| |
FOR APPEARANCE'S SAKE, Radko had not met with Captain Singh nor set foot aboard the Azrael’s Tear, despite his curiosity regarding both. Cagliari served as an intermediary for coordinating anything that need to be coordinated between Singh’s people and the Vimy Ridge, which, as it turned out, was serving them all in good stead.
"Just a standard patrol, Admiral," said Radko.
On the command deck of the Vimy Ridge, Radko stood by the sand table. In a floating holographic window was Admiral Mahoney, while above the sand table hovered a three-dimensional star map. Thor’s Hammer was marked with a pulsating orange diamond, and a thin dashed line – pulsating in the same orange – traced a long, elliptical route through several sectors of space before looping back to the diamond.
"The Ridge has been docked here for nearly a month," he continued. "I don’t want the crew getting complacent. And to be perfectly blunt, I think we’ve all gotten a little comfortable here. The number of patrols we send out has been dropping off quite a bit lately."
The admiral looked exhausted as he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
"Agreed, Commander. But I don’t want you going out there looking for a fight."
"Of course, Sir."
Inside, Radko sighed. Sooner or later, the Commonwealth was going to have to go out looking for a fight or nothing about this war would ever be resolved. But for the time being, he’d play the good officer and follow orders.
"It looks like your route will take you not far from Muriel’s Moon?"
Radko made a show of double-checking his proposed patrol route.
"That would be correct, Admiral. I’m not really familiar with the location – is there something in the area we should be alert for?"
"No, nothing like that. There’s an old manufacturing plant there – the Azrael’s Tear is planning a salvage operation."
"The pirates," said Radko, throwing a small amount of distaste into the words.
"I know, I know, but they have their uses, Commander. It might be advisable for the Vimy Ridge to escort the pirates to Muriel’s Moon. Safety in numbers and all that."
"We can do that, Sir. Does the Azreal’s Tear have a scheduled departure yet?"
"Tomorrow, oh-eight-hundred hours. Can you be ready by then?"
"Won’t be a problem, Admiral."
Mahoney nodded and terminated the link and Radko sent the holographic window spiralling off into oblivion.
Cagliari would already be aware of the timeline, since she was more or less in control of the pirates for the time being. At least, as in control as one could ever be with pirates. However, Cortez would need to be brought up to speed. She had said that her part in this wouldn’t require more than a couple of hours advance notice, but where hacking of computer systems was involved, the more advance notice that could be given the better. Radko knew little about the actual process, but he’d heard enough stories about encounters with unexpected security software to make him nervous about it.
He made his way to his office, which Cortez had a standing offer to use whenever she happened to be aboard the Vimy Ridge, and was surprised to find not only Cortez there, but also Freyja Sigurdsson. Sigurdsson was for some reason wearing mitts.
"Cold?"
"Something like that," she said with a smile.
She certainly seemed to be in better spirits than she had been the last time they’d spoken and Radko was glad of it. As strong a bond as he’d formed with Anna Cortez over the course of their experiences, he felt a unique kinship with Sigurdsson. The two had faced similar circumstances, each ending up by pure happenstance as the head of a small group of survivors, fighting against the ril-galas and responsible for the lives of those who looked to them for leadership. While she fought on Von Daniken’s Landing and he in space aboard the Vimy Ridge, they’d maintained contact as much as possible, each knowing that the other was perhaps the only human left alive to know – to really know – what they were going through emotionally. When they had finally met in person it had been several weeks after the breaking of the blockade at Thor’s Hammer. Sigurdsson and her group had been evacuated from Fort Hathaway, a new garrison left behind to hold the fort. She’d been in the hospital recovering from the first of her surgeries and only had one cybernetic arm at that point, the other arm still ending in a bandaged stump halfway down her deltoid.
Meeting and speaking together in person had been a surreal experience.
Since that time, the two had kept in touch as much as their respective assignments would allow.
"How are the arms?"
She hesitated slightly.
"Good. They’re good. The doctor that Nasrin recommended... I think everything will be fine now."
"Glad to hear it," he said, then turning to Cortez. "We are scheduled for launch at o-eight-hundred tomorrow for our patrol mission."
The young officer nodded.
"Okay. I was just explaining the situation to Freyja."
The look on Radko’s face clearly conveyed his dismay, because Cortez held up her hands and Sigurdsson shook her head.
"Don’t worry," said Sigurdsson. "I’m not going to tell anyone. I’m... actually not a member of the Commonwealth Armed Forces anymore."
"And since you said you wanted to have people on this mission you knew you could trust," said Cortez. "I’ve asked Freyja to be involved."
"Okay, hold on. Let’s backtrack for a second," he said, frowning in confusion. "Why aren’t you in the armed forces anymore? I thought you were on temporary medical leave."
"I was. Then I got better and the army decided they didn’t like it. So I was given an immediate honourable discharge. About an hour and a half ago," said Sigurdsson. "Pretty good, huh? From Regimental Sergeant-Major winning a key colony to unemployed in under a week."
