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"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles."
~Sun Tzu
Chapter Twenty-five: Commander Gallant
"Oh, God." John Bradford ground his teeth as he beheld the situation: Assassin, Viper King, codices, muton, MEC, half the team down or dazed... "Oh, God. This is a disaster. They're going to-"
"Surely there's something we can do!" Shen clasped her hands over her mouth. "We can't just sit here and...and..."
"There's no way we can affect the tactical situation from here," Tygan murmured. The bridge staff watched in rapt horror, and Bradford knew - just knew, without glancing at the bar feed - that Aileen Quinn, Sylvie Richard, Da-Xia Liang, Cameron Rogers, and Aidan MacLeod all had to be in limbo, hanging on the fates of their friends just the same.
"We have to...we can pull Junior out," Bradford began. "He's far enough away that-"
"Tygan, re-check Kelly's com."
The voice wasn't angry. It wasn't hard, it wasn't cold-edged or flame-tempered. Bradford's head spun, but he couldn't manage to speak - the shock of the voice, and of its tone, simply ripped his vocal faculties away.
"Shen, run a diagnostic on Junior's rocket armament and the jetboots protocol."
He stood in his pride of place, cane standing unattended by his side, and for once, Bradford didn't even think he was leaning on the rail. He stood unaided and stable, as if he'd simply decided to ignore the pain and discomfort, as if he'd waved his hand and willed his infirmity away. His fingers flew over the holodisplay, and in a flash he'd physically pulled status reports on every operative from far corners, opening them up with index and little fingers while his blue eyes burned...burned...
"John, I want a sensor pulse and whatever information you can get me on any of those active units. I want to know their ammunition, their injuries, their unit numbers - hell, I want to know what they ate for breakfast."
His eyes burned, but they burned cold. Cold with focus, cold with determination, and cold with a searing, undivided will to win that John Bradford hadn't seen in two decades.
One that, somewhere so deep he could barely even admit it to himself, he envied.
"Did none of you hear me?" Commander Edward Gallant demanded, as his hands flew over floating data tabs. The words were sharp, but there was no hostile rage in his voice. Just that cold, cold, cold will to win, and it seeped into Bradford's bones, fueling that manic intensity into his veins like his CO had stuck an IV in him and set it to pumping.
"...you heard the Commander!" Bradford cried. He nearly vaulted the rail to the technicians' pit. "Full power to scanners and ID the remaining units and their strong and weak points-"
"Diagnostics coming online for the com system!" Tygan shouted, as he scrambled back to his terminal. "Feed me any data on equipment-"
"Junior's weapons are at one hundred!" Shen called, bent double over her screen as she typed in a frenzy, biting her lip. "That MEC's cyber-shielded-"
"Don't give a shit." Gallant's lip curled. "Activate com lines and patch them to my display."
Bradford stared at the holodisplay, even as Sylvie Richard burst into tears on the bar feed. The veteran XO tried not to wince as the aliens finished dressing their ranks, but it was hard...hard, hard, hard...
They're going to die, he thought. He knew it in his bones, and everyone on the bridge had to as well.
Everyone except Edward Gallant.
"Jane!"
Julie Richardson slid, scrabbling on permacrete, barely getting her knee under her in time to avoid hitting stasis canisters head-first. Her heart thundered and roared with fear and pain, and her eyes widened as she beheld the conflagration her field commander - her friend - had immolated herself in.
"No!" That wasn't Julie. The redhead turned her gaze, and she winced as she saw David White, ashen-faced as his eyes hung on the pyre. He shook on his feet, jaw working, everything in the world seemingly forgotten...except the Irishwoman the world had just lost.
"No!" he repeated, and that was that. Julie raised a hand to stop him as the Australian turned back to the fight, but she couldn't do anything before he vanished among the stacked containers and scattered rubble with vengeance on his mind.
At least... Julie's eyes fell on the empty rail line. At least the civvies are safe. They made it.
That changed nothing.
"Jane..." The first had been a protest, and this was a plea. Julie could feel the stages of grief settling into her system, and even through her haze of shock she could easily skip the first and sink her claws into the second.
"You!" Julie rose to her feet, glaring, as the Assassin appeared from the flames, tinted red and orange by the roaring blaze behind her. The redhead grabbed for her rifle, but it was gone. She still had her amp, though, and Julie drew it from her back, fingering the trigger as she reviewed her abilities. Her injuries throbbed and ached, and she was relatively sure one of her gunshot wound collection had reopened.
