Lieutenant Kalija is a newly minted pilot in the Colonial Defense Authority. But twenty years after moreaus first earned the right to become citizens, have they earned the right to be equals?

Here is the final novel in the Moreauverse Trilogy that started with Cry Havoc! and continued in Steel and Fire and Stone. Set 20 years later, it focuses on Kharåk Kalija Shada, the daughter of one of the minor characters in Steel and Fire and Stone who is now a naval aviator. I'm really not certain how this works out, so let me know whether you'd be interested in seeing more... Also, right now this is a clean novel -- so let me know if that needs to change, too!

Released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Share, modify, and redistribute -- as long as it's attributed and noncommercial, anything goes.

The Mighty Wind Arises, by Rob Baird — Ch. 1, "Far as human eye..."

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For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm;
– Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Locksley Hall"

Remember one thing: she wants to kill you. That's all the bitch wants.

Those had been her instructor's first words, and she had internalized them. Captain Delgado, with her unflappably calm demeanor and her sharp grey eyes, was no longer sitting next to her — but the advice still stood. 

And it was not hard to believe. Two hundred hours of practice had brought her to this point. Two hundred hours of practice, two years of study — god only knew how many words and charts and models had been crammed into her skull.

But now, three hundred kilometers above the surface of Leeuskloue, Kalija felt very alone. There was only the soft lighting of the instrument panel, and the quiet hiss of the oxygen regulator, and a boundless field of stars hanging like cold and empty promises over the curve of the darkened planet below.

Anyway, at the moment only one promise mattered. REPORT NOT LATER THAN 16 MAR 07 TO CVS-62 BELLAU WOOD HOMEPORT GARDNER, +LK. It was now the 15th — the Ides. Somewhere ahead of her, the strike carrier was nestled near the head of Task Force Kilo Six-Zero, already preparing to depart Leeuskloue. She had not been told where the TFK60 was going.

But of course, it was possible to guess. A Rapid-Reaction Task Force was CODA's smallest independent flotilla that could sustain combat operations over a meaningful period of time. That meant they were being sent to one of the Alliance's interminable corporate wars. Probably.

Who knew? She would find out soon enough. 

She saw the task force first as a constellation of new stars, far in the distance, highlighted on her head-up display. She took a deep breath, wriggled her fingers against the controls, and thumbed the radio switch. “Bishop control, Five-Oh-Four, inbound fifty, green." She was fifty kilometers out, with all systems operational and enough fuel to maneuver freely. Optimal conditions.

“Five-Oh-Four, control, acknowledge. Switch marshal."

Large and advanced as she was, the Bellau Wood could only recover so many aircraft so quickly. In a combat situation, with large numbers of vehicles aloft, those returning were pressed into a carefully managed stack, marshaling until they could be brought in. 

At the moment, though, there was nobody else landing, and they cleared her inbound immediately: “Five-Oh-Four, your signal charlie."

Forty kilometers. She checked her instruments again. Everything was going according to plan. But Captain Delgado had long since beat the complacency out of her. It was not her first carrier landing; not even her first solo recovery. But it was her first time on the Bellau Wood, and she wanted to make a good impression.

The Automated Carrier Landing System, according to her ship's thick manual, is a multiply-redundant system of four computers, three of which must agree before any movement is commanded. It went on to advise aspiring pilots: always use the ACLS where possible.

No worse place for malfunction than in a vacuum, though, traveling at orbital velocity and trying to safely settle on a darkened metal object not much bigger than a skyscraper. Captain Delgado distrusted the ACLS. Everyone distrusted the ACLS. She switched it out of automatic mode, and tightened her grip on the joystick. 

Now she could see the ships in the task force. The massive supply freighters, squat and ungainly — but the most valuable ships in the fleet, for they kept everyone in food and fuel and supplies. The aggressive, wedge-shaped escort cruisers, armed with powerful lasers and missile batteries and god only knew what else. The smooth, elegant lines of the landing carrier ships, with their huge wings that ended in powerful engine pods. The heart of the task force, they had to be able to swiftly dip in and out of the upper atmosphere to launch and recover the dropships that would carry TFK60's marines to the surface.

And the Bellau Wood. A six-sided cylinder nearly a kilometer long, dominated by the smooth, lighted flight decks on each face. At peak efficiency each one could recover an incoming ship every fifty seconds — an entire squadron could be back aboard in under two minutes. She adjusted her direction, and the course projection on the HUD nudged gently until it was just nuzzling the outline of the carrier.

“Five-Oh-Four, approach, cleared for recovery, deck four."

A quick roll brought her in line with the appropriate deck. Four centuries before, pilots had only one to aim for, and only four axes to control — pitch, roll, yaw, and the impulse of their throttle. She had to worry about her translation, too — how her ship moved to the left and right, or up and down. Everything needed to be perfect.

And, after all, the bitch wanted to kill her.

She swallowed heavily. It would've been easy to develop tunnel vision, seeing only the carrier in front of her. Bellau Wood glowed, soft and inviting in the blackness of space. But her eyes moved constantly, checking her controls, checking her sensors, checking the world around her.

When she focused on the carrier she was looking for the bright visualizer, a beam of light projected towards her that would tell her whether she was on the right approach. That was what really mattered. All her thrusters were off. She was drifting, if it could be called drifting — hurtling towards the carrier at four kilometers a minute. The visualizer beckoned.

“Five-Oh-Four, slightly high and fast; on slope. Two kilometers. Call the ball."

It was almost perfectly centered, just like the course projection lines on her display. She switched the controls into precision mode, and looked again to make certain that she could see the visualizer beacon. “Five-Oh-Four, Intruder ball, two-eight, manual."

“Roger ball, two-eight, manual."

A momentary burst of the forward thrusters; the ship slowed, and the ball settled down. But her path still put her too far forward on the deck, beyond the carrier's equipment that was designed to bring her to a safe halt. She fired the dorsal thrusters along the top to push her a little lower. Perfect.

“Easy with your nose." Well. Almost perfect. She pulled back on the stick; the nose thrusters fired, angling her up a few degrees — and, of course, slowing her forward progress a little more. Just a touch of throttle to compensate. “You're a little fast." Damn it. Too much. “On speed."

The Bellau Wood swelled before her. She had to fight the urge to use the thrusters to shove her into the deck. Everything but the ball told her she was going to miss the approach — that she was too fast, too high, too off-course. Her instincts, too, wanted to kill her. She ignored them. One final check — gear down. Magnetic couplers powered. Five. Four. Three. Two. One —

A heavy thump, as the Intruder slammed into the flight deck. She fired the ventral thrusters as hard as she could — trying to lift the ship back and away from the carrier, in case there was some problem with the recovery gear. Nothing. And now she was coming to a swift halt, gravity tugging her forward against the harness until she couldn't breathe.

The Intruder was no longer moving. The Landing Signal Officer's voice came in again. “Fair two."

Her head dropped. “OK" was the best one could hope for — a landing executed superlatively. “Fair" was average, and she should've been content with it. But it was her first landing on the new ship, and she did have something to prove, after all. Well, it wouldn't likely get her chewed out, at least, and that was something.

Electromagnets hidden beneath the deck of the Bellau Wood grabbed her Intruder and nudged it towards one of the elevators at the side of the flight deck. Doors opened, the elevator lowered, and then the carpet of stars above her was shrouded by the metal blast doors, and she was ensconced in the familiar flashing lights and bustle of a warship getting underway. Gravity shifted suddenly as she aligned to the decks of the ship's interior — but even that was nothing, compared to the g-forces of flight.

A green lamp glowing on her panel told her that the atmosphere outside was breathable, and when she saw people bustling around her she pulled off her helmet carefully and opened the canopy. The noise of the deck filled her cockpit — shouted orders, and the whine of machinery, and the dying sigh as her engine coolers slowly settled down.

One of the deck crew pushed a ladder into place, and she swung herself over the edge of the cockpit, taking two rungs of the ladder and then jumping the rest of the way to earth. The blue-shirted crewman's mouth was opened to speak — but when Kalija turned around the woman froze, and her jaw hung open wordlessly.

Kharåk Kalija Shada was not human. Her mother had been a German shepherd; her father, a Border collie. She had a long, wolfish muzzle, and a heavy tail, and one ear that folded perpetually at the midway point no matter how hard she tried to keep it pricked up. But she was a commissioned officer in the Colonial Defense Authority, and the gold badge on her flight suit marked her as a qualified naval aviator, and so she stared the crewman down. “I have permission to come aboard."

Her tone shocked the woman back into activity. “Uh — yes, ma'am."

A dark-complected man in a brown shirt had joined them. He was older, and though he lifted an eyebrow at the sight of the canine his lined brow betrayed more mild amusement than anything else. “Good evening, ma'am."

“Evening. Lieutenant Kalija — I'm joining VA-226."

“Chief Pavel Vartan, division head for the PCs here. Bringing me a new pear, ma'am?" This was one of the more polite names for the A-17E Intruder III, which had a squat, wide body that encouraged skepticism about its airworthiness. Its complete form — pear-shaped, ugly, fat fucker — saw them called puffins, as well, but Vartan seemed to be erring on the side of kindness.

