An Officer’s Duty (40 page)

“But?” he prodded her.

“There is no way that our paths will cross in the next few years,” Ia told him bluntly. “Even if you weren’t such a huge distraction, our orders will keep us apart. You’re headed to the Terran–Tlassian Border for the next six months, whereas I’m headed off to flight school for the next three, then being shipped out to the Blockade. We won’t get within four hundred lightyears of each other, Meyun,” she told him. “Not unless the probabilities shift you to that seventeen percent chance that you’ll wind up on Blockade for your second tour of duty. But even then, we won’t be on the same patrol routes. Trying to keep something going between us would be an exercise in futility and frustration. A distraction for
both
of us.”

He looked down and away at that. With her fingers tucked into his, she could sense the press of the thoughts racing silently through his head. She did not pry, though she could sense him coming to some sort of conclusion, and the resolve backing it. When he lifted his head again, she met his gaze steadily, gripping his hands.

“Fine. We’ll part ways, as we originally planned. But not without a cost,” he warned her. Dropping her hands as he rose from his knees, he pushed her back onto the bed. “I’ve never considered myself as a bastard type before now, but I plan on making
damn
sure you will regret walking away from me.”

Trust me, I already do,
Ia promised him silently, arms already lifting to help bring him back down to her.

JANUARY 1, 2494 T.S.
BATTLE PLATFORM
MAD JACK
SS’NUK NEH 2238 SYSTEM

“Happy New Year, everyone!” The cheerful call came from a woman clad in Army greens. She was carrying a bin of supplies and peered around the large package as she maneuvered her way through the lobby of the transient soldiers’ hotel on Battle Platform
Mad Jack
. The woman received several callbacks.

“Happy New Year!” “Happy New Year!” “Enjoy the last holiday for a while!”

“
Happy
New Year? Why in the name of mutant squirrel nuts are we even
celebrating
that?” someone else catcalled back. The young soldier, one green-clad leg over the arm of his chair, his head resting on the padded back, flicked his hand. “It’s not even relevant, anymore. Earth isn’t the only world we’re occupying, and it certainly doesn’t share the same solar rotation as any other planet we’ve colonized. Certainly it isn’t on the same cycle that this miserable, slime-covered rock uses.”

Done with checking out of her room, Ia grabbed the handles of her weight suit case and kitbag. Bennie, at her side, looked like she was going to speak. Ia answered the Army private first.

“Time is relative, meioa-o; that’s a given. But the Command Staff says we have to use Terran Standard time, so we have to use Terran Standard time. So Happy New Year, for what it’s worth.” She started to move toward the lobby doors, then checked herself. “And if that doesn’t suit you, then have a Happy Mutant Squirrel Nut Day.”

Rather than sulking and arguing further, the young man burst into laughter. “I’ll do that, thank you!”

Bennie snickered. Strolling beside Ia, she accompanied the younger woman out onto the promenade overlooking the atrium. It was part and parcel of the Battle Platform’s lifesupport systems, though it was designed to look more like a pleasure garden, with its fruit trees and berry bushes, its carp ponds with waterfalls and scattering of tables and chairs. It smelled as fresh and green and sweet as the biotechnicians and botanists could make it. Ia still thought it needed the spark-smell of ozone to be complete, but instead, there was a faint, persistent odor of cleaning products.

She sneezed.

“Bless you,” Bennie murmured. “Need a tissue?”

Ia sniffed experimentally, then shook her head. “No, I’m fine. And you don’t have to walk me all the way to the
Audie-Murphy
. I’m a big girl, I can find my way.”

“Hey, I told you, the brass on both sides want me to keep an eye on you,” the redhead warned her. “Just because you’ve survived a tough Border Patrol doesn’t mean you’ll be just as fine on Blockade duty. So I’m supposed to mother-hen you until the last minute or whatever.”

“How does one mother-hen a fellow adult, anyway?” Ia quipped. “For that matter, how does one mammal mother-hen another mammal?”

“Oh,
now
you show off your sense of humor?” Bennie mocked, and nudged Ia in the side with her elbow.

Ia winced and subtly covered her abdomen with the arm carrying her kitbag. Modern medicine and biokinetic abilities were fine for the physical aches, but mentally, she still missed her reproductive organs. A pair of hormone-releasing spheres in their place took care of the chemical needs of her body, but not the needs of her mind.
For which, I blame Meyun, for making me think about what I was giving up…and for the implication that he
wanted
to have children with me.

Mindful of the woman at her side, Ia shoved away her darker thoughts. The regret-filled ones. “If you don’t like it, I can always pack it away again.”

“No, no, you’ll need it,” Bennie dismissed. “Just don’t go so far into a sense of humor that you start laughing as you lop off heads out there. You might start lopping off the wrong heads, and that would be bad.”

“Not in this lifetime, I promise you that,” Ia murmured. The corner of her mouth quirked up. “I’ll save that for my next life.”

“You’re a reincarnationist?” the chaplain at her side asked, reaching for the lift buttons as they reached a bank of elevators. “I know you said you were Unigalactan, branch Witan, and your personnel file says sect Zenobian…but there isn’t much in the records on
what
the Zenobian Sect believes.”

