Test of Mettle (A Captain's Crucible Book 2) (12 page)

R
ade sat nervously in the mess hall, waiting for his daughter to arrive. He glowered fiercely whenever anyone came close to his table in order to dispel any notions they might have of taking a seat with him. It worked. People would rather stand than sit next to a scowling special forces soldier any day.

Sometimes he wondered at the paths his life could have taken if he had made slightly different choices along the way. He had told himself that he had no regrets, but that was a lie. He had a whole lot of them. It didn’t matter.

He probably should have ended his enlistment when he hit fifty. He didn’t really fit in with the Teams, not anymore. Between deployments, all the other MOTHs cared about was drinking their nights away and getting into fights at the bars and strip clubs. Whereas Rade wanted to concentrate on going to the gym and maintaining his specialized training.

Even during deployments, such as the current one, the interests of the younger MOTHs were basically the same: after mandatory PT, war game training, and security duty, they spent their free time in virtual strip clubs and bars. It was quite ridiculous. 

He had the same thoughts of leaving at sixty and seventy. By the time he was eighty, he realized there was no point in denying it: being a MOTH assigned to starships was all he knew how to do anymore. The only other option was to become a private contractor—a morally ambiguous slope he wasn’t ready to climb. Every time his enlistment came up for renewal he always received a slew of messages from companies inviting him to join their private mercenary armies. So far he had always refused the requests. But the day might come when he would either agree, or start his own security firm.

I’m ninety-eight years old
, Rade thought.
Not young, but still vigorous, thanks to the rejuvenation treatments.
I have at least another hundred and fifty years left in me.

He sighed, unfolding his arms. Where the hell was his daughter? He glanced at his shaking hands and chuckled softly.

Ninety-eight years old and I’m afraid of my own daughter. Ridiculous.

He managed to calm himself with a controlled breathing technique he had learned way back in his spec-ops rating school. Though he hated it at the time, looking back, that school had taught him the mental discipline he needed to survive as a MOTH all these years. The most important lessons he had learned in his life had come from that time.

But man, the training had been brutal. He rarely had nightmares about an operation or mission he was involved with. Instead, his dreams were haunted by memories of his rating school, even at his advanced age. University students dreamt about missing exams or entire classes. Rade dreamt about shivering in the icy waters of the New Coronado bay, locked arm and arm with his classmates; he dreamt of ATLAS portage, carrying the earlier variants of the robotic suits across the sand while instructors screamed at them; he dreamt of infinite PT—push-ups and burpees and scissor-kicks performed in the sand without end until most of the class was throwing up.

And while those dreams mostly sucked, he welcomed them, because he would find himself with his brothers again, most of whom had died. After hard deaths in his first few deployments, he had learned to harden himself and not get too close to people—that was another reason he didn’t fit in anymore. Eventually, he even pushed away his family, farther than anyone else. They were a vulnerability inside him that he had needed to excise.

Yes, he had treated his own daughter as if she were someone else’s.

My own daughter. I’ve been such a fool. What was the point of fighting all those wars, those battles, if not for her?

And then he saw her.

His heart rate tripled anew.

Sil joined him, setting her water bottle down on the table. Her expression was unreadable.

“You’re not going to eat anything?” Rade said.

“Where’s
your
plate?” she shot back defiantly.

He shrugged. “Not hungry.”

“Neither am I.”

“Okay then.” Rade leaned back.
This is going to be harder than I thought.

Her eyes defocused and it was obvious she was checking a message via her aReal contact lenses.

“Can’t you catch up with your friends later?” he asked, remembering when she would send messages to friends like that at the dinner table while growing up. “That’s really rude, what you’re doing.”

“They’re not friends,” she said. “Believe it or not, I’m actually doing my duties. Technically, I’m still supposed to be in the lab right now. Unlike you, I have real work to do all day. Other than push-ups and bench presses in the gym.”

“You’re an assistant now,” he retorted flatly. “How much work can you be doing?”

“I have a degree in xenobiology. It’s kind of a big deal. The scientists are constantly asking for my input. And I still have the rank of captain, I might add.”

“All right.” Rade pushed back his chair. Throw her rank at him, would she? He’d had enough.

Sil’s eyes abruptly focused on him. “You claim to love me, yet you have the oddest ways of showing it.”

Rade froze. Her words cut worse than any knife.

“What are you talking about?” he said.

“You know,” Sil continued. “When you were down there in that alien ship, and I thought you were going to die, I actually believed the final words you sent me over the comm. That you regretted not being a better father to me, and that if you could do it all over again, you would have left the navy and raised me proper. Well you’ve gotten your second chance, but you’re only doing the exact same thing all over again.”

Rade sighed. “I haven’t gotten any second chance. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m still enlisted in the navy. And my service term isn’t expiring any time soon. And you’re right, I’ve been a bit slack on the communication front lately. But I wanted to leave you alone. Give you some space to live your life.”

Sil sighed, smiling sadly. Her cheeks dimpled the same way as her mother’s when she did that. “I have my space, dad. All I ask is that you show some interest in me once in a while. Send a message to my aReal. Inbox me. Say hi. Ask how my week is going. Normal father-daughter stuff, you know?”

Unable to meet her eye, he looked guiltily at his hands. “I’m sorry. I’ll try.”

