Virtues of War (52 page)

She gasped. “Broken ribs!”

He released her. “Sorry.”

She stepped back, steadying herself on the bed and carefully climbing back on. He watched her fight through the pain, finally seating herself comfortably against the raised mattress.

“Hi, Thomas. Good to see you still alive.”

“Likewise.” He tried to think of something witty to say, but her dark, steady gaze kept him earnest. She’d looked at him in many ways in the past, but never quite like this. There was no admiration in her eyes.

“Thanks for sending that message, Katja. I’m really happy that you wanted to see me.”

“Well, when they finally untied me, I figured I should practice being nice again. Even to you.”

His good mood dimmed. It seemed everybody in his life was determined to have a go at him. In this case, though, he deserved it.

She motioned for him to sit on the end of the bed, then leaned forward to wrap her arms around her knees. When she spoke again her voice was quiet enough that only he could hear.

“I guess I really shouldn’t care that you’re fucking Breeze, but I do. Even though I don’t have any ‘claim’ to you, it hurts a lot. I really thought that there was something between us, but I’ve figured out now that I was wrong.”

Conflicting emotions battled in his heart as her eyes bore into him. His first impulse was to say something sweet and reassuring, to avoid hurting her any more. But a growing realization finally took hold within him. This woman was a blooded warrior and a brave, natural leader. She didn’t look delicate or fragile.

She didn’t need his protection.

“That night in my cabin was motivated by lust,” he said finally. “I shouldn’t have taken advantage of your feelings, especially since I wasn’t ready to return them. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not like I tried to stop it. But I guess at the time it meant more to me than it did to you.”

He looked down at the hands in his lap. His emotions were still churning.

“If it matters, it only happened with Breeze once. We’re not an item.”

“When we first met,” she replied, “I thought you were larger than life. Commanding a ship, confident, strong, handsome. I really thought that you were the military ideal. But now I see that you’re just a self-serving asshole like everybody else.”

He sighed. “Thanks.”

She poked his shoulder. He looked up to see her smiling.

“But I’ve met assholes on every world, and on average you rate pretty well.”

He nodded. “But I took something special from you. I regret that.”

Genuine good humor welled up from the depths of her eyes.

“Do you think I was a virgin that night?”

Her question stopped him dead. He’d never consciously considered it, but he suddenly realized that yes, he’d thought exactly that.

She lifted one foot and gently kicked him.

“Grow up, Kane. I’m a woman in the Astral Corps. And I’m twenty-nine, not nineteen.”

He stared at her, hardly recognizing this vivacious, confident adult sitting before him. Then he burst out laughing, all the tension of the day releasing. On an impulse, he took her cheek and kissed her lips.

She responded for a second, then pushed him back with considerable strength. But the humor hadn’t left her eyes.

“That’s the last time you ever get to do that,” she said. “Save it for Breeze.”

He shook his head. “No thanks. She’s slobbery.”

Katja’s laugh echoed through sickbay.

He stood up and stretched. “How are you feeling, by the way? When are you returning to duty?”

She leaned back against the raised mattress and extended her legs out straight. The movement caused her to wince.

“I have nine broken ribs, a few busted organs and a spine they want to keep a close eye on.” She sniffed thoughtfully. “I figure I’ll be good by this evening.”

He smiled again. “Well, as soon as you’re ready, I have a seat for you on
Rapier
’s bridge. We’re pulling the crew back together and we’re going to be assigned to space patrols.”

“I have a platoon to command.”

“The orders don’t come from me. But… I’d rather you come willingly than not. If you want to stay with your troops, tell me and I’ll see what I can do.”

She thought for a moment, almost as if she was sizing him up. “Well, I’ve been running a lot lately, carrying heavy equipment and all, and I’m getting kinda tired of it. Maybe growing my ass in a Fleet chair is just the thing.”

He felt a new kind of warmth grow inside him. He extended his hand.

“Welcome aboard, OpsO.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“
S
ir, please stop screwing with the door.”

Jack grinned at the medical attendant and pulled himself through one last time. The zero-g of the passageway carried him forward until sickbay’s AG grabbed a hold of him and he fell like a stone. His boots thumped down on the deck.

