Forsaken Skies (46 page)

Valk picked up the cards. “How about a game?” he asked. Maybe if Ehta had to focus on her play she would sober up a little.

“It's good,” she said. She let out a roaring belch, which made her laugh. “Good to see the two of them, Lanoe and Zhang, back together. Been a long time. Back in the old days, in the damned old Ninety-Fourth squadron, he could be a real cuss of a commander, you know? But she always took his edge off.” That was apparently enough of an innuendo to make her laugh again.

“They make a great team,” Valk agreed.

Ehta nodded to herself. She beamed for a moment, and then her face fell. “We were. All of us. A great team. Madman Jernigan. Bloody Khoi. Hakluyt—he was a devil of a fighter, we were always running defense for him. They're gone now but Lanoe and Zhang, they, they're still here. Still together.”

“And you. You survived.”

“Yeah. Imagine that, huh? I made it through the war and then I made it in the marines. You're not supposed to live very long in the marines, but I did. We have a saying in the Navy—if you're born to die in the void, you'll never buy it on the ground.”

“We said something similar in the Establishment.”

Which made her laugh more than anything so far. “Imagine that. Imagine old Lanoe fighting along side one of your bunch. That,” she said, “is irony. Or no. That's not what that word means. It's just funny, I guess.”

“That's all in the past. War's over.”

She nodded, not looking at him. “The past. Sure. You know—I don't blame Maggs for running.”

Surprised, Valk sat up a little in his chair. “You don't?”

“He didn't owe Lanoe. Not like me and Zhang. He wasn't one of us.” She got up to search for the bottle. She wobbled a little but she didn't fall down. Eventually she found the scotch and poured herself another drink. “What's the point of staying here to die? He knew we haven't got a chance.”

“Lanoe doesn't see it that way,” Valk said.

Ehta studied him for a long time, just sipping at her drink. “He's not looking right now. Neither is Zhang.”

“You suggesting something?”

“Nobody would notice if you decided to do the same thing,” she told him, her eyes locked on his helmet.

“Run away, you mean.”

“You aren't one of us, either,” she told him.

Was this a test? Or maybe she hoped that he would say yes, that he would go out and steal the tender and fly back to the Hexus and try to rebuild his life—maybe she was hoping he would take her with him.

Except he knew better. She might be tempted, but Ehta would never run away from Lanoe, would she? She'd come all this way. She'd tried to overcome her trauma and fly for Lanoe, even though she must have known it wouldn't work.

How much courage had that taken? Well, he knew she was no coward. She'd joined the Poor Bloody Marines when she realized she couldn't fly. But there were different kinds of bravery.

Like his own, he thought.

It was easy being courageous when you were perfectly happy to die whenever the Grim Reaper had an opening in his schedule.

“This is where I want to be,” he told her. “Until Lanoe came along, until he took me out of the Hexus, I hadn't flown in seventeen years. I'd forgotten how much it meant to me. All the shooting, all the craziness of a battle, that I could have given up. But that feeling, when you're all alone out there in your cockpit, hanging over nothing, not even sky over your head—”

He barely registered how white her face had become until she dropped the bottle. It rolled across the floor, a few precious drops of liquor spilling on the concrete.

“I'm sorry,” he said, suddenly feeling like an ass.

“Don't worry about it,” she insisted, scrabbling around on her knees to pick the bottle back up.

“I didn't mean to—”

“I said it's okay.” She climbed back into her chair. “You want to hear something funny?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“I miss it, too.” She wasn't laughing. “I think about it every day. I think about it and then I catch myself hyperventilating, or I hear my heart pounding in my ears. It's not me that's broken, you know? It's not me, it's my body. That's the funny thing. It doesn't feel like me.”

He had no idea what to say to that.

Afterward, as Lanoe lay entwined with her, he kissed her toes, her tiny little toes. Zhang had big feet. She used to have big feet. Now they were positively dainty. The idea made him laugh.

“This is the best part,” she told him. “This was always the best part.”

“What, lying in bed being lazy?” he asked.

“No. The part where I've brought you back to me. When I know you aren't planning strategies or going over old patrols in your head. You're just here with me and there's nothing else.” She sighed happily and shifted around until they were face-to-face again. She stroked his hair.

“I hope it's worth it. After I dragged you out here to the end of the galaxy to fight a war you didn't ask for.”

She shook her head. “You didn't drag me. You asked for my help. I said yes.”

“I wasn't sure if you would.” He didn't want to talk about what came next, but he felt he had to. “I'm so sorry, Zhang. I should have stayed in touch. The way we left things…”

“I moved on, Lanoe. I got over it. Seventeen years. Do you think I spent all that time lying in that hospital bed, feeling sorry for myself? No. I built a new life. A good one.”

