Iphigenia Among the Taurians

March 796 U.C., Heinessen

Heinessenopolis was a dirty, bustling, run down city. Annerose had lived in it for most of her adult life, and still, she thought that she would probably never get used to all of its contrasts. The fleet operations headquarters that she had just left was such a tall, glittering building, but the city surrounding it was anything but. Autumn was in full swing, and the wind was whistling through the alleys between brick buildings, tenements and corner stores, to the outskirts of the city where train tracks met highways and the edge of the huge industrial airfield. Her uniform jacket was barely sufficient to protect her from the chill as night descended, but she was savoring the cold.

Most of the Rosenritter were already on board the ships that would take them to Cahokia-3, with just the senior officers of the regiment meeting at headquarters to discuss a few last minute operational changes. Things had felt like they were moving very slowly for a long time, and then all at once, pieces started to fall into place, and Annerose had barely had time to say goodbye to Julian and Ingrid before she was standing here, almost ready to leave.

Annerose was on the edge of an industrial trainyard, watching under searing construction lights as the last of their heavy equipment was loaded off the trains and onto shuttles to bring it with them to Cahokia-3. Annerose had a familiar itch in her fingers that made her want to be ticking things off on a clipboard as the cargo moved from one place to another, but it had all been checked and double checked by people who knew what they were doing, so she had to trust it. Schenkopp had gone inside the offices to find out when the loading process would be finished. Annerose had said she could find out with a phone call, and he had said, “Lieutenant Commander, it’s not as though we will be leaving without these things, so there is no time wasted in going to see for myself.”

It wasn’t that Schenkopp was nervous— that certainly wasn’t it— but Annerose could tell he was using this as an excuse to savor the last few hours on being on a habitable planet, and Annerose couldn’t blame him. So, she accompanied him to the shipping yard, leaning on the chain link fence and shivering, but relishing the feeling of being cold, and of a long night closing in.

Schenkopp jogged back out of the office, coming up right beside her. His breath fogged the chill air. There was the smell of smoke drifting in from somewhere, the industrial kind, not woodsmoke, and a train screamed and clattered as it went distantly past them. Even several hundred meters distant, Annerose could feel it rumble the fence beneath her fingers, and its lights splashed like fire across the other still trains in the trainyard.

“How much longer?” Annerose asked.

“Couple hours. We’ll need to get on our shuttle soon.”

Annerose nodded silently.

“How are you feeling, Müsel?”

“Fine,” Annerose said. She chuckled a little bit. “I’m more worried about leaving Julian than I am about anything else. I think it’s bad for him not to have stability in his life.”

“He has Ms. Roscher, and your mother,” Schenkopp pointed out.

“I know,” Annerose said. “It will be fine. You should tell me I’m projecting all my stress onto the one thing that I know will be fine.”

“You’re projecting all your stress onto the one thing you know will be fine, Müsel.”

“You’re right, Captain,” she said. He tugged some of her hair playfully.

“Did you get in touch with your brother?”

“I did,” she said. “He didn’t write me back, which I think means he understood my message.”

“Good,” Schenkopp said.

“And how are you feeling, Captain?” she asked. “Or is it insubordinate for me to ask that question?”

“Oh, you can ask,” Schenkopp said. “I’m fine. Just trying to make myself remember what fresh air feels like, before we stop feeling it for the next six months or however long.” He leaned his back against the fence, causing it to sag, and she looked over at him. His nose was catching the light, and his scarf was all untied, fluttering in the wind instead of tucked neatly into his jacket. He was smiling at her, mouth wide.

“Do you think we’ll see combat?” she asked.

“They’re sending us for a reason, Müsel,” he said. “I’m looking forward to it.”

She nodded again. “I feel like I should be scandalized by that. But I’m not.”

“No, you feel it too, don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“I think you and your brother have the same kind of crazy,” he said. “You just haven’t had much of an opportunity to let it out.”

“What kind is that, Captain Schenkopp?” she asked, turning towards him. As he opened his mouth to answer, she reached up and grabbed his flyaway scarf, pulling him towards herself with it.

“The kind that I appreciate, Lieutenant Commander,” he said.

She tied his scarf back up and tucked it into the front of his jacket. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“I look forward to seeing an axe in your hands, too,” he said.

She laughed. “We should probably find our shuttle.”

May-August 796 U.C., Cahokia-3

The Rosenritter had been on Cahokia-3 for a little over a month, and Annerose had decided the place was not one where humans were meant to be.

Their base was of the most temporary possible construction: huge inflatable domes the same sandy red color as the ground, to be less visible from above. Although they were rated to withstand the hot windstorms that swept across the planet, kicking up walls of sand into the sky, the domes lacked any true feeling of protection. Just being inside one without her suit on made Annerose’s skin crawl. It was an order of magnitude worse than being on a ship, she thought. Ships at least were made of comfortingly heavy metal, and could move. When she walked to the airlock, she would poke the outer wall with her finger, and it would bend inwards. She hated that.

Not that being outside was much better. Except for the few roads that had been laid down to allow the heavy machinery to move around to facilitate construction, the ground was almost entirely composed of loose, silty sand, smeared thick and unpredictable over jagged rocks. Walking was difficult, and riding air bikes sent up clouds of dust behind them.

Even standing still on Cahokia was disorienting: the sun was large and hot in the sky, and the planet spun so quickly that the shadows seemed to dance. It was autumn on this part of the planet, and though this didn’t change much about the temperature, it did mean that day would break, then night would fall about an hour later, with three hours of darkness in between.

Annerose was glad that it was almost winter. The cooling systems of the suits could only do so much, and she found herself sweating all the time, drinking her water ration too fast and feeling ill for her trouble.

Worst of all, though, Cahokia was intensely boring and isolating.

The Rosenritter were in relatively good spirits, but the same could not be said of the mine construction crews. The mine construction workers fell into two categories: old hands who had the benefit of knowing what they were doing, but who also knew exactly how miserable the conditions on Cahokia were compared to their previous posts; and new recruits, who seemed to Annerose to wander around in perpetual dazes, always getting in the way of the Rosenritter, and being very annoying. Both of these groups were overworked, but that didn’t stop them from spending the little free time they had getting blindingly drunk, getting into fights, and wandering out of the base into the desert.

Most of the excitement of the first month on Cahokia, for the Rosenritter, anyway, involved searching for people who went missing, either from ill-advised wandering, or from being caught out working during one of the dust-storms that whipped up with almost no warning, during which a person trying to find their way back to the base could accidentally wander in the wrong direction and end up completely lost. Two people had died in this way, which was tragic, but neither of them had been Rosenritter, so Annerose couldn’t exactly do anything about it.

For all that the Rosenritter were a rowdy and opinionated bunch, they respected and obeyed Schenkopp, and, by extension, Annerose and the other officers of the regiment. They, at least, were not wandering out into the desert to die, mainly because Annerose was watching the failures of the mine management, and instituting very strict safety rules, such as posting a guard at every airlock, and requiring sign-out and written checks of every air-bike that was sent out. Annerose was not going to be responsible for entirely preventable deaths.

