Women of War (43 page)

She pulled the dagger from his chest and wiped it on the fine linen cloth of his shirt before returning it to the sheath on her belt. She picked up the other blade and placed it in her boot sheath. She could smell the blood and the urine that stained the front of his trousers and pooled on the leather seat. She touched the blood on his chin, smearing it, marveling at its heat.

Bringing her stained finger to her lips, she tasted it.

She thought it would taste sweet. It did not.

Ajit Sulamin came up behind her as she queued at the security gate on Level 14: Ops Level. “What's the matter, Delia? You look tired.”

Delia yawned involuntarily as she shrugged and let the line of blue light from the scanner run over her body. She felt the usual slight tingle as the gate activated the identity chip implanted under the hairline at the back of her skull. “Are you implying I look like hell, Doc?”

Ajit grinned. “What, just because you could stuff your whole wardrobe in the bags under your eyes?”

“Ouch.” The light on the gate turned green and she went through. “That's pretty cruel for someone shaped like a giant walking pear.”

Ajit pursed his lips and raised his hands in mock surrender as he stepped into the scanner gate. His waist grazed the gate's bars on either side. “Touché. You win. You look fine, really; you just seem ... I don't know, a little less than your usual chipper self. Cailin been keeping you up?”

Delia grimaced at that. “You really are trying too hard, Doc, and you're not particularly funny.” She shook her head. “I just didn't sleep well, that's all,” she told him.

Ajit blinked as the scanner light played over him, then stepped through. Thick fingers rubbed his neck. He tilted his head as he peered at her, the way he did when she had her regular biweekly appointment with him: appraisingly, with a careful empathy in his chocolate eyes. She wondered if he was that way with all the pilots; he would be, she decided. It was his doctor-face, the one he gave everyone. “I'm fine,” she told him. “You'll need to wait until our next appointment to change my psych profile.”

“So ...” Lips pursed. He rubbed his nose. “Will I need to change it?”

“No, Doc,” she told him. She forced a smile to her lips. “No, you won't.”

In the Ops room, Delia slid into her seat. Most of the other pilots were already under their visors; she nodded to those who were, like her, just getting into their seats. None of them talked; they never did. She reached up to pull down the helmet, then slid her hands into the gloves built into the arms of the seat. Voices whispered into her ear; the room darkened beyond the visor, vanishing. “Your coordinates for today are listed to your right. Toggle the vid for your photos from Recon. Questions?”

“No, sir,” Delia said, and heard the echo of her response from under the helmet: the other dozen or so pilots in the room.

“Right. Good flights, all. Debrief is at 1300. See you then.” The commander's voice clicked off. Delia blinked as the arrays settled in front of her. She was no longer seeing Ops, but the blue and white curve of a planet hovering in space. A triad of purple numbers pulsed to the right of her vision; underneath the planet was an array of virtual controls. She moved her left index finger to the right. The coordinates pulsed and a small window opened above them: a white, five-story building with a blue-roofed tower on one side, the windows just slits of smoked glass like black lines painted on snowy walls. A Ghastly building like any other. She wondered what it was: weapons manufacturing facility, a planning headquarters, research laboratory? Something of military importance, certainly. Hopefully. Though she would never, could never know. She felt the gloves tighten around her fingers and the spectral display at the bottom of her vision brightened as the image of the planet shuddered slightly and slid to her right. “B5, confirm,” she heard a voice whisper.

“B5 is away,” she confirmed. “Burn commencing.”

She did nothing, but two lights flickered off on the floating console and number began flickering above the display: altitude and speed. The AI controlled the craft; Delia was there as backup if the AI failed. Redundancy. Someone for Control to talk to and blame if things didn't go right.

