The senior staff and civilians were going to evacuate Orion before the action, and go back to Arches. Even Captain Boote the Forty-Third had chosen not to stick around to witness this climax of his beloved Rock’s destiny. Pirius Blue had pulled strings to ensure Cohl could go if she wanted to, but she couldn’t bear the thought of running out on the people she had worked with for so long. There was only one place she wanted to be — on the surface, waiting for the sky to fall in, along with the rest of the troopers. And so here she was.
Blayle wasn’t asleep, though. Blayle, her platoon sergeant, was a good bit older than her, in his midtwenties. She could see his eyes on her, bright blue eyes visible behind his faceplate, a cold blue like the light of IRS 16.
He asked, “How are you bearing up, Lieutenant?”
“Fine,” she said uneasily. Her rank was basically honorary, and it made her uncomfortable.
“I’m proud to be here,” he said, without affectation. “There’s a lot of tradition here on Orion.”
“I know.”
“My own birth cadre — Cadre 4677 — is mentioned in the Rock’s first operational order, which is preserved in the archives. Of course we never knew what our mission would turn out to be. And nobody ever knew when it would end. But now it’s turned out that it’s me, my generation, who has the responsibility — no, the privilege — to be here at the climax.” He sighed. “A thousand years culminates here and now, in what I do today.”
Blayle was a disciplined soldier and a good sergeant; as she had worked with this platoon she had learned to lean on him. But he was a thoughtful, soft-bodied, soft-spoken man who seemed to lack the spirit of camaraderie of some of the other troopers, the loyalty that impelled them to fight so hard. Rather, Blayle seemed to embrace the larger mission of Orion Rock, and had to argue himself into fighting. And, like most people on this Rock, Blayle was a combat rookie.
“Might be best not to think too hard about that stuff, Sergeant. Combat is difficult enough without the feeling that forty generations are looking over your shoulder.”
“Yes. What would Hama Druz say if he was here? Focus on the moment; the present is all that matters.”
“He might say, shut your flapping mouth while some of us are trying to sleep,” somebody called, to a ripple of laughter.
Cohl knew little about the mission of Exultant Squadron. What she did know and her platoon didn’t, however, was that all their elaborate preparations, all the lives that would be lost on this Rock today, were not even the point of the operation. After a thousand years of planning, preparation, and silent running, Orion Rock was to be sacrificed as a diversion. She wasn’t going to say a word about that.
Cohl tried to relax, letting the Rock’s microgravity cushion her. She closed her eyes and tried to shut out the situation, to think back to less complicated times, when she had been just another trainee on Arches Base…
Even reveille sounded somber that morning.
It didn’t make any difference to Enduring Hope, who hadn’t slept anyhow. He had spent those last hours checking and rechecking everything he could think of, but the novel systems grafted onto these wretched greenships were about as integrated as a third arm growing out of his own back, and he knew that the paltry weeks of developments, trials, and modifications had not been enough.
What he was really scared of was that he might be responsible for the mission’s failure. He knew his crews felt the same. So they kept on working, right up until the moment the first flight crews began to arrive, trying to be absolutely sure that this mission wouldn’t screw up because of something they had missed.
At last the crews of the first wave arrived. And Pila was with them. As the flyers clambered out of their little transporter, Pila stood to one side and began making checks on a data desk she carried. Nobody approached her.
Everybody still found Pirius’s adjutant more than a little intimidating — this woman from Earth was cold, and strange. But her duties included such mundanity as ensuring that the crews had been served the breakfast they wanted, that the transports had been laid on correctly — a hundred tiny details to make sure that nothing got in the way of the crews doing their jobs. She carried out those duties with calm, invisible efficiency, and people had slowly granted her respect.
Everybody knew a Ghost was flying this mission. Hope was relieved that it didn’t show up this morning.
The crews, meanwhile, did what flight crews usually did. They allowed the techs to check over their suits, but ran double checks themselves — if you were flight, you never trusted ground crew with something like that. Some of them quizzed their engineers on the state of their ships, as if anything they could ask now would make a difference. Others indulged in various superstitions, such as walking around their ships, or kicking at their landing rails. One man vomited up his breakfast. A tech cleaned it up for him. The atmosphere remained tense, quiet.
Hope saw one stocky pilot pull open the front of his skinsuit to squirt a jet of urine over his ship’s landing rail.
“Pirius,” he called.
The pilot turned, his face shielded by his visor. “I’m Blue, by the way, to save you making a fool of yourself.”
“I knew it was one of you from the lumpy shape of your dick,” Hope said, walking over to him. “Where’s your clone?”
Pirius pointed. Another copy of Pirius, in his own skinsuit but with a commander’s red flashes on his shoulders, was working his way around the hangar, shaking hands, having a final word with his crews. “Red’s doing his job,” said Pirius Blue.
“Just what you’d do,” Hope said.
“I’m glad I don’t have to.”
“I bunked into the briefing. I heard Nilis speak.”
“Nilis, yes,” Blue said uncertainly. “What an oddball the man is. Red claims to understand him; I never will.” He regarded Hope. “I don’t think he gave us the truth about what he’s thinking, in that briefing.”
“The truth?”
“He has all these ideas about how Chandra is hosting antique life-forms, and if we were to keep on burrowing into it, we’d find more and more. He’s becoming fascinated with Chandra for its own sake, I think. Falling in love with the damn thing.”
“How does that help us destroy it?”
“It doesn’t,” Blue said. “You can’t control these Commissaries, though. We had better get the job done before he digs so far he comes up with a reason for us not to attack it in the first place.”
“Pirius—” I know how scared you are, he thought. But he could never say such a thing.
Blue held up his hand. “You know how it is. The fear goes away. I’ll be fine once I lift.”
“I won’t be, though,” Hope said fervently.
Pirius Blue grasped his hand briefly. “I wish you were flying with us.”
“Me too.”
“Just don’t steal my stuff until after I’ve lifted. Show some respect.” And with that, Blue turned and clambered up a short ladder to his cockpit.
It took only minutes for the crews to load themselves into their blisters. The last maintenance hatches were closed, the last bomb trolley withdrawn. The ground crew pulled out of the hangar floor.
The roof of the hangar cracked open, and the air vanished in a shiver of frost. The harsh blue light of the Galaxy’s heart flooded into the chamber, overwhelming the glow of the globe lamps that hovered around the ships.
Hope watched from the hangar’s observation area. Here was Marshal Kimmer, and Captain Marta, and the reserve crews who weren’t making this flight, and others like Tili Three who hadn’t made the grade, and many, many of this strange base’s child-soldier inhabitants, all come to see the launches. Hope suspected that the military types longed to be in those ships, as he did, rather than be stuck here watching them leave. But he wondered how many were here because, morbidly, they expected these crews not to return.