At night, in bed, she tried to talk me out of entering the Zeta system.
“It’s suicide, Orion! They’ll blast us before we have a chance to blink our eyes. The system must have automated defense bases all around it, belts of them orbiting the star. They’ll be programmed to shoot the instant any unauthorized vessel pops out of superlight within range of their weapons.”
“We’ll send message capsules ahead,” I repeated each time she brought up the argument. “We’ll tell them exactly when and where we’ll appear.”
“Great! Then they’ll know exactly where and when to shoot!”
“Our mission is a peaceful one,” I said. “Surely the Hegemony can understand that one scout won’t be a threat to their capital.”
Frede huffed at me. “No, they’ll see it as an opportunity for target practice.”
Every night we came to the same deadlock. And every night I would end the matter by saying, “Lieutenant, the time for argument is finished. As your commanding officer, I order this discussion closed.”
Frede would grumble and give it up. Until the next night. We made love infrequently during that flight to Prime; it was difficult to work up any ardor when each of us was convinced that the other was being pigheaded.
And then, the night before we were scheduled to start sending out the message capsules, Frede told me what was really bothering her.
“You call out to Anya in your sleep, you know.”
She was undressing. I did not feel at all sleepy. I did not answer her.
“That’s the reason you want to go to Prime, isn’t it?” Frede asked me. “She’s there.”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“You’re willing to get us all killed, for her?”
“She can stop the war,” I said.
“Dogshit she can. Nobody can stop this war. It’s going to go on forever.”
“Is that what you want?”
“It’s the reason I’m alive, Orion. All of us mutts. Stop the war and they freeze us.”
“Continue the war and you’ll be killed, sooner or later.”
She ran a hand through her short-cropped hair. “Some choice, huh?”
“Maybe I can change things,” I said, not really believing it myself, but wanting to give her some glimmer of hope.
She smiled weakly at me. “You asked me what I wanted. I want you, Orion. I want to get off this damned dogshit of a life and run away and find some happy little world that the Commonwealth and the Hegemony have never even heard of and live a normal life there. With you.”
The look on her face. As if she expected to be hit. Cringing, almost. She had revealed herself to me knowing that there was nothing she could expect except to be hurt.
As gently as I could I took her in my arms and held her for a long, long silent time.
At last she disengaged a little and smiled up at me again. There were tears in her eyes. “Some soldier, huh? I ought to be popped back into a freezer and given a long course in discipline and loyalty, right?”
“You ought to be allowed to live a normal life,” I murmured.
“Yeah. Right.” She pushed entirely away from me and began to strip off her army brown undershirt. “Well, a normal life for us mutts is to follow orders, fight the enemy when we’re awake, train for the next fight when we’re in the freezer. Right?”
There was nothing that I could think of to say. As I watched, Frede stripped naked, stamped barefoot to the bunk and pulled down the top sheet.
“Well, I know my rights. I may be just a mutt, but I know my rights as a soldier. Get your gorgeous ass into bed, sir. It’s time for you to do your fucking duty.”
I made myself smile and say, “Aye, aye, sir.”
Next day the tension on the bridge was thick enough to chew on. We slowed out of superlight one last time, and Frede used the few seconds to snap panoramic views of the star fields around us. Once we were safely back in superlight, she checked our position, made a slight course correction and announced in a loud, brittle voice: