Special Forces 01 (38 page)

“He’s here, he is actually here.” Without another word of explanation, he grabbed her hand and towed her off the floor, straight for the balcony doors on the far side of the room. Mentally, he called up his wing man, with a short four word burst.
Gremlin, Sarge is here.

“You’re kidding!”
Gremlin responded instantly.
“Where?”

Balcony doors, eight o’clock.

Rys was already within five feet and moving fast toward the man he owed a great deal to, taking him in like a breath of fresh air. In the six months since their last meeting, he had changed dramatically. He looked less gaunt and haggard, with a shower, a shave, and a fresh change clothes. Tonight, sporting the same Fourth Colony dress uniform that Rys and Gremlin wore, with his hair carefully shorn high and tight and glowing with renewed health, the man looked better than ever. Rys smiled to himself as he recorded this, and called out, “Sergeant Barrett!”

Barrett turned at the unexpected hail, spotting Rys instantly. A rare grin swept his face from ear to ear, lessening the severity of his craggy features. “Savar! You scrap yard dog, how did you get in here, is the back door standing wide open?”

Rys accepted the hand extended to him in a vice like grip, grasping his Sergeant on the shoulder with the other hand. He beamed up at the man who had raised and trained him, the closest thing he had to a father. “I could ask the same of you, Sergeant; this is a pretty upscale event, not your usual fare. You look pretty good, all things considered.”

“Course I do,” Barrett responded with a snort, “I’m finally getting a decent night in the rack for the first time in years! It’s impossible to get your beauty sleep when you’ve got twenty super-brained, crumb snatching rug rats to keep on the straight and narrow.”

The former rug rat laughed, but didn’t try to deny anything. “Anne, let me introduce you to the man responsible for what I am today, Sgt. James Barrett. Sarge, this is Miss Anne Dorian.”

They exchanged nods and intrigued smiles, eyeing each other with clear speculation registering on their faces. Rys was sure they would have a lot to talk about, and he wasn’t so sure that was a good thing.

“Sgt. Barrett, I’ve heard so much about you,” Anne responded with an impish light in her eyes. “I promise to hold my judgment, until I hear your side of the stories.”

Barrett chuckled, the sound deep and gravelly. “Miss Dorian, a distinct pleasure! I haven’t heard a word about you. I look forward to telling stories on all of them; I have enough material to fill volumes.”

Knowing Rys’s luck, it would probably be his most embarrassing stories first.

“Sarge!” Gremlin converged on the gathering at that moment; smile so electric that he nearly glowed in the dark.

“Gremillion,” Barrett clapped the tall young man on the shoulder, “did you grow
again?
I told you to quit that, boy! If you get much taller, we are going to have to start charging you extra for uniforms.”

“Now, how am I supposed to stop a growth spurt, Sarge?” Gremlin responded as he always did to this teasing.

“What, a direct order wasn’t sufficient for you?” Barrett shot back. “Perhaps we should just start feeding you captured, outdated, ration packs from Nova to help curb your appetite!” Gremlin gave a mock look of horror, and clutched his stomach, making the Sergeant laugh all the harder. “And who might this beautiful young woman on your arm be?”

“Sarge, this is Miss Candace Dorian. Candace, this was the sand in our cereal and the bane of 01’s existence, Sgt. James Barrett,” Gremlin introduced them.

Candace’s eyes lit in recognition. “Oh, the same Sgt. Barrett that trained you?”

“That would be the very one,” Gremlin confirmed.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir,” Candace responded in transparent sincerity. “I have so many questions to ask you, I don’t know where to begin.”

“As it happens I have a few questions for
you
, Miss Candace Dorian,” Barrett responded with a glance back and forth between the two young women. “Sisters?”

“That would be affirmative Sergeant,” Anne replied simply, and grinned at Rys, mimicking his standard single word response. Everyone caught the joke, and smiled, nodding at her passable rendition.

“Well, Savar, Gremillion, what sob story did you tell these two beautiful young women to get them roped into your sorry lives tonight?” The tone was crunchy, but the warm admiration in his eyes said that he was quite pleased to see them obviously out on dates.

