan Coralate.
Someone was mumbling, then shouting, trying to snare her attention. Lazar’s eyes were like the stunned eyes of a lamb struck by lightning, unmoving, too shocked to even blink. His mouth twitched in absent attempts to process thought into sound fragments, however rudimentary, but only wet noises, half-gasps and quiet clicks slipped from his lips.
Nearby, someone was sobbing. Dumbstruck, Faith’s eyes swivelled sluggishly toward the noise, caught and lingered briefly on Harrison’s lunch as it came up and splashed across the deck in a thick slick of orange and brown. A dozen paces away, the Comm officer was panicking, all but digging her fingers into her cheeks, her wet eyes wide and unwavering, taking in every horrific detail as Tarsis 12 cracked open like a fragile egg, consumed by rising flares of raging fire. Faith tried to say something, anything. You’re an Admiral, dammit! Say something! Screams and violent static vibrated through Baker’s subdermal implant, chaotic and cruel. Lazar choked again.
“An–– Anderton.” Faith forced sound from her throat, stumbled forward, hands dropping onto the back of his chair. “What the hell is going on? What... what just happened?”
“I don’t know, Admiral.” His response was direct, almost absent–– he was shocked, hell, they all were, but of all of them, Anderton was the only one really holding it together. He glanced at the screen, made a quick, half-dismissive gesture. “But I think we’ve got bigger problems to worry about right now–– we’ve got company out there, a hundred fighters or so, and distortions indicate cruisers closing fast––“ He paled suddenly. Faith looked up. “My god, there’s––“
And then Tarsis blew itself apart in a brilliant flash of blinding flame.
When the darkness returned, the sky was full of silver.

Admiral Faith Minear sighed and looked up.
It had been a long jaunt and she could tell the crew was beginning to feel it. Heck, she was beginning to feel it, beginning to feel every twitch and vibration more and more clearly in her bones, as if she were slowly becoming a part of the ship. It made the crew edgy and irritable, but she’d promised them a week of shore leave once they’d picked up Virek’s pilots and made their rendevous with the Von, and that kept them on their toes. Sure, Earthside command would be spitting nails at the end of it all, but regulations gave Faith the leniency she needed to give her crew what they needed, what they deserved–– a chance to gear down and relax for a change, without having to worry about getting shot at or running across a Coralate fleet on a routine jump.
She blinked, and her eyes slipped across the balding head of her Captain to the men and women working consoles near the massive vidscreen that dominated the entire forward wall of the Hok’s operations control center. With the Wu Ang Hok’s Fu-Hetschwietz degen-drive running at maximum output, the lightyears had whipped by, stars warping and bending into impossible shapes, strange angles that stretched on into other realities, other dimensions of thought, as if the fabric of space itself were being pulled toward some distant point and just happened to bounce off every particle and wave between the ship and that point at every possible angle at once.
Or at least, that’s the way it would have looked to anyone unlucky enough to be outside on the surface of the hull. FTL cruisers were sturdy, streamlined ships, built massive, smooth, and totally devoid of any kind of window or viewport–– instead, they relied on hundreds of artificial windows, millimeter-thick sheets of silicon plasmate designed to give the illusion of glass or some sort of energy field and provide a realtime feed of what was really going on just outside, or at least until the drive kicked into gear and the cruiser punched through the light barrier. At that point, the realtime feed would immediately transition to a preprogrammed section of an extensive, ship-wide mock feed, a stream of modified and coordinated images that gave a contiguous loop of the standard stars-scrolling-by reel, moving in a manner consistent with the rest of the faux-windows pasted to the walls throughout the ship. It wasn’t accurate, considering, but countless Science Fiction vidshows over the past few centuries had instilled a vision of FTL space flight that people expected, and the false footage was designed to meet those expectations in a way that kept the crew of FTL ships from going insane.
Thinking about the system’s intricacies and idiosyncracies brought back memories of a prank the then-Junior-Grade-Lieutenant Virek had pulled off on the Cloudwalk during his first assignment there, their first assignment together, both of them straight out of Earthside academy and still wet behind the ears as far as officers went. Using his expertise with the ship’s systems to hack and reprogram the streaming window feeds into randomly clicking over to a series of non-standard programs at sporadic intervals for random lengths of time, Virek had left the system to its own devices, augmenting it with a media library of close to a hundred different spliced feeds he and five other crewmen had cobbled together using a cannibalized terminal that had conveniently disappeared off the quartermaster’s equipment manifest a month before, thanks to a close friend who worked miracles in the cargo bays when it came to secret requisitions and making things vanish without a record or a trace.
Even Faith had been tied into the prank, trying her hand at the editing and processing, cleaning up old images and working to contribute seventeen different sequences of her own during her shifts alone with the console. Most of the material that the other crewmen involved with Virek’s project had given her to edit was the same, clips that plugged the system full of neohop sensedata condensed down to grainy high-def digital audio-video feeds with some of the oddest, shakiest camera angles and the faint but ever-present rhythm of the human heart pulsing bass-like in the background of every soundtrack, but Faith’s contributions had been much more artistic–– She claimed credit for splicing together a couple sequences of swirling psychedelic colors with lines of old Jimi Hendrix music and copy-pasting Neuroline recordings of Arizona Alhambra during ancient concerts at her peak in 2162. A series of action scenes from black-and-white westerns were her work as well, packed with shots of ancient leather-clad cowboys chasing hooting Indians away from burning wagon circles and shooting each other down in dusty high-noon draws with lilting whistling and gently-strumming strings accenting each dusty, tumbleweed-sepia frame. Virek’s own special touch had come in the form of a handful of old Russian music videos, everything from the golden era when bands like t.A.T.u. had forced their way into the Western limelight to material from the later Ruskie Comeback of the 2170's that had followed eager colonists out on some of the first manned expeditions to the distant stars. A few collages of classic films from the twenty-first century had come out of Virek’s rest intervals as well, copy-pasted bits of jumbled material from Dracula, Frankenstein, Zombieland and Poltergeist set to obscure music from that same forgotten era.
The changes to the feed program were an instant hit with the crew–– two days after the installation, requests had come in, silicon dataplugs left taped to the door of central processing, asking for everything from the simple and modern to the ancient and bizarre. Some of the requests were easily indulged, others laughed at and passed over, but the stockpile grew steadily, with one young officer starting a betting ring with wagers on which sequence was going to pop across the screens next.
But like all good things, it wasn’t meant to last–– when the Cloudwalk’s Captain, Hans Christoph van Schattendammerung III woke up half-way through the night to scenes from The Exorcism of Emily Rose dubbed over with the equally ancient composition Reload, he’d gone on an immediate witch hunt, yanking officers he suspected out of their bunks and screaming at them redfaced until Virek had finally tracked him down and claimed responsibility outright. Just eight short days and the whole thing had come crashing down, with Virek taking a permanent mark on his record for it, reprimanded and forced to spend the rest of his rest interval switching the screens back over to the same old bland scrolling of software stars that rolled monotonously by as the ship hurtled through the heavens.
Faith sighed at the memory. It felt like so long ago.
Like Virek, she was an Admiral now, no longer an officer bowing and scraping to the ops brass and calling them “Blackpants” behind their backs. Now she was a member of that group, a Blackpants, and in her mid-fifties but aging well. Her long, glossy black hair still held its shine, fell in long straight lines past olive eyes and creamy cinnamon skin until it tapered off near the small of her back among the seams and black silk of her on-deck uniform. Unconsciously, she brushed one of her soft, black bangs away from her eyes and absently studied the gold trim, pips, accents and filigree edges of her cuffs. Blackpants. God, I really was that young once.
She’d been thinking a lot about Henryk Virek lately, ever since that message, ever since the message that had brought the Hok to this colony at the ass-end of space, her cargo bays refitted and converted en route into makeshift hangars ready for the rigs of Virek’s little lost pilots. Now all they had to do was slip into the Tarsis system and find his pilots, locate their rigs and bring them home to the Von.
...or whatever’s left of their rigs, whatever’s left of them.
“Harrison––“ She shook her head, forcing the thought away. “I want a readout on Cygnan activity the second we pop into the Tarsis system. Anderton–– keep the drive hot. I want to be able to get the hell out of there as soon as possible if we end up flying into a hornet’s nest, got it?”
A pair of stiff “Yes Ma’am”s came back in response. Captain Lazar gave her a wary glance, and she swallowed reflexively. I know, I know. The last thing anyone wanted was to end up on top of a Coralate fleet in the middle of a Cygnan invasion. The air was thick with nervousness.
The sound of the Hok’s degen-drive powering down to a hot standby whispered along silent vibrations as they slipped through the deck, softly jarring lines of unstable gravity that bounced between each subatomic particle and back again. She could feel it, feel each point zero-zero-one G-shift as it slipped through her body, moving in waves between every inch of flesh, every cell, every molecule, every particle in the very fabric of her being, but they said it was never enough to do any real damage. Long term exposure was supposed to cause all kinds of problems, everything from osteoporosis to Resnick’s Advanced Gravitic Cellular Anti-Cohesion Syndrome (RAGCACS) but most Naval Officers were subjected to years of exposure and got away at the end of their service with little more than the occasional oddly-placed rash or sporadic spike of short term heart burn to show for it. Faith herself had been on FTL cruises off and on for close to thirty years and hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary, but that didn’t mean it didn’t happen. The Wu Ang Hok’s chief medic was always busy treating obscure reactions to FTL travel.
Klaxons sounded suddenly, obliterating her thoughts. Yellow lights flashed, once, twice, three times. A final shiver passed through the deck, and then the monitors switched over to live feed and Tarsis punched through, all five outer planets roaring by to put the Hok within sight of Tarsis 12, that little blue gem just less than a unit from the system’s unassuming little yellow sun. Faith glanced at the tracking scope, eyes darting across the display, waiting.