When she brought these common sense measures up with the mine management, offering to have Rosenritter watch the entrances to the mine and the workers’ quarters, as well as guarding all their transportation equipment, she was brushed off, in a way that she found very rude. She complained about it to Linz and Blumhart as they sat in the rec room. Blumhart and Linz were drinking, but Annerose was too annoyed to touch the beer that they had procured for her, and she was instead pacing back and forth in front of the table they were sitting at, playing cards.

“Maybe it’s because there’s only like, twenty women on the planet,” Blumhart said. “Might make them less inclined to listen to you.”

“Nah,” Linz said, slapping a card down onto the table. “Remember last week when we found two of their guys broken down, and I yelled at that guy, what’s his name?”

“Whittacre,” Annerose supplied.

“Yeah. I told him that if they didn’t want us to bring back bodies next time, they were going to have to start actually inspecting their vehicles and using the logs.”

“Hah, I do remember you telling me about that,” Blumhart said. “Think they listened?”

“Of course not. That’s the point. They’re not going to listen to us.”

“It’s so stupid,” Annerose said, continuing to pace. “It’s like they want their own people to die.”

Linz shrugged. “Don’t let it be your problem. You can’t save people who don’t want to be saved from themselves. Besides, not our job.”

“It is our problem that we keep having to solve their problems, and we don’t get so much as a thank you,” Blumhart said.

“Do you actually want to be thanked?” Linz asked.

In a funny voice, Blumhart replied, “Well, it’d be nice to get some goddamn respect around here.” And he glanced at Annerose to see if that had made her laugh, which it almost did, though she didn’t stop pacing.

“It’s just insane to me,” Annerose said. “How can you be so careless as to disregard every single safety precaution ever written, and refuse to listen even after people keep dying?”

Linz spread his hand of cards onto the table, causing Blumhart to curse and get up to get him another beer as the victor. Linz shuffled the deck as he leaned back in his chair and said, “They ignore safety because they want things to get done cheaply and quickly. You know this. Safe, on time, on budget— you know you can pick two of those, max. And they got the contract by being the lowest bidder. It’s as simple as that. Should I deal you in?”

Annerose ignored the question. “I just feel like I could do a better job than anybody over there.”

“Of course you could,” Linz said. Blunhart returned and slid the beer across the table.

“Müsel, queen of the mines,” Blumhart said. “I’d love to see it.”

“I wouldn’t,” Linz said. “Look, Müsel, you can’t manage your way out of every issue. Sometimes you just have to hit people until they listen to you.”

Blunhart snorted. “Gods, you’re not wrong. I would love to punch some of them.”

“Don’t,” Annerose said. “We don’t need to give them any more reason to hate us.”

“They’re just not used to having anybody other than their own people around, I’m sure,” Linz pointed out. “It’s not normal to have the fleet guard a mine like this.”

“Kapche-Lanka,” Annerose pointed out.

“Different story,” Blumhart said. “You never went there, right?”

“No,” Annerose said. “Did you?”

“Hah, before I got transferred into the regiment, I was stationed there for like a month. The place sucked ass.”

“Which is worse?” Linz asked. “Kapche-Lanka or Cahokia?”

“Oh, this place is worse, hands down. At least on Kapche-Lanka you could breathe the air. Kinda, anyway.” He shrugged. “Oh, and we actually got to do things other than play ranger rescue with mine workers.”

“Will you stop pacing, Müsel? You’re stressing me out,” Linz said. “Sit down, have a drink, let the mine get mismanaged into the ground. They’ll figure it out eventually.”

She scowled, but did sit down with the other two.

“Great. Now, do I deal you in or not?”

“Fine,” Annerose said, and she tried to accept that Linz was right, and put her grumpiness aside. It wasn’t easy, though.

The troubles with the mine were exacerbated by the fact that communication off planet was impossible. They were maintaining strict radio and ansible silence, in order to minimize the opportunity for the imperial fleet to detect them. The only times they received any word about what was happening in the outside world was when one of their ships crept silently through the Iserlohn corridor to Cahokia to bring supplies. These supply drops happened very infrequently, which made time feel stretched and liquid in between.

And in between, they watched the skies, hoping to have advance warning, should any imperial fleets decide to make an appearance.

Three more months passed in this manner.

By August, Annerose had almost gotten used to Cahokia and its whims. She had become adept at running over shifting sand and cleaning omnipresent grit out of the engine of her air bike. The taste of the sand that somehow ended up in everything, despite the sealed suits and environments, no longer really bothered her.

After the first time she had noticed a rotten, sulphurous smell in her suit, she no longer panicked when trying to find the leak and patch it with the kit at her hip. Intellectually, she knew that it wasn’t the actual components of the atmosphere that were dangerous to her, just the lack of oxygen, but it had taken that first experience with it to calm her nerves. So when one day a freakishly strong gust of wind sent her stumbling down a hill, and she cracked her helmet open, she had had a calm and clear mind while shutting off the air supply in her suit, holding her breath, removing her helmet, and detaching the emergency release of the breathing tube, so that she could jam it into her mouth. She had to run back to base, and the team she was with laughed at how she looked, chipmunk cheeked, but mild embarrassment was far better than a fatality.

Aside from missing her family, a feeling that never really left her, Annerose was too busy to think of much of anything. She barely even saw Schenkopp, since they ended up on opposite duty cycles. Annerose wasn’t sure if she should be unhappy with this or not. Well, she knew that she was unhappy, especially when she met up on an informal basis with some of the few women mine workers on the planet, and she heard Schenkopp’s name mentioned.

It wasn’t her problem.

What was her problem, though, was rescuing (again) a prospecting group that had gone and gotten their vehicle broken down and the engine filled with sand (again). She and Linz had played rock, paper, scissors for who would have the dubious honor of going out this time, and Annerose had won. It wasn’t strictly necessary for an officer to go— there were plenty of capable NCOs, and Annerose trusted the enlisted men of the regiment far more than she trusted any of the mine workers— but it was nice to get off base for a while.

Annerose had a group of six Rosenritter with her, and it took them almost five hours of careful driving in their rescue vehicle to get even close to the stranded mine survey team. It wasn’t a particularly long distance, but the truck they were driving was large, and the route was not well mapped, so they had to move slowly or risk becoming stranded themselves.

Luckily, the survey team had not wandered far from their disabled vehicle and its distress beacon. They had up a little shelter underneath a cliff face, while their vehicle itself was buried over the windshield in sand.

“Gods above,”Annerose said when they inspected it. “How does this even happen?”

“Windstorm,” one of the mine workers said sheepishly, in a way that Annerose doubted was the whole explanation. She suspected that running the vehicle to try to free it had contributed to how deeply it was buried.

By the time that she and the rest of the Rosenritter had dug out the back of it enough to hitch it up to tow, the telltale signs of another sandstorm were beginning to appear: a wind beginning to whip up, and a fuzzy haze appearing on their weather radar. Annerose, not wanting the trucks to get buried again, ordered their convoy of two to make their way a few miles further away from the base, to an elevated, rocky area. They parked there just as the sandstorm descended, and it was an annoying, cramped wait in the dark vehicle, with sand scraping the windows and reducing outside visibility to nothing.

Annerose slept through it, since they were relatively safe, aside from not being able to go anywhere, but she was woken up by one of the Rosenritter gently shaking her shoulder. She woke with a start, jumping in her reclined seat.

