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  They could not return fire until the ships landed, which of course they didn’t have to. In theory, they could just start up there and stay up there until everything was destroyed. But she knew the Arkana, and she knew that wasn’t likely. There had to be something here that they wanted, and not just to destroy it. They’d come down here to get it.

  If only she knew what it was.

  From under the heavy overhang of the building, Andy stared up at the glowing objects as they grew larger. She was almost crossing her fingers that they would keep coming on until they were on the ground. None of her Marines could take a shot unless they got closer, but even then, their weapons weren’t ideal against the ships. Not that it would stop them from trying, of course, but the shuttles had to get a little closer.

  Are you coming down here or not? Andy thought hotly, feeling her temper rise faster and higher than she was used to it doing.

  As if answering her, the glowing balls got larger and larger until she could make out the white metal of an Arkana shuttle. Then closer and closer still.

  “Get ready!” she shouted. “They’re landing!”

  8

  As soon as the pale white ships touched down, the ramps dropped and disgorged their snow-colored soldiers. The Marines certainly didn’t give them any time to get their bearings, or too many of their boots on the ground, before they opened fire. From all angles where Marines were planted in their defensive perimeter, gunfire shot off and slammed into the enemy soldiers and their craft. Not that the bullets were much use against the shuttles, but they took down several soldiers.

  “These guys sure know how to ruin a good vacation,” Dan shouted over the noise, balancing that line between true anger and dry humor. It was a high-wire act that he was skilled at.

  “Good manners isn’t high on the list of Arkana training,” Anath shouted back. “I suggested it, but my father is notoriously stubborn.”

  “I think we’ve all learned that,” Andy called.

  If there was one sure way to make her blood pressure spike beyond the usual being-shot-at moments of combat, it was bringing up her father. She knew that staying cool under pressure was difficult, as was grace under fire, but thinking about that evil bastard who had somehow fathered her made her want to tear people apart with her bare hands.

  By this point, the second wave of soldiers coming out of the enemy ships had moved into more defensible formations, using the first wave as not-so-glorified cannon fodder to cover their movements. With both sides positioned behind buildings and other manners of cover, it was an old-fashioned shootout.

  Andy kept an eye on the sky, waiting to see if any more Arkana vessels would be landing.

  Fortunately, none did.

  The battle was, in a word, anti-climactic.

  The leg up that the Marines had simply by being on the planet when the shuttles descended allowed them to hold out without as much trouble as other locales. The Arkana shot at them for a while, and they shot back until those left alive made a retreat for their shuttles, and took off.

  Andy watched the shuttles ascend with an almost confused frown.

  What had just happened?

  “I’m certainly glad that the evacuation plans weren’t needed,” the chairwoman said to Andy, some ten minutes after the last Arkana shuttle had taken off, when they were checking over the casualties. She didn’t sound particularly relieved, but it was really too soon for the tension to have dissipated.

  “Yeah,” Andy agreed, although her brain was still stuck on how strange it all had been.

  The Arkana never committed that sort of force without a purpose, and they rarely gave up. When they did retreat, it was never that fast. This was very atypical behavior, and it bothered Andy to no end. She was barely listening to the chairwoman, as well as the reports coming from her squad leaders over her earpiece.

  “—you, Major.”

  Andy blinked and looked back at the chairwoman. “I’m sorry,” Andy apologized with a faint smile. “I have communications coming in so I didn’t hear what you said.”

  “I said thank you. We haven’t had any citizen casualties in the city.” She managed a smile just as a young man ran up and whispered in her ear. Frowning, she gestured ‘excuse me a moment’ to Andy and then hurried off with the young man back into the building, leaving Andy on the street.

  Roxanna walked up and nodded at Andy. “Major,” she greeted. “Several injuries and a couple of them bad, but no Marine casualties.”

  “That’s good news,” Andy said.

  “Then why don’t you seem relieved, sir?”

  The major laughed softly. Sometimes having a Selerid as a sergeant was trouble. “It’s just not right. There was something weird about this attack, but I don’t have the first idea as to what it is.”

  Roxanna nodded. “Yeah, I had that sense too.” She sighed. Her purple skin was still swirling after the fight. “Where does a pair of keenly alerted instincts get us, though, sir?”

  Andy shook her head, searching for a witty reply just as the chairwoman came running back up. All of the panic and upset was back on her face, and those hands were wringing themselves at double-time.

  “What’s wrong?” Andy asked, her tension jumping back up to previous level.

  “Our whales are gone!”

  The major just stared at the other woman for a moment, the sentence not really processing. She knew what whales were, but all the words seemed to be entirely out of place in the situation.

  “What?” she asked dumbly.

  “Our whales!” the chairwoman yelled. “The oceanic preserve was home to a pod of whales, and a massive Arkana ship descended and…caught them! They took them!”

  Again, Andy understood all of the words, but it just didn’t make sense.

  “What kind of whales?” Anath asked, suddenly appearing beside Andy. She looked at him and blinked, finding his question just as odd.