“It was that or come up on the COD, and they told me planetside that you were supposed to get a spare bird."

Vartan nodded. “Any gripes?"

“None. Paint's still new on the panels." 504 was also still painted in primer; the deck crew would fix that, and find a new number when she was assigned to a squadron.

“Always good to have something new to break," the man chuckled. “Alright. Crewman Wyckoff, get this moved into one of the bays for checkin. VA-226, huh?" he asked, as the blue-shirted woman got to work.

“Yes."

He gestured down the hangar deck, and Kalija followed him when he started walking. “That explains something, then — they told us to get another bird ready. 'Fraid you won't be in the new one, ma'am. Spaceman English is the captain we're looking for..."

They'd stopped at an empty bay; a lean figure was bent over a computer terminal. At the sound of his name the young man turned. He blinked in confusion and, like Wyckoff, it took him a moment to come to attention. “Sir. Chief."

“As you were." The boy relaxed, although he still seemed less than clear on what was transpiring.

“Spaceman, where's Five-One-Oh?"

“Scoping the engines, chief. At the run-up this morning, we got a minor temperature drop on the starboard coolant tank."

Vartan nodded, and indicated the empty bay where a puffin might've sat. “I expect you'll be given Wagon Five-One-Oh, ma'am. This is her home. Spaceman English, Lieutenant Kayila is joining us this cruise." Save for mispronouncing her name, he was doing a far better job of not treating the whole situation as incomprehensibly bizarre. “You want to explain?"

Spaceman English, whose grease-spotted uniform had adopted the mottling of camouflage, flicked his eyes from Vartan to Kalija. “Uh, okay. I mean — yes, sir — ma'am. Um. It's been parked since before the end of our last tour when her pilot... uh... when it was moved to squadron reserve. I've tested the systems regularly. I was told to bring it operational two days ago... just doing some final checks now, ma'am."

“Any problems aside from that temperature drop?"

He glanced towards Vartan for approval. “Minor ones, ma'am, yes."

“Don't be shy," Chief Vartan ordered. “First impressions count. You know what you're talking about."

English straightened back up. “Right, chief. Ma'am, Five-One-Oh is a twenty year old airframe with just under seven thousand flying hours. Her maintenance records are completely clean. She was delivered as a Block Four and upgraded to Block Five three years ago. The engines are rebuilt, with less than four hundred hours apiece. She's never been in an accident or a rough landing."

“Orbital transitions?"

“One thousand, two hundred and nineteen cycles, chief," he answered promptly. “Those are low for a ship of her age — her records say that she spent four tours surface-side. The thermal protection is brand new; I just applied it yesterday. As far as gripes..." A deep breath. “The status indicator for the anticollision beacon keeps burning out, there's a sticky valve in the right-side cabin heater vent, and the bombardier says the targeting computer is 'slow' but can't tell me any more. Also, the GIMPS comes back from every mission off by point four degrees and has to be recalibrated. I believe it's related to a static discharge vane being misconfigured on the left wing, but officially the status bulletin only applies to Block Two and Block Three models so we are not authorized to replace it. That's it, ma'am."

As 510's plane captain, English would've been responsible for the airframe. He'd been working, and his uniform was as dirty as his face — but the hangar floor was spotless and gave the sense that 510 had been well cared-for. Kalija had the reassuring sense that he knew it better than anyone — that she could've asked him any question at all. “Thank you, spaceman," she nodded.

Pavel Vartan walked her to the end of the hangar deck. “Know they don't look like much, but we keep them in good shape. Never lost a plane to maintenance in thirty years, ma'am."

“Good to know, chief."

He nodded. “See you soon, then, ma'am. Welcome aboard."

She ignored the looks that followed her as she made her way up along the corridors into the bowels of the ship. The squadron had its own section — its own hangar, its own ready rooms, its own mess — and she had committed the map to memory before her arrival. 

The door to Commander Grace Putnam's office was open. It was immaculate, inside, although every wall had been covered by thin computer screens. Squadron organizational charts; aircraft diagrams and maps of far-off planets. None of it seemed haphazard.

“Enter," the commander said. “At ease. You are..."

“Lieutenant Kharåk Kalija Shada."

“Can you say that again?" 

The question was not unkind. “Kharåk Kalija Shada," she repeated. “But it is most common to say only 'Kalija.' We don't have conventional first and last names."

'Kalija' was also what was written on her uniform. It had taken some fighting — three months of paperwork back and forth — to get the Bureau of Personnel to understand that. “How can I help you, Lieutenant Kalija?"

“I've been assigned to the Trailblazers." The dog handed over her ID tag and orders, and took the opportunity to examine the woman more closely. First impressions counted, after all; Commander Putnam did not resemble her hologram.

She had twenty years of service, according to a dossier Kalija had read. Campaigns across most of the Arm — transferring from flying the more prestigious F/A-206 Kestrel because she had a natural aptitude for the dangerous ground attack missions CODA gave to their Intruders. 

At the same time, she did not look the part of a warrior. Told of her flying skills, it was natural for anyone to imagine Grace Putnam with lace wings instead of a warbird. She had a doll's elfin, delicate appearance and a soft, smooth voice. “Yes, so I see... it looks like you bring us to full strength. It says you're fresh from quals, lieutenant?"

“Yes, ma'am. I was just transferred. My equipment and... my uniform," she added self-consciously. “It's all coming on the next COD. They asked me to fly a new Intruder up, instead."

“Hmm. Well, alright. Commander Fuller?" she called back, and presently another man stepped through the hatch. “This is Commander Charles Fuller — squadron XO. Commander, this is Lieutenant Kalija. What do you think, Chuck?"

Fuller was Putnam's opposite — tall and heavier, he looked older than he must have really been. His brown hair was starting to thin, receding in lines that marked a series of disorderly retreats. The wrinkles of his face pinched his eyes shut when he smiled — but by the looks of things, he did that often. “He looks... uh. Well-groomed?"

“She," Putnam corrected, “is our new pilot."

“Gets Alamo, then, huh?"

“Somebody has to, Chuck. That room's free, isn't it?"

“Sure. Yeah, I'll show her." He indicated the open door behind him, and she followed along. “Welcome aboard, lieutenant. Sorry about the, uh — well. You know. Never had to tell the difference before."

“It's alright, sir." She had never found it particularly difficult to identify the genders of her fellow moreaus; this was a particular human failing.

“The Bellau Wood is pretty new. Hell, junior officer staterooms are damned nice — probably better than you had shoreside!"

Calling this 'overpromising' demeaned the word to the point of redefinition. The room, which was roughly a three by two meter rectangle, was dominated by its single bunk bed. A desk crammed into the far wall sat below a video screen that took up most of the wall: the screen was off, and the desk's occupant was busy working on some kind of presentation, at a flexible computer that had seen the worst of a decade's wear.

“Lieutenant Glenn," Commander Fuller said; the man turned, and stood. It was either deference, or he meant to give them both enough space to step into what, charitably, could've been used as a prison cell. Fuller declined, remaining outside. “Lieutenant Kalija is your new ticket to the stars." 

“Mornin'," Glenn nodded. His youthful face was poorly matched against the close-cut grey of his hair, and the low, laconic drawl of his voice. “Guess they figure you'll do..."

“High praise. I'll let you two get acquainted, then," Fuller decided, rather than cramming the room with his bulk. “Lieutenant Kalija, check back in later when I've had a chance to go over your paperwork."

“Yes, sir," she agreed. He closed the door behind him when he left.

“Do you shake?" Glenn asked. She held out her paw, and he took it. “Right. I'm Barton Glenn. Lieutenant, Junior Grade, blah blah."

“Barton is your first name?"

He shrugged. “My mom was really into nurses, and even my folks weren't so mean they'd call me 'Clara.' Kalija?"

“That's the short form, yes. Kharåk Kalija Shada. 'Elvis.'"

“Yeah, guessing your dog name didn't last long in training, did it? 'Alamo,'" he returned in kind. “Did Bucky give you the talk about how nice the staterooms are?"

“Yeah."

Barton rolled his eyes. “Yeah. Well. It's soundproofed, which is nice for some people. Not enough room to swing a cat."

“Not enough room to do anything with a cat," she observed. The remainder of the space was taken up by two lockers; the one on the right was unlocked, and opening it revealed that it was empty. “Shove one in here..."

“Maybe, if you're keepin' one for a snack. Take the right locker, and as far as a bed, that one's yours," he pointed to the top bunk. The sheets were appropriately stiff and coarse — standard CODA issue, threaded through with memory-wire so that an electric shock could take the wrinkles right out. The cables did little for their comfort — but at least it looked well-made. “So, I've never served with a dog before."

Kalija raised an eyebrow, and lifted her right ear as high as it would go — though it frustrated her by staying folded, as it always did. “Is that going to be a problem?"

“I dunno, Elvis. Is it? Maybe we could get some ground rules out of the way."

“Sure..."

“Do you shed?"

Why is that always the first question they ask? She had gotten good at policing herself, at least. “A little. I'll keep it under control."

“Uh huh. Do you have a sensitive nose? Dogs do, right? Bloodhounds and shit?"