“Lieutenant Commander,” the soldier, Groteschele, said. “There’s something strange on the radar.”

Annerose rubbed her eyes. The storm was clearing up outside, though it wasn’t completely gone, she had at least a little visibility out the windows of the car, and the radar could pick up something other than blinding static. Annerose leaned towards the screen, looking at the anomaly that was being pointed out. It didn’t look like weather, it was too pinpointed and small, and it was just on the edge of their radar range, enhanced by the fact that they were well above the usual ground plane, on their elevated ridge.

“Hunh,” Annerose said. The radar signature looked very familiar, but she didn’t want to panic anyone in the car by jumping to conclusions. She pulled up the topographical map of the area, made a note on the map of where the signature was, then reached over to flip the switch on the dashboard that would put their vehicle into radio silent mode; receive only.

“We’re supposed to check in with base—“ Groteschele protested.

“We’re going to check this out first,” Annerose said. She plotted a new course for their vehicle, one that would take them along the elevated ridge, hopefully enough to give them visual confirmation of what their radar was picking up. “If we can drive, let’s get going. I don’t want to linger here.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

They began their plodding way across the ridge, carefully making their way closer and closer to the anomaly. It took several hours of slow driving to get within visible range, and the sun was rising again by time Annerose was able to peer across the sandy plains with her binoculars, the hot red light glittering in her eyes as she checked the horizon by degrees, looking far out into the distance.

There.

Her heart beat faster, and she increased the magnification on the binoculars so much that the image became huge and blurry in her eyes. It was unmistakable, though. Imperial ships, anchored to the ground with their long tethers. She counted six.

“Confirm what I’m seeing at three o’clock,” she said, handing the binoculars off to Groteshele. He looked, then twitched when he saw what she had seen.

“I see it too, ma’am,” he said. Annerose hadn’t said what it was, not wanting to spook the mine workers clustered around them, and Groteschele understood this.

“Let’s get back to base,” Annerose said. “I want everyone in our vehicle, and unhitch the other truck. Move!”

The Rosenritters scrambled to obey, but the mine workers complained vociferously. Annerose told them, as politely as she could, that they were welcome to wait with their own disabled vehicle until they returned to pick it up, which was enough to shut them up.

The ride back to the base was as fast as they could make it, but even so, it took a long time. As they finally pulled in to the base, Annerose typed a private message to the Rosenritters in the car with her, and showed it to them.

> do not let the mine workers leave or speak with anyone

> they could start a riot

> and not a word of this to anyone else, understood?

She made sure her group understood, and slipped out of the car as Groteschele forced the waiting mine workers to fill out a long and tedious log about how their car had broken down.

Annerose ran through the base, helmet under her arm, headed directly for Schenkopp’s bedroom. It was the middle of third shift, so he was certainly asleep. She called Linz, who was on duty at the moment, as she jogged.

He picked up immediately.

“Müsel! Where the hell have you been? I was about to send out a party after you when we saw you coming in on the scope.”

“Linz, I need to talk to you and Captain Schenkopp, now. Is Blumhart on duty?”

“No, he’s off this shift.”

“Is he awake?”

“Probably.”

“Can you get him and meet me in Schenkopp’s office?”

“What’s going on? Could you not find the mining crew?”

“No, I have them under guard down in the garage,” Annerose said. “Just meet me there and I’ll explain.”

Linz could hear the tightness in her voice, so he just said, “What code is this?”

“A,” Annerose said. “But let’s not let anyone panic yet.”

“Got it. I’ll see you in a few.”

By then, Annerose was at Schenkopp’s door, and she was ringing the bell. Once, then again, more insistently, when there was no answer the first time.

The door jerked open. Schenkopp was naked and obviously somewhat disoriented. Annerose could see, in the light spilling in from the hallway, the back of some other figure passed out on Schenkopp’s bed.

“Annerose, what—“

“We have a bit of a situation, Captain,” Annerose said. “Sorry to wake you.” She was averting her eyes from everything.

He stared at her for half a second, then his brain woke up enough to register what she had said, and he said, “Give me thirty seconds,” and shut the door in her face.

“I wasn’t going to make you deal with it in the nude,” Annerose muttered to the shut door.

Thirty seconds later, Schenkopp pulled the door open again, dressed now, and began taking long strides down the hallway. Annerose followed him. “I told Linz and Blumhart to meet us at your office,” she said.

“Great.”

Linz and Blumhart were already waiting outside the doors to Schenkopp’s office when they arrived, and he let everyone in, then shut the door firmly behind them all.

“Explain the emergency, Müsel,” Schenkopp said, looking at her. He didn’t even bother to sit down, so the four of them were standing around in a huddle in front of his desk.

“I assume all your radar was knocked out during the storm while I was gone,” Annerose said.

“Of course,” Blumhart said.

“And visibility on the skies was also nil?”

“Yes.” Linz already had some idea of what was going on, but Schenkopp and Blumhart were frowning, waiting for Annerose to drop the other shoe.

“When we were picking up the surveying team, we decided to go to higher ground to wait out the storm, so that we didn’t end up buried like they had been,” Annerose said. “And when the storm cleared, we picked up an unfamiliar radar signature.” She explained going out to investigate, and the imperial ships that she had seen as quickly as she could, mentioned that was her reason for radio silence, and told them about the mine workers she was keeping quiet down in the garage. When she was done, Schenkopp was looking contemplative.

“They know where we are, then,” he said.

“How?” Blumhart asked. “We’re not exactly visible from space.”

Annerose pursed her lips. “I think they might have been waiting and watching.”

Schenkopp looked at her. “What do you mean?”

“It’s not like there’s any rush to capture this place,” Annerose said. “In fact, the more developed the mine is, the less work that they’ll have to do. So if I were the enemy commander, I’d send in a tiny, undetectable drone to watch what’s going on for a while, gather information— it’s not like we’re going anywhere— and they would see our supply ships come in to land.”

“So, we can’t yell at the mine for lax radio discipline,” Blumhart said, sounding disappointed.

“You can yell at them all you want,” Linz said. “I certainly have.”

“It’s a little late to worry about that now,” Annerose said.

“Do they know that we know?” Schenkopp asked.

“Probably not,” Annerose said. “I stopped broadcasting anything after we picked them up on the radar. They might have detected that, but it was during the last of the sandstorm, so they might not have noticed it.”

“We have an advantage, then,” Schenkopp said.

“Do we?” Linz asked. “Not like Müsel took a headcount, but six ships is a lot of ships.”

“No, it isn’t,” Blumhart argued.

“Compared to our regiment?”

“They don’t know that we know they’re here,” Schenkopp said. “That’s enough of an advantage.” Schenkopp paused. “And those ships, there’s only a few of them. They’re a weak point.”

“What do you mean?” Annerose asked.

“If they were going to attack us from the air, they wouldn’t have landed,” Schenkopp said. “That means that they’re planning a ground assault, and they’re going to have to leave those ships where they are. Weak point.”

“That still doesn’t help us if six ships worth of soldiers are coming here in tanks,” Linz said.

“It could,” Annerose said, seeing what Schenkopp was getting at.

“How?” Blumhart asked.

