Jessica, it seemed, had been thinking of little else.
“Jess, I can’t even begin to tell you how surprised I was at Tassa’s move. I honestly didn’t see it coming.” He moved toward her, but she held up a hand to freeze him in place.
“You kissed her back.”
Raul nodded. “I did.” There was no denying it. He’d wanted to, and so he had.
“I thought…” he began, then shook his head. “It doesn’t matter what I thought. And to answer your first question, I don’t know. I guess I felt an attraction toward Tassa the day she arrived on Achernar, three… four days before the Steel Wolf assault.” Raul remembered that late afternoon meeting—had it only been three weeks ago? Tassa had promised to be on Achernar “As long as it takes.” And then the Steel Wolves followed—
Jessica took three quick steps forward and slapped him. She looked awkward doing it, unsure of herself the way she frowned at every move. Medical school and residency had never prepared her for this. She reacted woodenly, as if this was something she had simply been instructed to do from the Guide to Feminine Behavior.
Raul saw it coming, began to flinch away but then forced himself to stand there and take it. Jessica had put more force behind the blow than he expected, watching her hesitant motions. The side of his face stung warmly, and his right ear rang.
Something tickled his chin and Raul swiped at it, the back of his hand coming away with a smear of blood. He winced and a stab of pain cut at one side of his mouth. Jessica’s engagement ring had cut the corner of his lower lip. He nodded, and a surreal side of his mind almost prompted him to ask her, “So, we good?”
He didn’t.
“You embarrassed me in front of the entire planet, Raul. How do you expect me to react?”
All their arguments and fights over the last few years, and this was the first one that rang with any sense of permanence. The slap notwithstanding, Raul saw it in Jessica’s haunted eyes. “However you feel you have to.”
There were likely a dozen other comments he could have made that would have gone over better. He just couldn’t think of them right then. Raul had a feeling that he had missed a great many such opportunities in the last few minutes—in the last few days, or even weeks. Important opportunities to make things right. To change the events which had unfolded in the wrong direction. But he couldn’t go back.
Jessica proved that to him as she stripped the ring off her finger, picked up his hand and placed it in his palm, and then calmly folded his fingers over the circlet.
“Good-bye, Raul.”
He stood there, watched her cross the floor and exit through the open door. The perfect end to a terrible day. Raul fought down an urge to run after her, knowing it would do no good, and instead turned back to the kitchenette and his depleted liter of Glengarry’s Best. He picked up the glass and dashed its contents into the sink, wasting every drop. Before he could think better of it, he also upended the bottle and allowed it to drain. He didn’t need the drink anymore. Raul had been looking for a bit of numbness.
He’d found it without the bottle.
18
Escalations
Highlake Basin
Achernar
6 March 3133
Achernar’s blue-white sun tore a brilliant hole through the pale afternoon sky, flooding Highlake Basin with heat and bleaching light. Temperatures ebbed higher, past the usual tidemark of forty-two Celsius and lapping up toward forty-three. With no moisture left to the cracked-mud plains the air remained dry and baking, and puffs of dust swept up from each pounding stride Star Colonel Torrent took as he turned away from the Stealthy Paw and eased into the last leg of his run back to the DropShip Lupus.
Torrent’s khaki shorts and dust-smeared tank top were damp with fresh sweat but hardly soaked through. The thirsty desert air drank in the moisture quickly. Still, his shaven scalp and his arms glistened as if painted with a diamond glaze. His lower legs were streaked with mud—desert dust mixed with sweat, drying to gray streaks along both well-muscled calves.
Unsnapping a plastic water flask from his hip, Torrent swigged its last draught without breaking his stride. It tasted stale, tinged with the sweat on his lips and the plastic taste of the flask, and completely failed to wash away the sour taste of yesterday’s performance. He hooked the strap back into his belt, fastened it, and forgot it as his concentration turned back to the run and what might have been.
Kyle Powers was dead.
He knew it before any announcement was made. Torrent had watched his laser cut up over the Jupiter’s chest and into the thin strip of ferroglass that protected the cockpit, the ruby-bright beam punching through into flesh behind. The star colonel had to keep reminding himself of that or else lose himself in the anger of having been forced to flee. Torrent had defeated the Sphere Knight, had certainly driven a hard wedge in between the Swordsworn and Republic forces, and that had been his goal, after all. The Steel Wolves had required drastic measures and he took them. And he won. He always won.
But not one hundred percent, this time.
Not a flawless victory.
That single Legionnaire had held the line, battering back no matter how much Torrent’s Tundra Wolf threw at it. Raul Ortega—according to the staffing reports, a recently promoted reservist, not a regular line officer at all. He should have broken with the loss of Kyle Powers. He should have quailed beneath the Tundra Wolf’s heavier weapons. He should have.
Instead, Ortega’s threatening rotary autocannon had carved into Torrent, worrying his armor and chewing new damage into critical systems like his engine shielding and weapons. The star colonel’s anger—and his pride—had encouraged him to hang in, to push forward and live gloriously or die honorably by the next few minutes. His instincts, his many years of experience, his loyalty to Kal Radick—those all told him to take his limited victory over Powers and withdraw to fight again another day, perhaps to claim Achernar despite Fetladral’s misfortune and Kal Radick’s shift in priorities. This time he listened to the saner voices, but it had been a close call. Muscles tight with frustration, he had levered the Tundra Wolf away. One step. Then another.
Torrent continued his run—one stride, then another—picking up speed as he pushed himself for the DropShip.
A stinging tear of sweat leaked past the seal of Torrent’s dark goggles, burning at the corner of his eye. His vision blurred for a moment, but Torrent blinked it clear. Not that there was much to see in any case. A flat, dry basin pounded by the harsh glare of a strong sun. His dark lenses filtered out much of the painful brightness but did little to help the stark, colorless landscape. The desert looked more gray—maybe a dry dun—than the yellow he had expected. His Lupus commanded the horizon, but painted the stark, stellar white so common among space navy. Even the sky of this world looked washed out and lifeless to him.
But the world was not lifeless. It was an important world now, with its functioning hyperpulse generator station. So long as he had a means to pursue it, Torrent would not abandon Achernar. He would take what victories he could, build on them, and rise to greater honors than ever before.
That was what it was time to do. Build.
Pounding up the DropShip ramp and charging into the BattleMech bay, Torrent quickly dropped down into a brisk walk as he forced himself through several cool-down laps of the shaded work area. He stripped his goggles away, tucked them into his belt as well. His breathing strong but even, muscles burning with the pleasant ache of an honest workout, Torrent lapped the bay in slower circles, considering, planning. Seeing who was on hand.