Deadweight.
Trick was out, and Bronse could feel it in every ounce of the body on his back. He had always been fascinated by why that made a difference. It was a balance and weight distribution factor, he knew logically. The person wasn’t awake to best center himself on the person who carried him. Still, it was remarkable how consciousness, or lack thereof, made such a difference in the feel of their weight.
Bronse realized he was grasping for thoughts. Practically babbling in his own mind, really. But he had to do something to make himself move faster, maintaining burden and strength, beating out the storm, and not second-guessing himself about why he wouldn’t have the rest of the team come out to meet them.
“That was cutting it close!”
Justice made the declaration seconds before she yanked and banked the transport away from the approach of the storm. She pitched up toward the higher atmosphere of Ebbany, the gravity decks working hard to compensate so the team didn’t end up spilled across the flooring. But it wasn’t Justice that Bronse was worried about. All of his concern was aft, in medbay, with Trick and the medic. But because he needed to hear his team’s report, he had to fulfill command first and let the others get back to him as to Trick’s progress.
“I sure hope we don’t have to find another nav/com officer,” Justice quipped over her shoulder. “They come and go so fast around here; I’m getting tired of wiping the butt streaks off this chair.” She nodded to the empty chair behind her and to her right.
“That isn’t funny, Captain,” Bronse said sternly, looking up from his VidPad, where he was recording his portion of the report before transmission.
“You’re right, sir. I’m sorry, sir,” she agreed quickly.
Captain Justice Mulettere was looking straight ahead, piloting them out of the atmosphere and into the starred darkness of space, but she was also glancing in her backview disc. She kept the little shiny disc clipped to her console so she could see the activity behind her. Not having to turn around to see what her crewmates were up to made for better piloting. The ship’s designers could have set the pilot’s chair farther back, she supposed, but she preferred models like the transport which let her feel the nose of the craft around her rather than the pilot’s chair being muffled in its mid-section.
So she could clearly see Commander Chapel’s reflection in her shiny disc as he sat sprawled in the command chair behind her. He hadn’t even paused to breathe after dropping Trick on the medbay table and ordering her to get the transport out of there. The commander had come forward, sat down still drenched in sweat and blood and caked black sand, and gone right to his report. The trek had been brutal on him, and she could see the tremors in his overexerted muscles, even via the disc. She wasn’t one to second-guess her commanding officer, but she hadn’t understood why he wouldn’t let them meet up with him so they could help bring Trick in. Was Bronse protecting them? They were ETF, for Great Being’s sake. They were supposed to stick their necks out. But she’d known her superior officer for a while now, and she suspected that Bronse had been a little wrecked up about letting the new kid get tanked. The commander got very strict after one of them got hurt. His personal motto, they had learned, was no fear/no fail/no fatality, and no fuckups.
Justice sighed. The episode with Trick meant they’d be running rigorous drills and extreme training again during their next downtime. Not that she minded, because a girl had to do something to keep her figure, but she did wish that Bronse would parallel that way of thinking with other things sometimes. Like snapping a bootlace would mean a day of intensive shoe shopping. She chuckled noiselessly to herself, trying to picture the hulking men she was teamed with sitting in a shoe emporium, eating canapés and sipping Lathe wine, while salers slid the latest in fashionable shoes onto their feet, one after another. Actually, Lasher was a mighty fine fashion plate when he was out of uniform, Justice mused. He would probably get a kick out of a day of shoe shopping.
But Commander Chapel was plainly not in a mood to appreciate her humorous ideas on these matters, so she kept them to herself. Perhaps she would share them later with Lasher. And Trick would get a kick out of them for sure.
Justice frowned, hoping that Trick would be all right. She had faith in their medic; he could hold the kid over until they returned to Ulrike. The best medical care in the tri-planet system was on their base planet. Once they got the kid there, he would be good as new.
Of the three worlds, Ulrike was the most advanced and civilized in many ways besides medical care. The ETF was based there, as was IM headquarters. Although the planet was half land and half water, most of the landmass was settled and there were few uninhabited areas.
Not like Ebbany, the planet they had just left. Ebbany was mostly landmass, with little in the way of water and oceans. That made for a high percentage of deserts covering the face of the planet. However, the Ebbanites had managed to eke out an impressive civilization along the edges of the waters. Yet the bane of the peace seekers were the barbarians of the wilderness areas and the Nomaad populations wandering the desert highlands and the lowlands of belowground caverns that stretched for hundreds of miles in all directions. The endless squabbles and arming for war, especially in the Grinpar Desert, had begun to make Justice feel like she would be wearing black camouflage for the rest of her life.
If Ulrike and Ebbany were polar opposites in civilization, however, Tari had to be the middle ground. Living there was rough, whether you chose jungle or desert, city or country, or life on the many colony platforms sharing the planetary orbits and sight line between Tari and its forested moon of Adia. The platforms were situated in a line from Tari to Adia like metallic stepping-stones, each one housing tens of thousands of citizens. They had the best advantages and technologies that life had to offer, their supplies often coming straight from Ulrike, where they got first dibs on imports before they even filtered down to the planet itself.
