Bessany’s mouth twitched, halfway between a smile and a grimace. The night skies above Thule were spectacular, and not just because of the seventeen moons that sailed across the planet’s heavens like ancient galleons going to war. There was an immense amount of debris in the Thule star system, which made for spectacular meteor showers on clear nights.
Meteors weren’t the only spectacular thing on Thule, either. Ferocious summer thunderstorms produced appalling quantities of lightning, sparking fires in grasslands and forests if too little rain fell along the edge of the storm system to quench the flames. Bessany would never forget the storm that had caught her three days’ hike from the station, when Sooleawa and Chilaili had nearly been killed right before her astonished eyes. The very last thing she’d expected to stumble across was a sentient species, much less two of its members in near-fatal trouble.
Alison Collingwood, the station’s biochemist, asked quietly, “Do you think anyone’s going to answer your messages?”
Bessany pushed back her long hair with a frustrated sigh. “I wish I knew. I’m not even sure any of my reports have even been seen. The Ministry of Mineral Resources hasn’t responded at all. Not even with a routine ‘report in message queue’ reply. The Ministry of Xenology should have been really interested, but they haven’t answered, either. The only thing that makes sense is budget-conscious bean counters refusing to foot the bill for an answering message.”
Elin made a rude noise. “Given the outcome of the last elections, I’m surprised there’s still a budget to keep us going.”
Alison’s lips twitched. “The cost cutters haven’t pulled the plug because it would take more to ship us back home than to leave us out here. And you’re probably right, Bessany. Communications techs who have to justify every teensy expense won’t send expensive SWIFT messages to a world as far on the edge of space as Thule is, not without a really critical reason. I guess the Tersae aren’t critical enough, huh?” A bitter silence fell as everyone reflected on the cost of that particular bureaucratic blunder. Open warfare on every human colony not socked in by this blizzard. Hundreds—maybe thousands—dead. A feeling of near hopelessness swept through Bessany, closing her throat and stinging her eyes.
Herve cleared his throat in the stricken silence. “Well, we have the comfort of knowing that has changed. Thule is at the top of the military’s list of worlds to protect, Deng War notwithstanding. Speaking of which . . . isn’t your brother-in-law in the military, Bessany?”
“Oh, yes. Third Dinochrome Brigade.”
He wasn’t answering her messages, either.
Of course, she and Lieutenant Colonel John Weyman were hardly on speaking terms.
She rubbed her temples, trying to soothe the beginnings of a ragged headache. Bessany had stupidly ignored his warning not to marry Alexander Weyman in the first place. Then she’d refused to answer any of her brother-in-law’s messages in the aftermath of her husband’s messy and very public suicide.
Sending a message—any message—to John Weyman had been one of the hardest things she’d ever done. Right up there with facing the endless sea of news cameras after the shattering dissolution of her marriage. Given her own track record, she could hardly blame him for not returning her messages, but it was distressing, nonetheless. Even if the reply was short and obscene, she’d expected him to say something about those incendiary reports of hers.
Yeah, well, he’s assigned to the Dinochrome Brigade, which means he’s probably at the front lines of the Deng War. Which is damned well where he belongs. Where he’s happiest, God pity him . . .
She was about to ask Ed Parker if he could give them an educated guess on the blizzard’s duration when an eerie sound brought the fine hairs at the nape of her neck starkly erect. “What’s that noise?” she frowned, staring at the far plascrete wall, since it seemed to be coming from that direction. Her headache throbbed with a dull and distant warning. At that same instant, an alarm began to shriek from the weather station in the corner of the rec room.
Ed Parker blanched—a terrifying sight—and scrambled for the computer terminal which displayed weather conditions around the clock, for everyone’s benefit. Parker rattled keys, scrolling through data screens, then stared in open horror. “Oh, my God . . .”
“What is it?” Bessany demanded, coming to her feet as real fright began to take hold. The noise—a low-pitched moaning roar—was getting louder. Much louder.