The results came up fast, too fast. She blinked, looked again. No way.
No hits. No Cygnan activity. The system was clear.

It took five minutes to get every pilot up and moving.
Five minutes. Five minutes and they were flying out of tent doors like oxygen shooting through a pinhole breach into a hungry void of hard vacuum. It was so sudden, so fast– everyone stumbling, everyone shouting, a mass of half-asleep or half-drunk pilots sprinting chaotically into the night to form a loose line of mixed clothing that surged relentlessly forward across nanocrete and hard dirt, a line where flightsuits were the exception and second-hand or vending machine civilian gear was the rule.
At the front of the line, Tessa pounded barefoot across smooth black roadway, eyes intent on the airfield. Every step felt like it was taken in slow motion, every contact between foot and road too slow, too slow. She pushed herself, forced her legs to move and piston as fast as they could manage, but she was still weak, still tender from the injuries.
Doesn’t matter. She told herself, the words arcing back and forth through her mind, replaying over and over again like the words of some sacred mantra. No choice. She had a plane to fly, a colony to protect–– it was her job, rain or shine, injury or no injury, she had to protect the people, her people, her species. Or at least try–– and probably die trying, came the unwelcome thought. She closed her eyes, forced out a resolute breath. Doesn’t matter. Stay strong.
Izzy was hot on her heels. She could feel the angst, the fear, the anxiety, all there, all building, exuding outward from the lieutenant in tangible waves. They both knew what the doctor had said–– it was still too early, the new tissue was still too fragile, but Tessa pushed herself anyway, ignored the worry, the fear that brewed like a sickly sludge in the pit of her stomach.
But Izzy dealt with it differently. Izzy fixated on it, fought with it like some wicked inner demon, dragged Tessa into the middle of it and forced her to look at it with a worried eye.
Tessa repressed the urge to try and push herself any harder. Thinking about dealing with Izzy at that moment was enough to kick her speed up a notch–– the last thing she needed was another emotional battle in the midst of a real one. That’s how good pilots ended up dead.
Behind her, Tessa felt Stone coming up hard off her left, covering ground with the speed and grace of a practiced sprinter–– Phoebe was back a dozen paces, Cordova and Davidson stumping along and bringing up the rear. Beyond them hung a mass of bleary-eyed pilots, some still clutching bottles and shaking their heads to try to force some clarity through the drunken fog or the scratchy wools of sleep that still clutched their minds. No one had expected an attack this soon and no one on Tarsis 12 had carried soberstims, but it didn’t matter–– a drunk pilot was still a pilot, and they would need every pilot they had in a Seindrive, ready to take on the Cygnans the instant they were within range. Sure, it went against regs to fly under the influence, and it was dangerous, but in an emergency, in a situation where they were all likely to die anyway, all of that went out the window without a second glance.
...and the Coralate fighters are already so close. Tessa thought. Anytime, the boy had said. There’s a Fuckload of them, and they’re dropping through atmo at crazy speeds!
She shook her head, muttered a silent, venomous curse. Shit. Shhhhhhhit.
The airfield loomed up ahead in the half darkness of city night. Every road and runway glowed, pale light and strobing beacons casting mosaics of color across long swathes of green grass engineered to grow into a closely-cropped lawn that always looked as if some VFW volunteer had spent his sweet time lording over it and ceaselessly mowing it into subordinate perfection. Close to two dozen rigs sat crowded around the long nanocrete runways nearby, some of them scorched, crumpled, flayed–– most were airworthy, tired but ready, capable of taking on the Coralate as long as the fighting didn’t get too thick or drag on too long. The colony on Tarsis 12 had compatible fuel, but ammo and heat-jacketing were things they’d have to keep an eye on until a ship came to get them. A rig without functional weaponry wasn’t much more than a fast target in the sky.
“Tessa!” Izzy caught up to her suddenly, shattering her thoughts. Izandra’s anger was just barely reined in–– beneath the thin and cracking surface of an expression of forced calm, she was fuming. “What the hell are you doing?”
Tessa gave her a cold glance, a cobalt brush-off that was more warning than anything. Izzy bristled visibly.
Instantly, she was in Tessa’s face, bare feet reflex dancing across nanocrete. “Tessa! No! Did you forget!? Your rig is fucked! F-U-C-K-E-D, FUCKED!”
Tessa stopped, eyes hard. Traces of an embarrassed flush blossomed along the edges of Izzy’s face, but she pushed it back, held her ground. Too much, Izzy. Too far. Came the nagging thoughts at the back of her mind. Too much. She held back an uneasy swallow, and the pause rotted, turned oppressive and sour.
“You got a better idea?” Tessa shot back a moment later, her eyes still locked with Izandra’s. I don’t need anyone to remind me how crazy this is. “We’re going to need every pilot we can get up there, and my rig will still fly.”
“It’ll get off the ground, yeah, but the Cygnans jacked with the grav couch, Tess!” Izzy finished, a growl of frustration rising in her throat as Tessa started moving again, slower this time. “Tessa! Dammit! Listen to me! I don’t want you to get fucking liquified if you have to dodge a fucking missile or accelerate to anything faster than half-speed!”
“So watch my ass.” Tessa shot her a quick, cocky grin.
The sudden, cocky response caught Izzy off-guard, left her standing, lips parted uncertainly. Tessa turned away again, started jogging.
“Dammit Tess, will you just listen to me, just this once–– “ Izzy shook her head in frustration, sprinted to catch up with the other woman. “Hey! I’m supposed to be the crazy one here, remember? You’re supposed to be the level-headed hard-ass who worries too-fucking-much!”
Another grin played across Tessa’s face as she half-glanced at Izzy. “Well, I can’t let you have all the fun, now can I?”
“Yes! Yes you can!” Izzy immediately responded, her tone a mixture of anger, fear–– it was pleading and arguing all rolled into one, a ball of emotion that hit the ears like a bad vibration. “It’s okay to let me have all the crazy-person fun!”
Tessa laughed. Frozen fingers of worry and uneasy dread tingled up Izzy’s spine. The rigs were close now. Tessa’s rig was close now. Think, Izzy, think!
“What do I have to do to keep you out of that death-trap, Tess!?” No answer. Dammit Tess! “Hey! Are you even listening to me?”
“Nope.”
Izzy bit her lip. “Well...” She hesitated. “You should be, dammit!”
“Why?” Soft grass whispered underfoot. Tessa’s eyes stayed fixed ahead, not even meeting Izzy’s in a glance. The rigs were so close... “I already know how you feel about it, and I already know it’s crazy, but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re going to need every pilot we’ve got up there as soon as things start to get hot.”
“I don’t want you to get killed, Tess!” Izzy shot back immediately.
“And I don’t want to die, Izzy, but it’s a risk we take every time we climb into the cockpit–– you know that!” Stone’s words slipped through Tessa’s mind and she closed her eyes against them, against the dark feelings they brought, the sadness, the dread, the cold fear. We’re always ready to die for our cause.
Izzy’s hand landed on Tessa’s shoulder, gentle and concerned, threading worry through channels that normal communication left unused. Her thoughts echoed in Tessa’s mind, refusing to be ignored. Don’t take this risk, Tess. It’s not worth it. Please... for me? There are still things about you I want to learn...
“Getting in my head isn’t going to change my mind.” Tessa pushed forward and dropped her shoulder, moving just a little faster, just fast enough to shake off Izzy’s hand. It was a cold gesture, but Izzy wasn’t getting the point–– her fingers slipped away, and the link fizzled instantly.
“Hey, Eisenherz.” Stone came up beside Izzy, yellow eyes searching Tessa’s bobbing cord of midnight black hair. “One of my pilots is unconscious, right-rear, rig says ‘Stewart’ on the side.” She paused, glanced aside in the break. Tessa was slowing. “I want you to take it. It’s less beat-up than your rig, and the grav couch hasn’t been tweaked or toasted yet.” She gave Izzy a wink.
“Give it to Cordova.” Tessa’s dismissive gesture was quick, absent. Izzy’s face reddened.
“Are you kidding? Give it to regs-boy!?” Izzy sputtered. “He’s green, Tess! We need someone with skill in Stewart’s rig. Cordova can sit this one out––“
“Izzy.” Tessa turned. She’d reached her rig. The traces of a soft breeze played with the loose fronds of her hair. “I’m going up in my Seindrive.” Her eyes were hard as diamonds, as dark as sacred ocean depths. “That’s final. I’m done arguing about it.”
Izzy fought for words, but her voice refused to cooperate and left her mouth working through silent syllables like a gulping fish. Tessa’s eyes slid smoothly across to Stone, softening slightly. “Cordova’s rig is out of commission for the duration.” She gestured to a faceless mass that was tarped to a distant stretch of grass like some somber, lurching hillside. “If Stewart’s rig is open, put Cordova in it.” She glanced back at Izzy, arched an eyebrow. “We need every pilot we can get up there.”
“If you get yourself killed, Tess, I swear I’m going to kick your ass in the afterlife.” came Izzy’s immediate response, her voice direct, matter-of-fact.
“What if we go to different places?” Tessa chided, features softening.
“Oh, don’t worry, we’ll both be going to the same place.” Izzy’s tone sharpened. The amused traces of a smirk played across Tessa’s lips. “Heaven just wouldn’t be heaven without a crazy bitch like you, babe.” Tessa’s grin was immediate, amused.
“How sweet.” Stone gave them both a narrow grin and thumbed a gloved hand in the direction of her own rig. Tensions were growing. They could all feel it. “Can we get in the air now, or do we have to wait until the blue-skins start blowing things up?”

A tent flap stirred. Booted feet touched cold earth.