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s kinda cool.”

The attendant sighed and crossed her arms. “Can I help you, sir?”

He nodded, offering up his hand-held display with the medical appointment opened on the screen. “I’ve just been posted in from
Kristiansand
and I have a flight medical. I’m a pilot.”

She ignored his offering and checked her own list. With another glance at him she indicated for him to follow. He enjoyed putting a bounce in his step under the refreshing pull of gravity. His smile faded, though, as he passed bed after bed of mangled troopers, feeling their hard eyes on him. He adopted a suitably serious look as he took the indicated seat next to a bank of steel cabinets.

Normandy
’s sickbay was as big as a hospital, compared to the closet in
Kristiansand
, but even so it felt cramped in here. Every possible space was occupied by either a patient or equipment, and the general noise was almost as loud as the wardroom during a mess meeting. Nobody paid him much attention, and he spent several minutes simply watching the people around him.

Most of the patients wore pale blue pajamas. Those who weren’t had too many things stuck into them or wrapped around them to allow for normal clothes. There was certainly enough chatter, and even a few laughs, but many of the patients sat or lay in silence, gazing intently at personal screens or just staring into space.

“Sublieutenant Mallory?” A doctor approached him.

Jack stood. “That’s me.”

The doctor quickly examined his file and chatted absently while he conducted a few routine physical tests that Jack knew well. It was nothing too demeaning, and he cooperated without hesitation.

Finally, the doctor reached up and pressed two fingers against Jack’s face, repeating the action in several places. He nodded thoughtfully.

“The bone’s knit fairly well. It’s starting to fuse permanently into place.” Jack automatically ran his hand over the unnatural bumps on his face. “Is that a good thing?”

“Yes and no. You’re healing, and that’s good. But the longer it goes, the harder it’ll be for a plastic surgeon to put it back the way it was.”

Jack had almost forgotten that there even was a chance to fix his face. The sudden reminder—combined with the doubt that it would ever happen—hurt more than his twisted features ever did. He nodded, sighing.

The doctor patted his shoulder sympathetically. “Otherwise, son, you’re fit and ready for duty. What kind of plane do you fly?”

“A Hawk.”

“Hm. I didn’t think
Normandy
had Hawks.”

“You don’t. Apparently I’m gonna be learning how to fly a fast-attack craft.”

“Well, typical wartime training should give you at least ten minutes of practice time before you go out on your first mission.”

Jack forced a smile. “Let’s hope so.”

The doctor made a few notes on the file and told Jack he was free to go. Jack looked around the busy sickbay. Free to go where? The hangar, he supposed. His pilot instincts always drew him back to the hangar. So he gathered up his hand-held and started for the door.

A firm grip on his sleeve halted him. He turned and came face to face with Katja Emmes. She was dressed in the blue pajamas, one hand on his sleeve and the other hanging onto her rolling IV stand.

“Hey, you’re Jack,” she said. “You’re a pilot.”

A real smile split his features. “Why, yes… yes I am. And you look very pretty in pale blue, ma’am.”

She scoffed and tugged him to follow her back toward her nearby bed. “Bring your chair, Subbie.”

Jack had never considered himself to be a big man, but with him in boots and her barefoot, he felt like he towered over her. Not that he had any illusions about who could kick whose ass, even with an IV in her wrist. He grabbed the chair and followed her across to the tiny, curtained space.

She settled herself, propped up in the bed. “I’ve been here long enough to be totally bored. But apparently my bones haven’t knit yet, so they make me stay longer.”

Jack pushed down any thought of knitting bones and resisted the impulse to touch his face. Instead, he placed his chair next to the bed and sat down.

“Well, I’m apparently quite healthy. But for you, ma’am, I got time. Don’t they give you reading material or something here?”

She indicated her own hand-held. “I’ve spent the better part of a day reading the reports from the battle. I’ve read enough.”

Jack hadn’t seen any reports, but he wanted to say something intelligent.

“At least we’re calling it a victory. We bashed up the homeworld of our enemies and…” He searched for the phrase Avernell had used. “…seized the initiative away from them.”

Katja eyed him curiously. “Did you think of that by yourself?”

He couldn’t help but smile. “No. I’m just a pilot. I drive the bus.”

“Speaking of which, why are you here? In
Normandy
, I mean.”

“Well, a pilot’s gotta have something to fly, and
Kristiansand
’s all out.” He briefly relayed his little adventure to get more torpedoes and its rather sudden and hard conclusion. She looked impressed. He had to admit that he was feeling pretty proud about it, but he didn’t want to brag in front of this combat veteran.

“But that’s two Hawks I’ve bashed up on this deployment. My paycheck is going to be small when we get home.”

“Two Hawks?”

“Free Lhasa?”

“Oh… right. That one wasn’t really your fault, though.”

“Tell that to Astral Logistics.”

She smiled. He liked her a lot more when she was in pajamas, he decided. Way more relaxed—almost human.

“So are you flying a strike fighter, or one of our adopted star fighters?”

He suppressed the frown that threatened to well up. “Neither. It seems I’m destined to never sit in a fighter cockpit, no matter how much I beg.”

“Well, they
are
pretty expensive to replace…” she said.

He tried to laugh, although he knew her words were truer than she thought. He had flown Hawks like fighters, playing star jock in his head while real stuff was happening around him.

“Hey,” she said suddenly, “nice job on finding the secret Centauri jump gate. Did my info help you out at all?”

In all the action over the past week or so, he’d totally forgotten about that. Hunting stealths in Sirius seemed like a lifetime ago.

“Oh, yeah!” he said, grinning. “Holy crap was that ever useful. I told my captain where I got the info from—I hope you get some credit.”

“Hey, you’re the extra-dimensional whiz kid,” she countered. “I’m just a jar-head who passed on what I knew.”

He’d hardly call himself a whiz kid, but…

“Thanks. It’s actually pretty interesting stuff. Like just these past few days, I’ve been thinking about how we use torpedoes in general. Right now doctrine says we can’t detonate one deeper than sixteen peets, but I think that if we changed the way the gravitons were released, we might be able to control it better. You see—”

She held up a hand. “Jack, I’m a jar-head, remember. I have trouble with polysyllabic words. Trust me, the section on multidimensional physics we had to do in Second Year did
not
help my final mark. There was never any danger of me being selected for ASW.”

“Actually, I really didn’t want ASW either,” he admitted. “But I guess Astral Selection knows best.”

“But if you hadn’t been Jack the Pilot, what then?”

“Jack the Fighter Pilot. What else?”

She sighed thoughtfully. “Honestly, Jack, I haven’t met many people who aren’t well-suited to their occupation. Like it or not, you do have an aptitude for ASW. As much as we all like to bitch about where Selection puts us, I do think they know what they’re doing.”

“What did you want to be when you joined?”

“Oh, infantry,” she said. “I made sure I met the requirements.”

He wasn’t sure which was more surprising: that she’d been placed in the occupation she actually wanted or that she’d actually wanted infantry. Suddenly aware that he was surrounded by wounded troopers, he leaned in and lowered his voice.

“With all respect, why?”

Surprisingly, she didn’t get angry. Instead, she nodded thoughtfully and dropped her gaze.

“Because of my father.”

“Is he a Corps officer, too?”

Her lips curled in a mix of smile and frown. “No. He’s career Army. I don’t know if you know this, but the Army doesn’t have officers. Everybody starts as a stormtrooper, and works their way up from there. These days he’s a storm banner leader—kind of the equivalent of a sergeant major.”

“So… what did he think of you going Astral Force?”

“He was pissed off, but I think he would’ve lived with it. When I went officer, though, that pretty much got me kicked out of the family.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Because there was no way I was ever going to be subordinate to him.”

Her tone had gone hard. Suddenly this was the old Katja Emmes, but he was fascinated and couldn’t stop asking questions.

“Why did you join at all? Why not stay a civilian?”

“I could have. Being the child of a veteran, I already had a lot of privileges. Where do you think I went to my first year of university?”

“Not the Astral College?”

She shook her head, a pained, wistful smile dancing across her features. “Canterbury—fine arts.”