Hundreds of thousands of men and women, in hundreds of vacuum-craft, made their way across the black void of space, bound for Fire Star. The journey would take some six months all told, with unrelenting combat waiting for them at their destination. Guardsman Carter and the rest of Fourth Company, Eleventh Armored Infantry Battalion, were billeted in the belly of an immense troop carrier of ceramic and steel. Once the ship was underway, leaving Earth behind, it had been made to rotate, spinning on a tether opposite a massive counterweight, the rotations imparting something like gravity to the ship’s interior. The speed of the rotation meant that the force pulling their feet to the deck was roughly one-third that of Earth’s gravity, identical with the gravitational attraction of the red planet Fire Star, so that when they arrived they would be well acclimated to its feel. Long hours were spent every day in combat exercises, hand-to-hand bouts, and weapons training. But even the taskmasters of the Green Standard Army could not drill the men twenty-four hours a day—or rather all ten watches of the shipboard day—and so there were always spans of time when the men were left to their own devices, to eat, to seek recreation, and to relax, as best as they were able.

Like most in his recruit class, Carter had been assigned to the Fourth Company, an infantry unit supported by mechanized crawler-tanks. Carter found himself part of First Squad, Second Platoon, under the direct command of Corporal Eng, a broad-shouldered, round-faced Han who had already seen combat on Fire Star, before returning to Earth to help train up a new combat unit. Eng was frequently seen in the barracks assigned to the Second Platoon’s First Squad, getting to know the men now under his command, learning their strengths, their weaknesses. From time to time the men also saw Captain Quan, leader of Fourth Company, but while Eng was personable, at least attempting to assay the role of the regular man with his smiles and hand clasps, while still maintaining a dignity befitting his authority, Quan was distant, aloof. It was almost as if Quan was uncertain of his own position, afraid that if he were to show any perceived sign of weakness, of being anything but the stone-faced leader of men, that he would find his position taken from him.

Still, there were some who saw in Quan’s distance some kind of steely resolve, an awareness of forces moving at a level that the common foot soldier wouldn’t understand.

Carter thought that men of that sort were just hungry for a father to whom they could look up, and that they would welcome any stern hand, whether it was worthy or not.

There was something almost comforting about being surrounded by so many familiar faces. The troop carrier carried thousands of men, and even a few women, both infantry of the Green Standard as well as sailors and airmen of the Interplanetary Fleet. Still, it occurred to Carter that it might have been preferable not to have been quite so familiar with the faces most immediately around him. He had taken some pride in the discovery that he was to lead a fire team of four men in the First-Second—First Squad of the Second Platoon—but that pride had been considerably leavened by the fact that the other three men were Spitter, Ears, and Moonface.

Ears was a right enough fellow, Carter decided, and Moonface had his good qualities, but Spitter? Aside from the man’s seemingly boundless flatulence, it seemed that he was a positive glutton for punishment. It seemed that there was no circumstance that the Rossiyan would not turn to his own disadvantage.

Such as the incident with the airmen.

Pilot Amonkar felt edgy, confined as they were within the steel hull of the troop carrier. Having spent the last months flying, part of every day in the air, to be cooped up inside the vacuum-craft for so many weeks was to her like a cage to a bird, and she wanted nothing but to fly free. But they had no choice but to wait until they reached Fire Star, where they would be able to board the reassembled Fair Winds for Escort and take to the skies. What matter that the skies were pink over red sands, instead of blue over green forests and gray rock? They were skies, and flying was all that mattered.

Most days onboard the carrier were spent reviewing mission plans and hypothetical scenarios with the other flight crews of the Sixth Squadron, a group made up of twenty light bombers and a dozen rotary-winged fighter escorts. Like Amonkar, none of those onboard the trooper carrier, with the possible exception of Squadron Commander Khai, had any inkling what their mission on Fire Star would entail, but it was rumored that they were to take part in a major new offensive. And even Khai, if he knew anything of the mission, would still have been ignorant about most details, and either way Khai wasn’t talking.

