Gently, tenderly, Admiral Kusnetsov set the steaming teacup in front of his wayward niece as she sat in his dining room. "Thanks, Uncle." Svetlana said, stirring the drink before taking a sip. Georgy retrieved his own cup, then sat down beside Svetlana. It was almost dark out, and the day was just about done.
"So, how's the cleanup been?" he asked. Even in this cold, sweat glistened on Svetlana's brow, induced by the back-breaking labor that went into repairing a whole planet's infrastructure.
"It was fine. They dug up another house in Polorus today; sixteen bodies, all on the top floor. They must've seen the floodwaters coming and not realized how deep the valley was."
"I see. I hear that they're deploying the 21st Biotechnical Division to the planet. You know, the ones who oversaw the Chernobyl Decontamination?"
"I know, Uncle. Hopefully they can get a more permanent solution to the heating before..." she paused and gathered her thoughts. "...before winter sets in."
Georgy sensed that something was up. "What's wrong, Svetka?"
She didn't answer. That could only mean one thing.
"Oh, you can't keep blaming yourself for what happened. From what the Euros tell me, it wasn't you."
"Yes it was, Uncle. If what they say is true--and I'm still doubtful; I don't remember anything of the sort--then I'm on the hook for tens of thousands of deaths. Even if I'm not brought up on negligence charges or something else, I'll never recover from this. My career, my future, all ruined because of something that I didn't do."
"Do I really have to tell you the story of the Contact Wars again? The president of Russia was in the military when they first showed up on our radar screens. His idea of a 'show of force' to scare them off cost nearly a division's worth of men, and he still made the '36 election fair and square. I think they'll be more forgiving than that, even, if they know the circumstances."
"And what's to stop them from just writing me off? I could be a sleeper agent for all they know, for all I know, even."
"Well, that's for the psychologist to figure out. Speaking of, your next appointment is tomorrow." Georgy finished, getting up and going to his pantry. Svetlana looked over to see him topping off his tea with clear fluid from a bottle.
"Are you putting a Stolichnaya in your tea?" Svetlana asked, mildly concerned.
"Hey, it might be cliché, but it works. Not everybody can afford a fancy therapist."
"Uncle, you're a billionaire."
"And I like to live modestly." he chuckled slightly as he took a swig from his concoction. Even from here, the fumes made Svetlana's nose sting.
"Don't you have admiral things to do?" Svetlana asked idly.
"Well, I've been meaning to talk to you about this, but..." Georgy paused for a moment to figure out how to put it best. "Well... when President Leonov gave his speech and put CAST at war, the Russian Armed Forces was activated in its entirety. I still have about a week or so until the Astronavy has assembled enough forces in Polegate for me to take command, but I need you to know that the General Staff has informed me that they think you're too valuable to keep in a radar post. If you're ever reinstated, which I'm pretty sure is going to happen, you'll probably see combat. It's just something you need to know."
"Okay, Uncle. I'll... keep that in mind." Svetlana harbored no delusions that she would be let back into the force after the whole fiasco. No one in their right mind would even think about allowing a potential enemy agent of her rank to re-enter the military after a suspension. Sure, Russia didn't have the best military track record, but they could at least get that right.
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. Someone knocked at the door.
"I'll get it." Svetlana said, standing up and hurrying to the front of the house. When she opened the door, the German, Captain Hess, was back, shivering in the frigid outside air. He was wearing the Bundeswehr's cold-weather uniform, but a cold day in Berlin and a cold day in Novoarkhangelsk were two different animals.
"Hello, Lieutenant-Colonel." Johann saluted. He was taller than Svetlana, though not by much, and he seemed somewhat more like a command officer than a field one; Svetlana felt that she could beat him rather easily if they ever got into a fight.
"Hello, Captain. Please, do come in." Svetlana responded, holding the door for him as he entered. Georgy's face lit up as he saw the Captain enter the dining room.