Outside the row of tents and beyond the still patch of weedspotted dirt that bordered them, a boulevard of smooth, black nanocrete stretched silently on into sprawling eternity, damp and dark with the leavings of a thin mist that fell heavily through the crisp air of the night. Tiny droplets flared in sheets as they fell, painted pale yellow where the cold light of street lamps brushed across them. The temperature had already begun its steady drop into the shivering lows, and the soft, frigid sheets of condensation that joined it in its earthward descent heralded the approach of a hazy midnight fog. There were no cars, no headlights–– the night was silent, and the silence stayed unbroken.
In the darkness, there was only an old military crawler that looked like the bastard child of a tank and tricycle, crouched in silent repose at the edge of the line of olive green tents where the Von’s abandoned pilots huddled in blankets or around bottles of local booze. It was a vintage piece, something from the early days of interstellar colonization that had been retrofitted with more advanced strains of restoration nanotech and a handful of aftermarket tractor parts to allow it to serve as a sort of all purpose vehicle. It was set up to plow, mow, harvest, spray, and had enough armor and rifle mounts fitted and welded to its bulky frame to turn it into a formidable anti-personnel weapons platform in a pinch. It had been the old sheriff’s baby, something he’d left in the care of the town when he had passed away in the early days of the Tarsis 12 colony, but to most of the locals, it was worse than a tired old horse–– it was a relic that cost good taxpayer money to maintain, money that only did as much as keep it running, only kept it crawling along the streets during meager parades. They had been more than happy to push it off on the Navy the instant tents were raised for the Von’s pilots.
Brushing away the last of her drying tears and tying her hair back into a strong cord, Tessa forced her mind away from the last shreds of discomfort and doubt that clung to her like dark cobwebs in the shadowy corners of an otherwise placid room. The air helped, each breath in the damp darkness of Tarsis 12's cool and hazy night was cleansing, refreshing, so unlike the nanomachine-thick air of Earth or any of the core worlds she’d set foot on.
She stretched and pulled in a deep breath, then let it out again, pushing away thoughts of that solitary link in an endless chain of humanity’s blunders. The exhale came reluctantly, a little forced, slow and shaky. God... what am I doing walking out on her like that? Another deep breath, a quiet sigh pushed through her nose. Her eyes wandered steadily skyward, searching the undersides of moonlit clouds bleached by city lights. I should go back in there. I should face this, tell her the truth, tell her everything, every last––
“Glad to see you came through this alive too, Lieutenant Commander.”
Tessa’s eyes flicked earthward, slipped to a spot of darkness beside the canvas of the tent–– the pale light played eerily off the starched white lines and golden flash of a Terran on-deck uniform as someone stepped out of the shadow and took a strong, confident step toward her, non-threatening, but still strong and purposeful, the stride of a soldier. One hand went absently through short and spiky hair like wild copper wire, while the other managed a tiny one-finger gesture from the white nanofoam surface of a cheap coffee cup. The traces of a smile slipped across Tessa’s lips as recognition kicked in.
“Lieutenant Stone.” She began, turning slowly. The Lieutenant managed a mild smile in response. “Athena Squadron, right?”
“Front-left wingman, yeah.” Stone nodded quickly. She was an attractive woman, more handsome, more masculine than most, with hard, whipcord muscles and sharp lines across every inch of her body. Even her face was all angles, her jaw as strong and resolute as a brick. Pretty seemed almost too effeminate a word to describe her looks–– handsome fit her like a glove.
Tessa gave her a quick, apparent once-over. “Nice uniform.”
Stone’s smile sharpened slightly. Tessa’s gear was a perfect contrast to the Lieutenant’s stiff, white uniform–– a loose black tanktop emblazoned with a stylized Egyptian eye and a pair of slacks the color of orange peel that Izzy had picked up at a local thrift store while Tessa slept and fought with her own inner demons in the darkness the doc’s old-tech nanobots had kept her locked in. “You keep a spare neatly folded in the cockpit?” Tessa asked. Thinking about the hospital made her chest hurt. She rubbed absently at the bruise, grimaced.
Stone’s smile cracked a little wider. “Oh, I’m not that anal, Lieutenant Commander.”
“Tessa, please.” Tessa gave her another smile. “The LC stuff gets old when I’m off-duty.”
“Are we ever really off-duty?” Stone chided.
Tessa’s smile spread, softened. “I guess we’re like Doctors that way, or nurses... always on call.”
“Except we’re always ready to die for our cause.” Stone added dismally, her attitude taking a sudden downturn. Tessa looked up, considered her features carefully.
“It’s a part of the job.” The traces of a sour grimace seemed to flicker across Stone’s face in the pause. It might just have been the light– Tessa couldn’t tell, didn’t want to think about it. “Luckily, only a few of us actually bite it out there in battle.”
Stone spared her an ironic chuckle. “Yeah, tell that to the Assault Squadrons. They lost seven rigs and seven pilots to the blueskins out there in the black this time.” Her eyes lifted, touched Tessa’s–– they were golden brown, almost yellow, like autumn leaves or twin discs of burnished brass. The smile was gone. “Even Athena Squadron wasn’t as lucky as your people were. I lost my LC and a young guy we’d just brought onto the team.”
“What was the young guy’s name?” Tessa asked, more out of force of habit and sentimentality than actual curiosity. Athena was Minerva’s sister Squadron, five non-specialized rigs with brilliant pilots behind the stick. It could just have easily have been us out there, slaughtered during the fighting. She closed her eyes. We could have lost Davidson... or Cordova... Jeez.
“Boehler.” Stone managed, staring off into the darkness. “Rod Boehler. He was a good kid, less than a month out of Earthside training.” She took an absent sip of her coffee. “I barely knew the guy.”
“And Giller too, huh?”
Stone nodded silently. “Yeah... but at least she went out the way she always said that she wanted to–– kicking blueskin ass.” Stone’s eyes dropped to the ground, seemed to study the dirt. “I plan on torching a couple of Coralate rigs for her next time we get airborne and get a chance to go head to head with the fuckers again.”
“I’m sure she’ll appreciate it.”
“It’s the least I can do.” A tiny, ironic laugh cracked from Stone’s lips. “Getting slagged by plas-flechettes in the middle of a warship crossfire doesn’t exactly leave enough of a corpse behind for a proper send-off.” Tessa shivered. Could have been you. Her mind was only too happy to remind her. A lot of good people caught the wrong end of the knife up there, and any one of them could have just as easily been you... or Phoebe... or–– even Izzy... She swallowed uneasily. Dark thoughts brewed, simmered. If she’d have lost Izzy...
It was something she refused to think about.
Tessa closed her eyes against the pain she could feel brewing in her chest, fighting to be heard, recognized. “Were you two...were you and Giller close?”
“We were just friends, if that’s what you mean.” Stone gave Tessa a tired glance. “Giller... Susan... she was... she was really an incredible woman.”
The pause was deafening. Tessa licked her lips apprehensively, then nonchalantly changed the subject. Stone smiled at the effort. “So where’d you get the uniform?”
“There’s a nanoreplication unit in the costume shop four or five blocks down.” She pulled absently at the fabric. “It’s not quite the same as what we wear on the Von, but it’s damn close.” She looked up again. “I figured it would be good practice to at least try to look official while we’re trapped on this rock waiting for rescue or certain death, whichever happens to show up first.”
Tessa looked away again. “Happy thoughts, Lieutenant. Happy thoughts.” The noise Stone made in response was unnecessarily harsh.
The edge of a smile slipped across Tessa’s lips. Yeah, I feel that way too. Stone glanced at her coffee, seemed to study it in the silence.
In the next instant, a blade of light sliced through the night and caught their eyes, bouncing harsh yellow glimmers off storefront windows as it arced in toward them, accompanied by the high hornet whine of an old kit bike. Tessa knew the sound–– it was one of those sport bikes that were pressed out of carbon nanotube on the cheap from any number of automated, AI run factories back near the more heavily populated Earthside worlds. They were popular with kids and jocks all across the rim, and rode smooth, if you knew how to put them together right and didn’t mind tweaking practically every part that came stock in the box. In that way, buying one and putting it together was almost seen as a coming-of-age ritual on frontier planets–– it was all about personal pride, bonding, status, just another little part of the commonwealth dream. Too many of them were painted patriotic colors and covered in decals of the flags of Earthside nations or political groups, a virtual army of emaciated bumper stickers on two spindly wheels.
But not this one–– this one looked like something out of a premillennial Indiana Jones flick, sandblasted and wrapped in dirty cotton rags with knobby tires that looked more suited for churning coarse dirt than nanocrete roadways. The kid on it was no different–– everything he wore was light or beige and long, all dirty desert gear, though every inch of skin showing was pale and waxy, a clear indicator that the gear wasn’t meant for much more than appearances. Apparently the sand-people look was back in style.
The instant before he reached them he swung wide, tires squealing, then dropped the bike. He hit the ground in a full-on sprint and the thing went skittering off across nanocrete, sputtering petrochemical protests–– one dirty thumb came up, jammed his mud-rimmed riding goggles into his gritty hair, and revealed his eyes, so clear, so vivid, so frightened.
“Woah, hey, slow down there.” Tessa managed as he came running toward them–– her tone was all tired bravado, stiff protocol softened by a casual edge, but it slowed him down almost instantly.
“Who’s–– I need–– I’ve got to!” He was out of breath, practically tripping over himself trying to get the words out. “I need to talk to your commanding officer right now!”
“Good luck with that.” Stone snorted, taking an absent sip of her coffee. “He’s got to be a dozen light years away by now.”
The kid shot Stone a quizzical look. Tessa stepped forward, caught his attention with a quick gesture.
“I’m the ranking officer.” She gave him a quick, formal once-over. “What’s up?”
“Blueskin fighters!” His words came fast, blurted. “Everything we’ve got to monitor air and orbital traffic is going crazy! There’s a Fuckload of them, and they’re dropping through atmo at crazy speeds!”
Tessa’s eyes hardened, darkened, shoulders stiffening. Stone’s nanofoam cup hit the dirt, coffee splashing across hard earth and sprouts of blue-green grass in a scalding cascade of steaming black.”How soon before they’re on top of us?”
