Gunship

by

J.J. Snow

Copyright © 2013 Jen Snow. All rights reserved.

Cover design by Adam Burn.

Images by Adam Burn.

eISBN 9780989778107

Five Years Earlier

The woman waited in the hallway, her dark hair partially obscuring her face. One finger tapped impatiently against the metal band on her wrist. Thirty more minutes and it would all be over. She would be free to do whatever the hell she wanted to. Thirty more minutes of her life she would never get back, but it was worth it. This time she was done with it, all of it. She tugged on her gray uniform jacket and absently ran fingers over decorations and rank that had been perfectly placed hours ago. Checking and re-checking. It had become habit. She reached for the blaster, then dropped her hand as she reminded herself she was at HQ. No need for a weapon here, they had told her. The guards had taken her knife, too, but they had missed the ceramic compound blades Gunny had palmed to her earlier as she left the ship. Those were discreetly hidden in a boot and up one sleeve. She smiled to herself briefly, enjoying the fact that she could still get weapons through prime security without being detected.

Nearby, a door hissed open, catching her eye. Military personnel passed by, talking over papers or briskly rushing about whatever tasks kept them busy up here. She couldn’t imagine being a policy wonk, stuck behind a desk all day. Her place was in the trenches, with her platoon and her ship. The thought made her draw a quick breath as a memory rushed forward unbidden. She pushed it aside and obediently followed the orderly who waved her towards a huge set of doors.

It was meant to impress and to intimidate. Everything was done up in cold, utilitarian grays and blacks, ultra-modern yet very simple. The sliding double doors were made of two blast plates that someone had attempted to dress up with a pair of ornate handles and the HQ emblem. It looked ridiculous. She snorted and shook her head, her gray-blue eyes showing mild amusement. The orderly gave her a disapproving stare. As the doors slowly, imperiously opened, a computer scanned her, announcing in a pleasant voice, “Campbell, Reilly A., Captain, identity verified. Please proceed.”

As she stepped through the doors, Reilly noted that the only thing more out of place than the flowery handles was the man sitting uncomfortably behind the large metallic desk in the center of the room. He irritably shuffled through a folder, his large frame only slightly diminished by the hulking desk. She noted that he kept a battle rifle and tactical gear on a table mount behind him.
So much for the no weapons rule,
she thought as she stopped abruptly in front of him and held a salute.

The man took his time, making her wait, like she had expected. She stared steadfastly at his regulation buzz cut, noting that there were flecks of gray beginning to color the hair near his temples. After a few long moments, he looked up sternly and returned the salute, eyeballing her, challenging her, and finally giving her a condescending smirk. Reilly continued to stand at attention, determined not to respond to his asinine games. He slowly pulled a cigar out of a wrapper, lit it, and shuffled a few papers before leaning back in his chair to look at her.

“So Campbell, what’s your deal? I hear you’re quitting. You a quitter, Campbell?” His voice was goading, hoping to push her to react, searching for a fight.

“No, sir. Just ready to get on with my life—do something different for a change.” She refused to bite.

He picked up the top paper, a copy of her discharge orders, between two fingers and waved it slowly while puffing on his cigar, scrutinizing her. Then he grinned and dropped it back to the desk, kicking his feet up.

“I was told that several members of your team are mustering out, too. Chang, Ty, and that pilot of yours, Jackson…huh… I never took them for quitters. You must be having some kind of impact on them as a leader.” He smiled as he watched her jaw clench ever so slightly before she forced it to relax again.

Reilly looked back across the desk with a cold smile. “Maybe so, Colonel, maybe so… But I hear my leadership is nothing compared to the impact your leadership has been having on retention. Especially since the Bulrion mission—”

The colonel was on his feet in a second, his towering frame leaning across the desk aggressively. “Like you’ve got any room to talk, Campbell! Those men on the battlefield, you used to know them, used to serve with them?”

“You already know the answer to that, sir.”

“So you go all soft inside and decide to jeopardize an ISU mission for some of your former troopers? You know how many lives were riding on that mission, Campbell? Thousands!”

“And I got the mission done! I got the fragging mission done without having to have anybody die!” Reilly shot back, her stoic façade replaced by anger.