"Ah, Captain Hess, the deliverer of documents and liberator of my niece. Sit down, sit down; surely, the pot still has some water."
Johann stifled a laugh as his translator worked through Georgy's words. Svetlana put her fist over her mouth, blushing with embarrassment. "Really didn't have to call him that, Uncle." she said. Johann collected himself, then poured some hot water from the teapot resting on the stove into his cup and looked around for a teabag.
"The green and Earl Grey are both by the stove, and I think we still have some mint in the pantry." Georgy said.
Johann quickly found a peppermint bag after that. "My favorite." he noted, plopping it into the teacup. Then, he sat down with the two.
"Tell me, what brings you here? Unified Combat Command normally doesn't send men just for tea and biscuits."
Svetlana noticed the considerable lag between Georgy's and Johann's sentences, as Johann's translator processed their speech. It was surprising that Georgy had managed to keep a natural conversation going despite the language barrier.
"It's regarding the Lieutenant-Colonel and her... incident. Now, I don't think that UCC is making the best of decisions here, but they no longer trust a civilian doctor to evaluate you, Svetlana. Namely, they believe that it's possible that your affliction is transmissible. Thus, they'll be assigning you to a military psychologist, and, by the precedent set out in EU Directive 114.A, stating that one must be in active duty to enjoy military medicine, you have been reactivated and placed into probationary service."
"That's great, Svetka!" Georgy exclaimed, patting Svetlana on the back. Svetlana was less enthused, but at least she could get back to work.
"What does that all entail?" she asked.
"Well, UCC will be keeping a close eye on you, and you'll be making regular visits to a combat shrink, but you'll be otherwise free to serve your duty as normal once they decide on a new assignment. On the other hand, however, if you are found to be mishandling documents, fraternizing with the enemy, or engaging in any other activity listed here--" he handed Svetlana a piece of paper, a list of dozens of actions, some more innocuous than others. "You will be detained under assumption that your affliction has converted you into a covert enemy agent."
Bureaucracy struck again. Judging by the dour look on Johann's face, he hated it just as much as Svetlana did, but Russia was in the EU, and thus had to deal with these things. Svetlana swallowed her annoyance and put on a happy face.
"Well, I'm glad that I'll be going back into the force. When do I report for duty?"
"Tomorrow at dawn, ma'am."
"And do you have anything else to do today?"
"No, ma'am."
"Well, how about you stay a little while longer? I'd hate for your tea to be wasted."
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
Johann weighed his options for a few seconds, then nodded. "That sounds like a plan."
---
Captain McCullough read through the combat dispatch from the Bactria in his office as he drank his morning coffee. It seemed rather close to after-action reports from the Contact War, the same ones he studied in the military academy at Annapolis, with one thing changed. The report made mention of a peculiarity, in that many of their weapons, namely those that relied on magnetic forces, proved completely ineffective against Poslushi combat vessels. Given the fact that System Patrol ships were armed almost entirely with rapid-firing coil cannons, it was no surprise that the Poslushi had demolished them during their first incursions into CAST space. However, the most powerful ship-to-ship weapon in CAST's (and the United States') arsenal, the guided missile barrage, remained unaffected, and despite heavy interception fire managed to destroy all three enemy vessels.
The Poslushi forces on the planet were decimated in the initial bombardment, but not defeated, as more troops crawled out of reinforced, concealed bunkers hidden all around the world. McCullough had complained multiple times to the Joint Chiefs that their idea of parking on the planet and not doing anything else wasn't going to work, and finally, they had yielded to his demands.
Burning out of orbit around the planet was a flotilla of transport aircraft carrying thousands of troops. Each ship was the size of an office building, bristling with defensive cannons and bearing engines so large that they had to turn them off and use their secondary turbines when coming in to land so that they didn't incinerate everything within three hundred meters.
With a start, McCullough was broken from his thoughts by the radar officer bursting through the door, panting.
"Didn't I tell you to knock before you entered?" McCullough said, mildly annoyed.