And none of it mattered.
"I must admit, the tendency of humans to eliminate themselves and spare me trouble is quite frustrating on occasion." The Assassin pushed herself off her sword - and wasn't that interesting, the way she was limping?
"Not fond of explosions, I take it?" Julie's lip curled, and her dirty ponytail flicked out behind her for a heartbeat as if lifted by the breeze that wasn't blowing, purple sparks flying from her highlights. "Don't worry. I'll hurt you a lot worse."
"You're brave." The creature bared her teeth. "We'll see how long that lasts when I hand you to the Elders."
"Why do they have to talk?" Commander Gallant wondered in Julie's ear. She blinked.
"Sir-"
"Now!"
Julie didn't exactly know what he wanted from her. She hit the trigger on her amp, and power exploded before her, but the Assassin was fast. She lunged, and Julie's eyes widened as she realized how much distance the creature had covered in their dialogue. Rookie mistake, talking to her enemy and letting her guard down like that-
Wham!
"Holy shit!" Julie cried, an instant before she released her soul-scorching blast. It rippled through the night, and she had the distinct pleasure of hearing the Assassin scream. Well, more accurately, the Assassin screamed before Julie's blast hit her, and choked off into shocked and broken nothingness in the wake of her assault. Something about knives and needles driving into someone's brain was altogether different from a two-ton armored robot football-tackling them into solid permacrete.
"Your resistance is futile," Junior alerted the Assassin, as she lashed out with fists and feet. He shoved her another six inches into the ground. "You cannot overpower me."
"Julie, watch your head!"
"What-" But she ducked anyway, and hot plasma sizzled through the air. Julie yelped, ducking behind a stasis container stack as two figures approached, weapons leveled.
"Avenger, I thought there was only one of the gilded strippers!" Where the nickname came from, Julie didn't know and also didn't care. She winced as another blast of green light blew a chunk out of her cover. "Where'd the other one pop in from?"
"She just appeared." That was Bradford, and Julie had never even imagined the XO with that note of trepidation in his voice. "Popped in out of nowhere when Kelly blew the building! Those codices can copy themselves!"
"Popped in out of..." Julie shook her head. "Sir, that doesn't...that doesn't make any sense."
"Sensible or not, soldier, that's what-"
"The First Law of Thermodynamics," Julie insisted. "First Law! Energy and mass can never be created or destroyed! It can't just copy itself, because that would mean creating new mass-"
She broke off. Julie broke off in a flash, and though she tried not to get carried away, the potentiality that had just occurred to her seemed far too likely not to test.
"Soldier, what do you-"
"Mass. Mass can't be created." Julie tightened her grip on her amp, swallowing. "It's the same amount of mass. It's the same amount of mass, which means each one of them is..."
"What are you doing?" Bradford cried, as she spun out into the open, amp surging with power.
"Back away!" Pratal Mox backed that up by flinging the butt of his bullpup into the Viper King's face, and the animal shook in reaction to the hit. It slithered backward, shrieking angrily, and Mox deployed his ripjack blades in the moment of clearance he'd won. His arm lashed out, and the Viper King's next roar was of pain.
Wounds, Mox thought, as he spotted the marks and stitch lines across the creature's body. It can't have had time to heal. It's weak.
The thing retreated, though only temporarily. Mox brought his gun back around, taking aim for its remaining eye, not the empty socket-
"Leave it!"
"Sir?" Mox didn't have time for anything but that. Well, that and a sudden wave of shock. What was Gallant thinking-
"Get Outrider and eject, damn it. Grapple out, and use your grenade, now!"
"Commander-"
"Junior, engage!"
"Engage-" Mox stopped trying to understand. The King was disoriented for a moment more, and the Skirmisher swore in his native language. Still, the order to rescue Elena was well-taken, and he drove the butt of his gun into the ice coating the Reaper's still form.
"Ah!" She collapsed to her hands and knees, rifle hanging by its strap. Mox leaned down and seized her with his ripjack arm, releasing his gun to do the same.
"Hold on to me," he ordered, even as he saw the Assassin break free from Junior on the ground floor. It darted past the SPARK and into the darkness, fading more with every second, and that didn't exactly make the one-time Advent soldier very happy. If that thing got away-
Hiss!