“We’ll take a card from Müsel’s baby brother’s book,” Schenkopp said. “While their ships are minimally guarded, a team can go and seize them.” The plan was clicking into place as Schenkopp talked through it. “If our timing is right, if we can get those ships in the air, we can use their larger guns against their tanks en route.”

“Does anyone in the regiment have pilot training?” Linz asked.

“The ships practically fly themselves,” Schenkopp said. “It’s not like we’re going FTL.”

Annerose thought that this was probably an exaggeration, but during her time at the Officers’ Academy, she herself had taken the introductory piloting course upon the urging of one of her freshman year roommates. She hadn’t ever gotten certified, but she said, “In a pinch, I probably could. But I can check the regiment lists to see if there are others with experience. I’m sure there are.”

“Hunh,” Schenkopp said, looking over at her. “Excellent, Müsel.”

“But even if we don’t get the ships off the ground,” Annerose said, “probably destroying them would be enough of a blow, morale speaking.”

“That’s true,” Linz said, contemplative. “But I’m sure that they have eyes in the sky by now. They’d see us heading out.”

“Not if we were to go during a sandstorm,” Schenkopp said. “I’d put money on there being another one soon.”

“It’s the season for them,” Annerose said.

“It’s always sandstorm season,” Blumhart chimed in. “But that’s questionable.”

“Do you have any better ideas? I’m all ears.”

“No,” Blumhart said. “But what’re the rest of us gonna do? Sit around and twiddle our thumbs?”

“We’re going to have to get the mine workers to shelter. And if the tanks aren’t destroyed, we’re going to have a battle here. Once they know that we know we’re under attack, we can ansible for help.”

“That’ll take days, for anyone to get here,” Linz pointed out. “And if we call for backup loudly, the Iserlohn fleet will hear us and send their backup to meet ours.”

Schenkopp glanced at Annerose. “How much would you bet on your brother being on the ball on this.”

Linz cocked his head as Annerose said, “He’s smart, but he’s not omniscient.”

“What do you mean?” Linz asked.

“I sent a coded message to my brother on Phezzan to watch what was going on here, to make sure if we needed backup, some could be called in on time. There’s a possibility that he already knows we’re under attack.”

“This is six ships coming away from Iserlohn,” Linz said. “They probably weren’t even detected by our people on their way here.”

“That’s true,” Annerose said. “But the idea would be that Reinhard might hear gossip about the imperial politics, which family was sending their ships and soldiers here. Six ships might be a minor outlay for the Imperial fleet, but if it’s one family’s personal group,” Annerose shrugged. “It might be a talking point in the court.”

“Hunh,” Linz said.

“I think we’ll have to risk calling for help,” Annerose said. “Regardless, I think this space is about to become pretty contested, especially if we do manage to beat these ships off. We’ve lost our secrecy, so we’re either going to have to make a real effort to hold this place, or we’re going to have to be evacuated. And that’s all decisions that will take place in the sky.”

“Then why bother sending just a few ships?” Blumhart asked. “If we’re going to contest this place with a fleet battle anyway.”

“There’s no point in the expense of the imperial fleet sending more than they need to to. just get rid of us,” Schenkopp said. “Iserlohn and their reinforcements are right there, if it comes down to it. And if they can deal with us with as little expenditure as possible, they’re just being economical about it.”

“True,” Blumhart conceded.

It wasn’t a great plan, Annerose thought, and it relied on a lot of factors going better than they had any right to expect, but it was the kind of plan that felt better to put into motion than just sitting around waiting to be attacked. But there was a lot to get started on, in the unknown amount of time before the next sandstorm came sweeping down towards them, so they got started.

“Müsel,” Schenkopp said. “You take the team that’s going out. Take as many people and as much equipment as you think you need.”

Annerose almost objected, almost said she would prefer to stay with Schenkopp, but she nodded. “Yes, sir.”

And so she prepared, choosing as small of a team as she thought would have a reasonable chance of success, about fifty men, and outfitting them in the small, light vehicles that they used for every day travel, rather than the defensive tanks that she left to Schenkopp. She wanted her tiny force to be fast on its feet, and she didn’t want to take away tools and men that Schenkopp would need if Annerose’s part of the plan failed.

When the next dust storm swept down across the hot desert, Annerose and her group departed, driving blind, slow and careful, across the expanse. It was an arduous and stressful journey, and she felt rather like she was in a submarine of yore, calculating their position based on nothing but their known speed and heading, and the topographical maps at their disposal. They had no vision on the outside world, not with the sand like an impenetrable wall in front of them. They made it to within a few kilometers of the ridge that Annerose had stopped at before when the sandstorm dissipated, and they were forced to regroup and take stock of their situation.

Miraculously, they hadn’t lost any vehicles or men during their trek. No one had wandered off course or gotten stuck in a hole or sand drift. Annerose muttered thanks under her breath to whatever god had been looking out for them, then sent a few scouts ahead to climb to a higher vantage point and spy on the imperial forces.

Annerose and her group had apparently arrived just in time. Her scouts flashed a light signal down from the heights that they were watching the imperial tanks disembark from the ships. That was good. They could lie in wait until the tanks had gone far enough away that they wouldn’t be able to respond in time to any calls for help from the ships.

Annerose laid out her plan to her men, squatting in a wide circle in the dirt, her suit radio carrying her words to the group. She drew the six ships in the loose sand.

“When night falls, our first priority is approaching quickly and without being seen. We’ll make the journey around this area during the hour of daylight, but as soon as we’re clear of the ridge, we’re going to sprint the rest of the distance to the ships. No lights.

“Once we’re there, there should be only minimal crews guarding each of the ships. I want explosives underneath these ones—“ She marked five out of the six ships with ‘x’— “and I want the team with me to focus on this one.” She circled the center ship. “If there are soldiers on guard outside, we need to kill them as quietly as possible. Axes or knives. Zephyr particles only after the explosives have been placed on the bodies of the ships, or if we’re detected. I need absolute radio silence for this. Turn off your suit comms before we go in. Understand?”

There was a wave of nods from the assembled men.

“The explosives are set to be armed the moment that they are placed, and they all detonate on my signal. Once you’ve placed them, get out from under the ship. The last thing I want is for anybody to get crushed by this. After the detonation, I’m sure the last ship will try to take off as quickly as possible, which is why we already need to be inside.

“We want to try to capture whoever their leader is here. He’ll probably be of strategic value.

“Are there any questions?”

There weren’t any, so Annerose sorted her team into small groups, giving each one a ship to be responsible for. Imperial ships usually hovered a few stories above the ground, tethered with guy wires to stop them from moving about in the wind. Because of this, each of her little teams was equipped with a launcher that would send packages of explosives on armor-penetrating spears up into the sensitive belly and vents of the ships. It was a fast and dirty plan, but it would have to do.

They waited one of the planet’s short “days” for the imperial tanks to get further away, and then they moved in. They drove around the ridge just as the sun set, plunging them in to utter darkness, except for the imperial ships lit up like beacons on the horizon. They moved over the sandy dunes as invisibly and quickly as they could, creeping just to the edge of the light cast by the huge ships, silent in the sky.