"Sir, the radar's just picked up a squadron of enemy aircraft en-route to intercept one of our transports. We've got six contacts."
"Where's the transport?"
"About three hundred kilometers to the south, sir."
McCullough quickly looked over the manual for the F-49 Stiletto in his head, which was required reading before he could board the carrier as captain. Three hundred kilometers was barely a dent in its operational range.
"Well then, send out six to meet them. Let's show these bastards that we can match what they can throw at us."
---
The adrenaline pumped through Spatha's dorsal vessels as the fighter screamed forth towards the enemy freighter. Normally, she would've been on thirty more patrol flights before she could move on to a combat deployment, but many of the experienced pilots of Omen's defense forces had perished in the initial bombardment, so they had to make do with Squires.
"Are you excited for your first kills, Spatha?" Greatsword, the Captain-General of the 101st Aerial Knights said over the comms.
"I can already feel my haemolymph rushing!" Spatha exclaimed triumphantly.
"Good, good! You'll be a fully-fledged Battlematron in no time! Then I'll have to answer to you, right?" Greatsword laughed.
It was rare that a Poslushi female was put into the military. Only one in thirty Poslushi were female, so most would go on to rear and raise their own broods to keep the species alive, but when Spatha was born, there was a surplus of them on her homeworld, so she was assigned as a Battlematron-in-training.
"Hopefully!" she replied. All the while, she was repeating to herself what she would say if she encountered an enemy aircraft.
"I am Spatha, a Poslushi of the Oxilini Brood. I do not have any kills to my name. I seek one to add to my tally or to become the tally of." she muttered rapidly.
The freighter came into view, a white, blocky contruct floating through the skies in great contrast to the smooth, pleasing curves and vibrant colors of Poslushi craft. Spatha exhaled in disgust at the crude machine before her, then did so again in delight at the idea of watching its broken form burn on the ground.
Then, her sensor display pinged and she looked over at it. One contact was coming in from the north. Then two, then three, until there were six total moving towards the squadron.
"Captain-General, we have contacts!" she yelled.
"I know. They've matched us one-to-one. It must mean that they want a duel!" Greatsword replied, banking off to the right. Spatha and the others followed suit, turning until they faced the aircraft head on. They weren't particularly close, seventy kilometers away, so Greatsword began his introduction to give him and his adversary time for preparation. The comms bleeped as they locked on to the enemy's communications feed.
"My name is Greatsword of the Rhokhan Brood. I have thirty-two kills to my name. I seek one to add to my tally or to become the tally of." Greatsword recited. Then, silence. The quiet went on for several tense seconds.
"I don't think they heard you, Captain-General!" Tachi, the pilot to Spatha's right, said.
"I guess so." then, he repeated his spiel. "My name is Greatsword of the Rhokhan Brood. I have thirty-two kills to my name. I seek one to add to my tally or to become--"
Tha-BOOM! Greatsword's comms went out in a squeal of static. Bewildered, Spatha looked over at her commander, only to see the burning remains of his aircraft plunging into the earth below.
"What in the Blessed Mother!?" Tachi screamed in dismay. Then, Spatha faintly saw an object in the distance, streaking towards them with a fiery contrail. She only realized what it was a second too late.
Tachi's aircraft was next to be struck, as the projectile burst in front of him, rupturing his fighter's skin. The inside of the cockpit lit up in a blazing conflagration as his fuel ignited. "AAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUU--" Tachi howled in terror and agony as the flames consumed him, only to be similarly cut off when his fighter impacted the terrain at four hundred meters a second.
POW-POW-POW. By some miracle, Spatha was spared, but at the expense of all around her, as she was suddenly alone. Instinctually, she veered upward, the projectile with her name on it steering with her just barely too slowly and detonating itself harmlessly. As she soared high up, she tried to compute what had just happened.