"No!" Mox swore as the Viper King's trunk wrapped around his waist. He lashed out with his fist, and the creature howled as he connected with an open wound. But it didn't yield, and its weight was far too much...
"Get out of there! Now!" That was Bradford, and Mox set his teeth. The King loomed, baring its teeth and letting fly a spray of spittle-
Crack!
It screamed. Anything would scream, Mox supposed, if a vektor rifle put a bullet down its throat at point-blank range. Elena's body shivered, but her hands never wavered, and the range had been less than a meter. Yellow blood sprayed as the bullet continued its journey and punched right through the snake's skin on the way out, and in its distraction, it released Mox. He almost shot it, or stabbed it, or did one of a hundred other things.
As it was, he simply seized the grenade from his belt and popped the ring, hurling it wide over the edge of the tower. It bounced across a stasis container and clattered down in a hollow, and Mox distinctly heard that stun lancer scream something very unhappy.
Then he wrapped his arm around Elena and raced for the rail while the Viper King was still recovering. She didn't resist, and clung to him when he braced his foot on the barrier and raised his arm to shoot his grapple line.
I believe the humans call this maneuver the...Tarzan. Must have been a general in one of their wars.
The King was too slow to prevent their extraction, as the grapple line set into one of the far buildings, and Mox hauled himself and Elena both across open space and well clear of the tower. The creature shrieked after them, before bringing up its bolt caster for a snap shot.
And the fact that it was looking after the escapees meant that it missed Junior pointing, and the BIT blinking acknowledgment before unleashing its Dragon II rocket straight at the tower.
Missile and grenade detonated effectively simultaneously.
"Tower's down!" Shen cried. A hungry cheer almost erupted across the bridge, but the two or three voices that snarled their appreciation petered off after a moment, drowned in the oppressive upsurge of concentrated silence pervading all corners. Eyes flicked from map to terminals, and Purpose with a capital P infused everyone's movements.
And none more so than the man on the command platform, fingers still flying as he called up data and dismissed it, freewheeling and forming plans on the fly with one eye half-closed and his lip curled.
The fragments of the tower hadn't even finished coming down - and the limp, obviously expired corpse of the Viper King, ripped in two pieces and spewing a yellow comet's tail - before his attention turned, and in a flash Gallant had called up David's inventory and run a scan on his enemies.
"Frag, here!" He tapped a point on the holodisplay, and a blue beacon shot up. "Grid Charlie!"
"Sir-"
"Do it, man!" Gallant dropped White from his world then, barely even noticing the execution of his order - and the blast that ripped the MEC's frontal armor plate to shreds. "Outrider, Mox, finish it!"
"It will be done!" Then Mox's gun roared, and Gallant stewed in grim satisfaction as the MEC's inner circuitry took a vicious barrage of rapid-fire rounds...and a few more surgical ones from the Reaper at Mox's left, still shivering but with her vitals up over the worry line. The machine shivered and stumbled...and also fell, crashing on its back and an Advent soldier with a tremendous groan of yielding metal.
"Assassin's gone dark somewhere out there!" Tygan shouted.
"Don't give a shit," Gallant repeated. His eyes fixed on the next target. "I want those codices down!"
"Hey!" Julie dropped, sliding under an Advent truck as plasma-fire rent the air around her, slapping her with muggy heat even here in the Swiss Alps. The redhead rolled to her feet on the opposite side, and she dove behind an honest-to-god APC she was just glad the aliens hadn't had time to bring online.
Purple seared her palm as she hit her amp's trigger, and the psi-op ground her teeth in rage.
"Die!" she ordered, bursting around the corner. The codex facing her leveled its gun, but Julie was faster, and violet energy ripped into it on all sides. The thing shrieked, almost piteously, dropping its gun and clutching its head as sparks and tendrils shot in all directions. Its smoking hair scattered, wafting up and out while distortion like that in a bad vid-com connection raced over its form from head to toe.
Then it burst, less like a bomb and more like a balloon poked by a needle, and what little was left of its energy scattered, dissipating in all directions.
Its cybernetic skull plate hit the ground an instant later, hissing purple smoke.
"That's for Aunt Penny," Julie growled. She kicked the skull plate on general principles, for just an instant forgetting the raging fight around her. "Now-"
Chirp!