Annerose gave the signal, and everyone spilled out of their cars, sneaking along the ground in their suits, axes strapped to their backs. She was right there with them, at the head of the pack, crouched just behind the last sand dune before the wide open space where the ground had been blown flat by the force of the ships’ engines. There weren’t any guards outside, but Annerose had no idea if anyone was watching from within the ships. There was no way to tell.

All of the ships had their loading ramps retracted, making the bellies of the ships smooth and impenetrable. They needed at least the main command ship to lower its ramp, so that they could board. Annerose signalled to the best gunner on her team, and explained what she needed.

“Can you hit the guy wire from here? I need it to look like it snapped in the wind, so they send someone out to fix it.”

Her gunner considered it for a second, then said, “I can get the anchor point.”

“Do it.”

Annerose held her breath as the sniper laid down across the sand, setting up his rifle and taking careful aim. The shot was a single bright, silent flash, and with a puff of sand, one of the anchor wires holding down the ship snapped, whipping away under its own tension. When a strong gust of wind rolled across the dunes, the ship shuddered, its anchors no longer holding it quite as steady.

They waited. After about fifteen minutes, the ship’s loading ramp extended, and a few workers headed out, bearing flashlights and a new guy wire. While they were standing around the snapped attachment point, Annerose signalled to her team, and five groups of four slunk off through the darkness, bearing the explosives that would need to be attached to the other ships. Annerose could see where they were, moving through the murky, dust-blown darkness, because she was looking for them, but even as they moved further into the light, the distracted workers now winching the guy wire didn’t see them. She saw the packets of explosives fly up and attach themselves to the ships.

That was all she needed. She gestured to the remainder of her Rosenritter, and then they were off across the sand, dashing towards the extended ramp.

The workers dealing with the snapped guy wire noticed them now— they hardly could have missed them— and sounded an alarm, causing the ramp to begin to retract, but by that point, Annerose was already close enough to it that she could take a running leap and catch on, while one of her Rosenritters shot at the retraction mechanism just visible inside the ship. With a flash of sparks from that shot hitting home, the ramp stopped moving, and Rosenritter after Rosenritter ran aboard.

The entry bay was empty, and as the last of the Rosenritter ran up the ramp, Annerose pressed the button that would detonate the other ships’ explosives. Even protected within the bay, she could feel the enormous change in air pressure from the blasts, and the ship she was on rocked violently. The explosives were heavy ones, taken from the mine construction crews, meant to blast deep pits in thick rock, so on the outside of a ship, or inside its delicate engine vents, they wreaked havoc. Annerose didn’t have time to look outside and glance at her handiwork; one of her men was already blasting the lock on the airlock open, letting her and her group into the main body of the ship.

Even though they had breached the airlock, that probably wouldn’t harm anyone inside the ship itself; it would take a while for the breathable oxygen to deplete, and a few of her men were already working on retracting the ramp and closing the ship up so that they could launch as soon as Annerose captured the bridge, which was her intent.

She took a small team with her, five Rosenritter, while the rest split off to go secure other areas of the ship. They needed to strike fast, and hard, and in as many places as they could at once. That was one of the lessons that Annerose had taken from her brother’s overwhelming of an imperial ship.

Annerose ran with her team on her heels through the ship, following the largest hallways to the bridge. Red emergency lights were flashing, and alarms were blaring, but Annerose tuned them all out in her helmet, feeling just the rush of adrenaline and blood pumping through her ears.

The ship was nearly empty, running on a skeleton crew, with the majority of the soldiers out in the tanks to attack the mine. That did not mean that they didn’t encounter resistance. Just before they arrived at the bridge, Annerose’s small team of five was met by ten imperial soldiers. Only a few of them had managed to put on their armored suits, but all were carrying both guns and axes. Neither group was prepared to run into the other right then and there, as Annerose had just turned a corner, but the Imperial soldiers reacted quickly, firing at Annerose who ducked back around the corner for just long enough to detach a Zephyr particle canister from her hip and throw it around the corner. These soldiers were better prepared, so they stopped firing immediately. Annerose hoisted her axe in her hands and steeled herself, turning the corner once again.

Time moved slowly. Annerose felt as though her body was moving strangely, and not just because the gravity was different on the ship than it was on Cahokia as a whole. It was as though there was a lag between her thoughts and the start of every motion. She ordered her arms up above her head, the axe blade glinting in the red emergency lights of the narrow corridor, and her arms had a sluggishness at the start of the motion, but then she was committed to it, unable to change course, even as her eyes widened and she yelled incoherently, bringing her axe blade down directly through the neck of the person in front of her. He wasn’t wearing a suit, and he hadn’t been able to bring his own axe up in time to counter her frantic rush, so Annerose’s blade cleaved directly through him, the blood spraying out and staining the white front of her suit, getting flecks of gore on her visor. Annerose’s eyes were wide, and she couldn’t quite process what she had just done— not that she had time to. Before she could even think, she had to duck out of the way of another attacker’s axe, move to the side of the hallway so the rest of the Rosenritter could come through, and swing a retaliatory strike, meeting blade-on-blade with showering of sparks and screeching metal with a suited imperial soldier.

The average Rosenritter was far and away a better axe fighter than the average imperial soldier, and Annerose was among the best in the regiment, so even outnumbered two to one, it didn’t take long before they had dispatched this whole group, ending up standing in the gore. Annerose looked around for just half a second, then one of her men touched her shoulder, and she nodded. “Let’s go, bridge,” she said. “Come on.” It was more for herself than anyone else, that statement, to spur her into action.

Her blood was coursing through her like fire, her brain seemingly split onto two levels. On one level, she was watching herself move, feeling half outside her own body, rationalizing and thinking over what she had just done. On the other, she was a creature of pure instinct, running headlong through the hallways to the bridge, and anyone who stood in her way would be cut down with no remorse whatsoever. She would have time for remorse later, or she wouldn’t. This was a war, and she was a soldier, and these were the enemy. No matter that in a different lifetime, one of these imperial soldiers could have been her brother. Not her, though.

And it was this thought, that she was living a better lifetime than she would have if she and Reinhard had remained in the Empire, that there were personal injustices that she was fighting against, things worth killing for, that made her able to let go of her need to think and analyze every specific action she was taking.

The doors to the bridge were sealed, unsurprisingly. One of her men sawed through the lock while Annerose and the others stood guard, ready to dash inside. They shoved the door open as soon as the lock had been cut, and they were immediately fired at, though the door itself protected them from the worst of it. One bolt singed the shoulder of Annerose’s suit, but she didn’t feel it. One of her men tossed in a Zephyr particle canister (they were running low, now, but they were at the bridge, so it didn’t matter) and the gunfire stopped.

There were only about ten people on the bridge, and none of them were wearing suits or carrying axes, so Annerose felt confident yelling out, “Put down your guns and surrender!”

There was a moment of hesitation, and some of the imperial soldiers glanced backwards, at a man Annerose hadn’t even noticed before. He was deep in the shadows of the bridge, so she couldn’t quite see his face, and he was seated cross legged on top of one of the computer terminals. The silver breastplate and stripes on the shoulders of his uniform announced that he was a captain.

“We surrender,” he said in imperial, then, “We surrender,” in the Alliance language— unaccented. He held his hands up.