The planet seemed to fall toward her. She glanced back over her shoulder once; the headset display gave her an image of
Revenge
in orbit, the huge cruiser now just a thumbnail-sized collection of spires and tubes, glinting in the reddish sun of the Ghastlies. Turning back to the planet, she saw flailing ribbons of yellow and orange flame tear away from the center of her vision as she hit the outer edges of the atmosphere, brightening until she could see little else through the glare. She moved a finger: the display shifted from visible light to ultraviolet and vision returned. The first streaks of Ghastly counterfire came at her and the others; even before she could move her thumbs to trigger the decoys, the AI had already done so. An explosion overloaded the screen to her right, then another, though she felt and heard nothing. The world swayed as the AI extended the craft's atmospheric wings and Delia toggled back to visible light as the craft slowed to supersonic speeds.

For the next hour and a half, there was nothing but the routine defenses of the Ghastlies and the AI's counters. Once, she saw a huge fireball below and to the left of her and heard one of the flight crew in Ops curse and slam his helmet back against the seat rest: shot down. A quick sunset burned the horizon behind her and she switched her view to infrared night vision. Control chattered in her ear; she answered back and listened to the others on the flight channel. The world slowly resolved itself into landscape, and now she was hurtling over low hills and past villages that were little but green-white blurs—all the Ghastly buildings used the same exterior plaster, made, according to the intelligence she'd heard, of crushed seashells. Her craft bobbed and weaved through the landscape, always a bare hundred feet or so above the dusty ground.

The coordinates pulsed violet, then green. A city appeared on the horizon. “Control,” Delia said. “We have target acquisition.”

“Understood, B5. You are go.”

The city raced toward her, and she began to see individual buildings. She was paralleling a road filled with strange tri-wheeled vehicles; she could see Ghastlies looking up as she streaked past, some just staring, others running for the ditches alongside the roadway. Delia looked for a dark-capped tower: she could see it now, directly ahead, one of the tallest buildings in the city. The windows were lighted in the night: she could see figures moving behind the glass. There was a brief burst of anti-rocket fire, but it was already too late: neither the AI nor Delia bothered to respond. There was a click as either she or the AI armed the explosives; she didn't know which. The building plunged toward her, growing larger as she inhaled.

The display flared and went white. Static roared in her ear.

She exhaled. “Control, this is B5,” she said. “We have successful contact with our target.”

“Ye never worry that you're not going to come back, do you now?”

She shrugged the sheepskin belt of the sword's sheath around her shoulders, feeling the comforting weight of the blade settle across her back. She cinched it tight, grimacing as the belt tightened around bruised ribs and old scars, the leather vest she wore creaking underneath. She shook her head. “Aye,” she told Padraic. “Ye know I don't. If you're worrying about coming back, you're not thinking of the fight. If you're not thinking of the fight, then you're not coming back.”

She let the smile slowly lift the corners of her mouth, until Padraic too started to grin. He was a huge man, with a waist easily twice the span of her, so big that sometimes she wondered how he managed to carry his weight. Yet he was a tremendous fighter and a good companion, someone she wanted by her side in battle. He rubbed at the scar that interrupted the ruddy beard along his left cheek: his nervous habit. She remembered when he'd received the scar, three years ago at the battle of Belach Mughna. One of Cormac mac Cuilennáin's own gardai had inflicted the wound, when they broke the shield wall around the king and took him down. She'd half-hoped that with mac Cuilennáin's fall the wars would cease, but there were many kingdoms and many rivalries and there never seemed to be an end.

If it kept her people safe, back in the achingly green pastures near Lough Sheelin, that was all that mattered. That's what she told herself. If one day she didn't come back, then that would have been worth it. She remembered best that awful day that the nasty Uigingeach had come raiding out of Dubhlinn and swept over the land around Lough Sheelin. They'd laid waste to the village and burned the cottages, and her family ... Her immediate family had all died: her parents, her husband, her daughter. But not her. Somehow, they'd left her alive. She had taken up the sword then, knowing it was the only way she could pay them back for what they'd stolen from her.

She had been taking that payment now for five years, and it never, never seemed to be enough.