"How... You got better and...? I feel like I have a concussion – why the hell would the army be upset that one of their best soldiers was getting closer to returning to duty?"
"Because they’re racist," said Cortez.
Radko looked at Cortez, then back to Sigurdsson, the tall, blond-haired and blue-eyed Freyja Sigurdsson. She was the epitome of the old Earth concept of the Aryan Ideal.
With a small, almost resigned smile, Sigurdsson pulled off her mitts, first left then right.
And she waggled her slender blue fingers.
Frowning, Radko opened his mouth, closed it again. Raised a brow and opened his mouth again to speak. Then just shrugged.
"Okay."
"Okay?" repeated Sigurdsson. "That's it?"
"Yeah, I can't think of anything else."
"Maybe," said Cortez, trying very hard not to laugh. "You should explain the discharge?"
"Apparently, back when the Commonwealth thought that AI was going to develop differently than it did, the armed forces wrote in some additional rules about members having to be human," said Sigurdsson. "Seems the brass doesn’t feel I meet that requirement anymore."
"Are you fucking kidding me?" sad Radko.
He seemed to be saying that far more frequently than made him comfortable.
"It really shouldn’t surprise you that much, Finn," said Cortez. "We had the icarans interested in an alliance and the government shot it down because, in their minds, the icarans couldn’t be trusted. Why would they trust a human-icaran hybrid?"
"I don’t know whether I need a pot of tea or a bottle of Scotch."
"We’re out of both," said Cortez.
"I hate everything," he said, rubbing his hands over his face. "Okay, so first question: you now have icaran arms?"
"Yeah."
Taking off her coat and tossing it onto a chair, Sigurdsson rolled up her sleeves to the elbow – which seemed a little more awkward with her new three-fingered hands – to show off her new arms.
"Not that this matters," said Cortez. "But they’re a really pretty colour."
"Thanks, I thought so too," said Sigurdsson, chuckling.
Radko cleared his throat pointedly and Sigurdsson looked back at him with a huff.
"Yes, I have icaran arms. The brill have this branch of medical science called xeno... xeno-something-ology. It’s using genetic material to heal injuries, treat diseases and all that across different species. From what the brill told me, its people have been using icaran tissue for years because they heal so fast. It said it could give me new arms."
"And it worked," said Radko, shaking his head. "I don’t know what’s crazier – that it worked or that you agreed to it in the first place."
"Me either, really."
Silence, longer and more awkward than when Radko and Sigurdsson had first met face to face, and Sigurdsson finally cleared her throat.
"So yeah, icaran arms."
"Sorry, I'm sorry," said Radko, rubbing his face again. "I don't care."
He watched Sigurdsson's eyes narrow and her jaw muscles twitch—a sure sign she was preparing for a fight—and he quickly held up a hand to ward it off.
"I mean that I don't care if you have icaran arms. Or robot arms or human arms. I care that you're back and whole and happy."
Her expression immediately softened, more than he'd ever seen.
"Thank you."
"However, about you joining this mission—if we put you on the Azrael’s Tear with the icarans, will they have an issue?"
"No," said Sigurdsson, shaking her head. "I spoke with Elgrapharr before making my decision."
So that was why Elgrapharr had made the comment about speaking to humans a lot – Sigurdsson had asked for his blessing on her surgery.
"Then a more practical question. Are you medically able to participate in this thing?"
"Doc says stay away from weapons I need to brace against my shoulders or anything with major recoil. Means I can’t use my sniper rifles, but I don’t see that happening in the hallways of an underground research place anyway," she said with a shrug, looking somewhat pleased at the action—probably, Radko figured, glad that she could do it without hearing and feeling the whir of gears in her shoulders. "I’m a good shot with a pistol, too, so I can still help."
"I have no doubt," said Radko. "We’ve been asked to escort the Azrael’s Tear to Muriel’s Moon. You can stay with us and transfer to the pirate ship when we rendezvous with the icarans."
There were nods all around and Cortez excused herself to pass along the revised plan to Cagliari while Radko dropped heavily into one of the two chairs facing his desk and pointed Sigurdsson toward the old-style globe of Earth bolted to the floor.
"It opens."
Frowning, she stepped over and examined it, then flipped it open on its Equator to reveal four glasses and two bottles of amber-coloured liquid nestled in high-density foam. One had been opened, but one remained sealed and Sigurdsson plucked them both from their protective foam recesses with a grin. The grin quickly disappeared when she saw the label on the unopened one.
"Shit, Radko, how can you afford this?"
It was a twenty-five-year-old single malt and would have been painfully expensive even back when Scotch was still being produced.
"That was a gift. Saving it for a special occasion – pour us a couple glasses of the other stuff."
She nodded and gently put the unopened bottle back in its foam, then poured two glasses from the other bottle. She handed one to Radko then settled into the chair next to the Commander. Almost at the same time, they each put their feet up on his desk.
"To your health," he said as they clinked their glasses, then tapped them on the arm of their chairs.
"And my loss of humanity."
Radko winced slightly.