The imperial soldiers in the room dropped their guns to the floor, and the Rosenritter quickly ran to tie them up. Annerose ignored that for a second, looked around at the various ship consoles, and shut down the emergency alert on the ship, mostly to give the rest of the Rosenritter who were storming through the halls free movement. Now that she had taken the ship, Annerose felt free to use her suit comms to communicate with the rest of her group, since there was no longer any worry about them being detected.

“We’ve taken the bridge,” Annerose said, over her suit comms. “Search and secure the rest of the ship. Report to me if you have any problems.”

There was a general response of, “Yes, ma’m,” and one “We’re heading to the engine room now,” from the small group leaders. Everything seemed to be going shockingly well. She could see on the monitoring screens outside that the other ships were wrecks on the ground.

Annerose turned her attention to the captain, who was specifically being guarded by one of her men. Now that Annerose got a good look at him in the light, she was, to put it mildly, taken aback. Her thoughts travelled, for a brief, involuntary second, back to the first time she had ever met a person who looked like this man: the day that she had arrived on Heinessen, the well-meaning social worker who had welcomed them to the Free Planets’ Alliance could have been this captain’s older sister. Her mother had made an embarrassing fumble with the woman’s name, unused to the practice of putting the family name before the given one. Annerose had met plenty of people like that since that day, but she had never in a million years expected to see a captain in the imperial fleet with that appearance. She had thought that Rudolph von Goldenbaum had consigned them all to labor camps on the frontier, where, aside from the ones who escaped with Ale Heinessen, she wasn’t sure what had happened to them all.

“You’re the person in command here?” Annerose asked in imperial.

The captain seemed weirdly relaxed. He scratched at the back of his head while he looked at her, but her visor was down, so he couldn’t see her face. “I suppose so,” he said. “If you mean this ship. And the rest of them. Previously.” He answered in the Alliance language, so Annerose switched to it.

“What’s your name, Captain?” Annerose asked.

“Oh, I’m obligated to provide that one, aren’t I?” he said. “Leigh. Captain Hank von Leigh.”

“Who do you report to?”

“His Majesty the Kaiser,” Leigh said, a funny little smile on his face. “But aside from that, that’s not one of the questions I’m obligated to answer.”

Annoyed now, Annerose shook her head and told one of her men to move Leigh into a different room so that she could talk to him later. She focused on getting together the Rosenritters who had been identified as having previously worked on the flight control of ships together, and getting their new stolen vehicle in the air. It didn’t take very long before they did, the ship lifting off with a shudder. Annerose was in great spirits, despite the nagging feeling at the edge of her mind that something was going to go wrong. She just was amused by the fact that both she and her brother had managed to commandeer an imperial vessel, though admittedly, she had had a far easier time of it than he had. It was just becoming something of a family tradition.

Because they weren’t planning on going into orbit, with the speed of the hulking imperial ship limited by the atmosphere, it would take about forty-five minutes for the ship to get back to the mine. That gave Annerose plenty of time to check in with the rest of her team, who confirmed that they had secured all the key areas of the ship. With that taken care of, Annerose decided it was worth talking to Captain Leigh some more.

He was being kept in a room fairly far from the bridge, the first room that had looked like it didn’t have any easy escape points or sensitive equipment in it, some kind of wardroom for the officers. Annerose was let in by the Rosenritter guarding the door, and she found Leigh seated in a chair, his feet up on the table in front of him, with his head tilted back and his eyes closed.

“You seem very relaxed for a man who’s just been taken a prisoner of war,” Annerose said.

Leigh didn’t open his eyes. “I’ve heard that the rebel POW camps are quite nice. I look forward to having nothing to do in one.”

“How come you speak the Alliance language so well?”

“I’m from Phezzan,” he said. There was a slight smile on his face. Annerose decided that she did not trust this man, not at all. There was some niggling thought in the back of her head, something her brother had said once. There was probably more than one ‘Leigh’ in the imperial fleet, but it didn’t hurt to ask.

“Do you know a Commodore Reuenthal or Mittermeyer?”

“They’re both rear admirals, now,” Leigh said.

“That’s a yes, then.”

“All I’m obligated to tell you—“ he cracked open his eyes and looked for the rank insignia on her suit— “Lieutenant Commander, is my name, rank, and serial number.”

Some of the von Müsel hotheadedness escaped Annerose, then. “I could say that you are being kept in nice conditions right now, Captain, and it would be in your best interest to cooperate.”

“Isn’t threatening a prisoner of war with torture generally frowned upon?” His voice and smile were both amused. “What’s your name? I’ll have to make some sort of formal complaint against you.”

“This isn’t funny.”

“Why are you curious about Reuenthal and Mittermeyer?”

“No reason,” Annerose said. “Who is in command of the ground force headed to the mine?”

“Captain Ansbach,” Leigh said.

“Are you his superior officer?”

Leigh laughed at that. “No. He’s the one who told me to stay here. We’re technically in co-command, but he’s been a captain for longer than I have, so he’s the more senior— It doesn’t really matter.” He had opened his eyes all the way, now, and was sitting up straighter in his seat, looking her over. His eyes fell on the insignia on her arm. “You’re Rosenritter?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You all get around,” he said. “I heard you were just on Phezzan.”

Annerose was grateful for her visor for hiding her face. “We were not.”

Leigh shrugged expressively. Somehow, Annerose felt like she was not in control of this conversation, or the situation. Leigh seemed too calm, like there was something that she hadn’t realized. She wanted to take her axe off her back and hold it, but that would have been inappropriately threatening. “May I ask a personal question, that I hope will stay between us, Lieutenant Commander?”

Annerose was silent for a second. “I make no promises.”

“I’ll answer a question of yours in exchange, if you like,” Leigh said.

“Ask.”

“Is Ms. Roscher doing well?”

Annerose blanched. “Why do you want to know?”

“A very good friend of mine— the Baroness Magdalena von Westpfale— would like to know that she’s safe. If I make it back to the Empire alive, I would like to let her know.”

“She’s fine,” Annerose said, unable to not sound a little choked. “She’s being taken good care of.”

“That’s good,” Leigh said. He closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat. “I’m glad to hear that. If you should see Ms. Roscher, please tell her that the baroness and I said hello.”

“How did you learn about the base on this planet?” Annerose asked.

“I already answered one of your questions, Lieutenant Commander,” Leigh said.

Annerose scowled. She wondered if Captain Leigh wasn’t being so nonchalant with her because she was a woman. The imperial fleet wasn’t well known for its respectful treatment of female POWs. She was about to say something about that, when there was the sound of a fight in the corridor, axe on axe. Annerose whipped her own axe from its magnetic hold on her back and pulled the door open.

A fully suited imperial soldier was there, taller than she was by almost a head, and he had just bested the Rosenritter who had been guarding the door: he was on the ground, his blood pooling out around him from some wound in his chest that Annerose couldn’t see.