The trouble with Tari was that each colony was a faction unto itself, and they were always squabbling over trading rights or imagined slights from another colony. Feuding was frequent, and policing the colonies was difficult because it was hard to blend in on a floating piece of metal where everyone lived in close quarters and was wary of strangers. Planetside wasn’t much better. Trading rights were a bone of contention there too. Traders figured, why spend time flying all the way to the planet surface when they could simply go to the nearest platform colony. This meant that by the time goods filtered down the line to the planet, the prices were exorbitant. Only half the planet was settled; the other half was a wild frontier that drew adventurers, troublemakers, and a serious criminal element.
Tari was one of Justice’s favorite places. She had grown up on one of its platforms—a middle-class upbringing in a place that, to be frank, had been flat, cold and gray. Still it had had more than its share of dangers for a young girl. A contrast to platform life, the wilderness on Tari held a wild, colorful appeal for her. It was a matter of honesty, she thought. At least when you went to the Tari plains and rises, you knew you were headed into blatant dangers, unlike space colony life, where you thought you were safe, yet good faces held hazards in camouflage. Justice had always preferred the honesty of knowing you were in constant jeopardy.
Rather like her career choice.
She had enlisted in the IM right out of school, letting them teach and train her, letting herself be the perfect lump of clay for them to mold into the perfect soldier. Now she was one of the top five pilots in the Special Forces communities; she was one of only ten female ETF officers, and she was on Commander Bronse Chapel’s First Active ETF team. Chapel was a legend in his own time, and there wasn’t an ETF soldier who wouldn’t give his right arm to be on his elite team. Justice had been in her exalted position for three years now, and she had thrilled in every minute of it.
“Out of atmosphere; out of orbit traffic, Commander,” she reported automatically as they pulled away from Ebbany and headed fast toward Ulrike.
&nb
sp; “ETA?”
“Thirty-two hours, sir.”
“That long?” came the sharp demand.
“This is only an XJL transport, sir,” she reminded him with gentle respect. “I don’t have any zip. Just handling for best travel and evasion on the planetary surfaces. I can do only thirty-two hours at top mach.”
Bronse’s jaw clenched, and Justice could see a nerve tick angrily in his temple. The one thing none of them ever had to doubt was that their best interests and safety were at the heart of Commander Chapel’s every motivation. The entire team trusted their lives to him, and with good reason. They had seen Chapel do much more miraculous things to save the lives of his crew than humping out a kid with a six-inch blade in his belly, over black sand, in hostile territory, and a sand hurricane nipping at his heels.
Justice tired of watching her commander in the disc. Now that they were in the void of space, she flipped on her autopilot and swung out of her chair as if she were dismounting a horse. She strolled back to the supplies chest secured against the rear deck plates, and unlatched it with a hiss as it released its airtight seal. She fished out a first-aid case and resealed the chest. Then she walked up to the commander, who had gone back to typing his report, the blunt tips of his fingers dashing over the electronic keyboard of the handheld VidPad. She opened the kit and, without bothering to ask for permission, she began to tend the wounds he had sustained in his fight.
He had a cut over his left eye that would need knitting, a great deal of generalized bruising that a heal patch would take care of over the next twenty-four hours, and a bitching case of sunburn that was already beginning to blister. He had apparently lost his protective headgear in the fight, which had left him exposed to the sun. Justice would bet he had a hell-acre of a sun-induced headache as well. He had the misfortune of having coal black hair, and, like the black sand, it had absorbed every ray of brutal sun that had beaten down on him. Justice selected two heal patches from the kit and slapped one on Bronse’s left arm and the other under the hair on the back of his thick neck. When she pulled back, he was looking at her, a brow quirked up in curiosity. A light scar cut through the peak of his brow, accentuating the arch.
“Two?” he asked dryly.
“Yeah.” She grinned, pausing briefly to nibble on the gum between her back teeth. “One for reabsorption and swelling reduction.”
“And the other?”
“To cut the pain of the headache and sunburn.”
She looked studiously into the first-aid case as she spoke, so she could only feel the narrowing of his eyes on her at first. Not one to give in to cowardice, not even in the face of Commander Chapel’s disapproval, she smiled sweetly at him as she looked up.
“You gave me a narcotic?” he growled dangerously, reaching for the patch on the back of his neck. He looked up in surprise when she caught his huge fist in her palm, staying his actions. “Back off, Captain,” he barked shortly.
“Uh … with all due respect … bite me, Commander,” she retorted with lazy, unconcerned wit. “It’s only a low dose, meant to counter the dip when your adrenaline plummets. Which will be any minute now. When it drops, your pain will kick in. I’ve been around this block enough to know. If you want to stay lucid, you have to let me cut away at your nerves a little. Otherwise, you won’t be able to focus and stay alert with us.”
“I don’t like my reflexes being diminished or my perceptions screwed around with,” he argued predictably.
“That’s why it’s a low dose,” she reiterated. “And that’s why I used a patch and not a hyperspray. If we run into trouble, you just yank it off and you’ll be right in ten minutes, fifteen tops.
