The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (18 page)

Captain Simms doesn’t hold to that, though.

A conversation they had, on the 
Indus
’ observation deck:

“But,” Laporte says (she doesn’t remember her words exactly, or what she’s responding to; and anyway, she’s ashamed to remember). “The Alliance pilots are people too.”

“Stow that shit.” Simms’ voice a thundercrack, unexpected: she’d been across the compartment, speaking to Levi. “I won’t have poison on my ship.”

The habit of a lifetime and the hurt of a moment conspire against military discipline and Laporte almost makes a protest—
Ubuntu says, Martin Mandho said
—

But Simms is already on her, circling, waiting for the outspoken new transfer to make 
one
 more mistake. “What’s the least reliable weapons system on your ship, Morrigan?”

A whole catalogue of options, a bestiary of the Federation’s reluctant innovations—least reliable? Must be the Mulberry GES-2.

“Wrong. It’s you. Pilots introduce milliseconds of unaffordable latency. In a lethal combat environment, hesitation kills.” Simms is talking to everyone now, making an example of Laporte. She sits there, stiff and burning, waiting for it to be over. “If the Admiralty had its way, they’d put machines in these cockpits. But until that day, your job is to come as close as you can. Your job is to keep your humanity out of the gears. How do you do that?”

“Hate, sir,” Levi says.

“Hate.” Simms lifts her hands to an invisible throat. Bears down, for emphasis, as her voice drops to a purr. She’s got milspec features, aerodyne chin, surgical cheekbones, and Laporte feels like she’s going to get cut if she stares, but she does. “There are no people in those ships you kill. They have no lovers, no parents, no home. They were never children and they will never grow old. They invaded your home, and you are going to stop them by killing them all. Is that clear, Laporte?”

Willful, proud, stupid, maybe thinking that Simms would give her slack on account of that first time they flew together, Laporte says: “That’s monstrous.”

Simms puts the ice on her: full-bore all-aspect derision. “It’s a war. Monsters win.”

The Alliance flagship, feared by Federation pilot and admiral alike, is
Atreus.
 Her missile batteries fire GTM-36 Block 2 Eos munitions (
memorize that name, pilot. Memorize these capabilities).
 The 
Atreus
’ dawn-bringers have a fearsome gift: given targeting data, they can perform their own jumps. Strike targets far across the solar system. The euphemism is “over the horizon.”

Laporte used to wonder about the gun crews who run the Eos batteries. Do they know what they’re shooting at, when they launch a salvo? Do they invent stories to assure each other that the missiles are intended for Vital Military Targets? When they hear about collateral damage, a civilian platform shattered and smashed into Europa’s ice in the name of “shipping denial,” do they speculate in a guilty hush: 
was that us?

Maybe that’s the difference between the Alliance and the Federation, the reason the Alliance is winning. The colonists can live with it.

She doesn’t wonder about these things any more, though.

One night in the gym the squadron gets to sparring in a round robin and then Laporte’s in the ring with Simms, nervous and half-fixed on quitting until they get into it and slam to the mat, grappling for the arm-bar or the joint lock, and Laporte feels it click: it’s just like the dogfight, like the merge, pacing your strength exactly like riding a turn, waiting for the moment to cut in and 
shoot.

She gets Simms in guard, flips her, puts an elbow in her throat. Feels herself grinning down with the pressure while everyone else circles and hoots: 
Morrrrrrigan—look at her, she’s 
on
 it—

Simms looks back up at her and there’s this question in her wary, wonderful eyes, a little annoyed, a little curious, a little scared:
what
 are
you?

She rolls her shoulders, lashes her hips, throws Laporte sideways. Laporte’s got no breath and no strength left to spend but she thinks Simms’s just as tapped and the rush feeds her, sends her clawing back for the finish.

Simms puts her finger up, thumb cocked, before Laporte can reach her. “Bang,” she says.

Laporte falls on her belly. “Oof. Aargh.”

It’s important that Simms not laugh too hard. She’s got to maintain command presence. She’s been careful about that, since their first sortie.

You need help, Captain Simms. Say it like this:

This is the first time they flew together, when Laporte saved Simms. It happened because of a letter Laporte received, after her transfer to 
Indus
was approved but before she actually shuttled out to her new post.