Annerose swung underhanded, trying to use her smaller stature as an advantage, moving in ways that would be difficult for this tall imperial to block. But he was quick on his feet, and their axes crashed together, the handles grinding along each other in a competition of strength as they each tried to force the other back. The tall man was stronger than Annerose was, and she realized she wasn’t going to win this fight on strength alone, so she tried surprise, dropping into a crouch and trying to ram her shoulder into the man’s gut to catch him off balance. The initial surprise of crouching worked: the man stumbled forward as the sudden pressure was released from his axe, but he sidestepped just enough that instead of crashing into him, they had reversed positions in the doorway, with the man in towards Captain Leigh, and Annerose in the hallway.

The man brought his axe handle crashing towards her, and Annerose couldn’t get out of the way fast enough, so it smashed into the front shield of her visor, shattering the outer layer completely. She had seen the blow coming, and had braced for it, and the inner layer of her helmet hadn’t cracked, so she was fine. Annerose stood from her crouch and immediately swung her axe again, aiming for the man’s knees. He just barely managed to block her swing with the handle of his own axe, and he stumbled backwards, seeming off-balance for some reason.

Annerose pulled her axe back and up, trying an overhead strike, but then the man yelled, “Reinhard! Stop!” and dodged to the side.

She missed her swing, but didn’t stop, attacking again. With one hand, the man blocked her swing with his axe, while with the other, he pulled his helmet completely off, revealing a wide eyed face and a shock of red hair that Annerose had never thought she would see again.

Immediately, Annerose yanked her axe back, taking up a defensive stance but not actually attacking. Kircheis dropped his helmet to the floor with a clatter. He was sweaty and panicked, his hair sticking to his forehead, and he stared at Annerose like he was seeing a ghost.

“Reinhard—“ he said.

“Annerose,” she corrected. If it had been possible for Kirceheis’s eyes to get any wider, they would have. “Drop your axe,” she ordered in imperial.

He did. It clattered to the floor, and she picked it up, now holding one in each hand. She didn’t take her wary eye off him.

“Kircheis, er, I’m glad you came to rescue me, but this doesn’t exactly seem like—“ Leigh said from the back of the room. Annerose had almost forgotten about him. He had been watching the fight from his position in the back of the room, but had (probably wisely) not done anything to step in.

From down the hallway, there was the sound of running feet, and a few Rosenritter appeared. The whole fight hadn’t taken very long, and it was clear that the man on guard at the door had called for help before he died.

“Are you alright, Lieutenant Commander?” one of them asked, taking in the bloody scene outside the door, the disarmed Kircheis, and Annerose with her shattered visor and an axe in each hand.

“Yes,” Annerose said. “For the moment, anyway.” She passed Kircheis’s axe off to the nearest Rosenritter, who took it. “Search him. Make sure he doesn’t have any other weapons. And I want two guards on the door of this room. I want to take both of them prisoners.”

“Yes, ma’m,” the Rosenritter with Kircheis’s axe said.

The expression on Kircheis’s face was inscrutable as Annerose stepped away. Her heart was in her throat as she walked back down the hallway to the bridge of the ship. Kircheis, a man she hadn’t expected to see again. Leigh, a man who knew Ingrid, somehow.

She would have to bring them back to the Alliance with her. She wasn’t sure if she even wanted that, the possibility that Reinhard would be reunited with Kircheis. The idea itched at her, but she knew that he wouldn’t forgive her if she hadn’t done her best to keep him safe. She hated that she had been placed in this position, casting this weird light on her whole mission. Why was he here? Reinhard had told her that he would be under that Reuenthal or Mittermeyer.

The bridge was a hive of activity.

“What’s our status?” Annerose asked.

“We’re approaching the mine,” one of the Rosenritter at the navigation panel said. “We should have visibility in a few seconds— the dust is pretty heavy here.”

“Good,” Annerose said. “I want us ready to fire on the tanks as soon as we’re in range.”

“Yes, ma’m.”

Annerose stared at the display, the horizon lighting up as the sun rose on this part of the planet, causing the red sand dunes to glitter, and the haze of dust in the air to glow brilliant orange. Over the hilly, rocky land, there came into focus first one line of tanks, then another. The imperial tanks and the ones led by Schenkopp. They were already engaged in battle, the flashes of tank fire visible at even this distance.

Impatiently, Annerose asked, “Do we have a firing solution?”

“Working on it,” the Rosenritter at the weapons console said. “We’re not quite in range.”

They came closer. The imperial forces on the ground outnumbered Schenkopp’s group by a fairly wide margin, but they were doing something odd. As Annerose watched, the back half of the imperial tanks turned around and started retreating, heading away from the main conflict. It only took a moment more for Annerose to learn why they were doing that: as soon as their ship got close enough, the tanks began firing on them. They were still high enough in the air and distant enough that the few impacts were mostly ineffective, but Annerose still gripped the leather seat of the navigation console and said, “Can we increase our altitude? Why aren’t we firing?”

“Ma’m, there’s something wrong with the weapons control,” one Rosenritter said. “We can’t open the gun ports. They’re frozen.”

Annerose swore. “Can we get someone down there to open them manually?”

“I don’t think so— these are the exterior controls.”

“What’s locking us out?”

“There’s some sort of computer override— like it’s been put in some kind of maintenance mode that I don’t have the authority to change from this terminal.”

All this time, they were still being fired on by the tanks below, damage indicators now lighting up on key areas of the ship’s status display. The ship had already been slightly damaged by the explosions next to it, and it was not designed to fly so far within an atmosphere. Annerose closed her eyes for a second, then made a careful, dangerous, split second decision.

She pointed at the map. “Pull us out to here. I want us to land— crash— through this line of tanks. If we hit them on the nose, with all of us down in the back, at an angle that doesn’t crush the bottom of the ship, we should be able to do some damage to them, and get out alive. We can join back up with Captain Schenkopp once we’re on the ground. Understood?”

There was a moment of silence as the assembled Rosenritter processed what she was saying, then some grins and nods. “You’re fucking crazy, Lieutenant Commander,” the man at the navigation panel said. “Understood.”

The ship banked hard, then, turning around and gaining altitude so that they could escape the tank fire. Annerose communicated the plan to the Rosenritter scattered throughout the ship, and there was a general rush to meet up in the rearmost area of the vessel.

Before Annerose could go there herself, she and two other Rosenritters stopped by the room where Captain Leigh and Kircheis were being held. “We’ll bring these two with us,” Annerose said. “I think they have information that we can use. The rest of the prisoners, we’ll leave them on the ship for now. Someone can come back for them at the end of the battle. Get the captain into a suit, and put cuffs on both of them so they can’t escape.”

Her orders were quickly obeyed, and by the time they arrived at the rear bay, someone had located an ill-fitting imperial suit for Captain Leigh— one that was spattered with blood, in such a way that Annerose suspected it had been taken from a corpse. Leigh put it on, complaining the whole time.

“You don’t have to haul me around,” Leigh said, hopping around in the bay to get his other foot into the suit leg. “You could just let me go.”

“No,” Annerose said. “You’re valuable. Hurry up, we have about two minutes before we land.”

She did a quick headcount of all her Rosenritter while she waited in the bay. There were thirty nine that she counted— so she had lost ten men. It was a steep loss, but she hoped that it would be worth it.

“Brace for landing!” someone yelled. Annerose lay down on the floor, hooking her feet into the grooved metal surface that was used to lock crates in place for transport. With one arm, she covered her head, and with the other, she held onto the floor as tightly as she could.

