yourself for very long and still stay sane, I started resenting you instead. I especially resented you for the way everything kept going your way… even though that meant we won the war and a saved millions of innocent people.” He shook his head. “It was crazy, and I knew it; but after the war when you kept insisting we search for Antonov, I thought you were a huge pain in the ass. I only started to warm to you… after I returned from that mission to Aphrodite.”
He paused to let that sink in and McKay’s eyes went wide. “That’s right, Jason. I don’t even know if we were really friends… or if the fucking Russians put the idea in my head. I don’t know if my marriage fell apart because I was a shitty husband, or because the conditioning they gave me
“Arvid,” McKay said, squeezing the man’s shoulder, “we
“You can’t be serious,” Patel murmured, almost too faintly to be heard, face toward the floor. “Nothing will ever be the way it was. I was the senior officer in the Fleet, McKay. They’ll never trust me to hold that position, not now.”
“Maybe not,” McKay admitted. “I promise you that will do my best to make sure they do, and I have quite a bit of pull with the President, but maybe not. But I’ll give you my word: if you can’t keep your current position, I will do my damnedest to make sure you get whatever else you want besides that. The Senate has to approve the Fleet Admiral, but you can still captain a starship, if that’s what you want. Or you can finish your doctorate and get a teaching position at the Academy… hell, you can
Patel took a deep, shuddering breath and nodded, straightening up. “You’re right. God knows, now’s not the best time for self-pity, anyway.” He looked up, looking McKay in the eye for the first time since he’d come in the room, something of the old Arvid Patel coming into their glint. “What are you really doing here? I know you don’t have time to sit here and listen to me bitch about my problems.”
“Things are pretty fucked up at home,” McKay told him, leaning back in his chair. “Worse than we could have imagined.” He quickly laid out the situation for Patel, finishing with Dominguez holding Valerie O’Keefe hostage.
“Bloody hell,” Patel swore softly, a hint of his London accent coming through-it was usually undetectable. “What are we going to do?”
“I’m going to be leaving the ship,” McKay told him. “Commander Nunez is a good officer, but he doesn’t have much combat experience. He wants you on the bridge with him.”
Patel’s eyebrow arched. “He’d trust me on the bridge?”
“There’ll be an armed security guard on the bridge with you,” McKay told him frankly. “If you do anything… hinky, he’ll stun you and throw you in a g-sleep tank. But he wants you there.” McKay grinned. “You can jostle his elbow the way I did yours. If you agree.”
“It will be very strange,” Patel said, shaking his head. “Very awkward. But as I said, this isn’t a time to be feeling sorry for myself.”
“Good,” McKay said, standing. “I’ll let him know before I go gear up.” He hesitated by the door. “Good luck, Arvid.”
Patel stood, extending a hand. McKay took it and the two men shook hands warmly.
“You will need the luck, I think,” the Admiral said. “As a General, shouldn’t you be leaving this sort of thing to your junior officers?”
McKay shrugged. “I’ve always been a lead-from-the-front kind of guy.”
“Really?” Patel barked a laugh. “I never noticed…”
Chapter Forty-Two
“Fire!” Ari swatted the CeeGee trooper on the shoulder and ducked aside.
The woman-she was technically a 2 Lieutenant, as she had just graduated the Officers Candidate School- touched the trigger on the missile launcher and the projectile kicked free of the front of the launcher with a hiss of coldgas, then fishtailed as the main motor lit. It streaked across the 500 meters of open field in less than a second and slammed into one of the lead APC’s in the Protectorate convoy, striking it just beneath the forward gun turret. Three more smoke trails joined it within a heartbeat of each other and the lead rank in the column disappeared in a huge fireball of hyperexplosives that stretched from one edge of the bridge to the other, lighting up the night.
The short bridge forded a dry ditch where a shallow stream used to run, and the slope was too sleep for even the Marine APCs to take it without flipping over. Ari sprinted forward to the front of the defensive perimeter, taking a knee and bringing his carbine to his shoulder as the line of vehicles crawled to a halt barely 200 meters away. From so close, he could smell the chemical tang of the burning fuel cells and hear the loud, random bangs as ammunition cooked off or tires exploded. Billows of black smoke were already beginning to climb into the evening sky, sending a haze across the moon.
Roza moved quickly from where she had been giving instructions to a small team of missile-launcher- equipped soldiers to crouch next to him. In the gathering darkness, he could only tell it was her from the IFF signal in his helmet’s Heads-Up Display.
“They will either have to try to go off-road,” she said, a hand resting on his shoulder, “and try to find another crossing, or send troops out on foot to clear the wreckage.”
“Targets of opportunity, independent fire,” Ari intoned to the Colonial Guard troops around him. “Only use your grenades if they cluster together.” He turned back to the missile-launcher team. “If they try to turn and go off- road, be ready to hit them at the choke points.”
Roza punched him in the arm lightly. “I already told them that,” she admonished him. He grinned, though she couldn’t see it through his helmet. Even in this huge clusterfuck, with imminent death staring him in the face, he was glad he was with her.
Then he heard turbines whining shrilly as the APCs in the rank behind the burning wreckage began to power back up… and slam directly into the burning hulks blocking the road.
“Oh, shit,” Ari muttered.
The first impact didn’t move the wreckage more than a few centimeters, so the vehicles backed up and rammed them again, the squeal of tearing metal and the grinding of the charred wheel rims against the pavement echoing down into the gulch and across the fields.
“Missile team up!” Roza was already yelling, waving them forward. “Get ready to hit the next row of vehicles as they come through!”
The first APCs to batter through the flaming hulks were on fire themselves, their grey metal hulls charred black and smoking, and Ari knew that the heat inside them had to be unbearable… for a human. The first group through stalled for a moment, and Ari thought the heat might have caused the wheels to seize up; but then the line of APCs behind
“Now!” Ari and Roza shouted together as the third lines of armored vehicles emerged from the line of wreckage, the firelight throwing menacing shadows off their dull grey surfaces.
The missile team let loose with another barrage and a half-dozen projectiles streaked out to strike the vehicles coming through the gap in the line. Six fireballs merged into one and the end of the bridge was consumed in an inferno with a wash of heat that Ari could feel through his armor even 200 yards away.
“I think that did it!” Roza said over their private comm channel. “They can’t just ram through that!”
“No,” Ari agreed grimly. “Now’s when the fun starts.”
The thermal lenses in his helmet were useless because of the flames, but by the light of the fire, he could see the armored figures clambering out of the hatches of the foremost vehicles in the jammed up convoy while the APCs behind them spread out on either side of the bridge. He knew what was coming next.
“Everyone get down!” He yelled over the general comm channel. “Get to cover!”
Taking his own advice, Ari flattened himself behind a berm that had formed where a low dividing wall had once stood, just as a rank of the Protectorate vehicles opened up with their autocannon. All around, the ground
