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  “Hmm,” he said with a soft grunt. “You seem to think I have any more power over this than you do.”

  Now that was new.

  Andy’s dark brows drew together as she finally turned to face him. She pursed her lips thoughtfully and let her dark eyes roam over his face. His skin, as pale as her brother’s, with the white hair and white brows and steely blue eyes. Everything that was exactly the opposite of her mocha skin, black hair, and black eyes. She looked like her mother, through and through, and could not see an ounce of her father in her.

  The only thing she seemed to have inherited thus far was the Arkana resistance to things, which had been a benefit, admittedly.

  “You look surprised, daughter,” he said with an arrogant smirk. “Did you think I was bringing you here to see me?”

  “I wasn’t giving you too much credit,” she replied easily, although that was what she had thought. She tried to think back to the dreams she’d been having over the long, torturous months of this war… Had he ever said that to her? Given her that impression? If he had, was he lying then, or now?

  The sad truth was, however, that she just couldn’t remember. There had been too much that had happened, and too many dreams to be lived through.

  Lacing his hands behind himself, he began to pace a slow circle around her. “You have a smart mouth, just like your mother did,” he commented, his lips pursed slightly with obvious disdain even as he no longer met her eyes. He seemed to be contemplating the grass under his feet as he trampled it with his meandering.

  Andy felt a strange sense of…defensiveness rise in her. She didn’t understand that at all, however, because she and her mother had never been…mother and daughter. She had no reason to defend her mother, and yet the impulse was there.

  Maybe that was just a sign of how much she hated her father.

  She bit her tongue.

  Once again, he stopped and faced her. It felt like those steel blue eyes were made of actual steel, piercing her body with their metal. She stood strong, however. Back straight. Head up. Eyes open.

  “You seem back to your old self,” he said.

  “I am more than I was,” she said. It was cryptic even to her own ears, but it felt right.

  “We are at war.”

  “Yes, we are.”

  He sighed. “We are enemies.”

  Andy inclined her head slightly. “Yes. We are.”

  Without another word, he lunged across the small distance between them. He had the speed of an attacking snake and was able to very nearly reach her before she had a chance to react, but he fell just short. When his fist flew toward her face, she sidestepped it easily and replicated part of her brother’s move against Dan by pushing his arm further off course. Instead of grabbing it, however, she let him go past her.

  She turned with every intention of kicking him in the kidneys, but he was too quick for that. He kept the momentum and let it carry him out of her range in a hurry.

  Colonel Dolan pulled her hands back up into a defensive posture just as he spun around, ready to come for her again. She glared at him with determination. He would not put her down again. She would not be in the dirt at his feet again. Never again.

  She kicked out with one foot, and he grabbed her by the ankle and twisted. Instead of letting him snap her bone, she threw her body weight with the twist. Her upper half bent forward as she lost her balance, but she caught herself on her hands. Putting her weight forward and using his grip on her leg to counterbalance, she brought her other foot off the ground and kicked back.

  She heard something crack, and then she fell to the ground. Not wanting to leave an opportunity open to him, she snap-rolled away and all but leaped back onto her feet. Jerking her head up, she saw him hobbling back. He was favoring his left leg. Knee, if she had to guess.

  Just as she was about to surge at him again, her ears were filled with noise. It sounded like a fight…like a battle.

  At first, there wasn’t anyone else around…but then she saw shadowy figures. They were familiar, and she realized that her squad-mates were fighting Arkana soldiers all around her, and yet not. They were here, and yet not.

  They were here.

  Smiling darkly, she leaped for her father again.

  The last thing she remembered before she woke was the feeling of her knuckles slamming into his jaw with a resounding crack.

  14

  Andy’s knuckles hurt when she woke up. She blinked slowly and turned her head, trying to recollect where she was.

  It came back to her in a moment.

  After they had read the letter from her mother, Andy and Anath had gone down to sickbay and called on the ship’s chief medical and science officers. Neither had been very happy, at first, to be woken from their sleep, but they perked up quickly enough when she presented them with the letter.

  In the past, she might have been embarrassed to let someone read the real nature of her relationship with her mother, but right then, she hadn’t cared. The information was too important to get wrong by her trying to conceal things that didn’t need to be concealed. Not now. Maybe never.

  Of course, after that she had been sent right back to bed to get some sleep while they worked on it. That was fine, though, because her work—for that moment—had been done.

  Groaning, she rolled over and checked the time. Just shy of oh-six-hundred, when she had set the computer to give her a wakeup call. Figuring she might as well get up, she turned off the call and rolled off her bunk. Standing and stretching, she saw that Anath wasn’t there. It didn’t look like his bunk had been slept in, either.

  She frowned, remembering him coming back to the room with her after the visit to sickbay…

  After a moment, she figured that he was probably in the mess hall, so she took a quick shower and got dressed for the day. She’d soon be headed to the mess hall herself, but her first stop was back at sickbay to see if they’d made any progress with the letter and the substance.

  The first thing she saw when she walked into sickbay, however, was Anath lying on one of the medical beds.

