That was Dak. He’d said what he had to say and wasn’t interesting in blathering on afterward like most people would. Most people didn’t know how to say goodbye. I didn’t turn the screen off, just left his image up there. It was a comfort, not so much the words he’d said, but the thought that there was someone out there who knew me that well and still cared about me.
Home, he’d said. He wanted me to have a place I could call home. But was home a place, or was it the people there? If I went back to Tijuana and found our old house, assuming someone hadn’t already occupied it, it would have been nothing but a collection of mud and brick and wood without Momma and Poppa and Anton.
I don’t know how long I sat there staring through his picture into the infinity on the other side of it, but only the knock on the hatch stirred me from the fugue. I blinked, unsure for a moment if I’d actually heard anything or if it was a waking dream, but the knock repeated. I pushed myself up from the bunk and opened the hatch, feeling a bit annoyed at whoever it was for not simply announcing their presence over the intercom.
It was Vicky.
“Hi,” I said, stumbling over the word. “Is everything okay?”
“No,” she said, her expression grim. “Can I come in?”
I stepped back from the hatchway and motioned her inside, then gave in to the paranoid urge to check the passageway behind her before I shut the door. She paced into the center of the compartment, arms folded over her chest.
“What’s wrong, Vick?” I asked, wanting to touch her, wanting to wrap my arms around her but feeling a barrier between us I was afraid to broach.
“Cronje is insane.” She turned on me as if she were making an accusation, though at least I knew now the anger wasn’t directed at me. “He’s ranting and raving and calling me a traitor in front of the other officers, and Freddy isn’t saying a damned thing to contradict him, either. I thought you two were friends.”
“I thought we were, too.” I leaned against the bulkhead, in one of the few spots not taken up by fold-down furniture. “I gotta be honest, Vicky, I’m not sure who my friends are anymore.”
She reacted as if I’d slapped her, with a moment’s shock followed by instantaneous anger.
“You told me to stay away from you till this blew over,” she reminded me.
“It doesn’t look like it’s going to.” I rubbed at my eyes, a dull ache developing behind them. “And we’re about to drop into more shit than any of us have seen before, if you believe Colonel Voss.”
“Oh, what the fuck does she know?” Vicky waved a hand in dismissal. “She hasn’t fired a shot in anger this whole war. She started it as a staff officer and got her promotion to battalion commander because of her connections at Brigade Staff.”
“I hadn’t heard that,” I admitted.
She sneered. “That’s because your company commander doesn’t get drunk and blather in front of his officers. Anyway, you’re not wrong. It’s not going away. Cronje is livid that Brigade forced him to drop the charges against you. He’s mad at Freddy, too, for getting him into this mess, and Freddy’s mad at me because I’m not going to throw you under the bus, but I think even he’s beginning to see the problems with Cronje.” She blew out a breath. “The bottom line is, I’m angry and I have the same bad feeling you do about this drop and I don’t want to go into it angry at you, because I love you.”
The words were a passcode, a key to the barriers that seemed to have grown between us over the last week and I pulled her into my arms and kissed her, all the negative emotions that had built up inside me turned into something else now.
“Come on,” she said, pulling away but tugging me along with her by my hand.
“Where?” I asked, shaking my head.
She grinned. “My bunkmate is a Force Recon Lieutenant and she’s got a thing with the Iwo Jima’s junior Navigation Officer. We’ll have the compartment to ourselves for the night.”
I followed, ignoring the nagging guilt. I should have been getting ready for the morning, but in the moment, nothing else seemed more important.
10
“Jesus H. Christ,” Bang-Bang hissed.
I don’t think he realized he was on the open platoon frequency, but I doubt he would have cared if he had. This was the closest I had ever come to shitting my pants from fear, and we hadn’t even launched from the Iwo Jima.
“What is it, sir?” Majid asked, his voice tentative, like he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. “What’s happening out there?”
I had to remind myself that most junior NCO’s didn’t know the tricks I’d learned about accessing the Fleet tactical feed, and I wondered if I should tell him what Bang-Bang and I were seeing or just keep him in the dark. Then it might come as a surprise when he died, which I heard made it hurt less.
Because I knew with a more concrete certainty than I’d ever experienced before that we were going to die before we got anywhere near that fucking planet.
“Just a lot of ships, Majid,” I lied.
I imagine if I’d just been looking at the optical feed from the drop-ship, it wouldn’t have been as bad. Most of the details of a space battle are invisible to the naked eye,