“Anytime.” Came the immediate response.
A pause. Tessa’s eyes flicked away. “Shit.”
Never really off duty. Always on call.

“Tessa.”
“Yeah?”
“We... we need to talk.”
Tessa rolled over. Lights were out in the section of tent that the colonists had partitioned off for Minerva Squadron, and the glow from the street on the other side of the canvas wall cast long, yellow shadows across Izzy’s face in the darkness, making her features stark, playing across every desperate edge, every line, every curve that cruelly begged for explanation or screamed its own silent scream of betrayal.
It hurt. Tessa pulled in a slow breath. It was so clear–– Izzy’s thoughts were painted across her face like a thick stroke of wet, pale light from some cruel and luminous paintbrush. She swallowed, turned away, and heard Izzy choke back a desperate noise–– the sound of her heart cracking open, bleeding away every denied tear, pushing the pain further and further into the depths of her tortured soul, internalizing, internalizing. Tessa closed her eyes.
“So I take it... the doctor told you.” Tessa breathed, lips hesitating, trembling with the need to say something more, words that refused to come. It was something she had always dreaded, knowing that one day Izzy would find out about her heritage, about the dark, dirty little secret hanging in the shadows of her past, the thing that she’d tried so hard to hide all her life, to ignore in the hopes that she could live her life without wearing some proof of her tainted DNA around her neck like a brand burned into the flank of an animal that someone owned. That was how it felt, how the Commonwealth government wanted it to feel– all GMOs and their offspring labeled and separated from the rest of humanity, segregation, and it was what the people wanted. It was written into short and direct bills that had passed by landslides decades ago.
She bit down hard against the pain rising in her gut, burning through her own heart as surely as it was burning through Izzy’s. Conflicting feelings battled in her chest, boiling up and bursting in little bubbles of hatred, worry, concern, and guilt, all stiffer, all sharpened by the deep-running pangs of discrimination she’d silently endured from afar for her entire life. Oh sure, she’d never faced the persecution directly, never been denied access to restaurants or schools or the miliary, never stood up before a mob of angry Catholics ready to lynch her simply for being born, but she’d seen it done to others, she’d watched in horror as that kind of heartless, inhuman discrimination had been meted out on people like her, people that could have been her, had she not been so lucky. Oh Izzy, I’m so sorry.
“Yeah...” Izzy’s tone was so direct, so final, like the last strike of a church bell at some midnight funeral. “The doctor told me about it.” Tessa’s eyes squeezed tighter, squeezed against blinding buds of burning tears. “Why didn’t... Why did I have to hear it from him, Tess? Why couldn’t you tell me?”
“I...” Tessa drew in a shaky breath, let it stick desperately in the bottom of her lungs. What was there to say? She’d been scared, she’d hoped Izzy might never find out, she thought–– Oh god, say something! “I–– I’m sorry, I just...” She stumbled, then suddenly buried her head into her pillow and forced the rest out, half-muffled. “I can’t talk about it right now...”
“You thought I wouldn’t find out.” Izzy managed, her voice level, her tone sad, almost fearful.
“No, I...” Tessa turned her head, looked across the mounded curves of the pillow at the distant horizon made where white met a sky of dark canvas wall. She bit her lip. Damn! She’s not even touching me and she’s practically picking up on my thoughts... She shifted, buried the heels of her palms into her eyes, held back a curse. “Izzy, I always wanted to tell you... I just...”
“Tess...” Izzy reached out, squeezed Tessa’s shoulder. “Please.”
“No, Izzy...” She trembled under the other woman’s touch, pulled in another shaky breath. Oh god... “I’m... I’m so sorry, I... I need––“
“Don’t...” Izzy tried, squeezing Tessa’s shoulder again. Warm tears burned in her eyes, breaking free in silent streamers and running in filmy rivers across her cheeks. Izzy bit her lip, fought the urge to shudder, to cry out. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried, truly cried –it had been so long, too long... it had been in Tessa’s arms– only now those same arms refused to hold her, refused to touch her. Instead, they rejected her, stayed limp at Tessa’s sides, silent and unwilling.
“I was going to tell you...” Tessa tried again. “But then I saw... I saw the footage of one of the speeches you gave on Mars, and I...” Another shaky breath crossed her lips and she swallowed. Dammit, Tess, pull yourself together! She forced herself to roll over, her eyes meeting Izzy’s and slipping slowly across the glistening trails of tears on her face. “I’m sorry Izzy, I... I can’t do this now, I...” She swallowed. “I have to get some air.”
“Don’t...” It came again, another desperate fragment, another broken piece of sentence that came out on a cold, quiet breath. Tessa bit her lip again. Izzy was a wreck, and it hurt to see her like that, hurt to see her so wounded and broken that she lay helpless and begging, face wet with tears held back too well, too long. Tessa shook her head quickly, shook her head against all the pain and remorse and regret and pushed herself upright.
“No.” She managed, forcing firmness into her shaky voice. “I... I need to get some air, Izzy.”
There was no resistance this time, no fight. The warrior spirit she’d come to love in Izzy, the strength she’d come to respect, even expect–– it was all gone, drained away like the blood in her face, leaving pale and weak flesh quivering in its wake. She couldn’t bare to look at the other woman. It just hurt too much to see her so weak. Fresh tears broke from Tessa’s eyes as she turned away, squeezing against the pain. I’m sorry, Izzy.
“You’re the stronger one.” Izzy managed, struggling to rein in the tears. “You always have been. Sure, out there, I put on a hard face and give you a run for your money, but... God, Tessa. You’re so much more... you’re so much more resilient than me.”
A teary fragment of laughter escaped Tessa’s lips, a little broken burst of sound that blossomed wet and sarcastic in the darkness.
“Don’t do this, Izzy.” Tessa shook her head. “We’re both people... people have limits...”
“Talk to me, Tessa.” Izzy sat up beside her, forcing herself to reach out and brush a stray line of midnight hair and a cold slick of tears from Tessa’s cheek. “There’s a part of you that I don’t know, a part of you I want to know. Talk to me.” Izzy’s hands traced gentle lines across the soft skin of Tessa’s arms. “There shouldn’t be any secrets between us... perfect love and perfect trust, remember?”
There was a long moment of silence–– It was sentimental, almost awkward, but somehow sacred. It had to be there, had to bridge the gap that stretched between their words. Izzy’s gaze locked with Tessa’s, almost faltered under that powerful, unyielding cobalt gaze. God, Tess, if I wasn’t so hurt and scared and... yeah... oh man, I swear I’d kiss you right now.
“Izzy.” Tessa managed, voice hoarse. She swiped at the tears at the edges of her eyes, tried to force a smile, failed. “Please... some other time.” She made a half-hearted gesture. “Somethings... somethings shouldn’t be rushed.”
“There’s no time like the present Tess, you know that.” Izzy’s resolve hardened a little, her strength returning. She forced a smile, but concern came through in every line and curve of her face, softening it immediately. “I don’t want to lose you, Tess.”
The traces of a smile creased willingly across Tessa’s lips, her eyes dropping.
“Don’t worry, Izzy.” She breathed, gently reaching out to touch her lover’s arm. “You won’t. We’re in this together, babe.”
“Just like old times.” Izzy’s smile widened slightly, overcoming the taint of concern and the lines of drying tears that streaked her face.
“Just like old times.” Tessa echoed.

It had been forty-six hours.
Forty-six hours out from Tarsis 12, forty-six hours that Admiral Virek had spent stewing in his office with only the groggy spinnings and tired regrets of a mind kept conscious by nano-stims and four pots of reconstituted coffee to keep him company while he silently scanned reports and communiques on silicon pads. It had been forty-six hours since the Von had leapt out of the hot seat and left every pilot and Seindrive behind to take the heat in its place-- a cruel decision to have to make, a decision that wasn’t even the least bit fair, but one that had also been exactly within the realm of acceptability when it came to keeping his crew and his starship from being reduced to a heap of slag left to float aimlessly between the stars.
Another necessary evil to add to the list.
He regretted every hour that passed because of the decision, his decision, every hour that his people were trapped in the Tarsis system, outnumbered and unsupported with the Coralate thick in their midst. Every hour that passed steamed with his regret, every minute, every second, leaving his psyche scalded and numb, locked. It was a sacrifice, a sacrifice indifferently labeled as cutting losses, keeping casualties to a minimum. As an Admiral, you should be used to the idea by now.
He wasn’t.
Tossing one of the reports back toward the stack, the old Admiral watched absently as it slid across his desk, uncaring as it slipped over the edge and clattered against the floor. A medley of Opera and Classical hung in the air, lilting and directionless, soft and endless, everywhere, some scattered bits familiar, others not. Wagner, Bach, Nicolas Lens...
He breathed a tired sigh. It seemed like no matter how many years passed, no matter how many medals were pinned to his uniform or scars were pinned to his flesh and psyche, he would never be jaded enough, never find himself truly able to accept the notion of acceptable losses, expendable lives.
At least, he buried his face into his hands, this time, there is some shred of hope.
It wasn’t much hope, a pinhole ray of feeble light– but it was real hope, tangible hope. At about two hours past 80 Ursae Majoris, Virek’s ensigns had made contact with another Wallace class warship, one of the Von’s sisterships on the rim, the Wu Ang Hok.
Virek and the Hok’s C/O, Admiral Faith Minear, had shared ground classes, been off-and-on friends through their years Earthside, and had served together during their first assignment on the Cloudwalk back before the rim had extended out as far as the Tarsis system. It hadn’t taken much effort on the part of Virek to convince her to leave her uneventful patrol routes around Laurentis’ Star and burn hard for Tarsis 12 instead. TCGND command would probably have an ear full for both of them when it was all over, but at least Virek’s pilots had a shot at survival now. Sure, it wasn’t much of a shot, but a slim chance was always better than no chance at all.
