“Not good,” I told him. “Even before everything that happened. I don’t know how much they’ve heard of what happened back in the Commonwealth, but they have to know contact with the government has been cut off. Seeing an alien ship the size of a warehouse landing like gravity doesn’t exist isn’t going to make anyone feel comfortable. We should use your cutter.”
“The Dutchman,” he corrected me, then shrugged. “The Dutchman II, to be exact. The first one sort of got blown up a long time ago. She started out life as a surplus missile cutter, but this new one was an Intercept.” Deke grinned. “Got all kinds of interesting little tricks. Not like this boat, but we won’t be helpless. So, who’s going? Besides me?”
“Both of us,” Vicky said while my mouth was still open to answer. When I scowled at her, her jaw set stubbornly. “There are still people down there we know… I hope. And most of them liked me better than you.”
“No uniforms,” I decided. “If we’re going low-key, then we go in civilian clothes.”
“Thank God I brought some along,” Vicky said.
“What about you, Conner?” I asked, and maybe there was a challenge in the question. “You prepared?”
“Everything I need is in my duffle,” he said, a tight smile the only acknowledgement of the barb. “Is this the sort of place I can open carry a gun, or should I conceal it?”
“Hausos?” I thought back to the place I knew, the farmers striding through Gamma Junction with shotguns resting on their shoulders. “Oh yeah. Before, you probably could. Now… definitely.”
“Sounds like my kind of place.”
The Dutchman II was tiny by comparison with the ships I’d been calling home these last few years, but the cockpit felt cozy rather than small, the embrace of the cushioned acceleration couch and the push of the plasma drive against my back familiar and comforting. This was flying, this was human. On the Ellen, for all that we’d cleaned out the stasis chambers and brought in some furniture, I could never shake the alien nature of the ship.
The thicker layers of the lower atmosphere buffeted at the delta-shaped craft and the rumbling of the plasma drive faded out, replaced by the whine of her fusion-powered jets. I checked the communications panel, wondering if there was any sort of traffic control out here, but the entire board was locked down.
For you, maybe, Jim told me. There’s been no attempt to communicate with this ship, no scans so far.
You’ve been quiet lately. Did I do something to piss you off?
Constantly. But mostly, I’ve had nothing useful to say. And unlike you humans, I don’t talk when I have nothing useful to say.
I had a thought, remembering that Jim had access to all the files from the Orion’s database, including the personnel files from the Commonwealth military prior to our departure from the Cluster.
What do you have on Major Conner?
There was a Deacon Edward Conner who was admitted to the Commonwealth Military Academy near the beginning of the war, but he was reported missing during the Battle For Mars after a Tahni attack on a cadet training vessel. No other records exist for anyone of that name.
Huh. That jibed with what Kara McIntire had intimated, and I put the rest together quickly, used to the Fleet Intelligence way of doing things by now.
“So, Deke,” I said, speaking before I allowed my good sense to talk me out of it, “you were in Omega Group during the war?”
His dark eyes flashed toward me with the promise of violence, just for a half a second before he was able to bring himself back under control, his expression going neutral.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said casually, attention focused on the controls as we dipped lower into the atmosphere on the planet’s night side. “I was in Fleet Intelligence.”
“You were a cadet at the Academy reported missing during the Battle for Mars,” I laid out my reasoning as if it were fact. “After that, you fall right out of the military personnel files. That means something so top secret the Fleet didn’t even know you worked for them anymore. A covert ops team, I figure. Omega Group. And the way you talked about him, I’m pretty sure this Caleb Mitchell was on it with you.”
Deke laughed harshly.
“Kara put you up to this, didn’t she?” Sighing, he settled back into his seat and sighed in resignation. “Doesn’t really matter much anymore, but old habits die hard. Yeah, we were all on the team, everyone who survived the Thatcher. Ten of us, though only seven survived the war. Now, there’s only three, assuming Caleb is still alive out there somewhere.”
A memory tugged at the corners of my mind, and I ran the file of those cadets through my head again.
“Matt M’Voba,” I said softly and this time, Deke didn’t even attempt to conceal his shock.
“How the hell do you know about Matt?”
“I met him,” I explained. “During the invasion of Tahn-Skyyiah, just outside the Imperial Palace. He went in with some Force Recon types, and my company stayed outside and got fucking slaughtered.”
And if I sounded bitter, it was only because I was. Vicky’s eyes flickered toward the deck. I thought she’d been about to tell me to stop taunting the Intelligence officer, but now her jaw clamped shut. She’d very nearly been killed in that final battle. Search and Rescue had gotten her into an auto-doc minutes, possibly seconds before it was too late, before the blood supply to her brain had been cut off too long to revive her.
Deke nodded, fell silent for a moment.
“Yeah, I heard about the casualties you guys took. Didn’t know it was you.”
“I was a first lieutenant. The Skipper…” I had to start again. “Our company commander had been killed on the last drop before the invasion. That was my first time leading a company into combat, and I lost…”
I couldn’t say it, couldn’t put it into words.
“We lost two during the first try at Demeter,” Deke said softly. “Daniela and Valeria. Then Brian in the Imperial Palace. Matt and Cowboy in that whole business with Andre Damiani and the Corporate Council. Holly in the Psi War after Trans-Angeles fell. Reggie later on, after… now it’s just me, Caleb, and Kel.”
Kel. They’d mentioned Kel Savage as a general, the guy who’d provided the ground forces for the provisional government from his mercenary company. I didn’t believe in coincidences.
“Sorry,” I told him, both for dredging up bad memories and messing with him about his record.
“Me too,” he agreed. “I know you guys had it bad out there, Alvarez, but trust me… it was no picnic back here either. Sometimes, I think it was inevitable, you know? Like we’d come too far, too fast. Went from riding horses to launching rockets in just a few decades, gone from nearly destroying ourselves in a nuclear war to spreading out to hundreds of planets. I mean, it took the Predecessors millions of years to get to what they had when the Skrela took them down.”
“They took themselves down,” I told him, then shook my head. “I got to know the Resscharr way too well when we were out there. Trust me, they’re not anyone you want to be using as a role model.”
“Shit, dude, there was a whole Goddamned religion worshipping them up until everything fell apart. Psychopath losers who didn’t even know what the Predecessors looked like but still had themselves physically augmented because they thought the Ancients would approve. Proselytizing on every streetcorner in the bigger colonies, stockpiling weapons for the revolution when their gods returned, fighting gang wars against the Evolutionist cyborgs.” He shook his head. “Like I said, it hasn’t been that great back here, even before the Psi War.”