Of course. Had she not already been taking anesthetics to deaden her sense of smell, there was no way she could've made it through living in the barracks — let alone the confined Bellau Wood and its recycled air. “Better than yours, yes." And she grinned, adding: “Not that that's saying much."

“No, but, like. Say you come in here and I tidy up real quick, you can still tell I was jackin' off, right?"

Kalija blinked, and looked down at the paw she'd just used to shake his hand. A few seconds passed in silence. “Yes."

“Oh. Well. Kinda might be your problem 'steada mine, I guess. What kind of music do you listen to?"

“Old terran stuff. Classical. Rock and roll. Belt rock, too. The Orbiters, the Twisted, Lazarus Road —"

“Got anything after Uncertainty Principle?" 

The mutt shook her head, giving the question all the respect it deserved. “Fuck no. Not worth anything when Kel left. Rich was so much less fun than Kel — Uncertainty Principle and This side down are their best work."

Finally, Barton Glenn grinned. “Good girl. Oh — might be I still am going to tease you about the dog thing, by the way."

“I'm used to it." She pulled herself up onto the top bunk and sat — awkwardly, because the ceiling was too low. “Just don't ask me to play fetch." When, curious, he looked at her, she smiled toothily. “Not enough room."

“Guess not. Well, alright. We can try to make it work. Anybody who knows LR and hates Rich Emerley can't be all that bad." He resumed his work, tapping along at his computer. A minute went by; then he turned around, like something else had struck him. “Wait. One more thing."

“Yeah?"

“You can fly, right?"

The rest of the day was taken up in tedious formalities. She collected her belongings from the Carrier Onboard Delivery lighter, and made room in the locker — not that this required too much work. Besides her paperwork and her uniforms, all she had to her name were a few books, and a portable music player loaded with whatever she'd been able to find to quiet the constant noise of her training assignment at Naval Air Station Zumwalt.

She was too excited to be hungry, particularly with Barton's hint of a squadron hop the following morning, so she skipped dinner — in any case, the smells wafting from the galley were not terribly appetizing. And she followed Lieutenant Glenn along to the ready room, where the squadron commander had convened a briefing from a mysterious “Dr. Müller."

The room was packed with loud naval aviators — theirs was not the only squadron in attendance — who all knew that they were far more important than a simple lecture. They joked around, waiting for the doctor's arrival. “New pet?" A tall, dark-skinned lieutenant nudged Glenn with a white-toothed grin, and then pointed to Kalija.

“My very own pilot," Glenn nodded. “Y'all could do with leashes anyway." 

“Try it, Alamo," the lieutenant laughed. “Just you fucking try it."

Another man — Carl Lincoln, she scanned his uniform quickly — leaned back in his seat to get Glenn's attention. “Alamo. Alamo! You like making men wear leashes and collars?"

“Why do you think I got the Board, Tophat?"

“Fuckin' perv," Lincoln laughed, and held out his hand to the dog. “Don't let him, lieutenant. I'm Carl."

“Kalija," she nodded, and shook it. “I won't."

“Promises, promises..." Glenn muttered. “Keep saying that."

“Attention!" someone on the far side of the room called.

'Dr. Müller' was Lieutenant Commander Joscho Müller, an older human with fuzzy grey hair and a beard. “Heads-up, it's the piss-off," someone else shouted, though the few snickers that followed were quickly muted by the scowling expression of the lieutenant commander at the front of the room.

“Hello, ladies and gentlemen," he began and then, realizing his error, tried again. The scowl vanished. “Morning, losers. The captain has informed me that the task force has begun preparations for the jump, which means it's time for you fine people to know where it is we're going. Can anyone guess?" A hand went up, and Müller shot its owner a look. “Not a strip club, Achilles."

The hand went down.

Lieutenant Commander Müller stepped back from the podium and raised his hand to start the playback of a vast hologram that filled the front of the room. It showed the galaxy as seem from many thousands of light years above. When he snapped his fingers, the view narrowed in on their local arm: shading indicated the vague political alignments of the star systems, although of course any given planet was likely to have been colonized by more than one of the great empires. The star he selected was highlighted in the cornflower blue that represented a non-aligned system. “Welcome," he said, “to Pike."

“Isn't Switch from Pike?"

“Damn straight I am." Kalija didn't recognize the woman who grinned back. “What the hell's there you boys care about?"

“Two hundred million non-aligned people," Müller answered. “That is, they're non-aligned at the moment. For two centuries, Pike has been officially neutral, but unofficially in the sphere of our own Yucatan Alliance." He used the official term for the Confederacy, which was also the term used by people who liked to believe in the strength of its central government. “Two hundred years — most of you can't even count that high." Some good-natured grumbling decried the accusation. “Uh huh. Roulez, what's the first number after two hundred?"

“Three hundred?"

Müller rolled his eyes. “Anyway, they're our friends. Did you know that Pike has the richest deposits of platinum in the Neutral Territories? Did you know that Macedo-Cullen-Transstellar produces sixty percent of the seed for Kendrick rape used in the Confederacy? Did you know that, by percent of population, more people from Pike serve in the Alliance military than all but four other planets? All this trivia and more is available as part of your briefing. But you want to know why we're going this time, right?"

The planet shrank in the holographic viewer, and was replaced by a heavy-jowled man in a black suit. He was mostly bald, and his eyebrows looked nothing so much as two caterpillars, pressed hastily into service for the job. A floating caption declared him to be GOVERNOR SERGEI KORABLIN, elected in 2504 to represent the Pike Socialist Front. A contested election, Müller assured them, plagued by accusations of irregularities and outright fraud. Pike's Republican Compact, devoted to the planet's ongoing independence and the source of its Yucatan leanings, had appealed for help.

“Help with what, you ask? And this, my friends, is where it gets interesting. Korablin has begun to pivot the planet towards the Sangan Kingdom and the Grand Orion Soviet. Six months after the election, he announced the purchase of two hundred Saker-type fighter-bombers. He's begun training domestic pilots, rather than relying on the Alliance for help. And he's raising a local militia, the Territorial Guard — commanded by loyal members of the PSF. That makes everybody nervous. In two years, he's assembled six divisions and replaced the leaders of the sector police and intelligence services."

Tensions had been on the rise ever since. Eight months of bickering in the legislature and protests on the street. The previous month, a declaration of martial law. Korablin's image disappeared, and Kalija could see the planet again. It had four continents; one, in the southern hemisphere, was nearly completely covered in ice. One was half-desert. Of the two remaining, she now saw the emergence of ominous colors: Confederacy bronze, the red they all associated with the Sangan Kingdom, and the slate grey of the Orion Soviet. One continent was completely red; the other was bronze, with a handful of grey spots.

“Three weeks ago, the central highlands called for a referendum rejecting the authority of the government in New Sydney. They have established an independent government at Aurora, and they claim to be the legitimate representatives of the planet."

“Are they?" The woman from earlier spoke up.

“Difficult to say. The Aurorists directly control about a third of the planet's population — more are filtering in, trying to escape crackdowns in areas more loyal to the New Sydney government. Everyone agrees the election was... complicated by its irregularities."

“We're not... going to war again, are we?"

Müller gestured with an open palm towards the hologram next to him. “Not yet," he said, as little points of light blossomed in the red and grey zones of the map. “Governor Korablin has appealed for help, and the Tripartite Kingdom has answered. The Sanganese have at least six thousand personnel, scattered across forward operating bases and military installations. Officially they're here as advisors. More equipment has begun to arrive, including armored hoverdynes and sophisticated anti-spacecraft batteries."

Despite his denial, Kalija could tell from the sudden hush in the room that they all saw the specter of open conflict again. The last war with the Sangan Kingdom had ended just twenty years before — two decades of relative peace, marked only by the endless but lightweight corporate squabbles that the Colonial Defense Authority was compelled to police. An actual fight, against an actual enemy — like her parents had seen? Well, such was her inheritance. 

“The Confederate Congress has ordered Task Force Kilo Six-Zero to Pike as a polite reminder that we have not forgotten the planet's existence and will not allow it to fall out of our sphere. It's only neighborly. And if Korablin and his friends happen to notice that it's a reinforced RRTF with a full division of marines and our own lovely Bellau Wood, well... maybe they'll back down. Or maybe you'll get to put all that training to use."

By the end of his briefing the mood was less than positive. “Fucking piss-off," she heard one of the airmen sigh. “Always feel worse than before we started..."

“What does that mean?"

Glenn, at least, was able to muster a grin. “Dr. Müller is from the Department of Political and Strategic Affairs. He tells us what's going on and what we should expect, right?"

“Right…"

“Anyway, officially his title is International Politics Specialist. Guess somebody started writing it as the Political Intelligence and Strategic Situation Officer. PISS-OFF."

“Uh huh."

“It's good if you chain it together, navy style. He's from the Martinez-Forbes Sector Command, so… what is that? MARFORSECCOMPISSOFF. Haven't you wanted to say that to them before? He's not all that bad. Doesn't fly, though."

His loss, wasn't it? “You really think we'll be fighting the Kingdom?"