These animals had interrupted the sacred practices of the air duel, and had committed a massive violation of the Galactic Laws of War in doing so. Not only that, but they had interrupted it with some sort of self-guided weapon, an even more serious trespass of the Obsolescence Convention. With all of this, they had given a most ignominious end to one of the most venerable flying aces in the Aerial Knights, and disgraced several others. But Spatha was determined to uphold galactic values. No one could just flout the enshrined laws of decency and get away with it.
If there was one thing Spatha knew about humans, it was that they were fleshy, and thus fragile. In a maneuver that would leave a human splattered across their fighter's canopy, she flipped one-hundred and eighty degrees in less than a hundred meters and fired her engines at maximum thrust, descending towards the enemy as such speed that she could see re-entry plasma beginning to form on her wingtips. Quickly, she sighted their lead aircraft and opened fire, the quad-mount power cannons on her nose blasting forth a volley of purple beams. Instantly, the fighter was cut from the air, the pilot ejecting as their craft hit the ground and drifting down on a plume of cloth. Yet another crime; pilots died with their craft. She spun around, putting the rulebreaker in her sights--
But she had made a mistake, gotten too caught up in the action. BRRRT. The wingman to the stricken pilot opened fire with their thirty-millimeter chaingun, perforating Spatha's fighter. Blazing white pain burned through her whole body as a shell punched through her torso. Instantly, white blood poured down her airman's uniform and collected in the bottom of her cockpit. She knew she should do something, but all motivation was lost to cold apathy as blood loss set in. Instead, as her beloved plane came down to carve a trench into the earth, she slumped forward against her controls, closed her eyes, and drifted off to sleep.
"Hey! We've got a live one!" someone yelled. Spatha came to just barely enough to find herself staring into the oddly-colored eyes of a human in some sort of biological protection suit. "Curious; this one is larger than the norm. A female, maybe?" they said, their voice muffled and distorted by Spatha's half-fried brain. She tried to struggle, or scream, or do anything, but she was bound and some sort of muzzle had been placed over her mandibles.
"Oh, it appears that she's conscious. Stay calm. You'll be just fine..." the suited human said, but their words were incomprehensible, the sounds their mouths made unreproducible by the Poslushi tongue. Spatha's exoskeleton hurt all over, her thoracic shell all but shattered by the slug as it passed through her. The human leaned down, one hand bearing an injector of some sort, and gently inserted it into the chink in her shell where her thorax met her head before pressing down on its plunger. Spatha let out a stifled yell for help, then stopped moving altogether, her eyes fluttering shut once more as she was prepared for retrieval to the Bunker Hill.
---
"And you're saying that the operative was using some form of active camouflage to conceal themselves?" the ship's surgeon asked Darren as a robotic arm wove his gunshot wound back together. Darren winced as it reconnected a nerve.
"Yeah. It was really good, too; the guy was completely invisible until he started bleeding."
The surgeon scribbled this down on his clipboard. "Fits with what we've been hearing from the rest of your team. And after engaging with and killing this operative, you were attacked and rendered unconscious?"
"That's how I got shot, yeah."
"Well, if you're the one to have killed the man, I might as well shake your hand. You might've damaged the device, but what we're examining of it--and the rest of the recovered corpse--shows that the Chinese are playing with some serious stealth technology. You've done a wonder for our national security, Sergeant Hardwell."
"Thanks, doc." Darren said, smiling, then yelped with pain as another nerve was put back into place.
"Don't worry about the machine; from what it says, you'll only be in there for another five minutes or so. After that, you'll be on some painkillers for the next few days, and you'll be right as rain afterward." the surgeon said, bowing as he left the room. Pavlov squeezed past him as he did so.
"Got a care package for you in the last supply shipment." he said, brandishing a small cardboard box and setting it on Darren's bedside table. "You got a girl back home, Darren?"
"Oh, no, but my mom sends me one monthly, has since I enlisted. Something about watching out for her baby." Darren beamed as he opened the box and pulled out a tin of gummies. "You're the best, Mom." he said to no one in particular.