Zero-Option | Page 2

across from her. He knew the FS Confederation had just returned from a raiding mission deep inside Unity space. He'd seen the scars when he'd come in from Earth orbit on board the flitter. Black blemishes, peppering the surface of the white hull like some sort of fungal disease. Laser blasts, mostly, though there was evidence the shields had had to absorb more than one hit from anti-matter torps.
Jhordel absently rubbed at her neck, revealing a red, perfectly symmetrical 'hickey' beneath the high collar of her jacket. He had expected to see it, but still a chill ran through him. He found himself probing self-consciously at the side of his own neck, running his fingertips over the bump that was still there, where a few weeks earlier he'd borne his own such mark. For spacers it was like a badge of honor, which they wore proudly wherever they went. It was the mark of the spacers. And on those who did the deep runs, it was essentially permanent.
Jhordel's was such a mark, showing signs of recent exposure to the bite of the 'pumps.' It looked as though it might bleed; and that said much about the battle she and her crew had just been through. A rough one, he ventured. They would have been hooked into the system for long cycles, bound to those horrid metal leeches that attached to your neck as though they were part of your flesh, sucking blood from you and pumping it back in. On the return the blood was rich with oxygen and primed with a virtual pharmacopoeia. All necessary, if you wanted to stay alive while the g-forces within the ship��despite the gravity dispensators��reached extremes that would render the unprotected human lifeless in seconds.
He shuddered when he recalled what it felt like, and wondered how they could do it, time and time again. He had never grown used to it, despite his many jumps; but men and women like Jhordel went on doing it again and again, running the ship while being crushed into the cocoon of bladders that surrounded each, and kept conscious by a battery of drugs and mechanisms that left one sick and sore and feeling like the living dead long after the fighting had stopped. They went out there into the deeps of space and rained down destruction upon the enemy without complaint, seemingly oblivious of the incredible forces that threatened life itself, treating such threats as though they were simply a fact of life, and enduring the ghastly nightmare of pain that was almost routine on a fighting ship. He supposed that spacers became accustomed to such things; but he never could, having spent much of his life rooted to one planet or another.
Now that he looked more closely, he could see the slight bruising around the captain's eyes, and recalled looking at his own face in a mirror after one particularly long skirmish. He hadn't recognized himself: bloodshot eyes, puffy flesh, the bruising��as though he had taken part in a drunken brawl. It had been frightening the first time, and after that he had never been anxious to look again. They must have been in a long battle, he thought, given that they'd already had a few days to recover.
"I've sent in my report to Intelligence," Jhordel observed, at last glancing up from the com-link cube and addressing him directly.
"I'm not here about the report, sir," he said. From where he sat the script in the cube was backwards, but he'd become quite adept at reading from this vantage point and knew she was preoccupied with data concerning the welfare of her ship. Natural enough after a return from battle, he mused to himself; and she doubtless didn't appreciate that Admiralty seemed little concerned about it.
She eyed him warily. "We've just spent three months out patrolling the line," she said. The 'line' was the Pomerium Line, a semi-official boundary between Federation and Unity space. "We're back in port less than a day and Admiralty tells me I have to be ready to sail within a six-shift, but doesn't tell me why." Her eyes narrowed, an unspoken accusation.
It took Imbrahim a moment to recall that a six-shift was forty-eight hours: six eight hour periods.
"My patience is thin, Commander, so I suggest you tell me why you're here. Since it's not about the report, I assume it has something to do with this mad rush to get us back out there again."
He ran his tongue over his lips and drew a breath. "Orders, Captain," he said. He reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew a file-chip, handed the small square of metalastic over to her and watched as she took it and examined it in a perfunctory manner.
"You're surely joking," she growled, with all the pretense of one who