Blood And Fire
Aboard the Commonwealth Forces Ship Unbroken
Landing Pad 150, Commonwealth Forces Base New Seattle, Big Sky
9/14/2101, 0006.16 Zulu
"Ssssh," Lieutenant Commander Stephanie Rhoads whispers, putting her finger to her lips and pointing at the sleeping form of Unbroken's chief flight engineer laid out on the wardroom sofa.
Commander Jamilinne Sipe nods her head, as she climbs up the ladder on to the cruiser's middeck, taking off the long black armorjack duster, draping it over a chair , Stevie getting up, walking over to the coffeepot, taking Jami's Winnie the Pooh mug down from the cupboard just above it, filling it three-quarters of the way full of coffee, the rest of the way with hot chocolate mix and pop.
"Sweetie," Jami objects, as she sits down in the chair she's hung her jacket over,"I could've-"
Stevie replies simply by handing Jami the cup of coffee, kissing the top of her head, whispering,"your hair's a mess," Jami hearing the low whirr of a sonic probe at work, Stevie gently taking some of her wife's shoulder-length,virally-blonded hair in her hands, using the probe to comb it, shushing her when she starts to object again.
"Let me take care of you for a change, ‘kay, luv?" she whispers, continuing to comb Jami's hair as Unbroken's skipper sips her coffee, regarding Ariel Dixon's fitfully-sleeping form, smiling in spite of the day she'd had, about to ask Stevie how she's managed that, when Stevie told her:
"I almost had to carry her off that bloody bridge," she cocks her head towards the hatch at the bow end of the wardroom, adding,"poor girl was afraid I'd-"
"You blame her?" Jami asks.
"After what she's been through," Stevie replies," no, I can't...."
She sighs, repeating," I can't," half to herself.
"She had her laser pistol out,"her wife and second in command adds, a silence later,"pointed at nothing; my God, the look in her eyes, she was...lost."
"Like I was, baby," Jami whispers, smiling, reaching out to touch her wife's right arm.
"Like I was," she repeats, starting to cry," before you...."
She trails off, biting her lower lip, crying, Stevie whispering,"ssssshhhh," as she combs her hair.
Fort Gibson National Veteran's Cemetery
Commonwealth Highway 62, Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, Earth
9/14/2101, 0009.48 Zulu
"Hullo, luv," Angelique Gault says, as she stands in front of the grave marked ZZ 2947, a stone wall separating it from the rush of traffic hurtling along the ten lanes of the old Shawnee Bypass.
Elli's grave.
The President of the Commonwealth sighs, knowing the woman she adopted as her daughter, her niece's wife, is or was doing much the same thing eleven-odd light years away, blaming herself for the death of Angelique and Rebekah's oldest daughter and the 3,500 Petro terraformers she couldn't save that day nineteen years ago.
Of course, she remarks bitterly to herself, they weren't really terraformers, but jackbooted stormtroopers stockpiling weapons of terror and mass destruction, as they attempted to skew the elections on planet in their favor, and the Commonwealth Forces happened to have twenty fleets in the bloody system to help that process along...YouTube said so, and YouTube's by the people for the people, so it can't possibly lie, now can it?
Another sigh, this one more forceful, Angelique staring up at the painfully blue Oklahoma sky...two days ago was the tenth anniversary of the Tau Ceti Accords and of the bloodbath immediately proceeding that, fifty-seven billion dead on both effing sides....
Which reminds her...Angelique moves down row Double Zed, towards 4049, stopping to face another marker.
Her niece, Stephanie's twin sister, commander of the old Arky, before she'd been shot down over Clavileno in the closing hours of Bloody Tau Ceti, taking the Yanker battlecruiser Iwo Jima and most of the enemy's 101st Fleet with her in the process, but still....
Micki had been by the house earlier, Angelique and she chatting 'til an hour ago, when she left to drive to Muskogee Starport.
Petro has Wanderer heading for Tallgeese, and, from there, to the Angel Halo, the accumulated nova shells at Cor Caroli's heliosphere, a container ship passing through there yesterday having picked up readings unusual even for the Halo, and home office, on Titan, thinks it's worth Micki's scout taking a looksee.
Ten years, and losing Cat still hurts like hell for her.
Angelique understands that only too well.