“Not a chance in hell," a skinny, extremely pale lieutenant butted in. “After the last treaty, neither one of us is going to want to do any fighting. Just a whole lot of hot air."

“This, like everything else, he learned from listening to rumors in space stations," Glenn rolled his eyes. “If the Sanganese want this place bad enough, they'll fight for it.

The pale human shook his head. “But that's the thing. They're not going to want it that badly."

“Just because you can't imagine wanting solid ground — oh, right. Elvis, this is Hobo. Hobo's never been anywhere but outer space. Might could be worried he'll get shot down on a planet's surface and have to breathe non-recycled air until they can rescue him."

Kalija tilted her head. “Never been planetside?"

“Not exactly never," Hobo clarified. “I was planetside for training. But before that, yeah, I grew up on freighters and stations. Alamo's right, I don't... like it outside much."

“I couldn't tell." She gestured with a paw to his milky skin. “You take shore leave in an EVA suit?" 

“Pretty much," he laughed. “It doesn't change what I know, though, and I know the Kingdom is not going to be willing to fight for a tiny little rock like Pike. We're just going to show up, fly some big sorties..."

“Admiral Lane doesn't care none about your big plan, you know," Glenn reminded him. “Nobody in Congress is going to mind if a little fighting comes between you and your master's license."

Hobo bristled. “Yeah, and they don't care that you're here either, right? Does your parole officer know?"

Grinning, Barton Glenn patted the man on the shoulder. “There, there. What about you, guard dog? You gotta mind to take 'em on?"

“It's in my blood," Kalija nodded. “My father served in CODA — he was on Jericho when... all that happened."

“All what happened?" Hobo looked rather puzzled, and Kalija was again reminded that the things that were important to her and her kind were not important to everyone. 

“The Battle of Jericho, back in '84. It was part of that whole series of battles when the Marathi got involved. Three companies of ground-mobiles held off ten times that many Kingdom militia, until they could be reinforced. Most of the soldiers were moreaus like me — that's how my father was awarded his citizenship. That was the first time that non-humans even could become Confederate citizens."

“Oh."

“Ready to go after the Kingdom again?" Glenn asked. He seemed to have noticed the pride in her retelling. “Or are you more a fan of the diplomatic route, like Hobo?"

Kalija bared her teeth. “Fuck the Kingdom. The things they've done to my kind..."

“Not all of them," Hobo suggested. “Right?"

“Not about to find out." From the stories her father told — from the things she'd heard from other moreaus — she was comfortable seeing the Sangan military only at a distance, and only through her targeting scanners.

While she slept — tossing uneasily for an hour before falling into slumber so deep she did not recall her dreams — the task force readied itself for the faster-than-light jump. She woke with Barton Glenn, at 0500, and joined him for breakfast in the pilot's mess.

“This is... uh..." She prodded the lump with her fork.

“They get the kitchen sponges and the scrambled eggs from the same place," he explained, and dumped half a bottle of hot sauce over the neon yellow brick. “I think they mix 'em up."

“I see..." The resistance the eggs gave was unsettling. “Are you sure they just don't reuse the eggs as sponges?"

“It'll get better. Need to figure out the operational tempo." He twirled a piece of soggy bacon around his fork, and Kalija congratulated herself on having skipped it. “I'm sure they prepared this six hours ago and just left it..."

“I guess nobody really joins up for the food, do they?" She stuffed a forkful of the scrambled eggs into her mouth and chewed thoroughly on what smelled of egg, tasted of salt, and had the consistency of dense packing foam. “You know what we're doing today?"

“Nope."

“Guess?"

Barton's clear blue eyes seemed to have been taken from a different man than the laconic, grey-haired lieutenant. They gave his face an alert, boyish look — the way he regarded her, Kalija thought he must've found her question amusing. “Find out soon, right?"

“You're so talkative..."

His eyes left her and he returned his attention to breakfast. “Just not asking the right questions."

“I bet. Fine — how'd you get your name?"

“My mom's a nurse. Told you that already. She was a real big fan of somebody named Clara Barton."

Kalija was not good at rolling her eyes; instead, she she narrowed them and glared. “The callsign."

“What do you think? I'm from Texas."

“On Earth?"

“Born and raised," Glenn confirmed. “Not from anywhere near San Antonio, but I reckon generally folks don't know anything about Texas other than that an' cowboys."

“Cowboys?"

He looked at her peculiarly. “You don't know?"

“No."

“Wow."

“Explain?" 

Glenn polished off the rest of his bacon first. “It's a big Texas thing," he finally began. “Most of the state raises 'em. Look real funny — like, they're half cow, half boy... you've really never seen a cowboy?"

Besides basic training in Honolulu, on a Pacific island, she'd never explored Earth at all — let alone any place with such hybrid monstrosities. “Never."

“Make good eatin'. Show you sometime. Not now..."

“Not now?"

“Briefing time, yeah? I'm gonna grab some coffee, and then we should put our bags on."

Following his lead, she changed into her flight suit and the two headed for the squadron briefing room. She remembered from her look at the organizational chart on Putnam's wall that the lieutenant commander giving the briefing was named John McCaffrey, but Alamo described him as 'Polo' to her and so that was the name she decided to associate with his face. He was not built like a soldier — wiry, with his hair almost too long for regulations. When he entered, though, the room came to swift order.

“So, I guess there's been some rumors you'd like me to address," he began, and then grinned. “Well, we're heading for a combat zone — that's rumor one. I suppose y'all'd know that. Blackout's results came back and it isn't Barinasi Fever. That's rumor two settled for — but c'mon, send him to a real brothel next time."

“Hey! It was!" a protesting shout answered.

Polo looked at the young man drily. “Roulez, a real brothel has women."

“Well —"

“Or men."

“Yeah but —"

“You got him drunk and dropped him off at the Santa Catalina Husbandry Museum."

“I thought they could make an honest man of him!"

“Nothing can make an honest man out of him," someone else cut in.

“Also, it was animal husbandry," Polo pointed out. “You even know the difference, Roulez?"

The lieutenant, who looked like a longshoreman had been awkwardly poured into his flightsuit, glanced at his fellow aviators furtively. “There's a difference?"

“Explains some things," Alamo grinned, and the hollering from the room mostly seemed to be in agreement — building in clamor when he added: “Your dad didn't know, either?"

“Right, right. Okay. Pipe down," Polo went on. “Third rumor: yes, it's true! Y'all get to fly today. But first: speaking of animal husbandry, let's welcome Lieutenant Kharåk Kalija Shada, our last pilot before we head out." Her ears perked up at the sound of her name. “Lieutenant Kalija, callsign..."

“Elvis, sir."

“Elvis?"

The canine nodded, and repeated herself. “Elvis. The conclusion at Honolulu was that I was, uh, 'nothing but a hound dog,' sir."

“And are you?"

“No. My father was a Border collie and my mother was a German shepherd. No hounds."

Polo nodded. “Damn Personnel. Always fuckin' things up. Well, anyway. As you can tell, Elvis is a dog. But she also graduated third in her class, so I expect to hear no off-color remarks about her not being human! She is just like one of us — that means keep your wisecracks to yourself. Am I clear? Good." He looked down at his computer, as though studying it. “Now, it says here that Elvis's dislikes include cats and vacuum cleaners, and her likes include being allowed on the bed and long wa — sorry, long w-a-l-ks on the beach. Elvis, anything to add?"

“No, sir." She'd long, long since learned to take it in stride. So instead, she cocked her head, and glanced towards Alamo for a moment. “Except — I'm allowed on the bed?"

“Ask Alamo nicely," Polo grinned, and that was that. “Okay, everybody, let's get to the real fun for today. It's a simple hop and we're all invited. We're going to jump into Pike orbit in a few hours, so you folks will police the fleet and make sure everybody's shipshape. Standard sweep. There's not going to be any other light traffic for the duration of this exercise and the admiral has ordered all sensors to be safed. Take off, hit your assigned zones, and log any EM radiation you find. Hopefully, though, nobody's leaking anything. When you're done, come home, and if it all looks good we jump. Clear?"

She took a moment to study the mission card with Alamo. They were to look after a pair of battlecruisers; her wingman, 506, was piloted by someone named 'Noodle.' She had yet to meet this person, and knew nothing save for a four-word description from Alamo. “Noodle's okay. Good people."

Not that she knew what that meant, but who cared? It was a chance to fly. Even if the mission was only a 'simple hop' — fly around the two cruisers, make certain their sensors and engines weren't radiating any signals that an enemy could detect, and return.

Her name, she discovered, had already been painted beneath the cockpit — and, better, they'd actually read her personnel file and used the short version. LT JG KALIJA “ELVIS," it said: she smiled, and her eyes rested there for a few seconds. It was a small reward the mutt allowed herself, before she began an inspection of her steed.

The North American A-17E Intruder III was not, by most metrics, a particularly graceful aircraft. Her too-blunt nose had awkward slab sides: seen from head-on, her fuselage had a distinctive profile like a kite with a squared bottom — or, in the words of a crew chief at Honolulu — 'a heaping dixie-cup full of shit.' The fuselage widened to meet her blunt, trapezoidal wings, and dihedraled horizontal stabilizers that seemed to be forming a sort of bizarre leer. 