Virek closed his eyes, and the darkness of sleep beckoned immediately, swirling drunkenly under his lids. Estimates put the Hok in the Tarsis system within another forty-eight hours. I just hope there is still someone left for her to rescue...
He sighed, rubbing his palms against his eyes. Now there’s a dismal thought.
Hilleboe still didn’t have an estimate on the Coralate’s standing forces in or around the Tarsis system, but if what the Von had come up against there had only been the tip of the iceberg...
He’d seem swarms of Cygnan ships come down on frontier systems like Tarsis before, usually one lead ship with hundreds of cruisers just an hour or so behind it, each folding space at once like a swarm of eager locusts, the successive gravitic bending of physical space building into massive waves of stellar turbulence that bent the courses of whole planets and moons. They filled the void with their numbers, a cloud of shimmering liquid silver that obliterated the black sheet of the universe, a wall of mercury blotting out the endless stars, each tiny drop of quicksilver a bristling battlecruiser ready for bear. Once, he’d seen a cloud of Coralate ships like that pop back into normal space right on top of several dozen Terran warships waiting for them. Once. Weapons had been hot, holding maximum charge, targeting arrays lined up and eager. The instant the Cygnans popped into their sights, the order to fire had blasted across the channel with all the force and ferocity of a startled roar, every frightened cadet, recruit and weapons officer squeezing triggers and slamming firing controls desperately, knowing that death was close, that they wouldn’t get another chance to hurt the Coralate like this for a long time.
Every Cygnan cruiser and fighter had been ripped to pieces in that fateful moment, all splitting open like so many festering silver boils, fragmenting into the night and disappearing into the hungry mouths of a series of implosion vortices that blossomed across the heavens long before the Coralate rigs could manage to bring their own ship-to-ship weaponry online. It had been easy, too easy... like dumping a thousand helpless bodies into the churning maws of a massive, galactic meatgrinder.
But that had only happened once. In the entire history of the war with the Coralate, the TCGND had only managed to pull off a single ambush that daring and that effective. In a way, Virek felt proud for having been a part of it, for having seen it, but it was also a dark pride, a macabre pride that left him wondering what part of his mind, what part of the human mind, was capable of taking any kind of pride in wholesale slaughter, even of a heartless and merciless enemy like the Coralate. It didn’t help that every other time the Cygnans had swarmed into a system en masse he had been forced to run immediately, to pull out without so much as a shot fired or a Seindrive launched.
And perhaps, in its own way, that’s even worse... His mind dropped its original thought and went shooting off after a tangent. At least with a TCGND ship like the Von, we can choose to jump if things get too hot. Most civilians, on the other hand, were chained to their planets and homes, and when the Coralate horde streamed into a system, their only remaining hope, the Naval division of the very government that had sworn to protect them, the men and women whose salaries the taxes levied on their hard-earned incomes paid, could simply desert them without a second thought. In the end, it all came down to the greater good. Don’t throw good soldiers after a lost cause, Virek. Live to fight the Coralate another day, Virek. Pick your terms, Virek. Better terms, Virek.
“Damn it all!”
Another weight on my mind.
All those lives... How many rim colonies had he left to the Coralates like that? Four. Four systems whose names he would never forget, could never forget. Seventh Yorkshire, Van Buuren, Delano, Abel-Gray. They haunted him like so many ghosts, plagued his sleep, chased him through the dark corridors of his mind in his most abyssal moments. How many people had died on account of his decisions? There was no official count... he’d probably never know for sure. Millions was a safe estimate.
God, Millions.
And they were all dead, without any doubt. The Cygnans were reported to be brutal, almost harsher on civilians than they were on soldiers. Every colony abandoned on the eve of a massive invasion like that was doomed, almost every man, woman and child left to spend their last few hours praying that they might be killed in the initial stages of the massacre, when ship-to-ship weapons stabbed down from orbit and ruthlessly scoured the major cities and settlements from the planetary surface, vaporizing everything, every trace of civilization, every trace of life and leaving only scorched earth in their wake. Those who lasted longer, those who managed to stay alive long enough to see the hive-like Coralate troop transports land were hunted for sport, caught and slaughtered in sadistic ways before being reprocessed into... well, that only the Cygnans knew. The Cygnans and God above, Virek mused, if he hasn’t chosen to avert his eyes to their savagery.
That was the word from the few leaked reports and recovered planetary vidcasts that had escaped invaded planets and punched through high-end Cygnan information nets. No one really knew for certain, no one had lived to tell the tale firsthand, no one had escaped, and despite limited communication between the Terran Commonwealth and the Cygnan Coralate, mostly due to humanity’s inability to comprehend the Cygnan tongue, one thing had been made perfectly clear by the blueskins, a chilling fact that seemed to confirm all the rumors.
Humans: not captive. Slaves: No need. Death exquisite: Granted to deserving. Undeserving: gathered, euthanized.
It was simple, direct, a message that painted a grim picture for civilians with claims staked out across the rim. The edge of Commonwealth territory was the front line in the war against the Coralate, and it was impossible to tell which system the Cygnans would set their sights on next–– Tarsis was just the latest in a series of too many Commonwealth stars. Or seems to be.
Images of frontier colony towns coalesced in his mind. They were all so similar, all second-hand tech and local resources cobbled together in a fashion like a cross between a well-established old western town and a starship graveyard. The children would be playing in the dusty streets, nanoweave denim, cotton and flannel serving as the unspoken dresscode. Women in dresses shouting from plank sidewalks on streetcorners, women in pants sweating with tools and heavy loads, men filling every other nook and cranny, working side-by-side with women, taking up subdued fatherly roles, doing domestic work in shops, homes. They were always so idyllically western, but with none of the defined gender roles, none of the racism, none of the hatred. Colonists were peaceful people who had struck out to the rim in the hopes of just trying to get by, to carve their own little niche out of the foreign soil of another world and forget about the complexities of intergalactic politics.
But it meant nothing when the Cygnans came. Beams of blue light would erase it all in two or three quick sweeps, vaporizing everything, all the colonists’ hopes and dreams, all that they had bled for, all that they had fought for, all that they loved– all of it gone in an instant. All those colonists would be obliterated in the blink of an eye, ruthlessly wiped out, and probably every last pilot of the Von with them.
Damn the Coralate! It had become like a mantra for Virek since the beginning of the war. Damn the Coralate! Yes, and damn the torpedoes while you were at it. It doesn’t make any difference in the end. The mind wanders when fatigued. The clock on Virek’s desk clicked over. Forty-seven hours since Tarsis 12, and close to sixty-five since he’d slept. Six hours of sleep wouldn’t cost him the war, or anyone else for that matter... Hilleboe could handle himself. He is Captain after all... If I’d had a codgy old admiral lording over my every move when I’d been in command of the Glovalsky, I’d probably have pushed him out an airlock. He smiled. Ah, the Glovalsky. Those were my own good old days.
“But you’re not that young anymore Henryk.” He mused aloud, taking off his hat and scratching his head absently. And you won’t be worth a damn like this if something does happen. “Come on, old man. It’s time to get some sleep.”
He stood and clicked his fingers to disable the music, then made his way for the door, pausing once to glance back at the silent comm terminal on his desk.
Good luck, Faith, and Godspeed.
Bring my pilots back alive.

...point oh two variation in the exo-kinetic modulation of the grav-couch which ultimately resulted in an exponential buildup of pressures during super-high velocity, super-high g-force maneuvers. Tracing the problem back, I found traces of a stealthy EV-11 class modular virus that punched a hole in the security barriers and mainframe defense walls of the AI’s hard memory and left a trojan to hold the breech before it tried to wipe itself from the system. Traces of remaining coding looks like Coralate technology...
Izzy slipped off her aviators and rubbed her eyes. Exhaustive was the perfect word to describe the report–– it was frightening to read, to consider the ramifications of the Cygnans suddenly being able to hack into Terran fighters and modify systems at will, but it didn’t matter. The report could just as easily have been live footage of the Commonwealth council begging the Cygnan warmongers for leniency on bended knee, ready to cede any and every Terran world to the Coralate, and she might still have been just as detached to the news–– her mind was somewhere else entirely, locked in a wicked spincycle. Dammit Tessa, why didn’t you tell me?
The GMO conventions of the twenty-one eighties and twenty-two forties had expanded the rights of clones and engineered species with more than seventy-five percent, and later more than fifty percent unmodified human DNA to standards near those enjoyed by normal humans, but fear of a future full of genetically engineered superhumans and the echoes of eugenics still hung on in what was seen as an otherwise enlightened society. The very pinnacle of human evolution, the most culturally advanced form of Homo Sapiens to paste its legacy across the starry fields of the heavens, and still fear managed to sway the votes more easily than bare facts. No matter how small the changes that were made by human tampering, people labeled as GMOs or offspring of GMOs were not allowed to hold taxable jobs within the Terran Commonwealth, couldn’t marry, couldn’t join the ranks of any military division or own firearms, could be legally barred from public areas, and were subject to a dozen other seemingly unjust laws that left them angry and disheartened, ashamed of what they were, the very bodies they had been born into.
But perhaps worst of all the laws and propositions that had come to pass was the length of the sentence that had to be endured–– the stipulations imposed on GMOs held for seven generations, and as long as any NCP signature tags were a part of an individual’s genetic legacy beyond that. In most cases, in cases like Tessa’s, where tags were involved because the original GMO had been designed specifically to be owned, hope for freedom from the label that kept them from living a normal life was negligible at best. After the Centauri police action of 2245, the last official, organized uprising of modified humans, suicide rates had spiked up twenty percent among GMOs–– it was a hard fact to live with, knowing that there was no hope for freedom, that even your grandchildren’s grandchildren might still be discriminated against because a speck of coding in their DNA had once belonged to a GMO. It all seemed like a huge price to pay, but perhaps that was all part of God’s greater plan, His divine will. She had to believe it was, had to... The Lord’s sword is swift and terrible. It was the only way to justify it, to justify the persecution, to justify what she’d done, what she believed.
