“Tuta?… Oh. Enduring Hope. That had nothing to do with religion. Surely you see that. I was just trying to knock a cadet into shape. That’s my job,” she said neutrally. “So what do you think about the Factory Rock action now?”
“It was a screwup,” he said vehemently.
“You think so?”
“Of course it was. The barrage was mistimed and off target. Our line was broken before we even left the trench. Our flanks were exposed and we walked into fire. We didn’t have a chance.”
“I can see you’re a perfectionist, Pirius,” she said dryly. “There are always mistakes in war. But the important thing is that we won, despite the mistakes. We took back Factory Rock. You have to have the right perspective.”
“Perspective? Sir, I was the only survivor, of two platoons, to reach that monopole factory.”
“It doesn’t matter how many fall as long as one gets through. I told you that in the briefing. We plan for wastage. The losses were a little high this time, perhaps, but most of those who fell were wet behind the ears. The Coalition hadn’t invested much in them. They were cheap. Of course, Pirius, nobody would have got through, or still less got back, if not for the way you took the initiative.”
“I was just trying to stay alive.”
“Believe me, even that’s beyond the capabilities of most of your comrades out there.”
“Sir—”
“Tell me about the Tilis. How does what happened to them make you feel?”
He struggled to find the right words. “I was close to my crew in the greenships. You have to be if you’re to work together. But this time—”
“This time you weren’t flying around in the antiseptic comfort of a greenship; you were down in the dirt with the blood and the death.”
“I saw her sisters die, and I’ve seen Tili Three grieve. And it’s not worth it. Even if we win the Galaxy—”
“The cost of a single life is too high.” She seemed to suppress a sigh. “And so you don’t want to hear me talk about the cost of a private’s training. For you, right now, it isn’t about economics, is it, Pirius? Being one in a trillion doesn’t reduce the significance of that one person you know. War doesn’t scale that way.”
He said hesitantly, “So you feel like this?”
“No. But I know how you feel.” She gazed directly at him. “This is a stage you have to go through, Private.”
He said, “I don’t want to stop feeling like this, sir.”
“Tough. If you’re smart enough for responsibility, you’re smart enough to understand the situation we’re all in, and the choices we have to make.”
He thought that through. “Responsibility? Sir, are you offering me some kind of command?”
“You proved yourself out on that Rock, Private. You may be a wetback reject, and your service record is a piece of shit. You’ll always be Service Corps. But you could make corporal.”
“I don’t want it,” he said immediately.
“What you want has very little to do with it. Anyhow it’s academic.”
He couldn’t follow her. “It is?”
“Somebody has been asking for you. I believe you’ve met Commissary Nilis?”
Chapter 26
One minute left. Torec wriggled in her seat, trying to find a comfortable position among the equipment boxes that had been bolted into this greenship’s little cabin.
Commander Darc had made it clear he didn’t approve of countdowns. Torec’s cockpit, and the displays of the test controllers on Enceladus, were full of clocks, and you could follow the timings; there was no need for melodrama, said Darc. But Torec had always had an instinct for the flow of time, and she couldn’t help the voice in her head calling out each second with uncanny precision: Fifty-five, fifty-four, fifty-three…
It was the first full-scale, all-up test flight of a ship modified with Project Prime Radiant’s new technologies. And with every second her tension wound up further.
She looked out of the blister, directly ahead of the ship, where the misty bulk of Saturn drifted. Enceladus was a pale crescent to her starboard side. The space around her was cluttered with sparks, the observation drones and manned ships assigned to monitor this latest test. It was strange to think that among the watching Navy crews, staff officers, and academics was a Silver Ghost. More ominously, in there somewhere were rescue craft waiting to haul her and her crew out of a wreck.
And directly ahead of her, a silhouette against the face of Saturn, was a night-dark delta wing. It was the Xeelee nightfighter, captured by Pirius Blue and hauled here to the heart of Sol system itself.
The nightfighter drifted, brooding, dark on dark. It made everybody nervous. The plan was that the Xeelee would briefly be returned to autonomous functioning; the fly was Torec’s sparring partner in this test flight. The nightfighter was disarmed, of course, and its workings were riddled with cutouts and deadman’s switches. Even so, that fly was surrounded by a shell of Navy ships. But using the Xeelee was the only way to simulate something like genuine battle conditions.
But whatever the Xeelee did wouldn’t matter if Torec failed.
If all went well, ships like this might one day sail triumphantly against the Prime Radiant itself. But for now this long-suffering greenship was nothing but a mess.
The greenship was the standard design, with the stout central body and the three arms supporting its crew blisters. It was an intrinsically graceful configuration, stabilized centuries ago, and scrupulously maintained ever since by the Guild of Engineers, the most powerful of the Coalition’s technical agencies. But on this ship those clean lines had been spoiled by extra modules, attached so hastily they hadn’t even been painted. It was all prototype equipment, of course. The CTC gear had come down in size an awful lot since the first proof-of-concept rigs on the Moon, but the CTC module was still a great egg-shaped pod that made the greenship look as if it was about to pup. The hull even showed scarring where the CTC had exploded in the middle of a static trial, two of its internal FTL drones losing their way and colliding.
Even her Virtual instruments had been cluttered up with additional displays. The whole thing was crudely programmed and liable to instability. And then there were the extra boxes, like a beefed-up inertial generator, and hardwired units designed to run the gravastar shield itself. All this gear had been crammed into a blister which barely had room for the pilot who had to occupy it. It was not reassuring.
Forty-one, forty…
At least her crew, sealed in their cabins, looked calm enough. They were both Navy veterans, both nearly twice her age. Emet, the navigator, was a tall, haughty man whose service had been confined to Sol system itself. But the engineer, Brea, was more approachable. She had seen action in the clear- out of a cluster of Coalescent warrens: human worlds gone bad, relics of the ancient Second Expansion in one of the Galaxy’s halo clusters.
Both Brea and Emet had been suspicious of Torec, this kid put in command of them. But the three of them worked well together as a crew, and as they had come through the stop-start misadventures, holdups, and downright disasters of the testing program they had, Torec thought, learned mutual respect. Brea had actually asked Torec to share her bunk in their Enceladus dorm the night before. Torec preferred hetero, and she missed Pirius. But she had accepted out of politeness.
Ten. Nine…
She snapped her full attention to her instruments. For once every indicator was green, the ancient color of readiness. She could hear a chattering in her communicator loops, a thousand voices talking. As she had been trained, she took deep breaths, and let the adrenaline kick lock her into full awareness of where she was, who she was, and what she was about to do.