“Our business is war! People die every day! You go bawoon over a bunch of damn regulars and then decide to quit because you can’t make the hard calls? Were they ISU?”

“No—”

“No. Then forget about them. They aren’t our problem. Best thing you can do in this business is not care. Caring gets you dead. You should have blocked their comms. You weren’t even cleared to help them!”

“We could do the mission and help them at the same time. You made the call to let them get cut to shit by those rockets!”

“And you jeopardized a mission with strategic impacts! Cost us one of our best gunships in the process, shot to hell thanks to you playing hero! You should be getting a general discharge for destruction of government property instead of this ‘honorable with extreme merit’ bullshit for your fragging theatrics! We get paid to make the tough calls, Captain. Sometimes people are going to die and you can’t do a damn thing about it. At least it wasn’t your ass down there dead in the mud, and it could’ve been! Your luck won’t hold out forever. One of these days, it’s going to cost you.”

“That’s why I’m standing here. I’m tired of being lucky and almost being dead. So issue me my damn discharge. Then I can work on forgetting all about the new ISU policy of promoting incompetence—”

“You are pushing it, Campbell! You will remember you are addressing a senior officer or you will be walking out of here a specialist with four more years of service and brig time to boot!” the colonel snarled as he jammed the end of his cigar into a dark metal ash tray, glaring back at her.

They continued to stare at each other for a moment, like two wild animals circling, looking for a chance to go for the kill. The door hissed open again, but neither one of them was willing to break eye contact. Reluctantly, the colonel looked past Reilly and then came to attention, his face still red.

“Colonel Bilby, has Captain Campbell been discharged yet?”

Reilly recognized the voice immediately and came to attention as well. Commander Alex Zain, senior officer for the Interstellar Units, AKA ISUs, had just entered the room. The colonel began to sputter out a protest, but Zain cut him off with a single silent gesture. He took the discharge orders and passed them to Reilly, surprising her with the move.

Reilly shot another glare at Colonel Bilby just as Commander Zain turned to face her. She quickly locked herself down, smoothing away the expression into a stoic military stare. Reilly knew better than to push her luck with the Commander.

“Will that be all, sir?”

Commander Zain looked at her thoughtfully. “For now, Captain, for now…but don’t be a stranger, hmmm? Dismissed.”

Reilly looked at Zain in disbelief. There was no way he could be serious. She saluted, turned on her heel, and headed for the door without a backward glance. She grabbed her gear as she passed by the entry control point and rode down the lift towards a waiting transport. There was no way in hell she was going back to the ISUs. Zain had always had an odd sense of humor. This was probably his weird version of a sendoff. The thought reassured Reilly as she pushed forward with the crowd. The ramp came up slowly behind the last few travelers as she stepped on board, tossed her gear into a locker, and headed for the mess. She pushed her way through tables of soldiers eating, talking, and smoking until she found herself in a dimly lit corner where three men sat playing cards. They nodded as she unbuttoned her jacket, tossing it over the back of a chair, before pulling up to the table.

“So?” An older Asian man, wiry but obviously a fighter, looked at her over his cards. The man next to him chomped on a cigar, glanced at Reilly, and threw a card down, then looked her way again. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and sporting some stubble, the first she had seen on him in almost twelve years of military service. The third man, a ginger, shook his head, downed some more coffee, and laid his cards on the table as he turned to face her.

“I guess they discharged you, Cap? Or are we fugitives now?” He grinned and took another swig from his mug.

The man with the cigar shot an aggressive look across the table. “I’d like to see them try to catch us! Incompetent sons of—”

Reilly gave them a tired half-grin, her dark hair glinting red in the dim light as she dug around the pocket of her jacket, then showed off her discharge orders. “We’re good, it’s all good. Once we land, we’ll pick up Skeeter and head out. Gunny tells me he’s got us a job already.”

Gunnery Sergeant Forlan Chang smiled briefly. “It will be a most profitable endeavor. Even Ty will not mind getting shot at this time.”

The man with the cigar rolled his eyes. “Why is it always me getting shot at? After all the damn jackassery we put up with from the Interstellar Quorum or Allied Organized…whatever the hell it is now!”