"Yeah," he said. "Are you... okay with that?"
She sighed heavily, then took a sip before answering.
"I’m okay with it in the sense that I don’t give a shit what people think of me. I assumed people would be all shifty or downright disgusted – I knew that shit would happen if I went through with this. What I’m not okay with is them using it as an excuse to take away my job. I’m a soldier, it’s what I am. It’s pretty much all I am."
"That’s not true."
"It is, though. I’ve been in the army since I was seventeen. It’s like waking up one day and having your dad tell you to get out of the house and never come back," she said, taking a very long sip, and staring into her glass for a long moment. "I’ve just been kicked out of a second family."
"Is that why you enlisted? To find a new family?" he said. She’d never spoken much about her past and, Radko realized, he’d never asked her about it.
To his surprise, Sigurdsson laughed.
"I enlisted to avoid prison."
Radko's glass paused at his lips.
"What?"
"My mom died when I was really, really young. Don’t even really remember her that much. And my father was a raging alcoholic. Spent so many days just in a black-out drunk stupor. Couldn’t hold down a job either – as you can imagine – so we weren’t financially stable by any stretch," she said. "I spent a lot of time just out on my own, doing whatever the hell I wanted. Fell in with the wrong people, blah, blah, blah. A little shoplifting led to a little pickpocketing. I was a tough kid, too, so I got some work as a... let’s say a debt collector. Kick some heads, collect overdue drug money, that kind of thing."
She paused, blowing out a breath as she ran a hand through her hair.
"Long story short, I got caught at it red-handed. Literally – guy's blood on my knuckles. Aggravated assault, assault with a deadly weapon, because I was wearing brass knuckles. I think they even tacked on extortion and living off the proceeds of crime. I was looking at a substantial prison term. But then I ended up in front of a judge who believed in rehabilitation. Said I needed structure in my life and it was my choice whether I got that structure in prison or in the army. So here I am," she said, holding up her glass in a mock toast. "Or here I was."
"You know why I joined the navy?"
She looked over at him and shook her head.
"Chicks dig the uniform," he said.
Sigurdsson burst out laughing and swatted his shoulder.
"You’re such a prick."
"What? I’m not kidding," he said. "I went into the Royal Military College because of a girl."
"Are you fucking with me?"
"Why would I fuck with you? You probably still carry brass knuckles."
"Ass."
"There was this girl named Candy-."
"Her name was Candy?"
"Well, no, her name was Candace, but everyone called her Candy. Anyway, I had a huge, huge crush on her. I thought she was the most beautiful thing in the galaxy – flaming red hair, these cute little freckles," he said, shaking his head at the memory. "I tried so hard to impress that girl. I tried out for the high school hockey team, but I was a horrible skater. I wrote a song for her – no seriously, stop laughing – but never got up the guts to actually sing it. And then she gave this speech for the school at one of our Remembrance Day events and she was talking about the honour of serving the Commonwealth."
"So you joined the Commonwealth Navy to get laid."
"Essentially."
"And did you?"
"Not with her," he said, taking a sip of Scotch. "Turns out she was a lesbian."
The laughter burst forth from Sigurdsson with the force of a minor explosion, so hard there were tears streaming down her face. She wiped them away with the back of her hand.
"I tell you this very personal story of the struggles that led me to where I am today and in return you tell me about trying to get a chick in bed."
"Essentially."
"You’re such a bastard," she said, laughing again. "I’m betting now all you’d have to do is introduce yourself and you could get any woman you want."
"It’s possible," he said, taking a drink. "But it’s not a theory I’m going to test."
"Not interested in getting laid?"
"Not interested in getting laid simply because I’m that guy. As great as that story about Candy is, it was another life. What it means to be human has changed, and I don’t mean you and your arms, I mean everyone. Things that used to matter don’t anymore and things that I used to always push aside are becoming more important to me. There are plenty of people on that station – even people who are part of my crew – who spend all their free time drinking and fucking and getting stoned because they figure why the hell not? I just keep thinking about that."
Sigurdsson nodded. She’d done her fair share of all three of those things during her life, but the frequency of all three had dropped dramatically after that first transmission from the Vimy Ridge had made its way to her at Fort Hathaway.
"Drinking and fucking and getting stoned isn’t enough to fight for," said Sigurdsson. "There needs to be something more, or what’s the point?"
"Exactly," said Radko, downing the last of his Scotch.
Sigurdsson did the same, then stared into her glass for a moment.
"So. You and Cortez...?
"No. Pretty sure everyone thinks we are, but we’re not. We’re just... I was going to say that we’re just good friends, but we’re not just good friends. We’re family now."
"Many other men would have tried to take advantage of that."
"I’m not many other men."
"Does this creep you out?"
"What? Does what creep me out?"
She held up a hand and waggled her three fingers.
"Oh," said Radko. "No. It certainly caught me by surprise, but no, it doesn’t bother me. Like I said: human arms, robot arms, icaran arms – doesn’t change who you are."
"Thank you," she said. "That means a lot."