Izzy pushed her fingers into her eyes and swore openly. Back at the papal university on Benedict, Mars, she’d given a series of speeches on the sanctity of the human genetic code and spoken out against the engineering of Genetically Modified Organisms and specialized forms of vatgrown slave-humans. Abominations. That’s what you called them, Izzy, abominations. You called innocent people like Tessa the unholy spawn of the idle hands of otherwise brilliant researchers. You screamed it and shook your fist at the bruise-red martian skies while Pope Vultaggio watched the broadcast and signed the checks for your scholarships. She breathed a shaky sigh. It wasn’t fair. She’d felt so strongly about it, still did, still hated the idea of trying to tinker with something as perfect as God’s own divine artifice. Oh Tessa, why? Why did you have to be one of them?
She pulled in a long, tired breath, feeling the cold grip of guilt and some nameless, painful emotion that bordered on shame, disgust, and remorse settle in across her shoulders like a yoke. It is His will to test us, to guide us... Judge not, lest ye be judged? Do not stray into temptation? What does He want me to do? She forced out a tired sigh. The Lord works in mysterious ways...
The ancient screen of the console glared at her, bathing her skin in pale blue light. She hated feeling weak, hated being put in situations like the one she was fighting to get out of now. One crisis for the Commonwealth, one crisis for our relationship and my faith. Millions, no–– billions of lives could be at stake, and all I can think about is myself, about Tessa. She ground her fingers further into her eyes. Dark colors flared on the insides of her lids.
She’s still the same Tessa, she reminded herself suddenly, swallowing against a knot rising in her throat. So what if she’s got some abnormal coding in her genes, so what if she’s the very thing you crusaded so passionately against back on Mars? Fact is, she’s still the same woman. She’s still the same woman I fell in love with, still the same woman I used to spend my Earthside academy leave with. Face it–– I’m not the kind of person who would ever normally go bowling on a Friday morning in New Orleans, but it was places like that I remember most, little family-owned bowling alleys and crack-in-the-wall restaurants in the French Quarter. Those were the kinds of places Tessa showed me, places I never would have found on my own, would never have set foot in alone, not in a million years. Those were the kinds of places we enjoyed together, enjoyed being in together, just being, just holding hands...
Memories of Tessa standing on a stretch of Louisiana bayou, staring out over the coast and into the sparkling depths of the gulf of Mexico came flooding back. She’d been wilder then, thinner, hair cut short and whipped into spiky fronds by highway wind. Memories of getting drunk at a little no-name bar and using a wire hangar to steal an old beater parked in the lot of a nearby Dollar General slipped through her mind, painted in swirling pastel. It had been a convertible, nano-lock roof engaged, but even that couldn’t keep Tessa out. She was too handy with a hangar, too good with her hands.
They hadn’t talked about a destination, hadn’t made any plans. They just drove, pushed the car on into the depths of the night, Izzy laying across the smooth, age-yellowed synthleather seat with her head cradled in Tessa’s lap. Twice they stopped, just to stare, just to take in the beauty of the gulf as it spread away from them in the night, Tessa’s hair stirring into serpentine spikes, stark black against the electric flashes of a massive storm brewing in the clouds over the sea. And when the sun finally did rise, it cast its golden rays across the green wetness of the everglades, the gentle sounds of morning waking Izzy gently, easily.
The car was wrecked. The engine had blown, and the stains of oily black smoke fogged the windshield. Beyond the tainted glass, Tessa sat on the hood, shoulders shrugged into her worn, black leather riding jacket, back turned away with the old German flag and the old name Deutschland emblazoned across it. Orange sunrise glittered across the dark glass of her favorite pair of raybans. A soft, casual smile played across her lips as they shared a soft kiss.
They had been a perfect contrast in those days, Izzy always in loose, casual whites and shimmering designer pastels with white-frame sunglasses propped up in her long, luxurious red-brown hair, and Tessa all in black with hard, sharp edges on everything she wore, from her glossy-black sunglasses to her dark, worn-out jeans and steel-toed boots. Damn, you looked good with short hair. Black lances, smooth and dark as shards of midnight–– punked out, untamed, undeniably sexy over painfully aware cobalt eyes.
If I’d known... If I’d known what you were then... would I have ever... would we... The thought wouldn’t come, refused to finish itself.
We all have our dark secrets, our skeletons.
“I have to see her.” Izzy’s hands dropped away from her eyes, collapsed against the console’s keyboard like dead fish. “I have to talk to her.”

Dark dreams brewed and frothed within Tessa’s mind, frantic hands grasping unresponsive control sticks amid swirling visceral duskiness.
Someone was talking beyond the haze, an unfamiliar voice that conjured up images of old grandfatherly figures, men with bushy grey eyebrows and thin, bottlebrush mustaches. She reached for it, hazy hands thrust into shadow...
But she caught something else entirely.
Tessa.
Somewhere, on some level, in some misty, forgotten pocket of reality, she managed a smile. Izandra?
You’re in a hospital, Tessa.
The images came flooding back suddenly, images of pulling hard on the flight stick and spinning at incredible speeds through starry darkness. Pain blossomed and writhed through her chest, long throbbing tendrils of agony tensing, threading wickedly through skin and bone–– and then the descent gripped her, only half remembered, everything running in cruel fragments, strobing like the broken frames of an old and abused film. I know. How bad is it?
Bad. Came the answer.
That was one of the nice things about the bond that she and Izandra shared–– they were both mildly telepathic, capable of communicating through touch when they concentrated hard enough. Izzy’s thoughts echoed through her mind again. The nurse says it was nothing, but the list of things the nanosurgery units fixed looked more like a donor-bank inventory to me than a damage report.
Tessa tried to laugh. Somewhere, the noise slipped through chapped lips, dry and broken. Just a few cuts and bruises, I’m sure... You worry too much, babe.
Maybe, but look who ended up in the hospital.
Good point. Tessa admitted.
There was a pause, a lapse in concentration that left Tessa floating alone in the swirling void for a split second. Izzy’s thoughts came again, hurried and half dispersed through staticky mental detritus. Rest now. I need to talk to the doctor.
Izzy’s hand slipped away, and the link slammed shut, severed.

- - -

“Lieutenant Copperfield? Thank you for waiting.”
The door closed smoothly behind the doctor, his white labcoat swishing as he and Izzy shared a brief handshake. His eyes seemed strangely cold and aware, iced iron under frozen glass, and yet at the same time they seemed soft, as if the grandfatherly grey bushiness of his hair and eyebrows were capable of softening steel. He spread a notepad ‘puter across his palm, bony fingers calling up Tessa’s file as he pulled in a deep breath.
“Now, I assume that Nurse Harrison already spoke with you about the internal damage the Lieutenant Commander suffered–– the cracked ribs, lacerated tissues and organs in the chest cavity, the pooling of blood and vital fluids, the punctured lung...” He gestured, trailing off. Izzy nodded and he continued, slower this time. “Luckily the gravity couch in her fighter managed to keep everything from moving around too much, but there was still some migration of bone shards through sensitive tissues that I’m sure hurt like hell.” He glanced down at Tessa’s comatose form, sprawled inelegantly through sweaty, rumpled sheets. “There were some capillaries and smaller vessels,” he gestured again, vaguely indicating his own chest with a circular motion. “and some smaller, uh, veins that burst under the skin, causing discoloration and bruising... that’s probably all going to stick around for a while, a few days at least, I’d say. Maybe a week.”
Izandra nodded absently, then blinked, trying to clear her head. It just doesn’t make any sense! Before she could speak, the doctor pushed on ahead, gesturing to Tessa with the notepad ‘puter’s lithe black stylus.
“On the whole, it wasn’t anything that I couldn’t fix with this colony’s almost worthless nano-surgery bay, but I wouldn’t recommend letting her fly anything but basic, low G maneuvers for a week or so.” He tapped the stylus against the pad, glancing absently at Tessa for a moment before he turned back to Izzy. “The new tissue is still pretty fragile on the whole.”
Izzy glanced at Tessa. One thing at a time.
“How much longer is she going to be out of it?”
“Probably a day or two.” The doctor followed her gaze, eyes lighting on Tessa’s sleeping features. “These are old style medical nanites–– they’re designed to secrete molecular chemical factories in the blood that keep the body in a restorative state of sleep until everything is stabilized, at which point they begin the shutdown and breakdown procedures.” He gestured idly with the stylus. “It never takes more than fifty hours.”
“Any idea about what went wrong up there?” Izzy fixed him with a careful, considering gaze. The look she got back in response was all doubt and curiosity. She pushed ahead anyway. “I know Tessa, doctor. She’s not dumb enough to torque a Seindrive to the point where the G’s thrown off by her rig rip her all up inside.”
The Doctor raised his eyebrows at her, then glanced back at his notepad ‘puter. “No, I don’t suppose someone with her standing in the Galactic Navy would be.”
Izzy’s tongue stumbled over itself soundlessly. That’s it? Turbulent thoughts boiled through her mind, angry and desperate. Dammit, if you know something, just tell me you worthless old labcoated fart!
“But then, that’s one of the reasons I decided to have the local airframe mechanic give all the systems that affect her Seindrive's gravity pattern a once-over inspection.” He glanced at Tessa again. “He actually turned up something interesting.” He paused. Izzy’s face was a hard, expressionless mask restraining need and concern with practiced force.
“Here,” He slipped a thin, thumb-sized disc out of the ‘puter and handed it to her. “It’s his report... pretty exhaustive, but I’m sure the people Earthside would really appreciate this data.”