  Major Andrea Dolan wasn’t used to feeling so completely unaware of what was happening right in front of her, but this apparently was the day for it.

  “Sperm whales, from Earth,” the chairwoman said, visibly on the verge of tears. “They were imported from Earth as embryos and brought here to be protected, and now this…” Now she did start crying. “Why would they do that?”

  Andy looked at Anath. He was laughing, although the sound was so cynical that it bordered on chilling. It was clear he had an idea of what was going on. “It’s…” He rubbed the back of his neck, smearing brilliant red blood across his cheek from a superficial wound on his face. “It’s archaic, but the conversion could happen. It was studied by our scientists, looking back over our history. The oil from the whales, sperm oil and not the stuff made from melting blubber, can be used to aid certain critical systems on Arkana vessels.”

  Now it was Andy and the chairwoman staring at him, like he couldn’t possibly be serious.

  “I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true. They apparently decided to use it to avoid having to go back to the home system to get the more high-tech stuff,” he said, sighing. “It means they’re preparing for a hard push inward.”

  Andy sighed. “So much for our day off.”

  II

  Keep the Home Fires Burning

  9

  Azara was three days behind them now, as was their shortened vacation. It had been a great day off, but one day just wasn’t enough. Azara had, essentially, closed to all visitors while they tried to figure out just how bad the damage was, and if any other animals or resources might have been taken. It seemed that the enemy had indeed achieved their goal, and as a byproduct, put a bigger dent in everyone’s morale.

  Andy and Anath were sitting in the mess hall drinking cold cups of coffee.

  “Is today’s coffee chewy or something?” Anath said, wrinkling his nose as he looked into the coffee mug. He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, like he was trying to work the taste out of his mouth.

  “I think you’re right,” Andy replied, only
glancing up at him a few times from her reading. “Just keep drinking.”

  Before he could reply, Captain Wallace walked in. The grim set to his face told Andy all she needed to know about why he was there. He held up his data tablet. “I have the latest in casualty rolls.”

  There was a collective sigh through the room. The captain didn’t like to do these from the bridge. Even if most of the crew would hear it over a ship-wide broadcast, he wanted to be amid some of his people while he did it. Andy could understand that. When you started reading a list of dead loved ones, you didn’t want to feel like you were on a throne far above the rest, who might be on the next list.

  No one wanted to hear what he had to say, but everyone turned in their seats to face him and every conversation silenced.

  They waited.

  He met several sets of eyes before looking at the tablet in his hand as he started to read the ships that had been destroyed, and the bases and colonies that had been taken. If any deaths were known from the latter , he read those off too, but that information was harder to come by.

  When the name ESS Nebula was read, there was a cry from the other side of the room. Andy looked over and saw a young woman she recognized as one of the nurses, covering her face as the chief medical officer put an arm around her.

  A muffled “my brother, my brother” could be heard from the woman as she grieved, and everyone’s hearts hurt.

  Andy felt Anath’s hand under the table as it took hers, giving a gentle squeeze. To think that just a couple of years ago, she didn’t have any siblings at all and thought she never would.

  Now she did.

  She squeezed his hand back, and went back to listening.

  “The agricultural planet of Jiir has been taken, and there is forward combat movement against Jiikar. The twenty-second fighter squadron, the Dragons, lost three-quarters of their numbers in its defense.”

  “Seventy-five percent casualty rate, and they still lost the planet,” Andy said under her breath. Such loss of life, and for nothing.

  “They are advancing inward again,” Anath said, leaning a little closer to her. “Jiir is closer to Earth than Azara, almost on a direct line. They’re taking planets that provide supplies.”

  “Yeah,” Andy said. She could see it too.

  The 24th Marines had been lost. The Star Runner had been so badly damaged that she would be in Earth’s spacedock for weeks, if not months, to be repaired. Almost half of the crew had been lost.

  The names just rolled on, and so did the numbers. It wasn’t the longest list ever, but even one line on that list was too long. When Wallace was done, everything that he’d said kept going around and around in Andy’s mind.

  How long would it be before some other captain on some other ship was reading that the Star Chaser had been lost? That the 33rd Marines had died in defense of…something, somewhere. They had already come pretty close too many times. How long would their luck hold out? How long could they possibly keep themselves off that list as this war went on?

  “Senior staff briefing in thirty minutes,” was the last thing Wallace said before he left the mess hall. Andy wouldn’t have said he walked out so much as trudged out, the weight of information bearing down on his shoulders.

  “You have that dark look again,” Anath commented.

  She gave him a dry but slightly amused expression. Between the two of them, it was a funny thing to say. She had a perfect mix of her mother’s dark skin and her father’s pale skin, while he was a perfect snow-white Arkana. For a brother and sister, they made a striking comparison.

  “What’s on your mind?” he asked with a wry half-smile.

  “What do you think?”

  “I know,” he sighed. “When is the news ever going to be good?”

  She leaned back in her seat and stretched her back. “I doubt that I’m going to get any in the staff briefing,” she said. “We’re probably going to hear that things are even worse than they seem to be and the thirty-third needs to be tossed head-first into another terrible situation.”