“Sob story?” Rys objected, warming to the topic at hand. “Gremlin, I did not tell any a sob stories, did you?”

“No, sir,” Gremlin responded seriously, eyes twinkling. “No sob story. However, I think we might have mentioned something about that long, arduous trek, fraught with peril here to Bijordan…”

“Right, right,” Rys agreed as Gremlin trailed off invitingly. “Perhaps there was the odd word or two about how we were marooned in space for several days with air and consumables running out.”

“With Nova using every asset, scouring the quadrant for us, and how we had to duck into that hazardous asteroid belt to avoid detection,” Gremlin added, ignoring the way his date was trying to smother a laugh behind one hand.

“Erksome drew the short straw to be the first person we’d eat if we had to resort to cannibalism,” Rys continued, lips twitching as Anne finally lost her grip on the reins, and started breaking up. “But I don’t recall there being any sort of sob story, playing for their sympathies at all.”

“Well, that is certainly reassuring,” Barrett commended them with a straight face, “as long as you’re not plying these lovely ladies with any of your tired old war stories.”

Candace was laughing hard enough that she had to lean against Gremlin for support, to keep from falling on the floor. Anne had a hand pressed to her left side, that was cramping from too much laughter, and the pain just made her laugh all the harder. “Rys, by any chance,” she finally managed to choke out, “did you get your sense of humor from him?”

“Affirmative, it is the only way to survive training under him,” Rys informed her drolly, staring straight at his Sergeant. “Laugh or die.”

Barrett laughed outright at this. “There is no way I can argue with that! Well, boys, I’m glad to see you two seem to be adjusting so well to your new environment. How are my other ruggies?”

They filled their Sergeant in on what the rest of 01 had been up to, both of the Dorians jumping in at opportune intervals. They added extra flesh to polish the stories to a bright luster, which pleased and surprised Barrett in turn. They spent a very pleasant hour just talking and relating stories, with enough good natured teasing to keep everyone sore from laughter.

Rys relaxed, setting aside all the worries and concerns that he was carrying for one night. It was a pleasure just spending some quality time with the people that he loved best. Times like these didn’t come along often enough, and passed far too quickly.

Chapter Nineteen

“Rys, are you even listening to me?”

Rys blinked back into reality with a start. He had a sinking feeling that he’d just landed himself into trouble with his inadvertent loss of focus. He and Anne were eating lunch in one of the few less trafficked areas of the school. It was a grassy knoll that was situated in between the agricultural building and the soccer fields. He had been preoccupied most of the morning, wading through the volumes of information that Gremlin was feeding him, and growing increasingly uneasy by what he was reading. There were still a lot of gaps in the intelligence reports, but the general direction was decidedly disturbing.

Nova was definitely moving, and they had no idea where or when.

Unable to put it out of his mind, he’d been constantly worrying about it, like a new cadet trying to locate that mythical left-handed spanner. In fact, he’d continued mulling it over when he needed to pay more attention to what was going on around him. Now he was caught, and he was sure he would have to pay a high price for his lack of foresight.

Anne was staring at him through suspicious eyes, putting her sandwich down on her paper bag, so that she could give him her full attention. Rys knew that admitting to a woman that he had completely missed what she was saying would be about as intelligent as jumping randomly around a minefield, blindfolded. On the other hand, if he came clean and told her what he was thinking about instead, he might be able to extract himself from the deep sink hole he was currently standing in.

“I apologize,” he replied, blowing out a breath and rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Gremlin found some information—some
highly
classified information that your security clearance unfortunately doesn’t cover—and it’s…unsettling.”

“Nova?” It wasn’t really a question or even a guess.

He winced in surprise, caught completely off guard by her intuition and insight. “You’ve heard already?”

“My dad’s study isn’t exactly soundproof,” she responded, admitting to her source of information. “I’ve been picking up bits and pieces, in conjunction with their name, all week. How bad is it?”