She looks up into the sky again, at the fires sprialling their way towards Muskogee Starport...Rebekah's due home any time, she's been at Mars Command since early this morning, meeting with the rest of the Military Operations Staff, and the only time Angelique's seen her all day has been when the MOS were online with Parliament earlier today, discussing their options in regards Twice-Born and the intelligence Unbroken and the Red Cross medships had brought back from there.
She's arriving by warpfighter, the Commonwealth flaghsip, the battle cruiser Astrolabe, remaining at Muskogee Spacedock, fully manned and alerted, while she travels between here and Mars.
A squadron of Raptors scream by overhead, maintaining a ladder formation as they rocket past at 200 meters per second per second...whatever her people's final decision concerning Twice-Born, Earth is preparing for the war the mad dog Guy Zellner will bring to her doorstep...no one here questions that, the murdering pederast has made his intentions entirely too clear in the past almost two decades he's ruled his fellow troglodytes, clearer than all the trogs what had come before him.
Than even RJ Williams and the bloody WARCOM what had come before them, and they'd damn near wiped out the human race in their fevered dreams of manifest destiny...they would've succeeded, if the Confederation of Two Races and the First Colonies hadn't spilled so much of their own blood driving them from Earth, if the Russians and the Chinese hadn't sacrificed themselves to buy Titan, New Europos and the other First Colonies the time they'd so desperately needed to fight WARCOM and win.
All so a man more than capable, more than willing, to murder the innocent and the lovely, could hang the threat of slow death over the heads of all her people sixty-five years after the end of the Eleven-Day War.
The sky wavers and swims in the Commonwealth President's field of vision, Angelique sighing one final time, dryswallowing, before looking back at Cat's grave, absently nodding her head, before she turns and walks back towards her aerodyne.
In the cockpit of Commonwealth Forces Ship Sky Dancer
Lunar L5 point, 500,000 kilometers from Earth
9/14/2101, 0012.06 Zulu
The same names echo in her ears for the umpteenth time, as Admiral Rebekah Lee Tilghmann, Chief of Military Operations of the Commonwealth Forces, drifts through the Kordylewski Cloud less than a hundred meters from a simple warp transceiver coupled to a maneuver jet and a guidance computer which keep it stationed at the precise point between Earth and Luna once occupied by the long-extinct Russo-Chinese Alliance's sole orbital colony.
The housing is a dodecahedron of gold foil, each of its twelve sides bearing a star-shaped plaque of anodized steel, the simple inscription:
JOHN 15:13
in all eight of the Commonwealth's official languages, as well as in Japanese, Russian, Mandarin, and Cantonese, a cross with a rose engraved in the metal below the star plaque which faces Earth, Rebekah having learned in school that this had been a symbol of the old Marist Order, the rose and cross together symbolizing pain, sacrifice and, either triumph or resurrection, depending on what one chose to believe.
Rebekah finds the idea of resurrection especially ironic, with the descendants of WARCOM howling at the gates of her Commonwealth, ten years after the last time they'd tried destroying her people, sixty-five years almost to the day since RJ Williams and his thugs had damn near killed all of them during the Eleven-Day War.
Memorial Week's not even half way over with, she thinks to herself, listening as the recent additions to the War Memorial's list of names drone over her Link's headset, the nearly half trillion people who died during 9YW, including the 3,500 Petro terraformers buried in Happy Valley.
And, her oldest daughter, killed before she'd even had the chance to fight back, her number one blaming herself even now for that, same as she'd blamed herself for all the others whose blood those miserable Yanker trogs and the pederast who they kept in their Governor's Mansion had spilled for no other reason than they could....
She hears her niece's name as well...the last ten years without Cat have been especially hard on Micki, time stopping for her the day the Ark Royal had been shot out of the sky over Clavileno.
She doesn't muse on that bitter irony...no time, not with war in the immediate future, and God above only knew what lay beyond that.
Naiad's waiting for her.
For now, that's the most important thing Rebekah can think of.
Nodding her head, sniffling away tears, the Commonwealth's Chief of Military Operations brings Sky Dancer's warp engine back online, turning the Mark IIB Raptor warpfighter's nose towards home.
"...so, you like girls, huh?!" she says, as she leers at Jami-stripped down to nothing but a pair of panties-as she huddles up in the furthest corner of the quiet room, knees to her chin, watching as Heather takes off her housecoat, straps on her dildo, and grabs the stoned-up out of her head twelve-year old girl by her hair, shoving the frickin' thing down her throat, chuckling as she told what a stupid effing b-
Stevie busts Heather right in its gob, tearing her away from Jami, before she takes the frightened, trembling girl in her arms, rocking her gently, the whole time....