It wasn't a chirp. In fact, that wasn't even close to what it sounded like, and Julie berated herself for that unthinking description even as she spun. But now that she'd used it, she wouldn't be able to un-hear it, and every time the golden creatures made noise, she knew that's what she would hear.
Psionic feedback, that's what that noise is, Julie thought, as the other codex - the other half of the same codex - loomed behind her, weapon raised. Her mouth went dry as its power cell warmed up. Oh, shit.
"Julie!" Sylvie Richard cried, nearly flinging herself out of her booth. Aileen Quinn held her down by force of will and a good bit of upper-body work.
"There's nothing you can do, rookie-"
"She's going to die!" Sylvie's face twisted with horrible, gutwrenching terror and certainty. "Oh, my God, she's going to die-"
"Sylvie..." Aileen didn't know what to say. But the best way to keep from falling into your own chasm of furious grief was to help someone else keep her own head above water, and at least this kept the Irishwoman's mind off the woman who had become the sister she'd never had. "Sylvie, you've got to stay calm-"
"Calm?" Sylvie demanded. "Calm?"
"Calm!" Cameron Rogers agreed. "Sylvie, you panicking won't help-"
"Me not panicking won't help either-"
"Shut up, all of you!" Da-Xia Liang stood in a flash, slamming her hands on her own table. Not even that could calm Sylvie's ongoing rush of tears and her broken sobs, but the light burning in the Chinese woman's eyes was enough to halt Aileen's train of thoughts rather conclusively. "What the hell is that?"
Aileen looked back at the screen. She looked, and her own hands tightened on the edge of the table.
"No," she breathed. "No way."
The codex twitched at the last possible second. It must have finally recognized the sound bearing up on it from behind, or used some more ethereal form of detection. It brought its gun around in a flash, almost teleporting through its 180, chirping a challenge.
That still wasn't fast enough, and an electrically-reinforced blade sliced through its throat with one savage backhanded swing.
Pop!
There wasn't silence. There was too much fire, too many flying projectiles, too much screaming and shouting and too many explosions for anything like silence. But there was a bubble, for just a moment, and a sheer instant of...duller mortal action.
"You..." Julie Richardson's eyes flared with shock and gratitude and a bit more shock on top. Her jaw worked, her face paled...and then she almost screamed. "You lucky broad-"
"Watch what you call your CO, Richardson." Jane Kelly lowered her soot-stained, scraped-open, raw-and-bleeding arm with her sleeve half-burned, struggling to see through the ash and dust caked across her eyes, wincing every time a buffet of night air wafted onto the ugly burn mark spread over her cheek and down her neck. Her leg was a little unsteady, and her hair still smoldered.
But, Jane thought, taking almost giddy joy in the utter simplicity of the victory - and the small comfort it presented, more precious than many comforts far more mighty. But my goddamn hat is fine.
"How did you..." Julie's expression broke with relief and joyous clarity. "How the hell did you survive the blast-"
"Not my first time, red." Jane snorted, then spat soot. "Maybe I'm building an immunity-"
It was a fist, she supposed: a fist appearing from the darkness and driving into her chest like a piledriver. The impact hurled her off her feet, and she came down hard several meters distant, sucking in desperate gulping breaths and already scrambling for the sword that she'd lost in flight.
She caught it. Her fingers wrapped around the hilt and Jane rose to one knee, interspersing the blade in the nick of time as another one came down for the crown of her head.
"We meet again, Jane Kelly." The Assassin's eyes glowed purple. "I grow tired of you."
"That's the..." Sylvie clutched the base of her throat. Liang's eyes were wide. Cameron and Aidan traded glances.
None of that shit for Aileen Quinn, not with Jane returned to life!
"Come on, Irish!" she screamed, leaping to her feet and making everyone else in the bar jump. Gazes turned, but Aileen just let out a wild whoop and threw her glass across the room, careless for the shattering of glass. "Kick her arse!"
"Her com must have been dislodged in the blast and destroyed in the fire-"
"Don't give a shit," Gallant told Tygan, for the third time. He didn't spare even a moment to watch Jane surge to her feet, to watch her sword flash and the Assassin's with it. "We've still got a muton to deal with down here."