  Anath stared off at nothing, nodding slowly. “Probably,” he agreed. “I just hope we don’t crash another shuttle. We’re two for two on our own ships and they are going to make us jump out of the Star Chaser with atmospheric suits and parachutes before too long.”

  “It’s a very real possibility, but I hate atmospheric suits so let’s hope not,” Andy said, wrinkling her nose.

  “I’m hoping,” he said.

  She finished off the last of her coffee and then made a face. “Oh, man, it is chewy.”

  10

  There wasn’t a single member of the senior staff that looked like they’d gotten enough sleep in the past few weeks as they all sat around the table in the briefing room. Andy had gotten herself another cup of coffee, but she’d waited until she was in the briefing in the hopes that the coffee would be better here.

  She was almost right.

  Everyone was gathered and seated by the time the captain walked in and took his seat, nearly collapsing into it as he rubbed his eyes.

  “As you all heard a half-hour ago, the Arkana have taken Jiir,” he said. “Jiir is an agricultural world in the J-2 System, and is practically a straight—if still somewhat long, thankfully—line to Earth. Things have been somewhat slower on their advancing front for the past three weeks, but they are suddenly making a hard play.”

  None of this was new, given that she and Anath had already discussed it, but intel was confirming it.

  “Now, they are moving against Jiikar, a neighboring planet.”

  “What’s the significance of Jiikar to them?” Andy asked. “Is there any, or is it just that it’s there?”

  Wallace smiled wryly. “It would seem on the surface that it’s just because it’s there. Jiikar is not a manufacturing world like others in the system, nor one that produces food or such, and it’s not like the Arkana haven’t made a point of just taking whatever is in their path.”

  “I sense a ‘but’ coming up,” the sensor officer said.

  “You would be correct,” Wallace said. “ESS Intelligence believes that there’s a twofold reason they’re moving in on Jiikar. First, it’s close enough to Jiir that if the ESS keeps a hold on it, they stand a better chance of taking Jiir back and cutting off one of their avenues of food supply here in this system. It’s a smart tactical grab. There is also one of the most important medical centers that the Earth Space Service operates on that planet.”

  Andy frowned curiously. “What makes this place more important than any other?”

  Wallace looked at the doctor. “You want to take that one?”

  The Selerid smiled a little and nodded. “Simply put, the planet’s situation and climate have made it advantageous for health and welfare with as little technological intervention as possible. This is why it was placed here, where it could handle the most intense and difficult cases. While front line hospitals can patch people up and move them on, there are many things that these places cannot handle. They send many of the difficult cases to Jiikar. The hospital has been there since before the war and has, over the years, attracted many of the best and brightest surgeons in the galaxy.”

  “That’s a really tempting tactical target,” Andy agreed.

  “It is,” Wallace agreed. “Until now, we didn’t have reason to believe that the Arkana knew about the planet and its hospital. Now, we believe they do. It’ll take out both soldiers and civilians, as well as many of our best doctors, and a big piece of the fleet’s morale all in one fell swoop. If…”

  Andy met the captain’s gaze. “If we don’t do something about it.”

  Wallace nodded.

  “Why don’t they just evacuate?”

  “They’re going to,” Wallace replied, “but they require a special medical ship to do it. One had been in orbit, ready for such an eventuality, but the Arkana damaged it beyond use. The next closest one isn’t close enough, so they are going to relocate as much as possible to a more defensible
location until the ship arrives.”

  Well, Andy could see where this was going. “They’re going to need someone to watch their back while they’re doing it,” she said, not even asking it as a question.

  “Yes, they will, Major, and guess what ship is closest to Jiikar…”

  “Jiikar?” Dan repeated, blinking at Andy.

  She frowned as she looked at him, noting the look on his face. “Yes. They took Jiir, and are moving in on its sister planet. Why?”

  Dan shook his head slowly. “I was actually born on Jiikar, though I mean… My family moved back to Earth when I was still kind of young. I don’t really think of it like my home world or anything, but, I don’t know… It’s still kinda close to home, as they say.”

  Andy nodded with understanding. Everything was getting close to home now, though.

  “I don’t know what will happen to Jiikar after all this, but we can at least make sure that the people in that hospital get out,” she said. “That’s what our orders are right now, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

  “They’d really take out a hospital? Non-combatants?” Roxanna asked with a frown.

  “They might try to capture them and take them as prisoners,” Anath said somberly. “I mean, they aren’t killing everyone on the planets they take over, only those who resist, but on the other hand…” he trailed off with a sigh.

  “On the other hand?”

  “They may kill the patients,” he said. “If they don’t think they can be of any use or would take too long to get there… They won’t kill the doctors and nurses if they can help it, though, because they can try to use them.”

  Anath sure knew how to make a room go quiet.

  But Andy didn’t let it go on that long. She took a deep breath and then let it out slowly, trying to clear her mind and focus on the task at hand. They didn’t have the luxury of getting lost in these sorts of thoughts and feelings, at least not during duty hours.