“I’ve got a console in the tent where they set us up.” She glanced at the disc, then let her eyes dart back to the doctor’s, her gaze suddenly hard with purpose. “I’ll check it out immediately.” I’ve got to get out of here. Her mind was already spinning wildly. I’ve got to see what’s on this disc!
“Actually, there’s uh, one more thing, lieutenant, before you go.” He sucked his teeth uneasily, then rolled up the notepad ‘puter and slipped it back into his labcoat. “I’ve kept it sealed because of... well, because of the nature of it.” He bit his lip. “I mean, I suppose that it technically falls under patient confidentiality... no-one else knows about this, I assume, besides myself and her...” He trailed off, making a futile gesture. Izzy blinked. Spit it out old man! What’s wrong?
“You see,” He breathed a tired, resigned sigh. “There’s... There’s a problem with Lieutenant Eisenherz’s genetic code.”
“A problem?” Izzy blinked again, expression blank. A problem with her Genes? What? Did something mess with her DNA since the last physical!? Ominous thoughts brewed, new forms of Cygnan weaponry, secret Government programs careening through her mind. She silenced them all with an uneasy swallow. “What kind of problem?”
“A tag, a marker.” He began, glancing down at Tessa and pausing thoughtfully. “It’s a very old one... it’s from a Japanese bioengineering zaibatsu that went under about a century ago during the Solomon upheaval back on Earth... It’s a second generation nanogenic crossover-proof tag, an early NCP signature code, the kind designed to cling to extraneous DNA through endless replication and be passed on to any offspring a given GMO might have.”
Izzy felt cold. “What are you saying, doctor?” No, no it can’t be. No! Don’t say it, damn you!
“I’m saying that her DNA isn’t exactly kosher.” He sighed, face as tired as his voice. “She has a GMO somewhere in her lineage, and it shows.”
No way. No freaking way. Izzy fumbled for words. Genetically Modified Organism!? “If anyone finds out....” She trailed off, mind spinning. “If anyone finds out about this, she could lose her commission, doctor!” And I could lose her! Dammit Tessa, why didn’t you tell me? How did you get past all those physicals and medical examinations without someone noticing!?
“I know, I know.” He glanced at Tessa again, bushy brows knitting as concern began to spread across his features. “That’s one of the reasons I’ve kept this under wraps.” His eyes met Izzy’s again. “I’m prepared to destroy the data.”
Izzy glanced at Tessa, studied the lines and curves of her flesh, the smooth skin of her arms, the way the starched white nano-woven fabric of her tanktop seemed to restrain the shallow bulges of her breasts. She bit the inside of her lip, breathed a shaky sigh. Dammit Tessa. It figures you’d have a corporate-engineered gene-freak in your family tree.
“Do it.” Her eyes met the doctor’s again. “Destroy it all. I want Tessa’s secret to stay a secret.”
A single thought came unbidden to her mind.
Jesus, what am I doing.
Nothing so bad ever felt so good.

Space.
It was a lonely place, a lonely, endless vacuum of black spotted with so many cold, pale burning stars, each set so far apart that traveling between the closest took days with the latest in FTL technology, but more often an order of weeks or even months. A typical supply run between the ribulon-8 gas mines that stretched their long, Ceralloy tongues half-way into Jupiter’s stormy core and the platforms at Yuba Station on the outskirts of Proxima Centauri, a little over a parsec distant, was a two week journey for any ordinary slowlane freelance shipping contractor. The Von der Tann IV’s degen-drive was cutting edge technology, and even with a core like that running the starship, that same jaunt took close to twenty-two hours from start to finish.
A little over twenty-two hours out from Tarsis 12 put the Von shuffling past 80 Ursae Majoris, ––Alcor in colonial slang–– and its four stellar companions, the brightly burning blue spheres of light known collectively as the Mizar A and B binaries, In excess of 402 the speed of light. It was a nav point in the middle of nowhere, five stars all less than a light year from one another, and home to nothing more than a lot of barren chunks of ice and rock. One supermassive gas giant hung alone in the mix, surrounded by a cold, dark cloud of treacherous debris.
Alone, like all those pilots you abandoned. Virek pushed his fingers into his eyes and breathed a tired sigh. He hated having to make a decision like that, hated having to leave handpicked men and women as irreplaceable as those in the hot seat while he ran for safety. Sure, it made sense numbers-wise, just another calculated risk, another sacrifice. The needs of the many always outweighed the needs of the few in war, and so six squadrons of Seindrive pilots had been left in Tarsis 12's outlying space, abandoned, while a hundred and fifty three crewmen ran from the battle, hoping to pull together enough reinforcements to drive the Coralate back again before the blueskins had a chance to wipe out the nearly defenseless colony planetside and all of his remaining pilots with it.
Another sigh. Damn procedure. It felt like he was being forced to hide behind Hilleboe, leaving everything, every crucial announcement to the Captain. That’s why they all think he’s a prick. Yeah, he’s a hardass, but every harsh decision has just been something I handed down to him. Virek looked up, vision blurry, and took in a slow breath. Poor bastard. I know exactly how that feels. The traces of a smile played across his face. Wasn’t as hard for me, though. I actually have some sense of finesse. Hilleboe was as rigid and unyielding as the surface of a diamond star. And his wrath is handed out just as heavily.
Stars and speeding streamers of cosmic dust and stellar debris roared by the Admiral’s office window and he thought of his daughter back on Earth. Sarah Virek-Baxter had followed in her mother’s footsteps, working her way through college instead of chasing after the mammoth enlistment bonuses the military was offering to secure the best and the brightest for duty in Earth’s second interstellar war. Now she taught for the ivy league Zakharov Orbital Botanical University that hung in orbit along with a massive array of a hundred or more other artificial satellites, everything from the centuries old equipment that pirates bounced the odd signal off of here and there to the prestigious orbital outreaches for universities like Cambridge and UCLA. It was a mess out there, a veritable web of slowly-spinning metal and glass hooked into the finest Air/Space Traffic control system ever devised by mankind. It made worlds in backwater systems like Tarsis seem uninhabited.
Tarsis. He nearly swore under his breath. Damn his mind and its nasty tendency to return to anything stressful no matter how much he tried to forget it. He’d had five ensigns on the horn since Hilleboe had ordered the retreat, each sending periodic QE signal bursts across all the upper frequencies. Conventional frequencies were useless at FTL speeds, and didn’t have the range or speed of Quantum Entanglement, so he kept them offline. Minimizing the galactic noise pollution put off by ships was standard procedure–– the Navy wasn’t too fond of the idea of Terran transmissions echoing across stars and planets for millennia, clogging up the conventional frequencies with static and ancient distress signals. Dealing with the old star-eaten television broadcasts as they faded steadily into the background noise was bad enough.
The closest ship they’d been able to raise had been the Alekzandr VIII, an older Carrington class cruiser already involved in an operation around the Maas-Vanmitter 11-82 system, about three parsecs away. Another ship, a Ceres class Dreadnaught affectionately referred to as The Daisy Chain for its long tail of trailing weapons platforms, was ready and willing to assist, except they were headed the wrong way through the Kruger 60 system and only bent space at a maximum speed of about 152 the speed of light, putting them more than a month out from Tarsis 12. But the Von was still receiving QE IFF signatures, new blips appearing on the screens about once every couple hours, usually little more than fast-moving patrol ships passing no closer than five parsecs, and nothing big enough or fast enough to take on a Coralate battlecruiser alongside the limping Von der Tann IV. Not yet, at least.
If all else failed, there was always Thuban Reticulae Station 88, an extensive orbital port-of-call in the Tiefke-Ixion system, another five parsecs earthward, but that meant at least another week of hard burn before the Von would be back in the Tarsis system. Time for nano-mechanical clouds and N-space matter converters to repair the damage to the hull was extra, but with a little luck, QE transmissions would put sufficient reinforcements on standby before the Von even arrived, and they could jaunt back out together as soon as the ship was patched up. If not, there were always mercs, but they took time to scout and hire. Freelancers were always eager to help, and clustered thick around major ports like TRS-88–– it was a well known fact that the TCGND couldn’t meet every incursion on the rim without assistance, and was willing to fork over astronomical amounts of cash for that assistance when it came to pulling their people out of the fire, so the number of mercs fiercely trying to outbid one another was always mindboggling. Three hours at the station, maybe four, and the Von would be on its way back to Tarsis, its own little fleet of ragtag spacers armed to the teeth trailing in its wake.
Virek threaded his fingers together and studied the window again. A week. It was going to be close. Too close.
He breathed a sigh. There has to be someone else out here.

“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!?”
Phoebe blinked, quickly brushed the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. Cordova sounded frantic, his voice practically exploding across the frequency. “We’re already in the atmosphere! We–– We can’t just swap out rigs now!” There was a pause, just the briefest slice of silence jammed between desperate yelling. “Lieutenant, I really don’t want to die! Not like this, I––!”
“Shut up!” Izzy’s voice was fire, sharp and razor-edged, snapping with all the growling ferocity of barbed leather. “Your commanding officer is down and out! At least show some fucking respect!” Phoebe thought she heard desperation in Izzy’s voice, the precursors to tears. No, not Izzy. Izzy would never cry.
A moment of dead silence slipped across the frequency. Izzy shifted in her seat, sniffed against worry, and quickly flicked controls, thumbing the mike. Her voice came strong, rich with cold-burning anger. “Phoebe, let’s do this.”
“Roger that!” The young lieutenant’s response sounded almost relieved. It was hard to do much else–– trying to push cheeriness past the shimmering walls of teary concern was like trying to squeeze a steel brick through a tiny rubber hole. Breathing a shaky sigh, she bit down, teeth digging mercilessly into her bottom lip.
“Alright.” She finally managed, nodding with the effort. Her mind was spinning a mile a minute. Tessa’s going to be on the ground soon. There are doctors down there. Stop worrying. Izzy probably isn’t worrying. Everything is going to be okay. “Coordinating resident AIs...”