She still carried a lock of her daughter's hair with her, wherever she went. It nestled on her breast under the protective leather, under the cloth of her shirt: a packet of red curls sewn into a soft, sheepskin pouch. She touched it now, remembering.

“It's time,” she said to Padraic. Already they could hear the sounds of the advancing army just beyond the drumlins ahead of them.

His large hand touched her face once, and she held it there for a moment. “We'll both come back,” Padraic told her. She was no longer sure of that: if not this time, then soon she would face someone and she would be slower or tired or outnumbered, and he would kill her. She'd see his face as he tore the life from her; his features would be the last she'd see. She wondered what he'd look like, whether he would smile as he slew her, or if there would simply be relief on his face that it was not he who fell. Until that happened, though, until she met that nameless soldier, she would continue exacting her red-hued payment.

“We'll come back,” Padraic said again.

“Aye,” she told him, hoping he couldn't hear the lack of belief in her voice, or her weariness. “Aye.”

“A successful mission, Delia?”

Ajit was leaning on the wall across from Debrief, smiling at her. She forced down her irritation as the rest of the pilots shuffled past her, heading toward Ops. “We'll know more when we get the next set of recon photos, but yes, it appears so. Eighteen of twenty made it through.”

“You were decimated.”

“Huh?” she said, puzzled, then lifted her chin. “Ah, the old meaning. I guess we were. I doubt the Ghastlies think of it as a victory, though.”

“No, I'm sure they don't. Do you?”

“Look, Dr. Sulamin—”

“Ajit.”

“Dr. Sulamin,” Delia continued. “I don't have any problem with my job. If you think I'm all of a sudden having second thoughts about killing Ghastlies, I'm not. They brought this on themselves when they attacked us. I don't know why you're following me around like I'm an ambulatory lab specimen, but I really don't appreciate it, and ...”

“I've spoken to Cailin.”

She couldn't keep the anger from her voice then. “What right do you have—?” He pushed himself heavily away from the wall, groaning as he lifted his hand and placed a thick finger to thicker lips.

“This isn't something we should discuss here,” he said. “If you'd like to go to my office ...”

“Are you ordering me there, Doctor? Do you have the clearance from Commander Esposito?”

“No.” He stared. There was too much empathy in his eyes.

“Then this conversation is over. My next appointment with you is in, what, ten days? I don't expect to see you again until then.” Delia glared at him a last time and stalked off. The soft soles of her boots made disappointingly little sound on the deck plates.

 

“I've made supper for you, Mama,” Cailin said. “It's on the table.”

Delia sighed. She kicked off her boots and placed them by the door before going to the tiny kitchenette. It was small; everything on
Revenge
was small. On the table a plate steamed. Delia sat and sniffed as Cailin sang to herself in the other room. “Smells good,” she said.

The voice stopped in mid-verse. “Thank you, Mama. I borrowed some spices from Stores.” She began singing again: a nursery rhyme.
There were two cats of Kilkenny . . .
Delia took a forkful of her dinner, savoring the unexpected bite: almost like curry, she thought. But it couldn't be. She hadn't had curry in four years now.

“Dr. Sulamin told me he spoke with you.”

A pause. “Uh-huh,” Cailin said, then took up the song once more.
So they fought and they fit / And they scratched and they bit ...

“What did you tell him, Cailin?”

“Mama ...”

Delia sighed. She set the fork down on the table, grimacing at the percussive
clack
of the plastic. “Cailin, I know. You just want to help. But ...” Another sigh. She pushed the plate away from her. “If he tries to talk with you again, you tell me first. Do you understand, Cailin? Tell me first.”

“I will, Mama. I will ...”

 

She was a warrior, but she could never see “war.” War was too big a term, too large a concept. There was only the endless sequence of battles and—most important—the person you faced who wore the enemy's colors. That was all she needed to know, all she needed to concentrate on. Winning the war didn't matter, winning the battle was of no consequence: all that mattered was survival. And to survive, you had to kill those who would otherwise kill you.