His gaze swept the room. “Alpha and Beta are to go to the sleep machines and get an hour of sleep,” he ordered. “The remainder are to wait in the squadron rooms, catching more normal naps if you can, apart from Gamma. You” — he looked at the Gamma pilots — “will relieve the CSP for an hour. Any questions?”
North raised a hand. “Why don’t we all go into the sleep machines?”
Kurt glowered at him. “As was explained to you at the Academy, and I was there so I know it was explained to you, sleep machines can have unpleasant effects if the user is yanked out of them early,” he said. “Blinding headaches are among the more pleasant side effects. If you don’t believe me, you can try yourself when we’re heading back to Earth. Until then, do as I bloody tell you.”
He caught his breath, annoyed at himself. He was tired and stressed, but that as no excuse for shouting at his subordinates. It just made him sound like Captain Bligh.
“The sleep machines may keep the pilots out of combat,” he added, lowering his tone. “I would prefer not to lose more pilots to sleep than strictly necessary.”
He looked from face to face, then sighed again. “Dismissed!”
Rose waited for the room to empty, then walked up and gave him a hug, more of compassion than lust. Kurt relaxed into it for a long moment… and then remembered where they were.
“We can’t hug here,” he said, pulling himself away from her. “Not here!”
“Pity,” Rose said. She gave him a daredevil smile. “You want to do it on that sofa over there?”
“Rose!”
Rose giggled. “You should have seen your face,” she said, as she stepped backwards. “I was very insulted at your refusal.”
Kurt blinked, then realised he was being teased. “I don’t think it’s funny, particularly now,” he said. “They’re going to have to come to terms with reconfiguring the squadrons sooner or later, sadly. They don’t need more shocks.”
“We are not quite within the forbidden zone any longer,” Rose pointed out. “And it isn’t as if you treat me any differently when others are around.”
“Not quite,” Kurt said. He wondered, absently just how well that argument would hold up in front of a court martial board, then decided he didn’t want to find out. “Besides, we both need to sleep. And I do mean sleep.”
Rose nodded, then slipped out of the compartment.
After a long moment, Kurt followed her.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“You know,” Henry said, “we could go for shore leave.”
North gave him the finger. “On an alien world?”
Henry had to admit it sounded stupid, but there was something about the idea of an alien world that drew him to it. As Prince Henry, he had travelled the world, but never as a true tourist. He’d always had to make speeches, impress the locals and generally sell Britain to them as a prospective partner for… well, whatever. Not that it had been a fun job, he remembered, bitterly. Very few nationalistic world leaders or hard-headed corporate CEOs would be flattered by the arrival of a member of the Royal Family. But if he’d gone down to Target One, it would have been a visit to somewhere new in his own right.
North snorted. “I dare you to suggest that to the CAG,” he said. “He’ll probably boot you out the airlock and tell the Captain that you were too dumb to make sure it was rigged as a decompression chamber before you stepped inside.”
Henry shuddered, remembering decompression training. It hadn’t been a pleasant experience — and it had all hedged on being close to emergency equipment. “If you don’t have equipment within reach,” the instructors had said, “take one last gasp for breath, then bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.”
“Maybe they’d start using it as a punishment again,” Tammie said. The dark-skinned pilot rolled over on the sofa and looked up at them. “You’re certainly stupid enough to deserve it.”
“Nah, too much effort,” North said. “He’d just boot Charlie-Boy out the nearest airlock. It’s tradition.”
Henry snorted, remembering his history lessons. Some of the first independent settlers, either on the moon or on various asteroids, had used near-fatal decompression as a punishment for anything they thought didn’t merit the death sentence. It was banned under British Law, but half of the lunar settlements and most of the independent asteroids hadn’t signed any of the international conventions. Henry couldn’t help wondering why anyone would want to live in such a regime, yet he had to admit it had its advantages. Reporters who probed into private asteroids — where people could live completely anonymously — were stripped naked, drugged and forced to surrender their secrets. He knew it should horrify him, but reporters were the lowest form of life in the known universe.
“I hate the pair of you,” he said. Two days of switching between sleep, combat space patrol and waiting in the ready room for something to happen had left scars on all of them. But at least they’d managed to catch up with their sleep. “It was just a thought.”
“Sure,” Tammie said. She sat upright and stretched. Henry hastily looked away from her unbuttoned jacket. “It was a stupid thought. S-T-U-P-I-D.”
“I generally leave spelling to witches,” Henry said. “No wonder you’re so good at it.”
“There’s a squadron in Russia called the Night Witches,” Tammie reminded him, without taking offence. “They’re all women.”
“Yeah,” North said. “Weren’t they the ones that released that porn movie?”
“That was a fake,” Tammie sneered. “And if it hadn’t come out of Sin City, I’m sure the Russians would have sued for every penny they could get.”
Henry nodded. A lot of things, mostly thoroughly illegal, came out of Sin City. A video showing twelve beautiful girls cavorting in a fake starfighter cockpit was surprisingly tame, compared to some of their other exports. And it had probably done wonders for recruitment; he’d watched it himself, long before he’d set his heart on flying a starfighter. Plenty of other would-be pilots had done the same thing.
North smirked. “I’m sure the Russians loved the publicity…”
“I’m going for a walk,” Henry said, before their argument could get out of hand. He’d sometimes wondered if North and Tammie were attracted to one another, despite regulations forbidding any form of intimate relationship between pilots. “You two have fun, now.”
“Take your communicator,” Tammie called after him. “You don’t want to be caught without it.”
Henry nodded and checked he was still carrying the device on his wrist. If there was an emergency order to scramble — which seemed unlikely, but one never knew — he’d be in deep shit if he was caught without it. If he had to run back to the launching tubes… well, if the aliens didn’t kill him the Wing Commander would have a damn good try. He stepped through a pair of closed hatches — with the entire ship on alert, airlocks had been closed throughout the ship — and walked up towards the observation blister. Somehow, he wasn’t surprised when he stepped through the hatch and saw Janelle sitting inside the blister, staring at the blue-green orb of Target One.
“We’re going to have to come up with a better name for the world,” he said, as he closed the hatch. The welcoming smile Janelle gave him made his heart spin in his chest. “Target One sounds so… awkward.”
“Most worlds have a name in their own language,” Janelle pointed out, as she rose to her feet and gave him a quick hug. It was a gesture of true physical affection, Henry realised. In a way, he knew he would treasure it more than any of the more intimate activities he’d indulged in over the years, because it was honest and freely offered. “We just stick with the English versions for interstellar communications.”