FLEETNET PERSONAL—TAIGA/TARN/NODIS
FLIGHT LIEUTENANT KAREN NG [YANGTZE]
//ENSIGN NOEMI LAPORTE [INDUS]

Laporte:

Just got word of your transfer. You may remember me from the
Nauticus
 incident. I’m de facto squadron leader aboard
Yangtze.
 Lorna Simms and I go way back.

Admiral Netreba is about to select ships for a big joint operation against the Alliance. Two months ago the 
Indus
would have been top of the list, and Simms with it. But they’ve been on the front too long, and the scars are starting to show.

I hear reports of a two hundred percent casualty rate. Simms and Ehud Levi are the only survivors of the original squadron. I hear that Simms doesn’t give new pilots callsigns, that she won’t let the deck crew paint names on their ships. If she’s going to lose her people, she’d rather not allow them to be people.

It’s killing morale. Simms won’t open up to her replacements until they stop dying, and they won’t stop dying until she opens up.

I want the 
Indus
 with us when we make our move, but Netreba won’t pick a sick ship. See if you can get through to Simms.

Regards,

Karen Ng

Laporte takes this shit seriously. When Simms takes her out for a training sortie, a jaunt around the Martian sensor perimeter, she’s got notes slipped into the plastic map pockets on her flightsuit thighs, gleaned from gossip and snippy FLEETNET posts: 
responds well to confidence and plain talk, rejects overt empathy, accepts professional criticism but will enforce a semblance of military discipline.
 No pictures, though.

She knows she’s overthinking it, but fuck, man, it’s hard not to be nervous. Simms is her new boss, her wartime idol, the woman who might get her killed. Simms is supposed to teach her how to live with—with all this crazy shit. And now it turns out she’s broken too? Is there anyone out here who 
hasn’t
 cracked?

Maybe a little of that disappointment gets into Laporte’s voice. Afterwards, because of the thing that happens next, she can’t remember exactly how she broached it—professional inquiry, officer to superior? Flirtatious breach of discipline? Oafishly direct? But she remembers it going bad, remembers Simms curling around from bemusement to disappointment, probably thinking: 
great,
 Solaris 
is shipping me its discipline cases so I can get them killed.

Then the Alliance jumps them. Four Nyx, a wolfpack out hunting stragglers. Bone-white metal cast in shark shapes. Shadows on the light of their own fusion stars.

Simms, her voice a cutting edge, a wing unpinioned, shedding all the weight of death she carries: “Morrigan, Lead, knock it off, knock it off, I see jump flash, bandits two by two.” And then, realizing as Laporte does that they’re not getting clear, that help’s going to be too long coming: “On my lead, Morrigan, we’re going in. Get your fangs out.”

And Laporte puts it all away. Seals it up, like she’s never been able to before. Just her and the thirty-ton Kentauroi beneath her and the woman on her wing.

They hit the merge in a snarl of missile and countermeasure and everything after that blurs in memory, just spills together in a whirl of acceleration daze and coilgun fire until it’s pointless to recall, and what would it mean, anyway? You don’t remember love as a series of acts. You just know: 
I love her.
 So it is here. They fought, and it was good. (And damn, yes, she loves Simms, that much has been apparent for a while, but it’s maybe not the kind of love that anyone does anything about, maybe not the kind it’s wise to voice or touch.) She remembers a few calls back and forth, grunted out through the pressure of acceleration. All brevity code, though, and what does that mean outside the moment?

Two gunships off 
Yangtze
 arrive to save them and the Alliance fighters bug out, down a ship. Laporte comes back to the surface, shaking off the narcosis of the combat trance, and finds herself talking to Simms, Simms talking back.

Simms is laughing. “That was good,” she says. “That was good, Morrigan. Damn!”

Indus
 comes off the line less than twelve hours later, yielding her patrol slot to another frigate. Captain Simms takes the chance to drill her new pilots to exhaustion and they begin to loathe her so profoundly they’d all eat a knife just to hear one word of her approval. Admiral Netreba, impressed by 
Indus
’ quick recovery, taps the frigate for his special task force.

Laporte knows her intervention made a difference. Knows Simms felt the same exhilaration, flying side by side, and maybe she thought: 
I’ve got to keep this woman alive.

Simms just needed to believe she could save someone.

Alliance forces in the Sol theater fall under the command of Admiral Steele, a man with Kinshasa haute-couture looks and winter-still eyes. Sometimes he gives interviews, and sometimes they leak across the divide.