"Mox and Outrider are too far out," Shen warned. "They're hurrying through the tower's wreckage, but she's still limping. Mox could detach-"
"No. Dragunova needs him more than White and Junior do."
"White and Junior?" Bradford demanded. "Sir, if that muton lands a hit that counts, White's dead. He doesn't have armor that's proof against plasma fire-"
"He won't need it."
"He's out of ammunition-"
"Not entirely." Gallant tapped the muton's position. "Grenade, now!"
"Sir, I don't have any-"
"Yes, you do!" Gallant reached for Junior's com icon. "Do it!"
White swore. But Gallant didn't reprimand him, because he did pull out his grenade launcher and pull the last remaining device off his belt, dropping it into the weapon from the muzzle end, already attached to a propellant charge.
"Fire in the hole!" White reported, in the instant before the device went out.
"Sir, we have no idea whether-"
"Junior, engage target at Golf Nine." Gallant didn't even bother acknowledging Bradford's word of caution. "Should be a clear shot."
"Affirmative, Commander."
"And what if it doesn't work?" Bradford demanded. "If that thing throws a grenade, we lose half the team-"
"It'll work." Gallant watched the little charge clatter down by the muton, beeping and blinking with blue light. "It's Vahlen's. Vahlen's toys never fail."
The muton roared, almost incredulously, when the bomb failed to detonate. It might have been laughing as it paused from the suppressive fire it was in the process of laying out in David White's general direction, and the beast seized the abortive explosive in one meaty, four-fingered hand.
Gallant smiled when it burst then, and sapphire gas exploded out around the alien, hardening in milliseconds on contact with the air.
"So, John," Gallant asked, admiring the muton statue Junior approached, autocannon at the ready. "Do you think it'll work?"
Clang! Clang!
Jane's arc blade whirled in orange loops and circles, and at every turn, it met resistance or air. The jet-black, unadorned blade of the alien beast she stood locked in battle with made the same deadly figure-eight patterns and spun about in the same torturous whirwind, and Jane parried as much as she evaded and struck. Metal met metal in showers of sparks and crackling lightning from the arc power cell.
Jane didn't know what was happening to anyone else. She knew half the yard burned and there didn't seem to be as much shooting, but the last time she'd tried to look at anything but the Assassin - the Assassin, deftly spinning through techniques like a ballet dancer who minored in kendo - she'd received a nasty cut on her good shoulder. Every move cost her agony now, as her burned leg and burned arm and slashed shoulder all protested the strenuous requirements of swordswomanship.
Clang!
"Ow!" It was ridiculously stupid, Jane knew. She made it sound as if someone had trod on her foot in the supermarket...when in fact, the Assassin's blade had come down on hers with enough force it was flung from her hand. Jane stumbled, clutching her stinging palm...and stopped when the Assassin brought her sword up.
"You're not very good at this, are you?" she wondered. "You don't live up to my expectations for a great swordswoman."
Jane lunged. She ducked past the blade, wove up into the Assassin's face, and unloaded an Ireland back-alley set of hooks and uppercuts and elbows: the kind of thing Resistance mentors taught as easily as breathing, good against the lone Advent sympathizer intent on turning you over to his leash-holders. Obsidian had been Jane's tutor in the fine art of turning faces to paste with bare flesh, and she liked to think she'd been a good student.
Which didn't change that her strikes struck only air.
"Fuck!" Jane barely clipped the word out before it trailed off into a high-pitched howl. She collapsed on one knee, clutching the line ripped open from her armpit down to her hip, already seething with red. The Ranger's vision went in and out, and she wavered where she knelt.
"You are beaten, child." The Assassin's guttural growl was oddly gentle, given all that she was and all that Jane expected. "You are beaten, yet there is no reason to die here today."
Jane looked up, feeling the heat of the fire and the searing pain of her wound collection. She swallowed dryly, beholding the leering blue face with its hateful purple eyes and abominable pointed teeth...and beholding the blade that ran with Jane's own blood, dripping off one bit at a time to plop down in front of the brunette's face.
Silence lingered for a long moment.
James. Obsidian. Irina. Nunez. Mendoza. Weber. It was very clinical, how those names presented themselves to her. She thought of the civilian's broken body inside the black site too, and Jane's lip curled as her eyes drifted past the Chosen to the hellscape behind her, and the blackened shape in it.