When at their liberty, not in mission reviews or in practice sessions with her crew in the flight simulators installed in the carrier’s lower decks, Amonkar had found boon companions in her navigator and new co-pilot. With Bosch washed out, and Amonkar elevated to the position of pilot, another trainee had been brought up to round out the crew of Fair Winds for Escort. Co-pilot Seathl was an Athabascan woman from the nation of Khalifa, two years Amonkar’s senior, one year older than Navigator Geng. When the three of them got together, away from the strictures of duty and training, it was almost as if Amonkar was once more a girl in Bhopal, getting together with her school friends, staying up half the night, laughing and talking about their hopes and dreams. But unlike those days in Bhopal, the hopes and dreams which the three crewmates stayed up late nights discussing did not involve boys, or fashion, or their aspirations for careers or lives beyond their parents’ homes, but instead were about flying, about their plane, about their hopes that they would survive the war unscathed, and their dreams that they would one day be able to return home, to fly for the pure joy of it, and not into the gauntlet of enemy fire.

Mealtimes, the crew of Fair Winds for Escort ate together in the immense mess hall on the carrier’s largest deck, along with hundreds of others of the ship’s passengers, sailors, airmen, and soldiers.

It was in the mess, after the midday meal on a day when the Fire Star was still a journey of long weeks away, that Amonkar and the others came in contact with the soldiers.

Having trained for most of the previous year at the Interplanetary Fleet’s air school in Guangdong, the airmen had, as a group, had little contact with outsiders for some time, dealing only with other members of the Air Corps, all of whom existed in the same chain of command, whether above them, on the same rungs of the ladder, or below. The troop carrier was the first time they had been forced to mix with others since first joining the Air Corps, but even here the different groups tended to keep to themselves, airmen to airmen, soldiers to soldiers. They had even had only limited encounters with the crew of the troop carrier itself, for all that they were their brothers- and sisters-in-arms in the Interplanetary Fleet.

Having completed their meal, Amonkar excused herself from the rest of the crew, and then she, Seathl, and Geng made their way back to their barracks to share a pot of hot green tea and while the time in idle conversation.

Before they were able to leave the mess hall, though, they found their way blocked by the towering figure of a man in the fatigues of a Green Standard guardsman. His neck was as thick as his head was wide, making it appear that both were a single bullet-shaped growth jutting up from his wide shoulders. The backs of the man’s broad hands were covered in coarse black hairs, as was his neck all the way around from front to back. He loomed over the three diminutive women, and if Amonkar had carried Geng on her shoulders the navigator might easily have been able to look him in the eyes.

“Our pardon, guardsman,” Amonkar said, somewhat confused, dipping her head in an abbreviated bow, the respect one paid an equal, “but you appear to be blocking our way. May we pass?”

“I don’t know,” the man said, his deep voice laced with the accent of Rossiya. He scratched his stubbled chin, eyeing Seathl hungrily. “I think perhaps we should all stay a little longer, eh? Get to know each other better?” He lisped when he spoke, badly, flecks of saliva gathering at the corners of his wide mouth.

Amonkar decided that the time for etiquette had likely passed. “Come on,” she said to the others, and shouldered her way past the towering Rossiyan.

“Wait a moment,” the guardsman said, grabbing Seathl’s arm as she passed, his thick fingers wrapped tightly around her bicep. “I think we can be friends, eh?”

Amonkar whirled, unsure how to respond but knowing that she had to do something. Seathl was under her command, after all. She wasn’t sure of the guardsman’s rank, him wearing no identifiable insignia, and besides, chain of command between the different militaries was a problematic issue, at best. Even if she outranked him, it was clear that a simple verbal order would prove insufficient.

“Arati?” Geng said from Amonkar’s side, sounding uncertain.