“We just don’t know,” he groaned in frustration. “That’s part of the problem. Gremlin has been working with your government’s top people and between them they’ve unraveled an impressive portion of it, but there’s…this gap that’s keeping them from understanding everything.” Namely whole sections of the message that were coded in an obscure form of slang, so outdated, that the linguistics department wasn’t even sure it was slang.

“Is that’s why he hasn’t been calling Candace every day?”

Rys frowned at her in bemusement. “He has been calling her
every
day?”

Anne rolled her eyes, obviously praying for patience to tolerate the clueless. “Rys, they’ve been dating for three weeks now, going out somewhere almost every night.”

“…oh,” was the most intelligent thing he could think to say, not even bothering to hide his amazement.

“I make a full appeal to the Guardians,” she intoned, raising her hands straight over her head. “Do men even
talk
about relationships?”

Not that he’d ever been involved in. Well, not unless there was a woman that was bringing the subject up. Rys pushed that thought aside, unwilling to venture into such a frightful abyss. “Yeah, that would probably be the reason. I had to order him to get a minimum of five hours of sleep a night. He gets so involved and focused on a project, he cuts himself short on sleep.”

Her voice shook a little, considering the sobering ramifications of his words. “That is bad.”

“Anne, if this heads south at light speed, as I expect it will, it is going to be very…bad. We will need to step in when that happens.”

She grabbed his shoulders in a grip tight enough to leave bruises, eyes searching his face intently. “But you’re —!” She cut herself short, eyes darting around the open area around them.

“We would volunteer,” he stated quietly. “We are their best chance of coming out of this, whatever
this
is, on top if Nova is involved.” That was obviously not what she wanted to hear, as her face fell and her mouth formed a perfectly shaped O. He reached out to hold her face with both of his hands, tone gentle but firm. “Anne, Bijordan came to our rescue when no one else would. We owe this planet a debt that we might never be able to fully repay. Bijordan forces are good troops, well-trained, but largely inexperienced and untempered by battle. That could be expensive,
very
expensive. The casualties could be staggering if they tangled with Nova right now. It would be unthinkable if we brought this trouble to your home soil, and then just stood by instead of jumping into the fray. No one has more experience with Nova, and no one has a higher success rate. It will be the best for all concerned that the 01 be ready to deploy when Nova finally shows their hand.”

“Rys,” her voice was choked, eyes struggling to contain the tears that were threatening to spill over, “you are only
seventeen years old
.”

“I haven’t forgotten my promise to you,” he whispered with a gentle smile. “I’ll come back. I even promise not to get shot more than once.”

That broke her resolve, and she closed in, arms folding around his shoulders, and buried her face into the crook of his neck. “You idiot, the correct response is
I promise I won’t get shot at all.”

“Negative, I am not sure if I can promise that.” Hugging her closely to his chest, as he rocked slowly back and forth, he offered a tentative compromise, “How about if I promise to come back in one piece?”

“
That
is a promise I will hold you to!” She shifted her weight and settled more comfortably into place, becoming a warm and compelling presence in his arms.

Rys felt his heart rate shoot up noticeably. He summoned up Mark’s sage advice on how to successfully ask a girl out on a date. Mark had emphasized several times that the proper mood was vital. Rys ran through his mental checklist. Alone, affirmative! Private, acceptable, there is no one within earshot. Tender or romantic, double affirmative! If things reached critical mass with Nova—and he thought that would be commencing very soon—he didn’t want his heart or his head somewhere else, before he jumped off into battle. This delicate and perfectly balanced dance that he had been executing with Anne Dorian required a lot of effort on his part. He had to get this right.

Taking a deep breath for courage, and a moment longer to consider his words, he eased out on to the limb. “Anne. I—”

“Hmm?” she lifted her head up to look at him.

The look in her eyes caused the words staged up in his mouth to completely evaporate.
This should be easy,
he thought frantically. He could reprogram entire alien computer systems, hack classified files with ease, plan and execute missions within a few minutes’ notice, and even debug his own computer after Gremlin got some serious time with it. Asking a simple six word question—Will you go out with me?—was ridiculously easy compared to all of that.