Hers were unclean lines, broken here by sensors and there by thruster ports and elsewhere by antennas and lights. Twenty meters of heavyset, hulking ugliness — and none of them cared, because the Intruder was their ticket to the stars. Twin Rolls-Royce Excelsior engines fed from fusion reactors to develop well over two meganewtons of thrust apiece. Between her underwing pylons and her internal bay she could carry sixteen thousand kilograms of stores from space to surface and back again.

This time, of course, they would be going in unarmed; the pylons were covered in protective plastic. But soon, they would be laden – soon, she would mount firepower a terran king would've sold half his empire for. Soon, Kalija's finger on the joystick would command world-shattering authority. She patted the ship's side affectionately; it was cool to the touch, and slick. Nothing on the checklist seemed out of place or problematic.

In harness, she went through yet another checklist. Power on. Avionics on. Radios on and tuned. Life support on — that was important. The Intruder looked ugly, and she was old, but her antigravity system was still state of the art. It surrounded the cockpit, and deadened the impulse of acceleration so that they could maneuver without turning their bodies to mush — even still, flying was stressful, and Kalija knew that no small part of her knack for it was her engineered moreau body.

“You good, Alamo?"

“Good," her bombardier nodded. Then he slipped on his helmet; she did the same, and the canopy closed over them. The joystick felt warm and living between her fingers when she gave the controls one last test. “Same — ready?"

She secured her helmet — awkwardly, over her long muzzle, but it worked, and she'd gotten used to the fit. All the flight suits were custom-made, anyway; it hadn't been an ordeal for them to create hers. “Ready," she confirmed, and switched the radio to transmit. “Launch control, Wagon Five-One-Oh, launch check complete."

“Wagon Five-One-Oh, control. Go for start sequence. You're third for launch. Set signal kilo on your final integrity check and wait for direction."

Exhilarating! The Intruder had two main engines. The Rolls-Royce Excelsior — officially the RB.782 MK XXI — was a fusion thrust motivator delivering 2.7 meganewtons at full power. Each cost enough to buy an ordinary civilian starship. Its development, over more than thirty versions — theirs was old — had taken the best minds at Rolls-Royce fifty years of combined man-hours.

And to start it required only four steps.

“Alamo, I'm going to kick this off. Check me."

“Fuel pumps active."

The dog kept an eye on the multifunction display as she thumbed the controls. “Main pumps active. Secondary pumps active. Fuel flow is good."

“Unlock reactor safeties."

Next, she flipped the four switches that had been keeping the fusion reactors in check. Two for each reactor — the second one hidden behind a latch. It was an engineer's way of asking: you sure you really want to do this? She did. Lights flashed on the panel — no warnings. “Reactors active and stable." At their maximum potential, each Excelsior developed sixty gigawatts of power. When nuclear fusion had first been conceived, an Intruder could've provided electricity to an entire Terran country. Five hundred years later... “System board green."

“Link inertial restrictors."

Most of the galaxy relied on magnetic constriction for their fusion reactors. It took a great deal of energy, and a great deal of space — their smaller ships had to rely on inefficient chemical rockets or the outdated, highly unsafe antimatter engines the Confederacy had long ago abandoned.

But then, those lesser countries had not truly mastered artificial gravity — in truth, even Kalija did not understand how it functioned. All she knew was that the engines fused hydrogen by applying titanic forces of gravity to it — just like a star. Like a star, except tightly self-contained, and completely isolated from the rest of the Intruder. They had to be — a trillionth of a percent off, and the two crew would be instantly crushed.

And all it took to control them was two more switches. “Restrictors linked." They were now coupled to the throttles near her left paw. “Throttles in launch mode."

There were four modes. 'Orbital' mode delivered the full power of the engines; they could use it to land or ascend in a large gravity field — such as Pike's. 'Combat' mode operated at a small fraction of this, and was good enough for rapid course corrections in atmosphere or space. 'Maneuver' mode was less powerful still, and useful for precise controls. In 'Launch' mode the Intruder put out less than a percent of its ordinary power.

The operations manual for the A-17E was mostly dry, but Kalija well remembered one particular line. The section header said: 14.7.4: Launch procedures, spaceborne. A callout box, which flashed in warning red when it detected that eyes had fallen on the flexible computer, said:

A Trafalgar-class strike carrier has a mass of 2.1 million tons and a beam of 120 meters. With throttle in 'ORBITAL' mode, the tightly confined exhaust of a RB.782 MK XXI will immediately vaporize the area behind it, in the fashion of a laser cutting torch, splitting the carrier in half. This is considered a major operational hazard that is likely to impair combat effectiveness. The A-17E must NEVER be launched with the throttle in any position other than 'LAUNCH.' Attempting to defeat the safety interlocks may be a serious offense.

Indeed.

“Arm ACS."

It was a selector on her throttle, and she advanced it from 'Safe' to 'Active - I.' In the lower atmosphere, the Intruder made use of moving parts on her wings and tail — the Deflection Control System, which once upon a time would simply have been referred to as 'control surfaces.' In space, she relied entirely on the Augmented Control System: thruster ports that drew from the main engines. “ACS active in mode one."

And that was that. Kalija brushed through the hologram, signing off the checks until the screen flashed 'K': complete. Ready. “Launch control, Wagon Five-One-Oh, systems check complete."

She leaned to get a better look outside the window. Soon enough, one of the deck crew approached. “Arrestors?" She heard his voice in her helmet.

When Kalija powered the magnetic grapples on, the Intruder jolted — locked to the magnetic tracks beneath the deck. “Powered."

The crewman stepped back, and the Intruder slowly edged forward, guided automatically. The short track of the catapult bay loomed. Before them, the airlock was still closed. The dog glanced over at her bombardier: Glenn was leaning back in his seat, relaxed. “Wagon Five-One-Oh, launch control. Catapult locked. Confirm status kilo."

“Last chance to get cold feet," she told the man sitting next to her. 

His visor was transparent; she could see his wry smile. “Ain't gonna, not right this moment. Roll the dice."

“Launch control, Wagon Five-One-Oh, status kilo," she confirmed. They could do nothing further; the next steps were out of her hands.

A white-jacketed crewman came up next to them; her sensors told her the catapult bay was still pressurized, but he wore a closed suit in precaution. “Wagon Five-One-Oh, you're clear," she heard his voice over the radio in her helmet. The inspector was responsible for making certain there was nothing around them — nothing that might be sliced in half, in the fashion of a laser cutting torch. “Check ACS."

Carefully, she worked through all the possible movements of her controls, feeling the ship shudder to every touch. Outside, the inspector would be watching each set of thruster ports in the careful sequence, making certain that they all fired as they were meant to.

“All good," the man said. And then: “go for throttle up."

Ideally the Intruder would not need her main engines. Ideally the catapult would fire, and kick them free of the Bellau Wood to safety without problem. Ideally everything would be handled automatically. But just in case, she pushed the two throttles forward to the stops. Then, with a grin hidden by her helmet, she turned, and raised her paw in a salute to the inspector. Counted down in her head. Ten. Nine. Eight. The airlock doors slid open wide. Blackness, for her eyes were still adjusted to the bright lights of the flight deck. Kalija gripped the throttles firmly, holding in the inertia lock with her thumb. It would keep them at the stops, wide open against the g-forces of launch pulling her back. Three. Two. One.

The catapult fired smoothly, and suddenly they were out and among the stars. A billion points of light surrounded them — lights that mankind had spent countless millennia dreaming about, chasing; trying to reach. Without thinking Kalija switched to reverse thrust, bleeding off the energy of the launch to close the distance in speed between her and the Bellau Wood. “Bishop, Wagon Five-One-Oh, clear." 'Bishop' was the carrier's callsign.

“Copy that, Five-One-Oh. Have fun."

“So, uh." Barton was fiddling with his controls. “How many times have you done this, anyway?"

“Enough," she told him. “Where's Six?"

“Right twenty, up eighty. Eighty klicks, our delta-v minus point five k and increasing. How many is 'enough'?"

“Tag him." She glanced to where she expected the Intruder to be, and a moment later a floating marker appeared before her. More or less on target. A little line pointed Wagon 506's velocity vector in three dimensions. The line was a faint red; 506 was getting further away from them. “I already told you, you missed your chance for cold feet." Kalija nudged the radio controls. “Five-Oh-Six, this is Five-One-Oh. Going to form up on you. We're about eighty-two away."

“'Cause you're late, Five-One-Oh." Noodle was either a woman, or a man with a voice that begged for merciless teasing. The statement was, in any event, worth little more than an eye-roll. More likely, Noodle had simply left the Intruder's throttles at full power longer. Speaking of; she checked that they were a safe distance from the Bellau Wood, and set her own ship to 'Maneuver.'

“It's not that I have cold feet," Barton said. “It's just a reasonable question, you know?" 

“What is?"

“I mean, we're like to be getting real close, right? So how many space shots have you had?"

The canine sighed; her brain was already working through the mechanics that would bring them up next to their partner. She pushed the throttle forward, and the velocity vector slowly turned blue. She waited until they were closing at about three hundred meters a second, and cut the throttle. “More than one."