“Don’t worry,” she said with a confidence she didn’t feel, stepping forward. “I’ll take care of this.”

As it happened, she needn’t have bothered.

One moment the lisping Rossiyan was standing before them, towering over Seathl, her arm in a one-handed vice grip. The next moment, another guardsman grabbed his shoulder and spun him around.

“Damn it, Spitter,” the man said, sounding like a character from a Vinlander gunslinger drama. He was considerably shorter than the Rossiyan, his fair hair close cropped, his eyes narrowed. “What the devil are you playing at?”

“None of your concern, Tejas,” the Rossiyan said, dismissively, scarcely even deigning to notice the other man, whose hand he shrugged off. He turned back to Seathl, puckering his lips. “Come on, now, pretty, just give us a little kiss, eh?”

Again the Vinlander guardsman grabbed his shoulder and spun him around, but this time when the Rossiyan turned in annoyance, the fair-haired man didn’t waste time talking, but balled his fist and swung.

Even though the Rossiyan outweighed him by kilos, easily standing taller than him by more than twenty centimeters, the Vinlander clearly knew how to deliver a punch. The Rossiyan went down, laid out on the deck-plates with a moan.

The Vinlander guardsman turned to Amonkar, but before he was able to speak, the Rossiyan reached over and clawed at his leg, shouting obscenities.

“Excuse me,” the Vinlander said, all courtesy, before spinning around and delivering a thudding kick to the Rossiyan’s abdomen, knocking the breath from him, as well as any remaining fight. In an aside, he said, “Damn it, Spitter, don’t you know when to stay down?”

The Vinlander glanced over at Seathl, who was more baffled than alarmed by the exchange. “Are you alright, ma’am?”

Seathl nodded, followed by a shrug.

The Vinlander turned to Amonkar, having seen her ranking insignia on her tunic’s collar. “My apologies for my… well, for him.” He jerked his head toward the Rossiyan on the floor, now holding his abdomen and moaning in pain. “We think he must have been raised by cattle, since he’s only half as mannered as an ox, but smells twice as bad.”

Amonkar smiled, and gave the Vinlander a slight nod. She motioned Seathl to her side. “You have my thanks, Guardsman…?” She let the name hang, like a question.

“Carter,” the Vinlander said, snapping off a jaunty salute. “Carter Micah.”

Amonkar nodded, and gave an absent-minded salute of her own. “Pilot Amonkar Arati.” She glanced down at the guardsman sprawled on the floor. “Next time, if you can keep your ‘him’ from bothering innocent airmen in the first place, I’ll be even more grateful.”

Guardsman Carter smiled, sheepishly. Then, as if in response, the Rossiyan on the deck let out a thunderous peal of flatulence. “Come on,” Seathl said, grabbing Amonkar’s arm, steering her and Geng away. “He smelled bad enough on the outside, I have no desire to discover the scent of his rotting innards.”

As they were turning the corner out of the mess hall, Amonkar glanced back, and saw the Vinlander crouched down, bawling out the Rossiyan on the deck. For a moment, perhaps, she felt like a girl in Bhopal again, and for a fleeting instant, wondered if tonight they might not discuss boys instead of flying, just this once.

---

PREVIOUS CHAPTER: Hexagram 12
Obstruction
Below Earth Above Heaven
Heaven and Earth do not interact. In the same way, the noble man holds back the practice of his virtue and thus avoids disaster. He must not allow himself to be honored with rank and salary.

NEXT CHAPTER: Hexagram 14
Great Holdings
Below Heaven Above Fire
Fire on top of Heaven. In the same way, the noble man suppresses evil and promulgates good, for he obeys the will of Heaven and so brings out the beauty inherent in life.

Return to Index.

Chapter 13 of Three Unbroken by Chris Roberson. Copyright © 2007 Monkeybrain, Inc. For more action from the Celestial Empire don't miss The Dragon's Nine Sons.

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