Requiem

[Jane Hartman]

Herbert Beeler Naval Hospital, City of Medford, Los Angeles

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+161 Days Since Planetfall.

”That’ll do just fine, thank you.” Hartman stopped, leaning against the glacier-white walls of her room, and peeled the orderly’s arm out from under her shoulders. A slow burning pain pulsed along the scars on her shoulder and back in time with her heart, but it wasn’t so bad that she let it show. Held against months of numb reverie on a Herbert Beeler hospital bed, the pain was almost welcome. Pain meant that she was alive. Pain meant that she was moving again, that she was acting instead of watching. It might never have been pleasant, but Hartman knew how to deal with pain.

”Alright, Miss Hartman. Is there any pain? How are you feeling?” The orderly was polite, but the doubt in her voice couldn’t have been obvious if someone had stencilled the word on his forehead. She was a young woman, about her height, and evidently descended from somewhere nature had built human beings like mountains. Prior to her hospital stay Hartman had never been scrawny, but even when she had been a marine at the height of her fitness she would have been a lightweight next to the blue-and-white uniformed woman. She’d wrapped an arm under Hartman’s shoulders and supported most of the older woman’s weight on the slow stagger across the room with barely a blink.

”None.” Hartman shifted her position on the wall, took a little more of the weight off her legs. She didn’t need to look at them to see they were shaking with the effort. Pathetic. She kept the grimace from her face. ”And it’s Admiral.”

”Pardon me, miss?” Her voice was low and soft, something more appropriate to animals and small children.

”I’m not miss. I have a rank.” Hartman growled. How many times had she had this conversation since her eyes had flickered open? Holes in her memory or not, it felt as though she was on a loop. Remembering a rank wasn’t hard. It was on the sheet at the end of her bed, for Christ’s sake. ”Worked hard for it, and I’d appreciate it if you used it.”

”Oh.” The orderly staggered a little, but recovered remarkably quickly. Half a second later and the pleasant, empty, meaningless little smile common to put-upon employees everywhere slid over her features. ”I’m sorry. Of course, Admiral.”

She reached out a hand and opened the bathroom door. ”The bag’s a twist nozzle, so all you need to do is sit down like normal and twirl the –”

Hartman stared at him. The orderly shifted a little and gave a half-cough.

”- nozzle.” Her head bobbed a jerky nod in the direction of the open door. ”Clockwise.”

”Thank you.” God preserve me from well-meaning hospital staff. She was wounded, not dead. Wearing the bag was bad enough without the help of the walking how-to guide. ”How long do I have to keep this for?”

”It’s just until you’re walking steadily again, Admiral.” The woman’s tone was apologetic, but there was an undercurrent of iron to the statement. Not his first unhappy patient, then. Maybe she could start a club. ”We had to fit the catheter while you were under. Otherwise you’d be sleeping in a heap of your own -”

”I’m aware, thank you. Don’t need to paint a picture for me.” That was one mental image she didn’t want to add to the gallery. The orderly gave a grin that Hartman was reasonably certain qualified as sadistic.

”Shouldn’t be more than a week or two.” She gave that same apologetic shrug. ”The surgeons have had their hands full lately.”

”Outstanding.” Hartman breathed. Two weeks with this thing hanging off her. It was a profoundly uncomfortable thought, and her disapproval was about as likely to change it as it was to flip the planet’s orbit. She might as well have wished for her fleet back while she was at it, for all the good it would do.

One step at a time.

Hartman closed her eyes, exhaled and, inch by inch, slowly pushed her weight off the wall and back on to her legs. There was no pain, but she was precisely aware of the sensation of weight on her limbs. It felt like she was carrying a hiking pack instead of a thin hospital gown. She staggered into the bathroom and closed the door in the smiling orderly’s face.

A week or two.

*

High Planetary Orbit, Leeds System

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+10 Days Since Planetfall.

All considered, Glendale’s intelligence section could have been worse. They would have to have been banging rocks together and trying to get strategic information off the sparks, but Hartman supposed that it was technically possible.

The troopship’s intelligence section was housed in what had been a pair of passenger quarters but now looked like the wreckage of a particularly electrically minded smart bomb. The interior dividing wall had been cut out, and more light blue crash foam had been hopelessly pressed into the gaps where the new rooms joined like an ancient surgeon gluing a wound closed. Conduit snaked across the ceiling, feeding a pair of old civilian-grade workstations, screens faded almost to illegibility under the glare of the strip lighting nestled into the ceiling. Two grim faced servicemen hunched over the desks, engrossed with their screens.

”He’s about as co-operative as we could hope for.” Lieutenant Sellers gave an apologetic shrug, honey blond bun bobbing in time with the motion. The intelligence officer was young for her posting, probably no older than twenty, but that wasn’t unusual in the Tenth. The Fleet had called up damn near everyone they could get on a shuttle on short notice, and the sheer scale of the mobilisation had jostled the young and untested a couple of rungs further up the chain than the peacetime navy would have seen as prudent.

And for good reason. A foreign front was not a place you wanted to start fighting out just what cracks people broke along. The posting wasn’t Seller’s fault, but that didn’t mean that Hartman had to like it.

Sellers trotted over to the table and scooped up a datapad. ”Which isn’t saying a whole lot, ma’am. He’s given us a name, rank, serial number, and not a word else. He’s been in there for five hours and hasn’t so much as asked for a glass of water. Smart man. He knows we can see in to his head.”