"Go to hell," Jane finally encouraged, before risking the amputation of one finger in particular. She spat contemptuously. "Go to hell, and while you're on the way, take that sword and shove it up your-"
"A pity. I had hoped to take you alive, but I don't think I can take that risk, after what happened inside." The Assassin leveled her blade, and Jane swallowed as it touched the back of her neck. "I will give you the mercy of swiftness."
"Evidently not," the Irishwoman snapped. She spat again, but this time in an altogether different way. "And it's going to cost you."
To her credit: the Assassin immediately lifted her sword to finish Jane off, eyes narrowing. That kind of reaction would have saved her...if she'd resorted to it before bursting into talk.
Not to her credit: she hadn't noticed that when Jane fell, she'd fallen right overtop of her sword.
Clang! Jane's blade came up and she caught the alien's assault bare inches from her hat. It still wouldn't have been enough alone, because Jane's arms wavered from the exertion. The Assassin had already withdrawn her blade and twisted into position for an impalement by the time the brunette was able to bring her sword back around, and she knew she wouldn't be able to block this.
Fortunately...
"Glory to my ass, bitch!"
Purple light exploded around the Assassin's head, and she shrieked in agony. Her sword fell from nerveless fingers as both hands went to her temple, and the creature stumbled backward, howling and wailing, cursing while knives drove into her ears and eyes and rippled through her brain tissue.
"Now!" Julie Richardson cried, and Elena Draguonva hurled something light and small. It fastened to the Assassin's chestpiece, and the creature looked down in sudden shock.
An instant later, Elena's vektor fired a single shot...and the claymore detonated.
The Assassin's body protected Jane from the worst of the blast, but she'd already realized that wouldn't be enough. The brunette was perfectly content to trade her life for the Chosen's, and she waited with a grim smile as the Reaper's bomb erupted with fire and shrapnel, wondering if it would be James, Irina, or Obsidian who met her first on the other side.
That fatalism was why she didn't notice the vise-like grip that caught onto her ankle...and tugged.
"Whatthefuuuuuuuuuuu-" Jane wasn't exactly proud of her eloquence, but when something hauled her out of an explosion's blast radius by the bad ankle, dragging her over the ground at well more than running speed, she wasn't at her most speech-y.
"My apologies, Lieutenant Kelly." The line disentangled, and while Jane lay gasping and bleeding on the ground, hands found her. "It was the only way to remove you from the situation."
"It was..." Jane coughed and cried out as Mox ripped open her shirt, pulling out a medkit and spraying her with nanobots that quickly injected stimulants and painkillers, even as they stitched the wound. "Of course. You have a grapnel launcher."
"Jane!" Someone else appeared, crashing to his knees beside her. "Jane, you fucking crazy imbecile, are you-"
"God, David. I thought you liked me." She pushed herself half-upright, eyes probing the darkness even as she shivered in the cold. "Where's the...where's the Chosen?"
"Dead," David pronounced, with cheerful zeal. "It's dead. It has to be dead."
"It's alive." Julie Richardson appeared from the darkness, amp in hand, uniform ash-coated and ripped in a hundred places, stained yellow as equally as red. For all of it, Jane had never thought the fresh-faced American looked more like a proper soldier. Something about the way she carried herself was new, different...and a lot less hesitant. "I sensed her energy departing. She's been preserved somehow by the Elders...but she's gone. She's going to be gone for a good long time, after being blown into ashes like that."
"Good!" Jane sat up all the way, ignoring Mox's murmured warning but taking David's offered hand to steady herself. Jane leaned on him where he hovered, eyes flicking from Julie to Elena's shadowy figure at her heels...to Junior's bulk as he kept watch over the gathering...
"We did it," she finally whispered. "Holy...shit...we're not dead!"
"Not quite," Elena agreed. She took a step, but it was David who pulled Jane to her feet. She couldn't keep herself from leaning on him still further, and he didn't seem to mind at all.
"That was brilliant. Waiting while I distracted the Chosen, unloading on her like that..." Jane shook her head. "That was masterfully planned. Nice work, Outrider."
"That...wasn't me." Elena glanced to the rest of the team. "None of us thought that fast."
"Then...if it wasn't you..." Jane frowned. "My com got turned into barbeque."
"I can transmit," Junior assured her. "Initiate Relay Mode."
