Honor Bound

break. It seems like we’ve been on battle stations for days.”

“If we do find a way to detect the wormholes,” Vinnie said, “we’ll probably be on battle stations for the foreseeable future.”

“Can I ask you something totally stupid that you’ve probably had to answer a million times before?”

“You can ask me anything except to leave you alone, darlin’,” Vinnie cracked.

She seemed reluctant, but finally managed to say it. “Everyone’s seen the movie and the newscasts, and I know you’re going to want to toe the party line, but tell me honestly: Colonel McKay and Major Stark… were they really that, you know…” She shook her head, looking for a word.

“Heroic?” He supplied, grinning. “Larger than life?”

“Yes,” she laughed. “I guess. You know how stuff gets exaggerated.”

Vinnie stared into space for a moment, thinking how to answer the question. “The first thing you gotta’ understand,” he began, “is that they’re very different people. Different leadership styles, different personalities, sometimes different priorities. How they wound up working so well together… and becoming a couple… is still a mystery to me. Major Stark is very calculating, almost cold. She will risk her life in a heartbeat if it’s the best way to accomplish the mission, but she also knows that sometimes as a commander, you have to put other people in situations that might kill them while you manage the situation from the rear.

“The Colonel, now, he was a Marine like me and he never met a door he didn’t want to bust in. He leads from the front, guns blazing and I think he figures, if he bites a bullet, the guys coming up behind him should have been trained well enough to take over. Don’t get me wrong,” he said quickly, “he’s smart too, and he has really good instincts, but he’s also got some great big cajones and a conscience that won’t let him order someone to do something he hasn’t done himself first. And the thing that makes it even more… awesome, I guess, is that I know him well enough now to know that he is scared when he does that shit. And he does it anyway, and he does it just as good as any of us door-kickers.”

“You sound like you like him,” Esmeralda commented, keen interest in her eyes.

“Darlin’,” he corrected her, “I love the man like he was my own family. More, since a lot of my family are shitbirds. You asked me if he and Major Stark were heroes… that’s an easy one. Everyone in the war was a hero. Bunch of cops and Republic Service Corps janitors taking the Defense Satellite Control Center, damn straight they were all heroes. And our team with two squads of Marines boarding the Protectorate flag ship. Ari Shamir realizing he was walking into a trap and finding a way to spring us from it, Gunny Lambert saving us all from a grenade by giving up his life, they were heroes.

“But the one thing that Colonel McKay did that made me love him like a brother, that made me respect him like I’ve never respected another officer, was when we were on Pallas, and Admiral Patel and Captain Minishimi were arguing about what to do and Colonel McKay realized that someone had to take charge and make a decision and he had the balls to tell them so. And then when both of them had the damn nerve to ask a Captain-and an Intelligence Captain at that, an O-3, not a Fleet Captain O-6-to take charge of the whole thing and he said yes. That’s what took some balls. I can’t imagine saying yes to that, when screwing up means you’ve just lost the whole damn planet.”

“Wow,” Esmeralda murmured. “I can’t imagine Admiral Patel doing that… handing off responsibility to a junior officer like that. He seems so… confident.”

Vinnie frowned, head cocked thoughtfully. “You know, that’s true. He has seemed awfully sure of himself since then. Especially on this mission.”

“Maybe he decided that’s how he had to be if he was going to be the Fleet admiral,” she suggested.

“I know plenty of guys who pretend to be confident, darlin’. The Marines are full of ‘em, and we get more than our share in the recruits for Special Ops. He really is confident.” He shrugged it off. “People can change, I guess.”

“I’m sure they can, corazon,” she said, nibbling at his earlobe, “but we only have a couple hours left and I would hate to waste them talking about the Admiral…”

“That is all I can remember,” Konstantin Mironov concluded, letting out a breath and then taking a sip from the bulb of water that had been attached to the table by an adhesive strip.

McKay translated the last of Mironov’s directions to Lt. Sweeny, who was feeding them into the ship’s navigation system in the ship’s auxiliary control room, away from the noise and bustle of the main bridge.

“Okay, got it,” Sweeny said as he adjusted the virtual template and saved it in the navigation system. “Thanks, Mr. Mironov,” the Helmsman nodded to the Russian drive tech. “With that, we should at least know if we’re in a jump or two of Novoye Rodina. Now I just have to get all that ready to present to the Admiral in…” He checked his ‘link. “Christ, in an hour.” He glanced up at McKay. “Sorry sir, but I need to work on this, if you’ll excuse me?”

“No problem, Lieutenant,” McKay assured him. “I need to go grab some food anyway. You want some lunch, Konstantin?”

“I do not eat too much in this no gravity,” Mironov said in English, making a sour face.

“There’s an officer’s mess in the gravity drum,” McKay told him, pushing off from the worktable. “Come on, I’ll buy you a soy burger.”

A few minutes later, they were both reveling in the pleasures of eating a meal under normal gravity, if not the meal itself.

“This tastes like shit,” Mironov commented as he took another bite of the soy burger.

“Well yeah,” McKay acknowledged with a shrug. “We can grow cloned cow muscle in a factory, but there isn’t much room for food freezers on a starship. It’s either fresh soy or reconstituted dried meat. Trust me, this is better. What did you eat on your ships?” He frowned curiously.

“We ate shit, mostly,” Mironov admitted after taking a moment to find the right words. “But I got spoiled in my time on the outposts. They had to be self-sustaining, so they had pens with animals.”

“Earth animals?” McKay asked. “Where did you guys get Earth animals?”

Mironov looked uncomfortable answering, but he finally replied. “From the colony ships that General Antonov pirated. The cloned animal fetuses you had frozen. He duplicated them in the nano vats on Novoye Rodina.”

McKay just nodded, not trusting himself to comment on that without getting angry. Tens of thousands of colonists had been murdered by Antonov and his clone troopers before the war and during the invasion of Aphrodite.

“So, Konstantin,” he changed the subject. “Do you… did you have family? On Earth?”

The Russian shook his head. “Not alive. My parents and my sister died in the war with China a long time ago. I was not married… though there was this one girl…”

“Tell me about her,” McKay urged.

“She was beautiful,” Mironov said with a sad smile. “She had this long, blond hair that I could just lose myself in.” He shrugged. “But she is long gone now. And I am alone.”

““Did she die in the war as well?” McKay asked solicitously.

Konstantin gave him a look that made his blood go cold. “Yes, she died in the war, Colonel McKay.”

“Sorry,” McKay said, holding up a hand. “Didn’t mean to open up a sore subject, Konstantin.”

“No,” the Russian shook his head, “it is all right. Sometimes the memories… they get the best of me. Living this long, the brain was not built for it, you know? The old memories seem more recent sometimes than the new ones, you know? When I thought of her, of Yevgenia, the old anger came back as if we were still at war.”

We? McKay thought.

“You were at war with the Chinese,” McKay reminded him quietly, “not America.”

“They were pawns of the Americans,” he said with an air of one who’d used the line before. “But it is no matter. It was a long time ago.”

“Yes it was,” McKay said with a neutral voice. Holy shit, he thought, guarding his face carefully, D’mitry is right: this guy is over the edge. I need to talk to Patel about this…  “Well,” McKay went on aloud, making a show of checking his ‘link, “the Admiral has had all his consultations by now, so I had better get to his office and see if he needs my input. You can stay here and eat some more if you like, or there’s also a gym and a sim room and a ViR theater. If you hear the warning klaxon, it means we’re going back on alert and the drum rotation is about to stop, so hold onto something.”