The petite intelligence officer gave a predatory grin and handed the pad to Hartman. It showed a young man in a Royal Navy uniform, slouched in a room with little more than three cheap plastic chairs and a table bolted to the floor between them. Strapped to his head was what looked like an ancient infantry helmet. He could have been sleeping, but for the pad’s steady insistence that his brain was lighting up like a firework. Hartman tapped the pad and the feed swapped to a camera directly overhead. Tapped it again, and it gave her a view of the room from the door. ”Impressive, Lieutenant. How many angles are there on this thing?”

”There are three hundred and six cameras in the room with him, ma’am. Counting IR and non-visual. Pressure sensors on the chair and the floor too.” Sellers was practically glowing with pride. She tapped a finger at the helmet. ”The monitor’s chunkier than I would have liked, but we made it work.”

”I thought the fleet had phased those out ten years back.” Hartman said.

”They did.” Sellers spared the room a vaguely apologetic glance. ”Most warships have the monitoring hardware built into the interrogation cells now. Harder for the captive to damage it that way. Too many rogues smashing their heads into the table and breaking the equipment.”

”But Glendale isn’t a warship, Lieutenant?” Hartman’s eyebrow inched up. Like she’d needed another reminder.

Sellers shifted uneasily. ”Yes, I mean- No, ma’am. Not like Missouri is. We make do. It’s not as tough as the integral versions, but the MPs trussed him up tight enough that he shouldn’t be able to do any damage.”

”And it can tell us when he’s lying?”

”When he thinks he’s lying, ma’am.” Sellers corrected. ”The system doesn’t read minds. Just physiological clues. Brain activity, pupil dilation, small facial twitches that a human would miss. That sort of thing. There are certain physical tells when someone lies. They’re not universal, but enough of them are common enough that everyone has some. It’s enough to give us a general read on his emotions and tip us off on deliberate falsehood. As long as the monitor’s there, he can’t lie to us any more than he can turn his brain off.”

”How is he holding up?” Hartman asked.

”Right now?” Sellers took the datapad from her and glanced at the readout. ”Not a whole lot of change since we bought him in. Calm, heartbeat’s steady.”

”You sound impressed.”

”I am.” Sellers nodded. ”The Gallics know their stuff. Rogues are usually starting to panic now. Even the military’s not usually this good. I ran a few interrogations back in Texas when we caught a BDM U-Boat. Nice and collected on the outside, but still panicky emotionally. No-one wants to be captured, no matter how well they’re trained.” She gave an appreciative whistle, which Hartman severed with a glare. ”Sorry, ma’am. It’s impressive. The man’s as cold as ice. It’s like he honestly doesn’t care that he’s sitting in a cell.”

”Is he drugged?” Physical control was one thing. To be picked up and dropped in a cell without so much as a ripple on the emotional pond was borderline sociopathic.

”No ma’am.” One of the analysts, a middle-aged petty officer with a creased uniform and once-broken nose, spoke up. ”Coral Sea took samples immediately after taking the prisoner on board. Sick bay ran a second round of tests when we took custody. He’s as clean as a newborn. Hell, cleaner. No combat stims, no painkillers. Nothing.”

A hint of trepidation laid icy fingers on Hartman’s spine. Stims were a standard part of space combat. Even with dampners, the lightening-quick changes in acceleration fighters experienced should have been more than capable of knocking a pilot senseless without the drugs. ”Was he conscious when 22 retrieved the pod?”

Sellers nodded. ”Yes ma’am.”

”Did the ship that kept him conscious?” Hartman asked. ”What do we know about Gallic dampners?”

”Possible, but not likely, ma’am. We don’t have a complete database on the Cougar, but if it’s built along the same lines as the Lynx-class, acceleration tolerance shouldn’t be too far away from our birds.” Sellers shifted a little. ”They could have been fitted with extra hardware, but manoeuvring didn’t seem to suffer when 22 engaged, which tells me that whatever they had on board wasn’t substantially different from the standard loadout.”

”I see.” Hartman added another unanswered question to the steadily growing list. ”Brighton was a long way out of the combat area. What do we know about how they got there?”

”Not a whole lot.” Sellers’s brow creased with remembered frustration. ”Looked like a cloak, but if it was it’s way more advanced than anything we’ve got. The nearest ship they could have been based from was halfway across the solar system. There’s no way anything on our side could manage the flight cloaked without stopping to dump heat.”

”Which we should have seen.”

”Which we should have seen.” Sellers nodded. ”You can’t hide a ship forever. Either Gallic cloaking technology makes our active camouflage look like a tin of paint and a twig, or they were already in the field when Brighton arrived.”

Hartman paused. Fighting the Gallics was hard enough already without believing that they outstripped her forces technologically as well. ”You think they had a carrier in the area.”

”It’s just conjecture, but it’s the best explanation I’ve come up with, ma’am. A carrier could stay cloaked a lot longer than a bomber could. That close to the Magellan jump point, it could leave the system when it needed to vent heat without us ever seeing it.” Sellers said. ”It would be easier if we’d been able to recover his ship, but…”

”But we’ll take what we can get. I know.” Hartman finished. The strategy made a certain degree of sense. Keep a handful of ships back, behind the enemy’s combatants, and use them to rip apart the support elements the fleet depended on to keep fighting. Sooner or later, the enemy ran out of fuel, food, or ammunition, and you could waltz in and mop up the pieces. The Gallics didn’t need to fight the Fleet to win. All they had to do was cut the supply lines and wait.

There was one man on the ship who could tell her how to stop them. ”I’ll speak to our guest now, Lieutenant.”

”Of course.” Sellers collected an earpiece from the table and nodded. ”If you’ll put this in and follow me, ma’am.”

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