  Her eyes widened with near-panic and she hurried over to his side. He was awake, though, and smiled weakly at her.

  “I hoped I’d be up and about before you got here,” he said.

  “What did you do?!” she demanded.

  “What you told me not to,” he replied, pushing himself up to sitting with a faint grunt. He gripped the edge of the bed and leaned forward carefully. “We needed to know, Andy, okay? They had me all hooked up and monitored and such. It was all very carefully done.”

  She bit her tongue, literally, for a moment. “At least tell me it was worth it.”

  He smiled slightly again. “It was. I have an allergy.”

  “Your mother was very observant,” the ship’s chief medical officer said as she walked out of her office and joined them in the main bay. Dr. Gerard nodded in greeting at Andy. “The substance is called doncyclatyne. It was, actually, discovered as a pollution byproduct of industry that grew from the late twenty-second century, at least two decades after the Arkana left Earth. They were never exposed to it, but humanity was exposed slowly. We developed a certain tolerance for it, but the Arkana did not. A small amount causes a fairly unpleasant reaction.” She gestured at Anath. “A larger, concentrated dose would likely be lethal. Even if not, it would be debilitating.”

  Andy’s mind raced and struggled to figure out how her mother had even noticed this, had recognized it for what it was… She wished that her mother had put more of an explanation into the letter.

  “So…” she began slowly, tossing one more dagger-filled glance at her brother. “How do we use this?”

  Gerard smiled thinly. “Well, one of the weapon upgrades we’ve got in production are bullets that can contain something. What we’ve filled them with so far has not been as effective as we’d like…as effective as this could be. We will be putting concentrated amounts into these projectiles, so they can be fired from your usual
weapons, but once they embed in an Arkana, it will release into their system.”

  She nodded slowly, taking that all in and wondering why she hadn’t heard about those already.

  “How much of this do you think you’ll be able to create?” she asked.

  “We’re working on figuring that out now,” the doctor said. “We’re still working on determining the best concentration. You know we’ll be working on it as much as we can, though. It’s in the hands of our science department now.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” the colonel said quietly. “When can I drag my brother out of here and yell at him?”

  “Please, Colonel, take it easy on him. He’s been of invaluable assistance, and I assure you that he is fine now,” Gerard said. “He just needs to get some food and rest a little, then he will be good as new.”

  Andy nodded. She wanted to box his ears, but she did understand the situation. It was just hard to not be protective of the only family she had left, and the only family she’d ever had that she actually loved.

  She let it all out in one long breath and met his eyes. “Are you ready to get out of here?”

  “Please.”

  “Alright,” she said with a nod, stepping back and holding out a hand to help him get down. He took it, even though he didn’t need it. He set his feet on the floor and stood up straight, pausing for a moment to assure himself of his balance before he nodded at the doctor, and then at Andy.

  “I’m fine,” he assured them. “I’m glad I could help, Doctor. Good luck with you guys getting all of that sorted out. I just hope it proves useful.”

  “So do we all, Master Sergeant,” Dr. Gerard said.

  “So do we all,” Andy echoed with a sigh.

  15

  Andy stayed with Anath through breakfast, and then walked with him back to their quarters so he could get some rest. It seemed that his little medical experimentation ordeal had taken quite a lot out of him. She was just grateful it was some energy that was taken rather than his life.

  It seemed like he practically fell asleep the moment he crawled into his bunk, so she headed right back out.

  This time, she went down to the flight deck. She had been given the name of the wing commander whose trio of fighter squadrons would be protecting her company’s dropships while they were flying through hostile space, hostile air, and landing on hostile ground.

  She asked around and was directed to where Commander Shawn Godfrey was speaking with a couple of his pilots. Waiting until they headed off, she approached him and asked, “Commander Godfrey?”

  The tall man turned around, and for the first time in a long time, Andy was actually struck by just how handsome his face was. Shawn Godfrey was tall and broad-shoulders, to the point she almost wondered how he fit in a cockpit, with strong, almost-chiseled features and skin darker than hers, but the same black eyes and hair. He flashed a dazzling smile.

  “Yes, Colonel?”

  “Lieutenant Colonel Andrea Dolan,” she introduced herself. “Commander of Second Company, First Battalion. I hear you’re going to be watching my people’s six while we head down to the planet.”

  The smile remained, and he laughed a little. “That’s right,” he said. He gestured toward a desk alongside several other desks lining the back wall. As they approached, his smile turned a little self-deprecating. “My spacious office. Like my decorating?”

  “It works,” she said with an almost teasing edge. She wasn’t sure where that came from, but she didn’t work too hard to stop it. “I mean, I’ve seen plenty of men who decorated worse.”

  “Hey,” he laughed. “I’m not going to take that affront to my entire gender.” He paused and looked at her sidelong. “Or I will, since you’re not wrong.”

  Godfrey stopped in front of one desk and spun around a large tablet on the center, tapping it a few times to bring something up. “So, your company has a hundred and fifty Marines. Your dropships are carrying roughly fifty per, so my squadron is guarding three of your ships.”