“I have encountered some compelling reasons for believing in reincarnation,” Ia admitted lightly, ignoring the other half of Bennie’s comment. The lift arrived, and they stepped inside,
joining a group of blue-clad soldiers on their way somewhere. A touch of the buttons lifted them up a few floors.

Bennie didn’t say anything, waiting as they rode the lift, exited, and crossed to the tram that would carry them sideways through the massive battle station. When the car they entered proved to be empty, the chaplain asked, “So…care to talk about these encountered reasons? Or what these Zenobians believe in?”

“Nope. They don’t really matter,” Ia said. The tram swayed, and both women grasped one of the poles inside, swerving with the subtle curve of the tram’s circular track through the station. Catching the chaplain’s wrinkled nose, she shook her head. “Bennie, while I am a card-carrying priestess of one of the local branches of the Witan Order on my homeworld, and am thus qualified to philosophize with the best of theologians, to try and debate the theological implications of a belief or disbelief in reincarnation when I am very much interested in focusing on
this
life would be a futile exercise in sophistry at best, and an annoyance at worst. Now, do you really want me annoyed?”

That made the older woman chuckle. “If you had said, ‘do you really want to annoy me,’ I might have said yes, since that can be fun. But no, I don’t actually want you to
be
annoyed. And I’d ask you why you didn’t ask for a cushy chaplain’s job if you really are an ordained clergywoman, except after following your career for the last two and a half years, I know better. Have you talked with your family recently?”

Ia took the change in topic in stride. “No, but my plan is to shamelessly abuse my officer’s privileges and call home from the ship on the military’s tenth chit.”

That made her friend chuckle. “Just make sure you do that
before
leaving the Battle Platform. No extraneous—”

“Yes, yes, no extraneous calls are to be made while on patrol, because they’d be a distraction and a potential security risk,” Ia dismissed. “I did pay attention to the Standard Operational Procedures lecture when I got here. The same as you did. At least, you didn’t
seem
to be falling asleep next to me.”

“I hid it very well,” Bennie quipped. “All those years of seminary school were good for something, you know.”

The tram came to a stop and they disembarked into a small crowd of Navy personnel. The two waded through the mostly enlisted group. Bennie’s chaplain pins, larger than her rank
insignia, earned her polite nods and friendly smiles. Ia’s single brass bar on each blue collar point and shoulder board earned her polite nods and a slightly wider berth than Chaplain Benjamin, despite the older woman’s much higher-ranking silver oak leaves.

If she had been a normal graduate of a naval academy, Ia should have had only a small brass square as the mark of an ensign, not the longer bar of a lieutenant. Being a Field Commissioned officer with more than a month of leadership in the field and good marks from her superiors let her skip the tedious “learn how to be an ensign-ranked officer in the field” stage of her post-academy military career. Of course, no enlisted soldier ever earned a Field Commission without first learning how to lead as a noncommissioned officer, whether that was as a sergeant or a petty officer, but there were instances where a prematurely advanced rank had been rescinded. The chance that she would be busted back down to ensign was slim, though.

Flipping up the screen of her arm unit as they walked, Bennie consulted the station’s schematic. “Not much farther. Good. This station has a different configuration than I’m used to. It doesn’t help that it’s so huge.”

“It’s not that much different. You’re just used to accessing a ship like the
Liu Ji
via the docking gantries. The Delta-VX Harrier Class ships use docking bays,” Ia pointed out. “Repair work goes much faster if you can do it in an atmosphere, even if most of it’s modular.”

“You don’t like the convenience of modular ships?” Bennie asked.

Ia wrinkled her nose. “I’m not sure I like everything being so uniform; once the enemy analyzes a component, they know the configuration, strengths, and weaknesses for that part on just about any other ship.”

“Well, we kind of
had
to jump-start our starship assembly system with modular units,” Bennie pointed out. “Joining the Salik War with just a handful of spaceships capable of interstellar travel made it vital to mass-manufacture the things. The only things that got manufactured even faster were the hyperrelay communication satellites that turned the tide of the war for the Alliance. Since the whole chain assembly thing worked out so well, why complain?”

“God bless Henry Ford,
eyah
?” Ia quipped.

“Hoo-rah,” Bennie quipped, echoing the Marines rallying cry. The upraised fist she made drew a chuckle out of Ia.

“Nice to see the Corps is rubbing off on you. Here we are; this is the right bay.” Ia nodded at the large, thick, half-silvered plexglass window next to the airlock doors. The view allowed them to see the usual suspects in a maintenance hangar, masses of robotic equipment, engineering mechsuits, testing equipment, and the impression of a pair of oversized courier ships mating back-to-back, one resting upside down over the other.

Bennie peered through the window. “So that’s what a VX looks like? But…wouldn’t it be rather awkward to be upside down that close to a second set of gravity plating?”

“The upper half isn’t actually upside down, on the inside,” Ia said. She tapped the window, tracing on it with her finger to separate each section as she explained. “When one ship proved to be taking too much of a pounding on its own, but constantly running two ships that close together in FTL proved too risky, someone got the brilliant idea to invert the shells to each other, connect them via the fore and aft airlocks on the dorsal sides, and arrange plug-in ports for everything from data streams to lifesupport.”

Ia inverted one hand over the back of the other, echoing the look of the two butterfly-like sections, then parted them as she continued, swerving her hands in imitation of combat.