“One you gave up the second I sent you a message asking for help.”

“This is a good time for secrets, I think,” she told him. “Let's start there. You don't think I dropped everything and stole a Navy tender just because I was still carrying a torch, do you? I had very good reasons to come here.”

“Not just to screw my brains out?” he asked.

She laughed, startled by the profanity. It was a beautiful sound. Not Zhang's laugh, not her old laugh, but he liked this new one all the same.

“I came,” she said, “because—well, okay, that was part of it.” She snorted and buried her face in his neck. “But there was more. I came because you were still my commanding officer, regardless of what it says on the Navy rolls. I came because you and I were a team and you don't just give up on that.”

“They disbanded the Ninety-Fourth,” he pointed out.

“They don't have that power,” she said. “But even beyond that, there was more. I had to know something. I had to find out your big secret.”

“Me? I'm an open book,” he assured her. “Never been subtle in my life.”

“Ha. That's just it, really.”

She burrowed into him, her arms holding him close, one leg hooked over his hip. “You're a lot older than me. You had whole lifetimes before I even met you. When I look back I think of our time as most of my life, but for you—it was just like an act in a video, a third or fourth act. Even when we were closest, when we were fighting side by side, I knew there was more to you than I was ever going to understand. But I wanted to. I wanted access to all of you. I still do.”

“What do you mean?”

“For me,” she said, “the fighting was like a drug. It was
fun
. It was like this big puzzle you had to solve, a challenge to be figured out. Even when we lost people, even when friends died, that was just momentum. Impetus to get out there and fight harder. For you, though—I could always see something happening behind your eyes. It meant more to you. You understood it better than I did, because you'd been doing it so much longer. Do you remember—there was this moon, some frozen chunk of rock and we stood on a ridge and looked down at broken ships lying on the floor of a crater. It was one of those times you asked me to marry me.”

“I remember,” he said.

“All I could think at that moment, all I could talk about, was the fact that we'd won. We'd won and they lost. I was thrilled. I was bubbling over with it. And then you proposed and I looked in your eyes and there was sadness in there, sadness I couldn't understand.”

“I remember,” he said again.

“You saw something I didn't. Something more. I've always wanted to know what it was. So,” she said. She reached down and did something extremely pleasant with her hand. “Are you going to tell me? I think I deserve that. Don't I?”

“Sure,” he said. Because he knew, for once, exactly what she wanted.

Ehta looked around the room and seemed surprised by something. “Everybody else is gone, aren't they? Hell. In the marines,” she said, “this happened all the time.”

“I'm sorry?”

“People would pair up before a fight. They knew some of them wouldn't be coming back. You ask your barracks room psychologists, they'll tell you it's some kind of evolutionary thing. Gotta reproduce in a hurry if your gene pool's about to dry up. I always figured it was just to stave off the boredom, you know?”

“I guess,” he said. He'd seen it happen himself, in ready rooms and in crowded berths on destroyers around half a dozen stars. “Maybe people just enjoy sex.”

She laughed again and turned the music up. Then she surprised him—though he should have guessed it was coming. She came over to him and plopped down on his knee.

“What do you think?” she asked.

He ignored the white pearl spinning in the corner of his eye. “Ehta—”

“Maybe I'm not your type,” she said.

“It's not that.”

She wrapped her arms around his collar ring and kissed the side of his helmet. “Might be our last chance,” she pointed out. “Unless you think I'm ugly. Do you? Don't worry, I won't slug you if you say yes. I'm a marine, I've got scars.”

“I like tough women,” he said. “It's just—I can't take off my suit. Ever.”

She slumped against him, her body weight falling across his shoulder and his side. For a second he thought she might fall asleep like that. Then she whispered into the side of his helmet, roughly where his ear might be.

“You've still got hands, don't you?”

“You think there was something more,” Lanoe said. “Some great understanding I had about the nature of war and life and death that you were too young to get.” He shook his head. “No. After all those years, all those wars. There was something less.

“Age doesn't make you wiser,” he told her. “It makes you more experienced, but there's a difference. You go into things knowing what's going to happen. Maybe not all the details, but you've seen similar situations before and you know how it's likely to play out. You know how you're going to feel about it afterward; that's the worst part.”

He pulled her closer. He'd stopped thinking about the new body, about the cybernetic eyes. This was Zhang. It had always been Zhang. The one person he could ever tell this. “I've been fighting since I was a teenager,” he said. “When I signed on, it was because I thought girls would like me better if I was wearing a space suit.”