“I know.” She held up a hand to forestall his coming argument. “A lot can happen in ten minutes. But you have to trust me. I’d rather you be half-narced without pain than blinded by the agony that we both know is coming. If I let the medic look at you, he’d lock you in medbay. At least this way I can tell him I gave you first aid and he can focus solely on Trick. Don’t you think I know that’s why you ran out of medbay—before the medic could get a look at you?”
“Fine. I’ll leave it for now,” he acquiesced as if it were a heavy travail. “But next time, ask and present arguments before just doing it, okay? I’m not ignorant. I can listen to reason.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
“Jus, I want you to stay at the stick for a while. I know you’re tired and the autopilot could get us there in its sleep, but I have … I have a strange feeling. Let’s just keep alert, okay?”
“Roger that, sir.”
Justice put away the case and slung herself back into her seat, keeping her eyes on her monitors.
Despite Bronse’s worries, they reached Ulrike without mishap or event. Justice swung into port on the IM space station that rotated in Ulrike’s orbit with smooth grace in spite of its enormity. Thousands of troops moved in and out of the station, known as Station Zero, every day, at all hours, and the time of their approach was no different. Since IM acted in the role of law enforcement as well as militia, personnel were constantly shifting. Station Zero was a major exchange port, situated equidistant from Tari and Ebbany and practically on top of Ulrike.
Shortly after the XJL landed on the tarmac, the doors of the cargo hold lowered to reveal the entire squad standing at the ready. Trick was supported on each side by two team members, their arms linked to form a human sedan chair of sorts to support their injured comrade. Justice and Lasher stood on the right, Bronse and Ender on the left. Bronse was, of course, in front, his thick wrist and forearm linked beneath Trick’s thighs with Lasher’s equally powerful grasp. At a soft sound from their commander, the team strode forward in a perfectly timed march, cushioning Trick, yet precise and proud in step so no one could mistake them for anything but the mighty warriors they were. Wounded team members of the ETF had always been brought home in such a manner, their heads held high, keeping them from being the object of pity or dismay, something every soldier dreaded in moments like this.
Silence fell over the soldiers crowded around waiting for their departing flights. A respectful silence. All braced their legs and linked their hands behind their backs in honorable attention as the ETF officers carried their injured man past them, heading for the station medical facilities.
Masin “Lasher” Morse was not famous for his conversation. He was even less renowned for actually initiating one. So when Lasher asked Bronse a leading question, the commander blinked at him in surprise for a long moment. They were sharing a meal in Bronse’s quarters, something they did often when they weren’t in the mess with other bored officers who were on downtime, or when they weren’t in the mood to search for more intimate company. Bronse’s fork hung suspended between his plate and his mouth, the rich juice of the steak he was enjoying dripping with little plops onto his potatoes.
“I’m sorry,” Bronse murmured after a moment, blinking and refocusing his disbelieving attention. “Could you repeat the question?”
Unperturbed, Lasher did so, grinning the entire time. He knew full well that Bronse had heard him and comprehended. “I asked you what you were thinking.”
Bronse laughed suddenly, half with humor, half with that same sense of disbelief. “I am suddenly having a flashback to my marriage. Liely asked me that question a hundred times a night when I was off-mission. Do I have to worry that we’ve been on-mission together too long?”
Lasher responded by throwing a bread roll at Bronse’s head. It hit him in the center of his forehead when he couldn’t be bothered to duck, then bounced off and slid under the table. “Don’t be a jackass.” Lasher grinned, making his companion laugh. “I only meant to say that something is bugging you, and I know enough after all these years that it’s a good idea to get a handle on your thoughts if I want to protect my own ass. Your instincts are uncanny and rarely wrong.”
“We’re on downtime, Morse. My instincts are going to kick back and relax until such time as we go on-mission again.”
Bronse set down his fork and leaned back with a deep sigh and a long, casual sprawl of well-muscled legs. There was hardly a trace left on his body of the fight he had been in, or the trek he’d been forced to make. Masin’s boss was freshly shaved and showered and even wearing civilian clothes. That in and of itself was strange, come to think of it. Bronse never wore civvies on the station. He always waited until he was planetside. It was allowed in the privacy of their quarters, of course, where they were now, but once they crossed the threshold into public areas, they were expected to be in uniform unless briefly traveling for social purposes from one place to another.
“Are you going out somewhere?” Lasher asked, again surprising his commander with his attempt to generate a conversation. Or, in this case, an information-gathering session.
“Am I being interrogated?” Bronse countered.
“You are being observed as acting out of normal character by a man who has been by your side since enlistment ten years ago. And before then, if you count officers’ college. If you didn’t want me to know that something was going on, you wouldn’t have invited me to dinner dressed in civvies, partner. Why in hell are you toying with me? Save the head games for the enemy, friend.”
Bronse fixed his unusual eyes on his second in command for a long minute. Lasher met his stare dead on and with no hint of his previous humor. Neither man blinked. The disconcerting thing about Bronse’s eyes, Lasher noted wryly, was that they were an unexpected periwinkle color. A cross between light blue and light lavender. Like hazel eyes that switched between green, gold, and brown, Bronse’s eyes would shift between sky blue, light violet, and the periwinkle or lavender combination of the two. They were like a woman’s eyes, some would say, for their sheer prettiness.