“More than two?"

“More than two," she agreed. To fully qualify for the squadron, she'd needed eighteen launch-and-recoveries from a starship. But VA-226 had been short of pilots, and ready to depart, so... “That was seventeen."

Barton's finger came to an abrupt rest on the control panel. “In my day, it took eighteen before your first assignment."

“So?"

“So, might could say you're two short."

Kalija turned to look at her bombardier. “You don't trust me?"

“Ain't gonna go that far. Just a mite cautious. Feelin' ya out, right? Idle conversation, like."

The dog snorted, and watched the display projected on her visor instead. Two kilometers from the other starship she started to brake, and drifted to a comfortable rest a few hundred meters away. “Ready to get started, Five-One-Oh?"

“Stay on me, Elvis." The Intruder twisted in space, and she saw the engines light up as it burned away from them. To hell with everything else — everything that had happened, and all the second-guessing, and all the sideways looks. The controls felt good in her paws: the ship responded crisply, less to her commands than to her desires. Noodle's trajectory took them straight to their first target, the battlecruiser Shenandoah. At her request, Barton tagged that, too. 

The fleet had spread out. Mostly this was a safety precaution to ready them for their faster than light jump. It also would make it easier for the reconnaissance flight to determine if there were any signals being leaked, and from where. Shenandoah was a thousand kilometers away, and when they finally approached its dull grey made it difficult to see — almost impossible to imagine, even. Just a dark shape, blotting out the stars.

“Elvis, you take the starboard side and I'll take the port. One pass, stern to bow."

“Roger." Kalija flicked a switch to boost the illumination in her visor and the great ship sprung to life. Eighteen hundred jagged, rough-hewn meters long, the battlecruiser was all sharp straight shapes like a long spire of broken glass. Shenandoah had been assembled in the vacuum of space and could never hope to leave it — too heavy and too ungainly for the stress of a planet's atmosphere. And yet, in its stark, brutal lines it was utterly beautiful.

The dog's paws worked the Intruder's controls and with an easy smoothness she slid under the big battlecruiser and around to its far side, pointing her nose towards the Shenandoah's massive stern. The thrusters of the battlecruiser's stardrives were alone the size of Terran skyscrapers. Forget laser torches — had those engines come alive the Intruder and her crew would've been so immediately, so thoroughly obliterated that they might just as well have been erased from history. 

“Alamo, you've started your scan?"

“Yep," he confirmed. “You just keep to flyin', if you've a mind to."

Gladly. She kept herself focused on the massive starship. It felt so close that she thought she could've reached out to touch it, though according to her hologram it was more than a hundred meters away. The jet barrels of defensive railguns lay flat against the hull — hundreds of them, in total, for one of the ship's jobs was to protect the rest of the fleet from harm. Each turret was the size of a cargo truck, but she knew that if the ship went to battle stations they would spring to life like a flicked switchblade, quicker than her eye could follow.

Further along hulked the ominous boxy nacelles of missile bays. Twelve — twenty-four — forty-eight... a hundred and ninety two, in total, in the starboard battery alone. She pulsed the lateral thrusters for a few seconds to grab some distance, trying to take it all in at once. A cruiser like it had shown up in corporate propaganda, she recalled. They could fire all of those missiles in under five seconds, and reload the entire battery automatically in only ten more. Nuclear-tipped, fast, and with built-in cloaking devices — with luck one of the Shenandoah's victims might take out a dozen, or two dozen — but eight hundred a minute?

The batteries and their supporting equipment took up only a quarter of the cruiser's length, perhaps — but then, despite her two kilometers, she was mostly weapons bays and fuel and armor. Almost twice as long as the Bellau Wood, she had less than a tenth of the carrier's crew. Kalija found herself wondering if there were any moreaus among them. Was she unique?

Then they were done. Long antennas sprung from the Shenandoah's bow like the dog's own whiskers: she almost expected them to twitch in the same fashion, when the Intruder snuck by. “Well, what's the word?" 

“She's clean." Barton Glenn quickly tapped his screens, to make sure. “Nothing over ambient on this side."

“Yeah?" Kalija quirked her eyebrow. “How many times have you done this before?"

“Enough," her bombardier smirked. 

“See, the difference is, I do trust you." The teasing was — she thought — playful. And she keyed the mic. “Hey Noodle, the boat looks good from over here."

“Same," Noodle agreed. “Blueridge, this is Wagon Five-Oh-Six. You're clean."

“Hot damn, Wagon," the bored radioman on the Shenandoah drawled into her ear. “You oughta be my doctor."

“But then I'd have to lie."

“Probably," the radio agreed. “Well, thanks for looking, Wagon Five-Oh-Six. See you at Pike."

“See you, Blueridge." Kalija saw Noodle rock the Intruder's wings, and there was a momentary pause on the radio, during which time Glenn had already highlighted their other target four thousand kilometers away. “Okay, Elvis. Red Demon is next. We're cleared inbound. Ready?"

“Born ready." The dog wasn't certain if she was the only one who found Noodle's voice difficult to place. She could not have been imagining all of it, certainly.

“You think? Tell you what, nugget. Put your throttle into 'Combat' and I'll race you to the IP. First one to station-keep wins; what do you say?"

This was not an uncomplicated problem: any acceleration would have to be exactly countered to slow them back down again. Nor was it a great deal of use, except as a point of pride. Kalija looked over at Barton, although her mind had already been made up. It was a boast, a waste of time, and utterly inconsequential. “You're on."

“On three, nugget." Kalija switched the Intruder into combat mode and tensed her paw on the throttle. “Three. Two. One. Go."

She pushed the throttle to the stops and their Intruder jumped forward. The inertia shoved her hard into the seat — harder than the catapult launch. There was no atmosphere to fight, and nothing to arrest their progress: only empty vacuum, all around them. “Elvis..."

“How's my trajectory?"

“Your trajectory is fine. I could question your judgment, but..."

“But what?" she grinned, rather wolfishly. The adrenaline was starting to tickle the edges of her thoughts.

“But I'll wait to see who wins. Three thousand."

Really it was a perfect test. They were aiming to come to the same, precise halt at the same, precise point. With two evenly matched spacecraft it would come down to the skill of the pilot at calculating the correct path — and their ability to execute it.

The cockpit around her faded into the background. There was only the stars, and the touch of her fingers on the controls, and the holographic display so crisp and clean in her vision it seemed to pierce directly to her brain. Ten seconds to the midpoint. Five... four...

Her manual said that the Intruder could execute a complete 180 in two seconds. In the sims, she'd timed it as 1.72 seconds exactly. She cut the throttle, pulled hard back on the stick, waited until they were pointed exactly backward — the pushed the throttle forward again, coaxing every micronewton of thrust she could from the Rolls-Royce engines.

Surgical precision. The ship was directly angled on the retrograde marker on her display. Every bit of power was now being used to bring them to a halt. Kalija hissed a feral, canine snarl, as if her raw emotion could bend the laws of physics to her will, and the Intruder's speed bled off rapidly. 

Noodle got there first, by a full four seconds that Kalija found perversely infuriating — all the more when the other pilot's voice filled her ear. “Pretty much what I thought. Alamo, you gotta whip her into shape..."

“Might could," the bombardier allowed. The dog contented herself — just — with the fact that her braking had been executed almost perfectly; they were drifting with respect to the battlecruiser at less than two meters per second. When she started to burn towards the ship, he put his radio on closed-circuit, speaking to her alone. “ACS."

“What?"

“Remember your NATOPS, Elvis. With the ACS on, it always takes at least five percent of your overall thrust. Noodle and Micro plotted a course that used both the main drive and the ACS. Not much extra speed, but you know..." 

“Every bit counts," the dog growled, and resolved that it would be a lesson she would not need to learn twice. “Thanks for telling me beforehand."

“Thought it mighta been they taught that in school." 

“Feeling me out?" she asked, and gave him as withering a look as a dog could manage.

“Somethin' like that."

“Sometimes it would help if you'd be more talkative," she groused for the second time.

“Might could," he said again. “Suspect you'd rather be focusing on doing some piloting now, though."

Unfortunately for her pride, he was right. She sighed, and pushed the Intruder alongside the other battlecruiser. This, the Spirit of Orc, was only a third the length of the Shenandoah, though she had more than twice the mass. Each ship had different purposes, although they had both been cut from the same mold of razor-sharp angles and brutal lines.

From the squared-off banks of her stardrive, the cruiser's hull angled forward at a shallow slope towards the point of her prow. Spirit of Orc had the form of a long, arrowhead-shaped wedge. The curve of the grey hull was broken by an arcing bulge of flawless glass: shields over mirrors polished to a fineness governed to a molecular level. There were four of them — two at either side of the wedge, and one on its top and bottom.

Beam cruisers like the Spirit of Orc had once been the pride of the Colonial Defense Authority, until the Confederacy's foes had learned to defeat the lasers with mirrors and ablative armor that scattered their power into uselessness. Still, they could blind sensors, and they were useful for hitting targets on the ground — no mirror was much use when the air itself had been turned into a column of star-hot plasma.