“Overwhelming violence,” he answers, asked about his methods. “The strategic application of shock. They’re gentle people, humane, compassionate. Force them into violent retaliation, and they’ll break. The Ubuntu philosophy that shapes their society cannot endure open war.”

“Some of your critics accuse you of atrocity,” the interviewer says. “Indiscriminate strategic bombing. Targeted killings against members of the civilian government in Sol.”

Steele puts his hands together, palm to palm, fingers laced, and Laporte would absolutely bet a bottle cap that the sorrow on his face is genuine. “The faster I end the war,” he says, “the faster we can stop the killing. My conscience asks me to use every tool available.”

“So you believe this is a war worth winning? That the Security Council is right to pursue a military solution to this crisis?”

Steele’s face gives nothing any human being could read, but Laporte, she senses determination. “That’s not my call to make,” he says.

This happens after the intervention, after Simms teaches Laporte to be a monster (or lets her realize she already was), after they manage the biggest coup of the war—the capture of the 
Agincourt.
 Before they fall into the sun, though.

They take some leave time, Simms and Laporte and the rest of the 
Indus
pilots, and the 
Yangtze
’s air wing too. Karen Ng has a cabin in Tharsis National Park, on the edge of Mars’ terraformed valleys. Olympus Mons fills the horizon like the lip of a battered pugilist, six-kilometer peak scraping the edge of atmosphere. Like a bridge between where they are and where they fight.

Barbeque on the shore of Marineris Reservoir. The lake is meltwater from impacted comets, crystalline and still, and Levi won’t swim in it because he swears up and down it’s full of cyanide. They’re out of uniform and Laporte should really 
not
 take that as an excuse but, well, discipline issues: she finds Simms, walking the shore.

“Boss,” she says.

“Laporte.” No callsign. Simms winds up and hurls a stone. It doesn’t even skip once: hits, pierces, vanishes. The glass of their reflections shatters and reforms. Simms chuckles, a guarded sound, like she’s expecting Laporte to do something worth reprimand, like she’s not sure what she’ll do about it. “Been on Mars before?”

“Uh, pretty much,” Laporte mumbles, hoping to avoid this conversation: she was at Hellas for Martin Mandho’s speech ten years ago, but she was a snotty teenager, Earthsick, and single-handedly ruined Mom’s plan to see more of the world. “Never with a native guide, though.”

“Tourist girl.” Simms tries skipping again. “Fuck!”

“Boss, you’re killing me.” Laporte finds a flat stone chip, barely weathered, and throws it—but Mars gravity, hey, Mars gravity is a good excuse for 
that.
 “Mars gravity!” she pleads, while Simms laughs, while Laporte thinks about what a bad idea this is, to let herself listen to that laugh and get drunk. Fleet says: no fraternization.

They walk a while.

“You really hate them?” Laporte asks, forgetting whatever wit she had planned the instant it hits her tongue.

“The colonists? The Alliance?” Simms squints up Olympus-ways, one boot up on a rock. The archetypical laconic pioneer, minus only that awful Mongolian chew everyone here adores. “What’s the alternative?”

“Didn’t you go to school?” Ubuntu never found so many ears on hardscrabble Mars. “They gave it to us every day on 
Solaris
: love them, understand them, regret the killing.”

“Ah, right. ‘He has a husband,’ I remember, shooting him. ‘May you find peace,’ I pray, uncaging the seekers.” Simms rolls the rock with her boot, flipping it, spinning it on its axis. “And you had this in your head, the first time you made a kill? You cut into the merge and lined up the shot thinking about your shared humanity?”

“I guess so,” Laporte says. A good person would have thought about that, so she’d thought about it. “But it didn’t stop me.”

Simms lets the rock fall. It makes a flinty clap. She eyes Laporte. “No? You weren’t angry? You didn’t hate?”

“No.” She thinks of Kassim. “It was so easy for me. I thought I was sick.”

“Huh,” Simms says, chewing on that. “Well, can’t speak for you, then. But it helps me to hate them.”

“Hate’s inhumane, though.” Words from a conscience she’s kept buried all these months. “It perpetuates the cycle.”

“I wish the universe gave power to the decent. Protection to the humane.” Simms shrugs, in her shoulders, in her lips. “But I’ve only seen one power stop the violent, and it’s a closer friend to hate.”