"I didn't...ask you...to do that..." Jane sighed as the robot beeped and flashed lights, and something about diagnostics flashed up on his monitor. "Sure, fine. Relay Mode." She squared up and faced the SPARK. "Commander?"
"...Kelly." That was him, and that was a subdued note in his voice. "I can't see your vitals, but I see you on scanners." He hesitated. "I'm glad my little brainstorm was enough."
"We..." Jane again glanced among her friends. "Odds like that, and we all...every single one of us got through." She shook her head slowly. "Sir...you've got to be the best commander alive today."
"...I can only work with the tools I'm given." His voice was much quieter than usual. And there wasn't even a hint of bitter anger. "Don't sell yourselves short, Menace. Any of you."
For a moment, it was quiet except for the flames.
"You need to extract," Bradford finally chimed in. "Firebrand is en route. We'll be very interested to study the vial you retrieved from the facility, as well as the brain plate from the codex."
"Bring the Viper King's body, too," Tygan urged. "It may prove useful."
"Right. Cleanup duty." Jane waved. "Junior, find the pieces of the snake. Someone collect the brain plate-"
"Got it." Elena leaned down and swept one off the ground. "The other one broke under Julie's psi-assault."
"All right, then." Jane glanced to David while Junior stomped off into the darkness. "You do realize you can let go of me at any time?"
"Can I?" the Australian wondered. "Any time I let you go, I wind up having to help save your arse from something or the other."
"Well, you can't hold on to me forever," Jane warned. "Besides, I've saved your arse a good bit too." Deliberately, she pushed away. "I'm a big girl, David: I can stand up by myself."
"I'm not letting you out of my sight until you check in at the medbay," the Grenadier growled. "You could have died!"
"And I didn't. Deal with it."
"I am dealing with your unfortunate survival-"
"Clearly not very well-
"I'm awful tired of your back-sass-"
"Then I'm afraid you need to get a girlfriend so you can stop having to hang around me-"
"Well, maybe I should, then!" David cried. "Someone halfway sane, who doesn't try to get shot every five minutes!"
"Oh, you know you'd get awful bored awful fast." Jane scoffed. "Shut up, David."
"You shut up, woman," he snapped. "You could have died tonight..."
He trailed off as Jane met his eyes.
Funny, Jane thought, in an almost detached sort of way. For all the back-and-forth, and all the snark and the insults...he's got a tear in his eye.
He really did think I died, and he looks like he's going to cry over it.
Adrenaline, really. Jane was all doped up on painkillers and steroids, and high from the thrill of battle and the rush of near-death, agonized by her serious wounds. Anyone would believe that she wasn't herself tonight.
Anyone except David White, and anyone except Jane Kelly.
Jane's lips hit his with sudden firmness, and the raggedness of his beard scratched around her mouth and tickled her cheeks. She had to stand on tip-toe to reach him, and somehow that sent a pleasant little buzz through her up and down. She clutched his shoulders for steadiness, but she also felt his arm lock around her waist - purely for her stability and safety, she was sure. She tasted his lips, and shivered when he did the same to hers.
Clap!
Jane broke loose with a splutter. She turned, and David - a little shocked in the eyes, but certainly not unhappy - along with her. Both of them scared at Elena Dragunova, who made an odd sight as she applauded from the dark back of the group in full trench coat and helmet.
"Go Jane!" Julie added a minute later, and the Ranger knew her cheeks matched the psi-op's hair as she added her clapping to the mix. Mox chortled, and then he joined in.
"Yeah, yeah," Jane muttered, coughing into her elbow. She shuddered both from the joy of David's touch and his breathless muttering and from the sheer relief of hearing Firebrand's engines roaring over the base. "Get in the damn dropship, assholes."
"Go Jane!" Lily Shen repeated, and to hell with the apparent fact that she didn't seem to like the Ranger all that much. "She shoots and she scores!"
All around the bridge, the technicians and staff nearly broke their voices cheering and whistling. They stood and clapped at the holodisplay and the way it had recorded every moment of that Event - far more important than the battle - and no one was immune to the searing joy that had driven everyone to their feet.
Well...there were two.
"Thank God." Edward Gallant leaned gently on his cane, and while all attention was away, his walls came down for just a moment. "What that'll do for morale..."