“Everybody down!” Parker yelled, throwing himself prone. “We’ve got a force five tornado bearing down on us—and I don’t think it’s going to miss!”
Chairs crashed. Bessany hit the floor, sliding frantically toward a doorway as a fragment of long-ago disaster training flashed through her mind. Doorways are more stable when buildings collapse. Aren’t they? And hard on the heels of that thought, Since when do blizzards spawn force five tornadoes? Don’t tornadoes form during collisions of warm-air fronts? Ed Parker’s assessment of Thule’s weather—amazing—was no longer even remotely funny. The tornado’s monstrous roar rose to a scream . . .
Then the world shattered around her.
Chapter Five
Alessandra DiMario leaned against the wall of the cargo lift and shook.
I’ve got no business going back into combat, she told herself bitterly, unsure whether to rage more at herself or at the officers who’d decided to jerk her out of a hospital ship and send her back into the trenches against the Deng. She’d already lost one Bolo, literally destroyed around her ears, a death she blamed squarely on herself. It had nearly destroyed her, just listening to Danny die, knowing it was her fault, her decision, her responsibility. She’d lain trapped in the smoking ruins for nearly two days, while the tide of battle raged back and forth across ground Unit DNY had died trying to take.
Even after the battle ended in a resounding human victory, it had taken combat engineers hours to extract her from the shattered war hull. They’d shipped her off-world to a mobile combat treatment center, where surgeons had repaired the physical damage and combat psychiatrists had gone to work on the emotional wreckage. But the damned, hairy horrors they were fighting wouldn’t wait for time or tide or one battered officer’s mental state. So here she was, on her way back to combat, with a Bolo so old, the psychotronic engineers refurbishing him had been forced to fabricate parts just to splice in the new systems.
And dammit, her new unit had been right to call her onto the carpet. She’d been unforgivably rude and she knew it.
But the crawling sickness in her gut wouldn’t go away and the realization that she’d be facing the guns of Yavac Heavies again with a Bolo so ancient, he still had flintsteel in his war hull, instead of duralloy, left her with a desperate case of the shakes. Oh, God, she groaned, trembling against the wall of the cargo lift, I’m in trouble, we’re all in trouble. . . .
She ought to march straight into her commander’s quarters and lay it on the table: “I’m not fit for command, sir. And you and I both know it.”
The trouble was, with the Deng hammering human worlds along the incredibly long front they’d hit this time, she was pretty much all that was available. And they both knew that, too. Somehow, she had to pull it together. The lift was slowing for the level her quarters occupied when the alert sounded, a signal piped shipwide that meant, “Bolo commanders, assemble in the wardroom, stat.” Alessandra gulped and slapped controls that would send the lift another three decks higher. What’s happened now? she wondered grimly.
Three minutes later, she strode into the CSS Cheslav’s wardroom, the last on-board Bolo commander to arrive. “Sorry,” she said, slightly out of breath from the run down the corridor, “I was in the cargo bay lift when the alert sounded. Took me seventeen decks and a midships bounce to get here.”
Colonel Tischler nodded and she slid into the nearest seat.
“Sixty-three minutes from now,” Tischler said quietly, “this transport will be dropping out of hyper-L to rendezvous with a combat courier ship. We’ve received an urgent request from Sector Command to divert a portion of this command to a place called Thule.” He turned and activated a viewscreen which flashed up a star chart of the sector. “Three months ago, ten colonies of miners were dispatched to secure rich saganium deposits critical to military navigation systems. Thule was declared devoid of sentient life by the planetary scouts who first discovered the saganium. They were wrong. The colonists have been hit hard by a sentient, native life-form and the mines—and several thousand miners and their families—are now at risk of total destruction.”
Alessandra frowned. “How in the world could planetary scouts miss a sentient species?”
“That’s one of many questions we want answered,” the colonel said grimly. “One of the others is where a species that apparently exists on a stone-age cultural level got its claws on energy rifles and fusion bombs. Unless the stuff was left lying around where these birds could find it—which isn’t very likely—then something has to be supplying and training them. I’d like to know what.”