ECV Ace of Drax
Outbound from Astrokaszy
Cargo Compartment
0130 Ship’s Time
17 November 3053
The small vessel was quiet, the muted roar of the transit drive the only sound. The last of the troopers had cycled through the showers in the truncated heads an hour before. Their exhausted minds had finally caught up with their bodies and everyone but the flight crew on duty had managed to drift off to sleep, fitful or unbroken according to the sleeper, but well-deserved regardless.
Almost everyone.
Steven Mattis reclined on the hood of 006, his back up against the thick windshield before where he normally spent most of his time groundside. The position left just enough space that the hold-out pistol clipped at the small of his back didn’t dig into his body and his booted feet were wedged against one of the thick staples that allowed the sturdy vehicle to be slung-load under a helo or craned aboard a waiting DropShip.
His left index finger toyed absently with a small divot in the hood underneath him. The round had left a faint semi-circle of lead to cool when it had glanced off the armored panel. The rest of it was several thousand kilometers behind him, lost forever in a trackless desert on a world in the middle of nowhere. The bastard who had loaded and fired it was probably in the same state.
The surface of his mind wondered idly if he could reach the pack of cigarettes in his pocket of his left sleeve without disturbing his recumbencyrecumbence. The animal part of his brain whirled in a slow-motion montage of images and sounds that would take a lifetime to unravel—which was fine, because he’d be glad to take the time. Assuming.
His eyes stared ahead at nothing at all.
Something clicked in a recess of his mind where experience melded seamlessly with training. The rest of his brain cleared; he willed his body to remain in abeyance but ready for whatever came next. There were a lot of options at a time like this, but he had long ago learned that sometimes waiting for the other fellow to make his move was the right move in the first place.
“Thought I might find you here,” Tia Spencaire said quietly when she emerged from the ladderwell off to his left.
She hadn’t , almost whispereding, even amidst the relative silence of the bay, but that was the effect. T; the growl of the thrusters beneath them was omnipresent, but almost felt rather than heard---until one had to speak over it.
“Thought you might find me here, too,” Steven replied, equally quietly.
He still hadn’t moved. After a heartbeat had passed, he turned his head and gave her a ghost of a smile, which was pretty much all the ghosts had left him at this time of night.
She gave him a smile back that was more in her eyes than her face. She looked tired, wrung out, haunted. The tepid water from the all-too-quick shower earlier had managed to wash away the grit of the planet they had left behind, and the seat and stink of fear and exertion. But in its place lay exhaustion and memories of a time and place that was so different as to have been a different world—
Which it was, of course, and the literal truth to the statement made it no less absurd or easy to come to grips with psychologically.
Mattis started to shift and offered his right hand to her when she looked as if she were ready to climb aboard. She ignored it and clambered up anyhow, using the passenger-side front wheel as a step. Instead of vaulting aboard like she might normally have done, she instead moved with the care of a drunk that who knows what how much they’ve htadken .
“I’m not going to lie,” she said, settling in next to him; close but not so close as to give the rumor-mill anything more to work with. “You sure can pick a Hell of a place for a first date.”
Mattis sniffed. “Only for a Devil of a good time.”
She glanced at him sidelong. “Huh. Quick on your feet, too.”
He shrugged, glancing back at her. “Not as quick as when I’m on my back.”
Spencaire sniffed. “Don’t be coarse,” she chided, letting the silence drift back over them like the aftermath of a sunset.
They sat like that for a long time; unspeaking, unmoving. The jeep swayed minutely when the flight-crew made a very minor course correction and the ship heeled over slightly when the maneuvering jets fired over. Mattis used the break in the mood to reach over and drag two cigarettes from their case. He lit them both and passed one over to his guest. Their hands touched in the process but neither of them broekbroke the contact any sooner than necessary.
“And they said chivalry is dead,” she said.
“I think it’s more of a latent gene,” Mattis allowed. “Or you could just blame my parents.”
“And where would they be?” she asked, turning on her left elbow to more properly face him.
“Nn-hmm?” he deflected, not willing to lie to this woman. And not that he would specifically have to in this instance… no one looking for Mister and Mrs. Mattis was going to find them, after all.
But training, damn it all to Hell, could be even more telling than Truth. In its own way.
She continued to study him, but let the matter drop, for the moment.
Mattis cleared his throat. “You, ah, did real good back there, Tia. Real good.”
Spencaire looked away, almost savagely, as if she were going to spit out something bad she had eaten. After a moment, she calmed down and took a drag from her cigarette. The tip glowed as a reflection to her mood a second before.
“I just did what I was trained to do,” she replied lamely.
Mattis clucked his tongue softly. “Negative, Tee,” he snorted. “The rest of your squad did what they were trained to do. You did real good.”
She was silent for a long time, and Steven let her be, until she was ready. When she was, she spoke quietly, but the words came out with the certainty of a flood.