Aboard the Commonwealth Forces Ship Unbroken
Landing Pad 150, Commonwealth Forces Base New Seattle, Big Sky
9/14/2101, 0424.21 Zulu
...whispering it was okay, she was here, now, Stevie's got her.
She always would.
Jami's sobbing against her breasts, and Stevie whispers that she's nothing to be sorry about, not one bloody thing, as she strokes her shoulder-length, straight virally-blonded hair...human telepaths are a rare enough mutation, starting from the darkest days of WARCOM and gradually growing in numbers over the past six and a half decades, the gene for it cropping up exclusively in female DNA, no one knows why.
The how's simple enough...even in the twentieth, scientists had known certain strong emotions released certain phermones-how animals and some humans could "smell" fear, for example...in telepaths, thoughts and emotions were released as phermones, though it seemed only other women were receptive to them...even the Commonwealth's scientists still don't know enough about telepathic abilities to make anything more than educated guesses concerning them.
Stevie, on the other hand, doesn't need to question...she's been this way all her life, just as she'd breathed all her life, and when Jami and she had made love for the first time, they'd come together, body and soul.
That's all she's ever needed to know, cos it's the only thing which matters a damn.
Her only true love trembles against her, whispering in a shaking voice," Baby, it ain't right, just ain't right, m-me always keep dragging you into m-my-"
"Bosh," Stevie whispers, kissing the top of her head, the two of them snuggling even closer against one another, as they lay side by side, intertwined on Jami's bed, Winnie the Pooh glowing softly on the night table, smiling as he reached into his honey pot...Jami has a million of them, from the shabby creature sitting on the workstation chair with its right eye missing and its left ear hanging on literally by a thread to the gargantuan Pooh sitting between the night table and the bed, cradling a smaller Pooh in its stuffed arms...
There's even one, in fourteen-karat gold, hanging from the stainless steel chain holding her gravemarkers and wedding ring-a simple band of stainless steel, a single blue sapphire gem set into it-as they depend from her neck, cool against her wife's skin...a birthday present, Stevie had found it in a shop on Valdezport, when Unbroken had been on patrol in the Kaus Australis system about eight years ago.
Stevie knows what all those Poohs(especially the shabby one)mean to her wife....
"...' get in there!" Daddy screams, hurling Jami-not wearing a damn thing but bleeding welts all over her body-into the cold tomb which is now her bedroom, the thirteen year old girl hitting the bare ferrocrete floor-he's had the carpeting taken out-hard, the door slamming shut and locking behind her as all she can do was sob like a goddamn little baby.
That wasn't-
Through the tears in her eyes, she swore she'd seen...wedged between the headboard and the wall, where Daddy would never have thought to look, Jami tearing Pooh Bear free and clutching him tightly against her....
...it's only the madness of the north wind what drives her to collect all those bears.
Stevie shivers, the toes of Jami's left foot raising goosepimples as it brushes ever so slightly against the skin of Stevie's right leg, itself moving slowly, gently, over the inner skin of her wife's right leg, round to the back of her knee and calf and sole of her foot.
She's gone back to sleep now, her snoring echoing off the bulkheads of her quarters.
"Good," Stevie whispers, kissing the top of her head again, as she cradles it against her breasts.
"Good," she repeats.
Tilghmann-Gault House
31048 E. 687 Road, Wagoner , Oklahoma, Earth
9/14/2101, 0432.16 Zulu
"...information which clearly shows the Yankers, far from keeping the peace between the A Fags and the Loyal Twits," Irma DeLong's holo says, as it lights up the otherwise dark living room,"are in league with them and against the people of Twice-Born."
"Which," the Commonwealth's most well-known blogger comments,"should really come as no surprise to anyone with half a friggin' brain."
"Which," she adds, after a drink from her ever-present glass of ice water,"apparentally leaves out those on YouTube's Media Committee, who have this to say about the civil war on TB:"
The cam dissolves to a view of Elizabeth Haas, uncomfortably crossing and uncrossing legs virtually left uncovered by her short skirt.