“Allied Organizational Command,” Chang finished and dropped a high card on the table, further infuriating Ty.

“Whatever! Why can’t Duv get shot at for a change?” Ty pointed back at the ginger-haired man, who blinked at him in mock disbelief.

“I’m a pilot, that’s why I don’t get shot at…well now, wait just one damn minute! I get shot at plenty, and mostly because of you! Who flew in to pick your sorry ass up last time, under fire with three alien fighters dogging me and—”

Reilly interrupted them with a wave. The quartermaster dropped a bottle of cheap, non-descript liquor in the middle of the table, slid four shot glasses out to her team, and topped them off as she began to speak.

“Here are the details: three hundred thousand credits, we split them even with some going into repairs for the ship. Gentlemen…we have arrived.” She lifted her shot. “To the black market economy and the loop holes in the regulated trade zones!”

Each of them grabbed a glass and downed it as Ty shook his head, still shocked by the sum offered for the job. “Hell, for that amount they can shoot at me all day and twice on Sunday! You know how many guns I can get for that kind of cash?”

Duv and Chang raised their glasses too. “Free at last! You know I was born to be rich,” Duv stated matter-of-factly as he downed his glass. The group poured another round and dealt Reilly in as they began to discuss their first job as a civilian mercenary crew. After a few more drinks, Reilly had almost forgotten Commander Zain’s comment as they started another round. She thought on it briefly, then shook her head as she dropped three high cards on the table, causing her crew to groan. The Commander was bawoon, and there wasn’t a thing he could do to her now. She put him out of her mind and focused on the conversation and the future. For the first time in a long time, Reilly realized, she felt happy.

—————

Back on the station, a weary-looking Commander Zain finished flipping through profiles on each of the new discharges. He noted absently that this was out of habit, not because there was anything in the folders he needed to know. His project, his creations, lethal, subtle, and completely covert—even the participants were unaware of what they were. Only a few trusted agents knew, and even then, their knowledge was compartmentalized. Only he knew all of it. Zain shuffled the folders precisely before scooping them up from the table. He walked them to a wall safe and locked them up before pacing over to the star-framed sky wall on the other side of the desk. Colonel Bilby watched him sullenly, nursing a brandy and still irritated by the lost chance to stick it to Campbell once last time.

“So how are you going ensure Campbell and her crew get into the fight? Sure we can recall them if there is a galactic emergency, but how likely is it they would even come back? There’s nothing to tie them to the ISUs now, and you just let them fly off to go gallivanting around the galaxy on their new business venture! Fraggin’ bawoon jackoffs cost us a million dollars, and we get left in their dust like a four-credit hooker!”

Zain barely turned his head, a crisp, sharp movement ever so slightly to one side, before replying. The motion alone was enough to get Bilby to shut up as he realized he had crossed a line.

“They will get into the fight. Their path will cross with the target in time, or we’ll arrange for it to. And when that happens, there will be situations that can be exploited and used to bring them back when we need them most. I made them, all of them. I know what makes them tick. All I need to do is give them a stake in the game, get them invested, something close to home that they all care about.” Zain turned back to the sky view and paused for a moment before continuing. “And of course there is always the boy. He has shown promise. But even if he doesn’t quite make the cut, people are always suckers for a kid, especially one who lost his mother. Always have a backup plan, Colonel.”

Zain turned to look back out into space as Bilby stood quietly, taking in what he had just heard, a slightly stunned expression on his face as the realization of how far the Commander was willing to go to support this operation finally hit him. He let out a short bark of ironic laughter and set down his drink before turning for the door.

“And she thinks I’m a bastard…I’ve got nothing on you. The day she realizes that, you’ll be a dead man.” Colonel Bilby shook his head again and walked out of the room, the giant doors hissing shut behind him, leaving Zain to himself.

“Maybe,” Zain mused softly to himself. “But if I need to be a bastard to save the galaxy, then I’ll be the biggest bastard Campbell and her crew have ever met.”

He watched as the transport carrying Reilly and her team disappeared into the infinite blackness of space, the faint blip on his holoscreen finally fading away to nothing.