“Not good enough,” she started venomously. “Lasskiy got hit, and even Baumann got a piece.”
Her right hand worked unconsciously as if she were reloading the grenade launcher slung under the receiver of her Mauser. “I keep thinking that if I’d taken one more bloody shot, or dropped my second there instead of here…”
Mattis smoked almost invariably with his left hand, cupping it out of ingrained habit. She was his mirror image, but instead smoked it daintily, as if each one were her first. His right hand found her left without conscious volition, but she didn’t draw it away like he would have expected if he’d thought about it
“You can’t think of that, Tee,” he intoned, equally quietly, though he knew he was wrong even as he said it. He stretched out his arm to full extension and rolled the filter of his cigarette to drop the glowing embers to the deck beside him. Things being what they were, most of them glanced off the side of the hood due to the vehicle’s width. “It is what it is.”
Sometimes people stand up into a round, he bloody well knew. Sometimes they trip and stumble into a mine that was nowhere near where they were going to step next. And sometimes some bastard pulls the trigger when he shouldn’t have, because the shape inside the doorway—or across the alleyway—was some ****** of a civ that was too stupid to hit the ground instead of running towards the sound of the bloody guns—
“Yeah,” she allowed, unbelieving. “You say that now, but it doesn’t bloody matter, does it?”
Mattis pursed his lips and looked away. Hell, he knew he’d screw this thing up seven ways from Sunday. Known it all a-bloody-long…
But she hadn’t moved, hadn’t even accused him. Not really. Not at all. Her grip on his hand was as tight as a vise, and he’d never let it go.
“Tia…” he started slowly, his mind searching for the words to say in a manner he never needed when he had a steering wheel or a weapon in his hand and all that mattered was what he did next. “The only thing that matters is that Lasskiy will be up to his old tricks when we get back to the ship. And the big guy is just fine right here, not so?”
Mattis hadn’t noticed anything wrong with Baumann, but even the big galoot was probably none the wiser, whatever it was that had happened. And because of that, it really didn’t matter, except to Tia Spencaire, Fox-Two’s foster mother.
“He’d better,” she replied, smiling despite herself. Then, more distantly, “But I wish I’d got more of those wog bastards—and faster than I did.”
She craned her head away from Mattis. He wondered what was going on in her head, but, Hell, he already knew it. He’d seen it before, hadn’t he? A montage of blasted, blood-spattered rocks and screams that she’d hear in the silence when everyone else was asleep. But that was in his own head, and it had precious little to do with Astrokascy, all things considered.
He wanted to tell her that you didn’t get them all, not every time. And that wasn’t always a bad thing, though the truth was one ghost was the same as ten. Or a hundred. But the words wouldn’t come to him. And it wasn’t like she wouldn’t get the chance to try again on this trip, anyhow.
“Well, I don’t think Mach is complaining,” he said with an air of lightness, mostly for her benefit; but maybe for himself, too. And Lasskiy got off cheap at the price, he added, but only to himself.
She stubbed out her cigarette and murmured an apology because she had used 006’s armored hood. Then, she used her freed hand to rub her eyes forcefully before pinching the bridge of her nose hard enough to snap her back into the present. Eventually, she detached her hand gingerly from Mattis’s own.
He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. He debated offering her another cigarette, but decided against it. She shook her head and closed her eyes for long enough that he thought she’d fallen asleep.
When she opened them, she could feel his gaze on her and she smiled in sheepish acceptance before drawing herself back up and together mentally. “Blazes, what bloody time is it?”
“Late enough that first call is going to feel like last call, trooper,” Mattis rejoined.
She nodded lazily. He sat up and sighed heavily, then rolled off the side of the truck to his feet. His boots thunked quietly to the steel decking. He half expected her to follow him, but instead she picked her way to the floor of her side with the quiet precision of a cheetah dismounting an outcropping.
Mattis gestured her ahead of him around the back of the truck towards the ladderwell on the passenger—the craft’s port side, now behind him. When she had rounded the rear bumper, Spencaire stopped short and Steven straightened. She turned and stared him directly in the eye. Her look froze him, the way a searchlight freezes men when it erupts out of nowhere to pin them in place even when they know that to run is to live.
He opened his mouth as if to speak, but she said, “Don’t talk,” in a dangerous tone to which obedience was the only reply.
She kissed him, long and hard, a dry mashing of lips and noses that left him frozen long after she had departed to patter up the ladder to the troop compartment and her waiting rack.
Mattis finally blinked and half-turned to collapse against the sturdy nose of his truck. He scrabbled numbly for his cigarette carrier and withdrew one. He regarded it blankly for a moment before he allowed his mind to marvel at its cylindrical perfection. It was a slim constant in a world gone mad.
He placed it behind his right ear, filter forward, and withdrew another, which he lit without a second thought. He didn’t know what had just happened. But he knew that he was smiling. And that Tia Spencaire was going to be just fine.