Izzy’s display lit up, half defensive, then surrendered to Phoebe’s Seindrive; it took less than a full second for the AIs to chat leisurely about the situation and tie the necessary functions together over a QE data channel. Phoebe gave it three seconds just to be sure, then thumbed the mike again.
“Okay.” She breathed. “Go.”
Tessa’s resident AI chirped acknowledgment, then spun gracefully away, punching the throttle and roaring straight for the surface. Cordova’s rig wobbled uncertainly with the absence, slipping, shifting. Phoebe bared her teeth, squeezed hard on the flightstick, fought the rig. It felt too much like trying to juggle a bowling ball one-handed. Izzy! Hurry!
“Almost there, kid.” Izzy’s voice crackled across the frequency, strangely softer, as if concentrating on the task had smothered her anger. Her rig was inverted now, slipping carefully into the gap left by Tessa’s fighter. “Almost...” There was a click, happy chatter from the AIs. “Alright! Let’s land this bird.”
Phoebe nodded silently, fingers flying across the controls. The resident AI devoured the input, and then the three Seindrives dove suddenly, seemingly as one. The change in velocity and angle kicked up flashes and turbulence all around them–– quick corrections orchestrated by the AI lined up the three-rig formation and the target airfield from within a few microns as they dropped, all three Seindrives bucking like mad cattle. The meters clicked by quickly, rapid descent kicking up flames that flared and licked against hull plating, giving the nanoregenerative skin coating a chance to warm up and come alive. Engineers back on the New Adelaide Station in the Alpha Centauri system had designed the nanomechanical goo to be eager, efficient and effective, reacting to extreme temperatures by excreting a microscopic shell of clear, superdense matter wherever flames, lasers, or practically anything else tried to touch the hull. Unfortunately, it wasn’t much good for anything beyond reentry or warning shots from plasma cannons, but it was better than nothing.
Wispy, translucent blue gave way to Tarsis 12's more vital colors, cerulean and visceral purple brewing in the steadily thickening atmosphere. The turbulence kicked up a notch, rattling everything. Cordova thumbed the mike.
“I don’t think Seindrive designed these rigs to do this sort of thing Lieutenant!”
Phoebe glanced at the display. “Just another hundred and twenty-five kilometers to the mesosphere, Cordova. Hang in there!”
“Think happy thoughts.” Izzy interjected. “Think about sex. Takes your mind off the turbulence.”
“I’m sure it does.” Cordova managed, brushing her off.
“What’s your favorite position?” She pushed ahead anyway. Phoebe could practically hear the grin in her voice. “Missionary? Doggie style? Maybe something exotic like the piledriver?”
Stunned silence filled the channel. Cordova’s thumb quivered over the comm button, his mind trying to construct a response. “I... uh... I’m not––“
“How about reverse cowboy?” She continued suddenly, cutting him off. “Yeah, you kinda strike me as the kinda guy who likes being on the bottom, the kinda guy who likes to be forced into sexual submission.”
“Lieutenant, I’m... I’m married, and I don’t think––“
“I didn’t say I wanted to fuck you, regs-boy.” She laughed. “Just trying to give you something else to think about.”
“Well, I mean, I, er...” He stumbled. “That is, if I were single, well, y’know, I uh...”
“Ha, like I’d even touch you with a sharp stick.” She laughed again. “You don’t really strike me as someone who’s very experienced, Cordova.”
“Eighty kilometers to the mesosphere.” Phoebe cut in suddenly, severing the line of conversation, quickly jamming in another transmission before Izzy could restart it. “Hey Izzy, what’s the Papal University on Mars like?”
“Not enough sex.” She shot back, playing off Phoebe’s reaction. “Too many old priests with hard-ons.”
“And other than that?” Phoebe prompted. God, Izzy.
“Other than that?” Izandra paused for a moment, considering. “The library had a lot of good books, most of them on holodisk, but some on paper.”
“Yeah,” Phoebe sounded preoccupied. “Like what?”
“Sixteenth century erotic poetry.” Izzy responded immediately. “Apparently the Vatican confiscated a lot of it back then.”
“Sixty kilometers to the mesosphere.” Cordova broke in. Phoebe couldn’t help but smile. “Another couple of minutes and we’ll be out of the Thermosphere.” He paused. “I’m still nervous about the landing.”
“Me too.” Izzy admitted, voice suddenly softer, less playful. Silence followed in its wake, a poignant pause that hovered somberly across the channel. Finally, Phoebe thumbed the mike.
“I’m worried about Tess.”
Izandra closed her eyes and breathed a tired sigh. “Yeah. Me too.”
“Do you think––?” Phoebe began.
“I don’t want to think about it right now, Phee.” Izzy cut her off. “Let’s worry about it once we get Cordova on the ground.”
There was another pause. Phoebe breathed a sigh. “Okay.”
“Ten kilometers to the mesosphere.” Cordova managed.
The next fifty kilometers went easy, sky lightening steadily around them, filling out with rich colors while the fluffy-white tops of wind-whipped clouds grew beneath them, getting closer with every passing meter of hot air. The mesosphere gave way to the building pressures of the stratosphere, flashing tongues of flame dying in favor of intense, buffeting winds. Cordova’s rig shifted with the sudden, deadly gusts, and resident AIs in all three Seindrives struggled to compensate, triggering wild bursts of overhead thrusters and careful N-space bendings of S-vectoring panels. It seemed to work, seemed to be just enough to keep the formation stable. The kilometers clicked by steadily.
Then the big one hit.
Four hundred and twelve km/h. The display flashed the numbers at Phoebe the instant before the gust hit them, peeling away both inverted rigs and flipping Cordova’s into a harsh backflip that immediately turned into a straight dive. Phoebe fought the controls, Izzy spun wildly off to her right.
Cordova dropped like a rock.
“Ohhhhhh shit!!!” He was already screaming, hyperventilating, his panicked voice blasting across the frequency with enough volume to force static. “Lieutenant!!!” Speed increased, clouds roared past. Cordova’s voice picked up an octave. “OhshitohshitohshitohshitSHITSHITSHIT!”
Wrestling with her Seindrive and diving into the winds, Phoebe jammed the throttle and went burning hard after Cordova. “Hang on!” She fought against the current, struggled to maintain control of her rig. “I’m coming!”
“Oh my god I’m going to die!” Cordova’s voice echoed across the Comm. Driving hailstones came rushing out of snowy chasms between thick clouds, blinding Phoebe– and then she saw his rig again, plunging earthward, close to 500 meters away.
“Hey, hey!” She had to keep him talking, had to try to get his mind off death. “Focus on the sound of my voice, okay? It’s gonna be alright.” No response. He’d gone silent. “Cordova?” Still nothing.
“What’s your name, Cordova? Tell me your first name.” She tried. “Mine’s Phoebe. You can call me Phee or Pheebs if you want.”
There was another pause, another dead silent gap, then the sound of a wordless, gulping swallow.
“Jose.” He finally managed, voice shaky. “My name’s Jose.”
“Nice to meet you, Jose!” She forced cheeriness into her voice again, then bit down hard, holding back a grunt as the gravity couch in her cockpit fought against the raging g-forces. “Don’t touch anything, alright? We’ve got you.”
“Yeah, everything’s gonna be A-ok, regs-boy.” Izzy laughed sardonically, her rig darting in from the right, punching through a cottony cloudbank. “Even if you burn up in the atmosphere, they’ll find some part of you to ship back to your parents Earthside.”
“Shut up, Izzy.” Phoebe bit off, instantly regretting it. She’d never talked to Izzy like that before, but... oh god you’re stupid, Phoebe. The mike clicked. Here it comes. Now she’s going to give you a piece of her mind, she’s going to ream you from here to Proxima. Just what I need right now. Izzy laughed.
“Damn Phee, you almost sounded like an honest-to-goodness woman just now.” Another laugh. Phoebe’s face reddened.
“Can you cut the chatter? I’m really trying to concentrate here!” Phoebe shot back, bending in close to the display. How embarrassing!
Izzy laughed again, just a quick burst. “Sure, no prob. Don’t strain anything.”
Phoebe was already forcing herself to ignore Izzy–– Cordova’s rig was close now, fifty meters ahead and closing fast. A quick glance off her right wing showed the other woman coming in hard beside her, thrusters blasting, her rig ready to slip in under Cordova’s wing as soon as Phoebe’s did. “Here we come!”
The recovery was smooth as nano-spun silk–– AIs triggered overhead maneuvering thrusters in a dance of blue flame that ended in a gentle pirouette of S-vectoring panels and hover systems. Magnetic fields touched like hands, gentle guides supporting Cordova as the heavens dropped away beneath them and the soft browns and greens of Tarsian soil spread out above their canopies, getting closer, every craggy detail intensifying into mountain ranges and fields, lakes and deserts, forests and rivers. With cohesion reestablished, Phoebe breathed a sigh of relief. The numbers on the display clicked by silently. Thirty-one kilometers to the surface.
Those last few kilometers slipped past easily, smoothly–– as the airfield loomed up beneath them, AIs ran through the final checklists, preparing Izzy and Phoebe’s rigs to slip away and leave Cordova to perform the landing, the final movement in a grand orchestra of atmospheric descent. Meters ticked away, less and less–– at seven they let him go, pulling out and into level flight just in time to see him grind to a halt on the black stretch of nanocrete, suspensors bursting with green flame beneath his rig as it etched long grooves into the runway. Phoebe was cheering, Izzy smiling, shooting off a few encouraging words– but her mind was elsewhere.
Thoughts of Tessa came creeping back like a cruel dream, souring the moment. She circled lazily above the airfield, eyes searching, lighting on her lover’s Seindrive, parked and silent on the grass beside the runway. An ambulance was burning toward it, lights flashing frantically. She had to land, had to get down there, had to know.
Please, Tessa. Don’t you dare die on me.