Well, Heather couldn't fault her for that. In a lot of ways, she supposed, she'd been lucky that she'd been far too busy during her own first taste of violence to think about it very much. Not that she'd felt particularly "lucky" at the time. Still, at least she'd been too . . . preoccupied during Esther McQueen's Operation Icarus to dwell on the horrors about her. She'd been on her snotty cruise at the time, almost ten T-years earlier, and there'd been very little time to think about anything besides doing her job—and hopefully surviving—as the sullen chain of Peep superdreadnoughts came over the hyper wall, missile batteries firing. The entire universe had seemed to go insane all about her as x-ray lasers chewed viciously into her ship and three of her fellow middies were torn apart less than fifteen meters from her own duty station.
But Aphrodite Jackson had never faced combat herself. And Commander Denton had quietly informed Heather that Lieutenant Thor Jackson had been Commander DesMoines' astrogator aboard HMS Roland, Commodore Chatterjee's flagship at New Tuscany. She hadn't seen the sights and smelled the smells Heather had, yet she obviously had an excellent imagination, and like every other member of Reprise's company, she'd seen the detailed tactical and visual imagery of the savage attack Tristram's platforms had recorded with such merciless accuracy. Even at second hand, the blinding speed with which those three destroyers—and her big brother—had been wiped away was its own sort of brutality, and Heather saw the ghosts of it behind her eyes even now.
"I . . . still can't really believe they're all gone, sometimes," Jackson said, speaking even more softly, and Heather smiled sadly.
"I know. And don't think it's something you'll 'get over.' Idiots tell you that, sometimes, you know, but what happened stays with you. And it doesn't get any easier the next time it happens, either—not emotionally, anyway. You just have to figure out how to deal with the memories and keep going. And that's not very easy, either."
"How do you do it?"
"I don't really know," Heather admitted. "I suppose a big part of it is family tradition, actually, in my case." She smiled just a bit sadly. "There've been McGills in the Navy as long as there have been Saganamis, when you come right down to it. A lot of them have gotten themselves killed along the way, so we've had a lot of practice—as a family, I mean—dealing with that kind of loss. My mom and dad are both serving officers, too. Well, Mom's detached from Bassingford right now—she's a psychologist, and the Navy has her working with Dr. Arif and her commission on treecats—but Dad's a senior-grade captain, and according to his last letter, he's in line for one of the new Saganami-Cs. Between the two of them, they make a pretty good sounding board. And," her eyes darkened, "we all had to figure out how to cope when my brother Tom was killed at Grendelsbane."
"I didn't know that—about your brother, I mean," Jackson said softly, and Heather shrugged.
"No reason you should have."
"I guess not."
Jackson looked down long enough to finish constructing her sandwich, then picked it up as if to take a bite out of it, only to lay it back down again, unbitten. Heather looked at her a bit quizzically, cocking her head to one side, and the EWO snorted softly.
"I'm dithering," she said.
"I wouldn't go quite that far," Heather disagreed. "You do seem to have something on your mind, though. So why don't you just go ahead and tell me what it is?"
"It's just—" Jackson began, only to break off. She looked down again, staring at her own hands as her fingers methodically shredded the crust away from her sandwich's bread. Then she inhaled deeply and looked back up, meeting Heather's eyes squarely, and her own gaze was no longer hesitant. This time, it burned.
"It's just that I know I shouldn't, but what I really want is for Admiral Gold Peak to blow every one of those fucking bastards right out of space!" she said fiercely. "I know it's wrong to feel that way. I know most of the people aboard those ships didn't have any voice at all in what happened. I even know that the last thing we need is a war with the Solarian League. But still, I think about what happened to Thor—to all those people—for absolutely no good reason at all, and I don't want the 'right response.' I want one that kills the people who killed my brother and his friends!"
She stopped speaking abruptly, and her lips thinned as she closed her mouth tightly. She looked away for a moment, then made herself smile. It was a tight, hard expression—more of a grimace than a smile, really—but at least she was trying, Heather thought.
"Sorry about that," Jackson said.
"About what?" Heather looked at her quizzically. "Sorry because you want them dead? Don't be ridiculous—of course you want them dead! They killed someone you love, and you're a naval officer. One who chose a combat specialty. So should it really surprise you when your instincts and your emotions want the people who killed your brother to pay for it?"
"But it's not professional," Jackson half-protested. Heather quirked an eyebrow, and the EWO made an impatient, frustrated gesture. "I mean, I ought to be able to stand back and recognize that the best thing all around would be for us to settle this without anyone else getting hurt."
"Oh, don't be so silly!" Heather shook her head. "You do recognize that, that's the reason you're upset with yourself for wanting something else! And if you want me to tell you you're right to be upset with yourself for that, I'm not going to. Now, if you were in a position to dictate the outcome, and you let your emotions push you into a massacre that could have been avoided,then you'd have a problem. But you're not, and I suspect that if you were, you'd still do that 'right thing' you really don't want to happen. In the meantime, I'm sure a young, attractive, female officer of your precocious bent can go out and find all sorts of better things to spend your time regretting!"
"Coming up on the hyper wall, Sir," Lieutenant Bruner announced.
"Very well," Lewis Denton told his astrogator, and glanced at the quartermaster of the watch. "Pass the word, PO."
"Aye, aye, Sir," the quartermaster said, and pressed a button. "All hands," he announced over the ship's com system, "stand by for translation into normal-space."
Thirty-two seconds later, HMS Reprise's crew experienced the familiar but never really describable queasiness of an alpha translation as their shipcrossed the hyper wall and the G0 star called Meyers blazed twenty-two light minutes ahead of her. She'd come out almost exactly on the hyper limit, in a piece of virtuoso hyper navigation, and Denton smiled at Bruner.
"Well done!" he said, and the lieutenant smiled back at him as Reprise altered heading slightly, aligning her prow on the spot in space the planet Meyers would occupy in two hours and fifty-three minutes, and went to five hundred gravities of acceleration. Then Denton's smile faded and he turned his attention to Heather McGill.
"Deploy the platforms, Guns," he said.
"Aye, aye, Sir. Deploying the alpha platforms now."
Heather nodded to Jackson, who gave her readouts one last check, then pressed the key. Heather watched red lights flash to green and watched her own panel carefully.
"Alpha patterns have cleared the wedge, Sir," she announced a few moments later. "Stealth is active and deployment appears nominal." She glanced at a time display. "Beta platforms prepped for launch in . . . ten minutes and thirty-one seconds."
"Very good," Denton said again, and as he leaned back in his chair, his earlier smile was not even a memory. His imagination pictured the Ghost Rider platforms speeding outwards, peering at the emptiness around them, and his eyes were hard with the memory of the last Solarian-occupied star system a Manticoran destroyer force had entered.