Admiral Judy “Ironsides” Ivans always made a point of reading the casualty reports.
She got people killed. Every battle, she made decisions—some of them mistakes—that ended lives. Perhaps there was an astral balance chart somewhere out there, kept in the stars by the ancient Saints, which weighed the Defiant lives she lost against the ones she saved.
If so, that scale had been greatly tipped by today’s battle. Two cadets were dead after barely a month of training in the cockpit. She read their names, tried to commit them to memory—though she knew she’d fail. There had just been so many.
She reverently set the list of names and short biographies on top of her desk. Two other pilots had died as well, and composing letters to their families would take a bite out of her evening, but she’d do it. To those families, the loss would take a bite out of their lives.
She was halfway done—writing by hand, instead of using a typewriter—when Cobb came to yell at her at last. She saw him reflected in the brass of the polished spyglass she kept on her desk. A relic from a much, much earlier time. He stopped in the doorway, and didn’t lay into her immediately, but let her finish her current letter. She signed it at the bottom, making a flourish with the fountain pen—a gesture that somehow seemed both necessary and ostentatious in such a letter.
“Are you happy, Judy?” he finally asked. “Now that you’ve gotten two of them killed, are you scudding happy?”
“I haven’t been happy in years, Cobb.” She turned her chair, leaning back and meeting his glare. She’d been anticipating, perhaps even relishing, his inevitable arrival. It was good she still had someone to defy her. Most everyone else who had done that was dead now.
He limped into the small room, which was piled high with papers, keepsakes, books—an embarrassingly messy office. Yet it was the only place she felt comfortable.
“You can’t keep doing this,” Cobb said. “First you lower the age of testing, now you send them into battle before they really know how to fly? You can’t keep firing on full auto while you simultaneously steal ammunition from the stores. Eventually you’re going to run out of bullets.”
“You’d rather I let Alta fall?”
He looked to the side, toward an old map she still kept on the wall. The glass was dusty with age and the paper inside had started to curl. It was a plan for Alta, from their development session almost a decade ago. They’d imagined a city with massive neighborhoods and large farms.
A fantasy. Reclaiming a dead world was harder work than they’d anticipated.
She pushed herself to her feet, the old captain’s chair creaking. “I will spend their lives, Cobb. I’ll eagerly put everyone in the DDF in danger, if it means protecting Alta.”
“At some point it stops being worth the losses, Judy.”
“Yes, and I happen to know when that point is.” She stepped up to him, holding his gaze. “It’s when the very last Defiant heaves their very last breath. Until then, we hold this base.”
If they lost Alta, then Igneous could be bombed from above—destroying the apparatus and humankind’s ability to build ships. If that happened, the Defiants would return to living in broken clans, like rats to be hunted.
They either stood their ground, or they gave up on ever becoming a true civilization again.
Finally, Cobb relented and turned to leave. From him, lack of complaint was agreement.
“I noticed,” Judy said, “that your little coward didn’t arrive at the battle until most of the fighting had already happened.”
He spun on her, practically snarling. “She lives in an unimproved cave, Judy. Alone. You realize that, don’t you? One of your pilots lives in a makeshift camp beyond the city limits because you refuse to give her a bunk.”
It was satisfying to see that anger in him. She worried he would burn out one of these days. He never had been the same, since the Battle of Alta.
“Do you know what the readouts are saying?” Judy asked. “The scans of her brain? Some of our doctors are certain they’ve figured out how to spot it now. I suppose I should thank you for that. Getting a chance to study Chaser’s daughter in flight might finally give me proof. She has the defect.”
That gave him pause. “We barely understand what it means,” he finally said. “And your doctors are biased. A few confusing events and some stories of the past aren’t enough to judge a girl’s entire life, particularly a girl so talented.”
“That’s the problem,” Judy said. She was surprised to hear Cobb argue, honestly. Many politicians denied the defect’s existence, but Cobb? He’d seen its effects personally. “As useful as this data is, I can’t risk letting her have a commission in the DDF. She would be nothing but a distraction and a blow to morale.”
“A distraction to you. maybe. A blow to your morale. The way you’re acting is a disgrace to the DDF.”
“For all intents and purposes, I am the DDF. Stars help us. There’s nobody else left.”
He glared at her. “I’m going to give the girl a personal radio. I won’t have one of my cadets outside my reach. Unless you would reconsider giving her a bunk.”
“If I make it too easy on her, she might decide to stay instead of doing the sensible thing and moving on.”
Cobb limped toward the door—he refused to use a cane, even after all these years—but paused again there, hand on the frame. “Do you ever wish one of the others had survived?” he asked. “Sousa. Nightingale. Strife. Admiral Heimline.”
“Anyone but me?” Judy asked.
“Basically.”
“I’m not sure I’d wish this command on them,” she said. “Not even the ones I hated.”
Cobb grunted, then disappeared into the hallway.
