Anna sat quietly for a while. “The Hammers,” she said at last. “Does anyone understand those sons of bitches? I sure as hell don’t.”
“Nor me,” Michael replied with a shake of the head. “Something tells me it will not be long before we’re at their throats again. If I were them, I’d tear up the armistice. Go back on the offensive. Hit us while we’re still trying to rebuild the Fleet after Comdur, shut down all our interstellar trade routes, force us back to the negotiating table.”
“Hell. That’s a cheery assessment. Can they do that, shut us down, I mean?”
“Don’t know for sure, but they should try. What can they lose? If they sit around waiting for something to happen, we’ll eventually have a Fleet that can take them on-who knows, maybe with antimatter weapons-and we’re back to where we were before Comdur. Lining our ships up, loading the marines, and counting the days down until we can invade Commitment to rip their Hammer hearts out,” he said, his voice rising, shaking with vicious intensity.
He paused for a moment to recover his self-control. “Sorry. Got a bit carried away.” He threw a quick glance at Anna, her face radiant in the early-morning sun. “I must stop taking it so personally. I really must.”
“You have every reason, Michael,” Anna said, her voice softened by concern.
He nodded. He had. “So,” he said after another long pause, “what about us?”
“What can I say?” Anna said, shrugging her shoulders. “Nothing’s changed. You’re right about the Hammers. There’s no chance they’ll sit around scratching their asses while we take our time rebuilding the Fleet. So the armistice is a dead man walking. It can’t be long before it falls over. That means
Michael frowned and shook his head. “No, they won’t.”
“So, like I say. Nothing’s changed. I love you, you love me, but until the Hammers are beaten, I cannot commit, and you can’t; you shouldn’t, either. Michael”-Anna touched his arm, so softly, it was more a caress-“don’t push it. I know you want me to commit, but I can’t. Not until this is over. Just take it a day at a time, and with a bit of luck we’ll both come through. Then we’ll do the whole commitment thing, I promise. Marriage, house, day jobs, kids …”
Her voice cracking, Anna turned away, but not before Michael saw the tears.
“Enough,” she said after a while, head still turned away as she wiped her eyes. “I’ve just been on the commair flight from hell, so all I want is a shower, a decent cup of coffee, and some breakfast. So let’s just leave it at that. Wake me up when we get close to the Palisades.”
There was nothing more to say. Soon Anna was asleep. They flew on, the flier’s cabin quiet, the only noise the soft hiss of air across plasglass.
Friday, September 15, 2400, UD
For all the progress Michael was making with the post-combat stress deprogramming, Detective Sergeant Kalkov’s jeering face still haunted him, the nightmare grinding its way to the same terrifying conclusion. Thanks to Indra’s team, the nightmares troubled him less, but they came all the same, and tonight was one of those nights.
Shocked awake, Michael knew better than to lie there thrashing around in a futile attempt to get back to sleep. Quietly, he slipped out of bed. Throwing on coat and shoes, he made his way out of the house, leaving Anna dead to the world, a shapeless lump in the bed, exhausted by a brutally tough day climbing the rock walls behind the Palisades. Outside, the air was cool and crisp; dawn was hours away, the night dark under a moonless sky, clear, still, and star-studded.
Aided by the low-light processor embedded in his neuronics, Michael followed the narrow track, climbing fast but carefully until he reached a solid mass of rock that reared up out of the heavily timbered spine of the ridge, an island of granite in a sea of green. Scrambling up the scree that skirted the outcrop, he sat down where he always did, a small, comfortable heather-filled cleft slashed into the base of the huge rock. It had long been one of his favorite places, a place he used to clear his mind.
He needed to. He had hoped Anna would help him sort things out, but she had not. The exact opposite, in fact. He was more confused than ever by the competing demands that fought for supremacy in a badly conflicted mind: the irreconcilable demands of love, duty, family, and honor.
He loved Anna, and she loved him: He owed it to her to stay alive.
There was a war on: Walk away from his duty as a serving Fleet officer? Unthinkable.
His family had suffered more than any family should, at times his parents wracked to the point of utter despair: He owed it to them not to get himself killed.
That left the demands of honor. He had made promises, and he was old-fashioned enough to think that promises should be kept once made; otherwise, why make them? The problem was that every single one of those promises involved making the Hammers pay for all the pain they had inflicted … on him, on the family, on the crews of
Michael was no fool. He knew that keeping those promises did little to increase his life expectancy, but what else was he to do? Walking away from them would make his mom and dad happy, Anna, too, probably. But he could never live with himself if he did. Jeez, what a mess, he said to himself. Soon Anna would be on her way back to
He pushed back against the rock and stared up at stars strewn in profligate confusion across the sky. He was there a long time, the warmth seeping out of his body, his mind churning without getting anywhere before a combination of cold and tiredness drove him to his feet.
Time to get back, he said to himself.
He scarcely made it off the scree slope before, through the treetops, a tiny, fleeting flicker of black smeared a path across the stars. He stopped, staring up. Whatever it was, it felt wrong-why he was not able to say-so, without thinking, he slid under the cover of a small overhang of rock.
Unable to see much, Michael chided himself for jumping at shadows when, with scarcely a soft hiss to mark its passing, a black shape leaped from the darkness below the ridge and shot overhead before disappearing back into the night. What the hell, he wondered, was an unlit flier doing this far from civilization in the middle of the night?
He had a bad feeling about this; whatever the flier was up to, it was probably nothing good. Had the flier spotted him? If it had done a high-level reconnaissance, it might have picked up his infrared signature. He hoped he had moved before they had.
Every instinct told him not to risk it, to get as far away as possible, to ask questions later. But he could not: Anna was back in the house asleep, and he refused to take the chance that the flier was just out joyriding the night away, even if that was the most rational explanation. Gambling that the flier would take its time before turning back, he started to run through the trees back to the house.
He had gone less than a hundred meters when the slashing hiss of a flier with its noise-reducing shroud deployed brought him skidding to a halt; he turned to see what was happening. The flier had returned, but this time the black shape, nose high in the air to kill its forward momentum, headed for the rock outcrop. Slowing into a hover, it spewed superheated steam into the cold night air, the blast driving pebbles skittering and tumbling into space while it came in to land.
Michael did not wait to see what would happen next; it was not hard to guess. The flier was small; assuming the pilot stayed where he was-he certainly would if he had any sense-the chances were that three, maybe four people would be on his heels before much longer. He ran, his mind desperately trying to work out how he could get himself and Anna safely off a ridge of rock bounded on all sides by cliffs he would think twice about climbing down even in broad daylight. Any way he looked at it, he and Anna were trapped, their escape route cut off by assailants