The dissolve catches her in mid-sentence:
"...began when actor David James Knight, the star of the popular military reality series JAG and mayor of Telfair, was illegally installed as President of Twice-Born by the Conspiracy during the recall elections five years ago, the zeds aiding Knight in spite of allegations that he sexually abused at least thirty women, including Catherine Bennett, his JAG co-star."
"Your pop, my dear," Rebekah says to Angelique, handing her her glass of cold Diet Doctor Pepper, before sitting back down next to her on the overplush couch.
"Thanks, luv," Angelique whispers, kissing Rebekah's cheek, before turning her attention back to the HV:
"The controversy, as our viewers may recall, stemmed from contested electoral votes from Knight's own constituency, which forced election officials within the city to manually recount those votes immediately after the incumbent President, Arnold Black, was declared the winner by the Twice-Born Ministry of State; however, Telfair's own superintendent of elections and Knight's campaign manager, Kate Harris, stopped the recount barely three days into the process, claiming that preponderance of electoral votes was in Knight's favor, a decision which was immediately appealed by President Black to the Twice-Born Supreme Court in Zellnersboro, where the decision was made to uphold Harris' ruling, by a vote of 12-11, the deciding vote being cast by then-Justice Ruthann Ginsberg, a zed activist with ties to such iconic Conspiracy organizations as M-POWER, the Lambda Group and even to the Commonwealth's State Security Buerau; she also wrote the majority opinion on that decision."
"Did you know we had a State Security Buerau, Naiad?" Rebekah remarks, a well-worn joke reassuring Angelique with its familiarity.
"News to me," Angelique replies, giving Rebekah's hand a gentle squeeze, both of them watching Haas continuing to shift her miniskirt with the constant crossing and uncrossing of her legs, the YouTube anchor continuing:
"Of the eleven other justices ruling in the majority, at least eight of them also have ties to various offworld organizations linked by the TSID to the Conspiracy, with one of the other three justices, Marianne O'Dell, seen by several eyewitnesses days before the ruling which plunged an entire world into five bloody years of civil war, quote,' walking arm in arm,' unquote, through the halls of the Supreme Court Building with the former Commonwealth ambassador to Twice-Born, Cynthea Pollock-"
"-who's been missing," Irma says, breaking off every word,"since the shooting started on that miserable slushball five years ago."
"Off," Rebekah whispers, the living room now dark except for the stars in the sky outside the bay window, Angelique leaning against her wife, snuggling up against her, Rebekah giving her a gentle squeeze, as she holds her, kissing her gently at the base of her neck, mumurring,"your hair smells nice, Naiad."
Angelique chuckles...Rebekah's always called her Naiad, cos she's Cor Leonis, born and raised...all her people are naturally adapted to life on the surface and under water, a condition arising from her homeworld's pelagic nature.
She shivers slightly, Rebekah kissing the base of her neck again, blowing on it, Angelique chuckling a second time.
"Whaaatttt?" Rebekah whispers playfully, tickling her ear with each soft word.
"Y'like?" she asks, tracing the outline of her wife's right ear.
"Yeah," Angelique whispers breathily, before turning to take Rebekah in her arms, the two of them lying in a tangle on the sofa.
Aboard the Commonwealth Forces Ship Unbroken
Landing Pad 150, Commonwealth Forces Base New Seattle, Big Sky
9/14/2101, 0424.21 Zulu
She gently brushes strands of curly auburn hair from Stevie's face, kissing her softly on her forehead.
Stevie murmurrs in her sleep, smiling, Jami smoothing the covers over her sleeping form, as she thinks to herself, good.
Glad I can make her smile sometimes, she adds, sighing, as she sits down in the workstation chair, taking the thick book of poetry Stevie had bought her ages ago, leafing through it.
She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror on the corner between the foot of the bed and the door of her quarters, and, she surprises herself by not looking away.
Was it that long ago, she wonders, looking back at Stevie, snoring loud enough to wake the dead, when I couldn't even stand to look at myself naked in the bathroom mirror?
She smiles, as she watches her sleeping wife.
Is that what you've done to me, baby, she asks, sniffling, a line from an old song coming to mind:
"Can't you see, can't you see? What that woman, Lord, she been doin' to me...."
Jami finds herself singing that, softly enough so as not wake Stevie up, realizing she doesn't know any of the song except that line, the captain of the Unbroken chuckling to herself, shaking her head, as she turns her attention back to her book of poetry.
-endit-