“This is the first I’ve heard from you in over four months,” Sil said. “Out of nowhere you send me a casual message, telling me you’re going on a mission. It wasn’t hard for me to figure out you’re heading down to the planet. Commander Cray instructed Connie to have the psi-shielded MOTH jumpsuits ready, along with the spacesuits. Who wears that, do you think?”

Rade didn’t say anything, keeping his gaze glued to his hands.

“So I get your message, and I insist we meet,” Sil continued. “And you say no, there’s no time. And I say yes, let’s make time. And so here we are. I only just sit down, and spend a moment to answer a high priority message from Connie regarding the suit fittings, and you already start getting up, ready to leave me here without saying anything more than a few words.”

“Sil, I—” He sighed. He still couldn’t meet her eyes. “I’m not good at this. I’m sorry. But I do love you. Believe me.”

“I know, dad,” Sil said. “But as I said, sometimes you could try to show it a little better.”

“I’ll try. Look, I do actually have to go. You were late.” That, and the conversation was becoming far too uncomfortable for him. He started to get up.

“Wait, I want to go down there with you,” Sil said. “I’m the best qualified, because of my degree.”

Rade shook his head. “Talk to the captain.”

“Oh I will,” his daughter said. “Stay, please. Just a bit longer.”

He sighed deeply, then remained seated. “A few more minutes.”

She seemed like she was going to say something, but then smiled nervously instead.

Rade pursed his lips, and was about to tell her to speak her mind when she did just that.

“Something’s been bothering me,” she said. “Remember what you told me after you got back?”

“What did I tell you?” he asked warily.

“That you saw a ghost.”

Rade shook his head fervently. “It was nothing. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“If it was nothing, then why were you shaken and pale,” Sil said. “Distracted. A ghost. There are so many things I can read into that.”

Rade shrugged, unsure what to say.

“Come on dad,” she pressed. “I’m your daughter. You can confide in me. What did you see? Was it someone you knew?”

“No, nothing like that.” When he realized she wasn’t going to let him go until he told her, he said: “I saw a man on the alien ship. I didn’t know him.”

“A man? What do you mean? You saw quite a few men when rescuing the crew of the
Selene
from that ship.”

“No, I saw him after that,” Rade said. “When you and the others had launched in your Dragonflies, and I stayed behind with the combat robots to cause as much damage as possible. That’s when I saw him.”

His daughter frowned. “You saw a refugee we’d missed? Someone roaming the passages in a spacesuit?”

“That’s the thing,” Rade said. “This man... he wasn’t wearing a spacesuit. He was just huddling there in the vacuum, looking right at me.”

“How do you know he was alive?” she asked.

“He was moving, Sil.” Rade wasn’t going to tell her that he could have sworn the man had mouthed his full name.

“You reported this to your commanding officer?” Sil asked.

“Of course,” Rade said. “First thing when I got back. I had no proof, though. On my video logs, some sort of interference caused my recording to blank out moments before I saw the man. And he didn’t show up in any of the combat robot logs—none of the Centurions had seen him. My LC told me it was probably a stress hallucination.”

“What happened to him?” Sil said.

“I don’t know,” Rade said. “One moment he was there, I look away, and then he’s gone.”

She regarded him uncertainly for a moment, then rested a hand on his knuckles and smiled. Likely she believed it was a hallucination, too. “Thanks for confiding in me.”

Yes, from that patronizing tone, he was sure she thought that.

I didn’t hallucinate it.

He stood, extricating his knuckles out from her under hand. “But now I really have to go, Sil. Goodbye. Thanks for meeting me.”

“Take care, dad,” she said. “I mean it. You’re coming back.”

Rade forced a smile. “Always do. Got another hundred and fifty years left in me.”

“You’re not going to give them all to the navy, I hope.”

“Maybe another hundred,” Rade joked.

T
HE CAPTAIN SAT in his office chair. He had the commander’s contact lens video feed piped into his aReal, and he watched as Robert made his way across the hangar bay toward the down ramp of one of the two Dragonflies involved in the mission. They were long, thin metal crafts, with two broad, stacked wings protruding from either side near the front, somewhat similar to their insect namesakes.

Robert wore one of Connie’s custom, psi-shielded spacesuits, though he currently carried the helmet in one hand. The lag was less than a few microseconds at the moment, though when Robert reached the surface, that lag would be three seconds, at best. Ensign McNamara, the second watch ops officer, had estimated they would have to deploy at least one signal boosting drone between the surface and the ship.

A holographic display request from Captain Sil Chopra appeared on Jonathan’s aReal. He accepted, opting for audio only.

“What is it, Captain?” he said.

“Requesting permission to join the away team, sir,” Chopra sent.

He frowned. “Permission denied.”

“I have a degree in xenobiology, among others.”

“So does O’Rielly.” That was the science officer who was going along.

“I specialize in first contacts,” Chopra insisted. “I’ve studied all the major protocols.”

“I don’t think your father could do with the distraction of having you along, Captain,” Jonathan told her. “Look, even if I wanted to let you go, we don’t have enough spacesuits with the necessary anti-psi modifications. However, because of your rank I can allow you to sit in on the proceedings with the other captains, but no more.”