Of course, Kalija had never seen the lasers in use, any more than she had seen a cruiser like the Shenandoah unleash the full fury of her missile launchers. Any more, indeed, than she had fired a weapon in anger from an Intruder. Most of what she knew had been learned in school, or absorbed from CODA's propaganda.

Still, drifting past six hundred meters of warship, it was hard not to feel at least a little reassured. Anyone on the wrong side of Task Force Kilo 6-0 would have to face the wrath of those lasers. And those missiles. And the men and women of VA-226, ready at a minute's notice to man the catapults...

If newly minted — nugget, indeed! she bristled with indignation — she was one of them. It was not something that could be taken away from her. They finished up, and again Barton Glenn reported nothing detectable coming from the Spirit of Orc.

Long-ranged starship combat, though, was always a matter of subtle behavior and the subtler ways of chance. If the fleet's sensors and equipment radiated nothing of interest, any enemy looking for them would have to notice them from infrared alone. This was not terribly difficult — they were, after all, to be compared against the void of space — but nor did it give such an enemy much to go on. They might've been a civilian convoy, or for that matter any other orbital traffic.

Picking up the characteristic signature of one of the Spirit of Orc's targeting radars, on the other hand… that would be a useful bit of knowledge, and it was best to deny that to one's enemies. Settling in a few hundred meters behind Wagon 506, who was drifting off away from the task force, Kalija took a glance at the holographic display. “Looks like the others are still working."

“Might head back, then. Get in early; grab some dinner…"

“What is dinner?"

“Burger night. Get to make your own."

“Any good?" Alamo's laughter was instructive, if not reassuring. “How fun."

“What. You want another race?"

She searched her display. They were better than two hundred kilometers away from the Spirit of Orc. “Maybe."

From his snorting, she suspected her bombardier was rolling his eyes. “Hey, Noodle. My pilot wants a rematch."

“Funny you should mention that," the other pilot answered. “My bombardier thinks we ought to get some maneuvering practice in."

Kalija wriggled her fingers, and Alamo picked up on the movement. “Elvis says she could lick the both of you."

“That so?"

Inside her helmet, the mutt grinned. “Have you seen my tongue?"

“She just asked if I'd seen her tongue," Glenn dutifully reported. “I can't tell if that was a threat or a come-on, though." 

Kalija growled into the mic, to make her message clearer. 

“It was a threat."

Noodle called in a request to the controller — describing their intent as maneuvering practice, just as the bombardier had said. “Want to test out our controls before we jump, you know?" Whether the fleet's controller believed them or not, he granted permission. In an instant, she watched Wagon 506 spin on her display — the other ship's nose was now pointed directly at them. “You're on."

Just like before, Kalija didn't have to think about what she was doing. Wagon 510 was suddenly in combat mode; the ship flicked to the side and she nudged the ventral thrusters just as her threat display lit up. “I'm going to come about. Get a missile solution." 

“Yeah, yeah," Alamo muttered — but he was leaning forward, locked on his display, as zeroed in as the dog was.

She slewed the Intruder around — Noodle was already gone; the starfighter flicked past like a loosed arrow. Kalija pulled the throttle back, grabbing as much reverse thrust as she could manage. The Intruder could carry AVM-20 missiles as a matter of course — light and maneuverable, they could lock onto a starship as easily as a hoverdyne. But because the A-17 had been designed to attack targets on the ground, her sensor suite was most sensitive in a cone directly in front of the ship.

And Noodle was not staying put. As soon as Wagon 506 slipped into the cone it was gone — twisting, flinging itself in all directions. Their circling dance had the dangerous, close energy of snake charming; to anyone else it would've looked like mere chaos, but Kalija saw the purpose in every new maneuver. Twenty seconds in she could begin to anticipate it: watching the velocity vector of the other craft change, she tried to guess at what Noodle was planning.

“Alamo..."

“Not giving me much to work with. Five degrees'd be real nice."

Nice, but impossible; her thrusters were already wide open trying to keep up. She kicked in the reversers and Noodle was ready with a burst of 506's throttle that pushed the bird back out of targeting range. “Okay..." It was chess and swordplay, movement and countermovement in three dimensions and a thousand meters per second. “I'm trying a Kaminska flip, down ninety in three. Ready?"

“Ready."

And then even as her paw twisted the ACS controls Noodle was gone. There was a flash in her vision — a starfighter blowing past kilometers away, catching the light of the system's star for the briefest of seconds. 506 had burned towards them — crossing her firing arc for a tenth of second, too little time for a snap shot. “Shit! Alamo!" 

“Break left!" 

Noodle was trying to get on the dog's tail — at first Kalija thought the other pilot would need to burn off so much speed that she'd have time to counter. Then she realized that in their close-range knife fighting neither had accumulated much of a speed differential — warnings were going off in her cockpit already. The break turn, and a burst of full throttle, silenced them for less than a second.

She wanted distance, but distance would give Noodle time to lock on to them. Back to maneuvering. The ship's ACS system was controlled by a knob beneath her fingers on the right throttle. 

3.2.7: ACS limits, orbital. In throttle mode COMBAT, the A-17E's Augmented Control System can deliver course corrections with load factor in excess of 25 before accounting for main engine thrust (see interactive table 3.2.7A). The built-in IMCS will compensate for inertial delta up to 12 g, leaving a load factor of 13 uncorrected. The human body CANNOT TOLERATE SUSTAINED G FACTORS BEYOND 9 (see interactive table 3.2.7B)

Kalija was not human. She had the controls hard over — fighting to keep her opponent from seizing the opportunity for a firing solution. One sharp twist, and Alamo grunted. “Careful..."

The g-meter had briefly flashed past 14. “Sorry."

But the missile warning was going off again and apologies had their limits. “Right k-drop and I'll try to pick them up."

The dog clicked her mic to acknowledge him. Full reversers, trying to force an overshoot, and a sharp burst of the dorsal thrusters to shove the Intruder downwards, hoping that the other starship would be unable to correct before she could bring the nose up and pointed at them. Classic Kang Drop — but Kenny Kang had died a century before, and that meant a century of practice. Noodle was already countering — clawing 506 around in an arc that slewed them right back into firing position. 

No matter what she did the other pilot was ready. The time between warnings was starting to drop. Kalija growled at the controls: she was not feeling the weariness physically, but her reflexes were dulling. The intense concentration required of combat pilots could not be sustained indefinitely. 

She was not, however, about to give 506 the satisfaction of surrender. “Can you strobe them?"

Glenn shot her a look. “Yeah? They'll compensate in like a second, tops."

“Get ready. Three programs."

Slung beneath either wing were the pods for their AN/ALQ-709 countermeasure systems. It was a multispectral, highly targeted jammer. Like the Spirit of Orc's lasers, those of the AN/ALQ-709 were of limited combat use — but they were good for blinding the sensors of a missile. Or a starship, although Glenn was right: 506's bombardier, Micro, would be able to correct for it in a second or less. Such was the cat and mouse game of countermeasures. “Ready."

“First program. Two seconds. Now." A light went on in her helmet, and she forced the Intruder into a sharp turn.

Not much. Bought them three or four seconds' peace instead of only two. The light went out. “What did I tell you?"

“Second program," she snapped. The light came back on, and Kalija pushed them through another evasive maneuver — reversing thrust, trying to close the distance. At short range it would be easier to escape the narrow cone of Micro's sensors. The light went out, and then the threat receiver shouted warning of a targeting radar in search mode. “Third — now!"

A second? Optimistically. She pushed the throttle to the stop — then, leaned forward, and flipped the systems power switch. Everything went dark. Dead silence — she heard Alamo without the radio. “The fuck?"

“Counting to ten," she told him. “I'm going to turn us back on. They're going to be at our five, low; I'm going to bring the nose around, and you'll have... like. Two seconds to pick them up."

“Jesus," he muttered. 

It was a gamble. 506 would've compensated for the jamming to find no other Intruder on their scope — no convenient radiation, no bright signature from the Excelsiors at full burn. Kalija was counting on them to have slowed down. She would come back to face them — hopefully at an angle where they could not escape before Alamo had a firing solution. Three... two... almost...

The lights came back on and her bombardier worked quickly at his computer. They were right where she'd expected — starting to move, just as the little red targeting cue flashed friendly green. It also flashed an 'X' across the Intruder, and a warning: ALLIED TGT. Kalija grinned. “Five-Oh-Six, I believe you're dead."

Silence. “Noodle," Glenn teased. “Come on."

“Bastards," Noodle finally decided. “Buncha bastards." Then quiet, and she watched her quarry's wings waggle. “Fine, you win. Form up and let's get back home, Five-One-Oh."

Kalija switched back out of combat mode — not just on the throttle. Her shoulders drooped and she let out a sigh as the tension slowly ebbed. But there was an undeniable high to it all. If she turned off the hologram projected into her vision, the stars seemed to be glowing brighter. A billion jagged diamonds. Constellations that shifted and danced. 

She let out a whoop — the mic was dead, but Alamo heard it anyway. “Yeah?"

“You made up your mind?"