  “That’s correct, Commander,” she agreed, folding her arms across her chest and looking down at the information on the screen alongside him.

  “You’re going to have one squadron per dropship to, ah…watch that six of yours,” he said, sending her another sidelong glance that surprised her on some level.

  She swallowed hard and nodded a little slowly. “I don’t usually work so closely with the aerospace corps. How many planes are usually in a squadron?”

  “There’s twelve in each of my squadrons, so we’ll have a good perimeter around each of your ships,” he said with confidence that somehow didn’t verge into arrogance. “We will get your people on the ground.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she said with a smile. “Getting shot down at this point would feel like being tackled on the one-yard line.”

  His thick, dark brows both rose. “You know old Earth football?”

  Andy chuckled and nodded. “My foster dad was really into watching old Earth games.”

  “You were in foster care?”

  “I was.” The amusement faded as she watched him, wondering if he would be one of those with pre-conceived notions. Her defenses immediately went up, but they came right back down a moment later.

  “So was I,” he said.

  “Really?” She laughed again, a little relieved. “My mom was in prison when I was born, and…well…the entire ESS knows who my father was.”

  He nodded, then gestured for her to walk with him deeper into the deck. “It’s got to be hard going to war against your family.”

  Andy shook her head, speaking firmly. “It’s just biology. I don’t know that man. He isn’t a father.”

  They started walking around some of the big fighter jets that Godfrey and his pilots flew in. Their conversation derailed from the topic of paternity, which she was happy about, while he introduced her to the planes and discussed their offensive capabilities. It was more in-depth a lesson on these craft than she’d ever had, but she found it comforting to know the sort of firepower that would be guarding them.

  Or maybe she just enjoyed speaking with Commander Godfrey.

  “The ESS is lucky to have you, Colonel,” he said suddenly, stopping by a landing strut and pausing to look back at her.

  “Thank you, Commander,” she said quietly. “I just aim to serve well, and to make up for my ancestry.”

  They kept talking for a while about the planes and the defensive strategies that Godfrey and his wing would be using to keep her and her Marines safe once they left the Planet Breaker and headed for the surface of the Arkana home world. As she left, she felt a little more confident about their chances of making it down there…although it was still all on them once they hit the surface and had to storm their way through a city.

  That was another matter. At least they’d get the chance.

  On her walk away from the flight deck, though, she found herself for the first time truly beginning to think about life after the war…

  She thought maybe she wanted a life after the war.

  16

  The next day, down in the science labs, the science and medical staff were continuing their hard work to perfect and replicate their new part of the arsenal against the enemy.

  Corporal Anallin, as its squad’s sniper, had decided to spend the morning visiting with the scientists and getting better acquainted with the much-varied armaments that they would be given when they touched down.

  “We’ve been working on a variety of ammunition changes,” the female scientist was reporting, gesturing to the outlay of armaments on the table. “This one,” she continued, picking up a bullet with some liquid white substance inside it, “is the new one based off what Colonel Dolan and Master Sergeant Anath brought to us. It contains a substance that causes an immediate, violent, allergy-like reaction.”

  “That will be useful,” Anallin agreed, taking the bullet from her to turn it this way and that, examining it. “What about the others?”

 
“These are, basically, a variety of poisons. They haven’t necessarily been proven against the Arkana yet, but they are deadly to humans. Since the Arkana were engineered from human DNA, there is a possibility that they will work. And if not, they are still a projectile. Get a kill shot, and it will be a kill shot.”

  “Understood,” the Hanaran replied. It put the bullet down and started to look over the other bullets. They were, as the scientist had said, still bullets. It could make them effective. It was all about the shot. After a moment, it added, “Will we have enough?”

  The scientist smiled wryly. “We aren’t sure how many of the upgraded bullets we’ll have, but you’ll have enough bullets. We’re making sure of that.”

  Anallin sighed heavily. “Such a terrible thing to be grateful for.”

  On the firing range, Dan and Jade had taken up two booths, where they were working on simple target practice. There were several Marines from other squads and companies, and then some infantrymen from the army, and even a couple of pilots.

  “I don’t like feeling afraid,” Dan admitted in between shots. He timed his shot so that he could talk to her when they were both not shooting. He didn’t feel like saying this on top of the noise of bullets being fired.

  “No one does,” Jade said, but it wasn’t unkindly.

  Another round of shots.

  “This one is getting to me,” he went on. Sighing, he moved around the partition to stand behind her. She put the gun down and turned to face him. “Isn’t this insane?” he asked her quietly.

  She shook her head sadly. “It’s desperate,” she said. “They look similar, but are different.”

  He smiled a little. “You sound a little like Roxanna.”

  “I’ve learned a few things being in the Marines,” she returned wryly.

  “I guess we all have,” he agreed. He got that look like he wanted to kiss her, but they were on duty, so he restrained himself.

  Andy and Anath spent their afternoon overseeing several different training sessions at the squad, and then the platoon level. There would be company level sessions in the coming days, but that would take over far more than a gymnasium or training room. That would cover an entire deck of the Planet Breaker, working to recreate the feeling of urban warfare as best they could.