As it was, it wasn’t easy. The sideways glances, the hurried looks, the whispered exchanges-isn’t that the cadet who… — were almost more than he could bear. All Michael wanted to do was to be away from this place and alone. Well, give it another hour and he would be alone, alone, that is, except for Lieutenant Hadley, his assault lander command qualification instructor. Michael wasn’t sure how happy Hadley would be at being kept back; not so unhappy, he hoped, that getting the required 98 percent he needed to requalify would be mission impossible.
Gradually the mob thinned, leaving Michael alone at the bottom of the imposing steps leading up to the main entrance of the college. Time to go, he thought as he turned to make his way back across the huge college parade ground. He might as well put in a solid couple of hours on the assault lander simulator to get ready for Hadley the next day.
“Michael, wait!”
Michael turned back to see Anna, followed by every member of the team, hammering down the steps two at a time-well, in Karen Sutler’s case, three at a time. Or was it four? God knew, she had the legs to do it. The group came to a shuddering halt in front of Michael.
“Oh, hi, guys. Thought you’d all be gone by now.”
“You didn’t think we would all piss off without saying goodbye, did you?” Charlie Mbeki’s tone was indignant, as if, Michael thought with a smile, he had just suggested that Charlie had been sleeping with the provost marshal’s incredibly ugly offsider, Chief Petty Officer Ramona Diaz. Come to think of it, he had seen Charlie trying to kiss Chief Diaz once, but it had been very late at night and very, very dark, and Charlie had been more than a bit drunk. That little lapse in judgment had cost Charlie seventy-five demerits. Even the officer of the day appeared to have great difficulty accepting the idea that any cadet in his or her right mind would want to kiss Chief Diaz; the team suspected that only that thought had stopped him whacking Charlie with a hundred demerits.
“No, no, no,” Michael protested, relieved that they hadn’t gone. “I knew you’d track me down. A lot easier than the other way around. I’ve seen better-behaved sheep, I have to say.”
“Smart-ass. If you’d met my mother, you’d understand why I move around in random jerks. If she kisses me one more time and tells me how wonderful I am…” Nicco Guzevic grimaced at the thought.
“Bull, Nicco. You love it when your mom tries to cheer you up. You don’t fool us,” said Bronwyn Kriketos, planting a huge wet kiss on his cheek. “I’d be depressed, too, if I only graduated in the third quartile.”
“Heartless bastard,” Nicco responded amiably. “Michael, I’ve got to go. The up-shuttle won’t wait, and neither will Carlsson Space Lines. It’s been an honor. Stay in touch. You know where to find me.” With a firm shake of the hand and a pat on the cheek, he was gone.
Two minutes later and with a bruised hand courtesy of one of Karen Sutler’s power grips-Michael swore she practiced for maximum effect-everyone was gone except Anna. The melange of Chinese, Asian, African, and European blood that ran in her veins together with generations of very expensive cosmetic geneering combined to produce a face so striking that it nearly stopped Michael’s heart when he looked at it.
“Michael, what can I say?” Tears sprang into the corners of Anna’s eyes as she put her arms around his neck. “You know what you mean to me, so don’t lose me somewhere in your life.”
“Anna, no chance. We’ve had too many good times for that to happen.” A memorable weekend high in the New Tatra Mountains behind the college sprang unbidden to mind; Michael shoved the thought away firmly. “Comm me when you get to the
“Yeah, I hear she is.” Anna paused. “I don’t know if we should prolong this; it’s going to be really hard not having you around after three years.”
“I know. I’ll miss you,” Michael said, still unsure of Anna and what she really meant to him and what he meant to her. Despite the time they had spent together, there had been other people in their lives during their college time, and both knew how many friendships struck early in a Space Fleet career, whether casual or intimate, failed to survive the pressure that distance and separation created. Space Fleet had no respect for personal relationships, Michael thought moodily. Never had and never would.
Abruptly, Anna tilted her head up, kissed him full, long, and hard on the mouth, then spun on her heel and was gone without another word. Michael stood there feeling empty and flat.
After a few moments, he turned and set off for the assault lander simulator building.
Thursday, July 30, 2398, UD
The walls of Digby’s small office seemed to close in on him as he stared at the e-mail on his workstation screen.
It couldn’t be, he thought, it couldn’t be. But there it was, in plain Standard English. The Sylvanian National Day reception had been canceled.
Digby cursed quietly but fluently and at great length.
Canceled. As simple as that. Not that the cancellation came as a surprise. The Sylvanians had been very rough on the captain and crew of the Hammer tramp spacer
But none of that helped him.
The Sylvanian National Day reception had offered Digby his only opportunity to meet Ashok Kumar without drawing the attention of Doctrinal Security and thereby risking his own death warrant. And now the opportunity had gone. Captain Ashok Kumar, the Sylvanian embassy’s military attache and its one and only senior military member of staff, was the one man on Commitment whom Digby was prepared to trust to do something quickly. He and Kumar went back a long way, nineteen years to be precise, to the bloody shambles that had followed the Battle of Delta Chimensis in the closing days of the Third Worlds War. Captured along with the shattered remnants of MARFOR-13, his interrogator had been none other than a very young Lieutenant Commander Kumar, a man Digby got to know quite well in the long days that followed. A hard man, a tough and persistent interrogator, not a man you could ever like but decent despite that.
And Kraa knew the Sylvanians had plenty of reasons not to be decent to any Hammer-the use of tactical nuclear weapons for one thing, small ones, thank Kraa, but still nukes, slipped past defenses badly stretched by the chaos of a full-scale Hammer planetary assault to fall on the cities of Vencatia and Jesmond. The only thing that had saved the Hammer was the fact that the nukes had been launched by renegade elements outside the chain of command. But it had been a close thing: Digby remembered as if it were yesterday the crippling fear that had gripped him at the thought of his family disappearing in the blinding flash of a fusion air burst. With that sort of history, even with the passage of almost twenty years, Digby knew that the fight would be to the death the next time around.
Struggling to work out how he was going to live up to his newfound resolve, he put his head in his hands, a small, solid, and in many ways quite unremarkable man seated behind a small cluttered desk in a windowless office deep below the ground.
After a long pause, Digby slipped on his lightweight comms headset and fired up his workstation. If Kumar wasn’t going to come to him, he’d have to go to Kumar. Thanks to DocSec’s obsessive interest in the minutiae of people’s lives, a quick walk through the Section 4 knowledge base should tell him more than enough about Kumar’s daily routine to allow him to set up an “accidental” meeting.
It was his only chance.
As he started work, Digby said a quiet word of thanks to Chief Councillor Merrick. The bloody man was obsessive about the operational security of the Eternity project, the blackest of all his many black projects. Understandably, of course. Chief councillor or not, any leak would see Merrick in front of a DocSec firing squad in no time flat. Thus, he’d given Digby unrestricted access to every knowledge base in the Hammer Worlds to make sure the Eternity project stayed black.