He flicked his visor up so that she could see the sky blue of his eyes. It was not entirely unlike being under the targeting scanners — but at last he snickered. “Still ain't been on a real mission, have ya?"

“No."

The visor dropped. “Then I can't say. That'll change things."

“I don't know. Trained a lot."

“Not the same. It'll be different. You'll be different, too."

“We'll see."

“You're being cocky. Wouldn't be so bad to stop that," he chided her. “And that stunt you just pulled? I mean, guess it was a ballsy move. Bit cute. Don't try it in combat, though. When you cut out, I go blind — and if it were up to me, I'd rather see the missile that kills us."

“Blind? Don't you have your passives?"

“Block Sevens have the passive sensor suite. Bellau Wood is still all on Block Fives. No big changes for you lefties, but... trust me, the new mods have much better toys for me to play with. Until we get 'em — no, you do that when we get spiked for real and I can't see shit."

The helmet hid the way her ears suddenly pinned. “Oh."

“Plus, Five-One-Oh's targeting computer has been acting up, and your maneuver kinda depended on us having a computer in perfect condition. But it worked this time. And it was clever. You had it all planned?"

“Wanted them to think we were desperate." Which, of course, she had been. “And I was braking, so I figured they'd assume I was going to try to drop behind them when they couldn't find us. But you get more delta-v out of forward thrust than reverse thrust — even more so when they hit the brakes, too..."

“And naturally, they were trying to burn through the ECM, so they had their sensors on low gain..."

Kalija hadn't thought of that. “So it was harder to pick us up? Huh. Good point."

“Reckoned you'd know that, too."

He did not press the issue, but she spent the rest of the trip back in quiet reflection. Had she been rash? At the end of the day, it had done what she anticipated, hadn't it? They'd won — right?

Even after their adventure, most of the squadron was still out. She listened to Noodle check the two Intruders in, and the carrier passed them over to the approach controller immediately. No waiting in the tedious marshaling pattern. “Control, Five-One-Oh, inbound thirty, two-four, green."

“Five-One-Oh, nominal recovery, no ALCOR; reference yankee minus two."

At first she was a little surprised, although on reflection it was logical. If the fleet had gone EM-secure, the Approach/Landing Coordinator would naturally be offline. So much for the automated landing system. “Marshall, Five-One-Oh. Roger, yankee minus two."

It was only a rough approximation that the Bellau Wood was drifting vertically at two meters per second relative to the fleet's universal reference vector. All the same, it made her job a little easier; she dialed the corrections in and waited, gliding silently ever-closer to the lights of the big carrier. Noodle had already turned into the break, and was landing.

“Wagon Five-One-Oh, approach, cleared for recovery, deck four."

“Ready?" Barton Glenn asked.

High stakes. Her first time with the bombardier, and he already had doubts about her flying. She didn't want to dwell — just in case. “Dirtying up," she told him, rather than answering directly.

“Gear?"

“Down and locked."

“Arrestors?"

“Powered. In standby."

“ACS and throttle?"

“Active mode one. Throttle in 'Maneuver.'" Deep breath, with the microphone off so he couldn't hear.

“Noodle trapped," he commented. “Up next."

Her paws locked on the controls. Kalija and the starship were no longer separate beings — computers and rocketry with a canine brain, operating in perfect tandem. She could see the carrier clearly now. Flat grey. Lights. 

“Wagon Five-One-Oh, on slope, two kilometers. Call the ball."

“Five-One-Oh, Intruder ball. Two-four. Manual."

“Roger ball, twenty-four." Because, like everything else, the Intruder was delicate in spite of itself. At 24,000 kilograms she was traveling light. If the Bellau Wood's grapples were set too gently, Kalija would bounce away from the deck. Too strong, and their starship might be crushed. Everything was a matter of degree. But the ball looked good. “On speed and slightly high."

Nudge. The slightest, gentlest tap on the thrusters. 

“You're good."

Even good — even perfect — the impact was still jarring. Solid. She fired the ventral thrusters at full blast to no effect: they were locked tightly to the carrier, gliding to a smooth halt. She waited with her paws fixed to the stick and throttle. Tense.

“OK two."

Which would've been good for another whoop except that she didn't want to seem too excited. All the same, she reached over and nudged Barton Glenn's shoulder. “See?"

“Yeah, yeah. Still one more to get you qualled."

The Landing Signal Officer, Commander Walter Winters, appeared in her vision. The hologram was remarkably vivid. He had a wiry mustache and a stocky build that brought visions of walruses to her mind. Were there walrus moreaus? “Pretty good. You would've been fine without that last correction — this is twice now you've come in a little high, though. Watch your entry into the cold zone."

“Yes, sir." 

“Still. Good landing. Keep that one up."

Her father had been a soldier for many years. She remembered the way he'd described the service — that he appreciated the way his comrades had looked at his deeds, rather than his species. Commander Winters had never seen her before — but if the LSO had been surprised to find himself talking to a dog, he didn't let on. 

It was refreshing.

Four or five of the Intruders had already trapped and the crews were relaxing in the ready room. Kalija changed back into her uniform and joined them. Immediately she was face to face with a tall, thickly-muscled boulder of a man. Ruby Moore, his nametag said. 

“Hello?"

“So you're the dog, huh?" In person Noodle's voice was no less shocking. Her ears briefly splayed. He must've been near the height limit for a pilot — well over a hundred kilos, none of it fat. “What was that?"

“What was what?" someone else asked. William Price — Woody — Tophat's pilot. 

“Noodle's jealous," Alamo preempted a reply from either Noodle or the mutt. “That's all."

“The fuck I'm jealous!" he countered; the pitch of his voice rendered it a high, girlish protest. “We'll see next time."

“We tangled," Kalija told Tophat. The others were listening, too — Noodle's shouting had attracted attention. “Alamo and I won."

Alamo rolled his eyes heavily, and for the first time she saw him something close to animated. “Too modest. See the thing is, Noodle's jealous — yeah, you are; shut up — because my rook of a pilot has some serious-ass chops. So picture this. Noodle has us sewn up." He pantomimed the maneuvering with his two hands. “Can't get away. Elvis says: 'what about a strobe?'"

“The fuck does that do?" Tophat leaned forward. “Micro can counter that in like —"

“A second! I know. So Elvis kicks in the reverse thrust, starts coming in closer — has me hit 'em again. New program. Again they beat it. They're starting to smell blood. Might could throw it in — 'cept then she has me do it one more time. Breaks, full burn on the throttle — then goes dead."

Tophat exchanged glances with Woody. Noodle rolled his eyes. Hobo, who had joined the circle, seemed immediately confused. “Dead?"

Hobo's bombardier looked at Alamo expectantly. “Dead how?"

“Cut the master switch, Drummer. See 'cause she figures... they're on high gain, 'cause they're trying to get through my ECM. Forward throttle 'cause Noodle's gonna be fixin' to brake, hopin' he can nail us when he figures out where we gone. Plays right into our hands. Shit, Elvis tells me right where he'll be when she turns the power back on. And there they are."

“Lucky," Noodle grumbled, although despite his attitude it was not said entirely without respect.

“OK two on the trap," Alamo added. “Not so bad for a nugget."

He was not fully convinced, she knew. And despite her outward bravado she knew, too, that he was right — that it would be different when it wasn't just a friendly score being settled out in their Intruders. Not that he was letting any of that show. He would never disparage her to the others in the squadron. As far as Noodle or Tophat or Hobo were concerned she was the best Honolulu had ever produced...

But she would have to live up to that.

Distractedly, the dog heard Noodle explain their first encounter, exaggerating the precision of his trajectory — of course. You could round up, round down, or round pilot — a good factor of two in whatever direction was most convenient. To hear Noodle tell it he'd shaved twenty meters per second off the budget for the maneuver, which really meant ten at most. In any case his audience knew the drill: already the convention was veering sharply. Woody was relating a story about some previous tour — racing into orbit past a gauntlet of hostile frigates, and how they'd needed to override the safeties to do it. That black sky blazing with antistarship missiles — that pounding rush of adrenaline — that close call and yet, in its own way, hadn't it been so exhilarating? A hell of a rush.

She shook her head to clear it of her self-doubt, focusing on the conversation. “You're saying you outran a LD-644?"

“Of course!" 

“In a puffin?"

“Even the dog sees you're full of shit," Noodle grinned. “Woody, you know their ROE said they couldn't open fire without —"

Woody scoffed. “Ye of little faith! It was brilliant! Dog, you gotta listen close. Okay. Okay, so it's nine months ago, and..."

Immediately he began explaining again. To hear him tell it the Trailblazers had been at the scene of the greatest aerial battle in human history — really, Kalija didn't know how she'd never heard of it. The rolling eyes around her spoke clearly enough: they'd heard the story before. Enduring it was a rite of passage. 

And, as he narrated his escape to the dog — throttle firewalled, alarms everywhere; a situation with a high pucker factor, wouldn't-she-agree?-of-course-she-would — she realized that the scorn she'd girded herself for had yet to come. The ribbing was light; hell, it was even good-natured. Nobody had shunned her. Nobody had called her names. Nobody had questioned her presence...

As first impressions went — no, it was not so bad after all.