"Sir." John Bradford reached out to touch his arm. "Sir, I think things are about to change around here for more reasons than that."
Gallant eyed the bar feed, and his lips twitched when he saw the absolute riot the entertainment center of the ship had turned into. The bartending staff fired off bottles of champagne that cost more than some guns with wild abandon, and engineers and scientists grabbed drinks along with the off-duty soldiers who wouldn't have to attend any funerals in the next few days. None of them would go to sleep wondering if they could have saved their friend, if they'd only been deployed, and that was probably the greatest gift Gallant could have given them.
He watched Aileen Quinn, slamming her drink together with Liang's so hard the commander expected them to shatter. They toasted a dozen times before they bothered to throw the alcohol back, and then MacLeod and Rogers joined them, arms around each other and pumping their fists in the air like college students celebrating a football game had in Gallant's younger days.
His eyes settled on Sylvie Richard, still in her booth, quietly weeping as she beamed and drank, and the Commander's lips twitched into something approaching a smile.
"Somehow, I don't think Julie is going to make it ten paces out of Firebrand's hold before someone tackles her," he observed.
Bradford paused. "I'll take your bet, sir. Ten bucks?"
"You don't think she's been pursuing our senior psi-op at least as hard as Kelly and White chased each other?" Gallant eyed his XO. "You blind, John?"
"No, sir. I just don't think Richard's got the public-affection thing in her veins. She'll content herself with hanging on to Julie until she can be reasonably certain she's got her all to herself. Then..." Bradford grinned, and he made a very crab-like snapping gesture. Gallant laughed, and the XO smiled. He sobered quickly. "Things are about to change, sir."
"Why?" Gallant ignored the continuing celebration. "What's new, except Kelly and White...and Richardson and Richard, of course?"
"Well, sir..." Bradford shrugged. "They were dead meat. We all knew it. I knew it, Shen knew it, Tygan knew it. The bridge staff, the off-duty...hell, Edward. The nearest politician would have guessed it. None of us believed they could pull it off, especially not all of them." He reached out and tapped Gallant's chest. "No one except you."
"I didn't..." Gallant coughed. "Glorified management."
"You saved today," Bradford corrected him. "You just proved to them that you are good enough to yank a victory from impossible odds - and you did it without losing any of them. You relied on their bravery and their skill, but you led them to a victory they shouldn't have won. People remember things like that."
Gallant eyed him for a long moment. Then he squared his shoulders and turned back forward. "Alert the galley. We'll need hot food for the entire crew. Get a good meal in everyone's belly, make sure they have access to drinks, and send the laundry detail to make sure their beds are in as good condition as possible. Kelly's probably bunking in the infirmary - and I wouldn't place bets against Dragunova and Richardson joining her - so make sure we've got at least three beds ready there. No, make it four: an extra just in case." He cracked a smile. "After all, if Julie's sleeping in the infirmary, I'm not wholly convinced Sylvie won't insist on staying with her."
"Fair enough." Bradford paused to salute. "Yes, sir...Commander Gallant."
Author's Note 25: All I Want For Christmas Is A TV Tropes Page
And that brings Season One to a close. I'm not going to clog this AN up too much, but let me start by saying that I really appreciate all the views, and all the reviews I've gotten. This project has fought me tooth and nail - I'm accustomed to a wordcount output in the thousands per day, and I've clawed for hundreds on VC - for almost the entire time I've worked on it, and it becomes a lot easier to stomach and face the fire and the fight again when I can look at reviews and know that the effort is appreciated. So thank you to anyone who's left me encouraging words, and I hope to keep entertaining.
I'm going to be taking a break now, so I can focus on certain other of my projects. Season Two will happen - or, if it doesn't, it will be because of unforeseen circumstances - and I'll likely start development work on it early next year. As of the time of this writing, I'm gearing up one of my manuscripts for #PitMad, and I'll be working hard on that until about when this chapter drops...and from there, I have my next blog story to write, and after that I want to produce at least one completely new IP. Expect Season Two to begin airing sometime in Q1 of next year. In the meantime, check my profile page for any news on VC. There's also a link there to my blog, where you can keep track of VC and any of my other works.
Take care, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Hanukkah...uh...insert whatever other appropriate statements for whatever you celebrate and do that I'm just too dense to know of. And never stop being kickass!
Until Season Two...Vigilo Confido.