The ship hit the ground with a sudden lurch, and Annerose was thrown into the air, her grip not enough to stop her from moving. There was a rending, screeching, horrible sound, and Annerose hit the ground again sideways, bruising her whole left side and twisting her arm badly. The lights were, miraculously, still on in the bay as the ship came to a sliding, shuddering halt. Every alarm in the ship seemed to be going off at once. Annerose pulled herself to her feet and looked around. All her Rosenritter were doing the same— it didn’t look like anyone had been grievously injured, the low angle of descent, the relatively soft sand, their slow speed, and the front of the ship all doing enough to stop them from tearing completely apart.

“Open the doors!” Annerose yelled. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”

It took some doing, but the door at the rear of the bay finally opened, sending sunlight streaming in, along with a wall of sand. The ship crashing had knocked sand into the air, and the wind and relatively low gravity of Cahokia meant that it would take a while for it to come back down.

Annerose and the Rosenritter streamed out of the bay, some limping, jumping down from the open door onto the sand. Annerose tumbled and slid until she reached the bottom of the sand wall that had formed up around the side of the ship.

In the limited visibility that she had, surrounded by the cloud of dust, she could tell that the situation was chaotic. The ship had indeed crashed directly into the mass of tanks, some of which had tried to get out of the way, most of which had not succeeded. There were half-buried vehicles poking out from the carcass of the ship, and several others that had been clipped but not quite crushed, that were half buried or on fire. It was an ugly scene, devoid of people for a second, until imperial soldiers stumbled into her view, and Annerose pulled her axe off her back and began swinging, trying to make her way towards where she had last seen the group of Schenkopp’s tanks.

The imperial soldiers were getting out of their vehicles, the ones that had survived, and many of them were running headlong towards the ship. Annerose didn’t understand why, since her group of Rosenritter was pathetically small in comparison to either the imperial forces that remained, or Schenkopp’s group that was sure to be approaching. So the Rosenritter and the imperial forces ended up meeting headlong, most of the imperials not prepared to meet Annerose’s axe, but by sheer numbers, they were able to run past the Rosenritter.

The hazy, dirt-clouded chaos only became worse when tank fire continued, raining down on both the imperial soldiers and Annerose’s contingent indiscriminately. She had to assume it was from Schenkopp, but that didn’t make it any less dangerous. Annerose decided that fighting these imperial soldiers headed towards the ship was less worthwhile than getting out from the hail of tank fire and reuniting with Schenkopp on the other side of the battlefield.

She signalled this to her group, and they ran, stumbling through the sand, dodging the mess of broken tanks, nearly getting lost in the haze. Two Rosenritter were dragging Kircheis and Captain Leigh along with them, but one tank blast hit the ground very near to them, knocking Annerose, the two Rosenritter, and Kircheis and Leigh to the ground. Kircheis managed to get up first, and in a move that Annerose hadn’t known was possible, disengaged the whole chestplate of his suit, which allowed him to free his arms from the cable ties that he was being held by.

Kircheis met Annerose’s eyes for a split second, while one of the Rosenritter who had been guarding him lunged to grab at his arm. Annerose was frozen in indecision for a second, trying to scramble up from the ground herself. But that moment of hesitation was enough for Kircheis to grab Leigh by his own arm ties and haul him away through the gloom.

The Rosenritter tried to go after him, but Annerose yelled, “It’s not worth it— they won’t make it very far.” and turned back towards Schenkopp. She had let Kircheis go. She thought it was true that he probably wouldn’t get very far, but it was still something she had allowed. Perhaps he would find an undamaged tank and escape and wait for rescue for a while. Why had she done that? What had compelled her? She had to stop her racing thoughts and focus on the task in front of herself.

The battle only became more chaotic and fiercer as she ran. They were encountering undamaged imperial tanks now, which would have been more dangerous if they weren’t so slow moving. A person could easily slip between them and come out unscathed, without the gun having time to aim before they lost visibility in the dust.

Some of the dust was beginning to settle now, and Annerose could see Schenkopp’s line of tanks emerge from the strange red gloom. They were half in among the imperial tanks, and the tank fire was now over their heads. By driving his tanks directly in amongst the enemy, Schenkopp had negated most of the strategic value of having a greater number of tanks, and the battlefield was mired in confusion, with the imperial vehicles unable to move, and the Rosenritter getting out of their tanks, climbing unafraid on top of the imperial vehicles, and turning the whole engagement into a blaster-to-blaster and axe-to-axe scrum. Since one Rosenritter was worth significantly more than one imperial soldier in this type of condition, it was clear that Schenkopp’s forces were slowly but surely gaining the upper hand, despite their initial size disadvantage. The chaos that Annerose had caused, and the loss of about half of the imperial tanks due to the crashing of the ship, probably contributed.

Imperial soldiers were abandoning their vehicles en masse now, running towards the ship. Annerose shot at them with her sidearm as they retreated, but she didn’t think she hit any, since visibility was rather poor, and she was firing sideways while running in the other direction. She wondered exactly what order they had been given to get them to abandon their tanks like that.

Through the lessening haze, Annerose saw a familiar figure, Schenkopp, leap down from the top of one imperial tank with his axe over his head, to cleave someone’s arm from their shoulder. The imperial hit the ground, hard, and Schenkopp was off to his next target, a vitality in his step that Annerose hadn’t seen before. She joined up with him, running to his side. He glanced at her, she grinned at him through her shattered faceplate, and then together they were scrambling up the nearest sand dune and tumbling down to leap onto the top of one imperial tank that was trying to turn around and head the other direction. The hatch opened, and someone fired at Schenkopp from within the tank, but Annerose tossed her last Zephyr particle canister inside, and Schenkopp leapt down to the interior, followed swiftly by Annerose. She didn’t think for a second as they took apart the relatively defenseless tank crew.

And then they were back out, going from enemy to the next, the number of imperial soldiers on the ground growing thinner and thinner by the minute.

In the hazy distance, a great roar and scraping of metal managed to carry through the air. The ship, which Annerose had believed to be completely inoperable, began rising from the ground. The whole bottom of it was a gaping wound, with dangling metal and scorched sides, pieces falling from the sky as it wobbled into the air, barely flightworthy. Annerose remembered with a jolt that the lights had all remained on after the collision: the engine and main systems had still apparently been functioning.

Several of the nearby Rosenritter shook their fists and yelled at the escaping ship as it limped away into the sky.

Annerose scowled. “Should have left explosives on that one,” she said.

Schenkopp knocked her on the back. “I certainly did not expect that thing to fly. Thought you were a goner for sure when you crashed it, honestly.”

“The landing was relatively soft,” Annerose said, which made Schenkopp laugh. He signalled to the Rosenritter to find any remaining imperial forces on the ground and take them prisoner. The few who were left surrendered themselves in short order, since the alternative was to die of oxygen deprivation out in the desert, now that they had no chance of escape or retreat.

There was a general air of jubilation as the Rosenritter returned to the mine. It was undamaged, as Schenkopp had managed to surprise the imperial forces before they even got close. The mine workers were all in a state of panic, but the Rosenritter were practically dancing through the hallways of the base, breaking into the alcohol rations and doling them out to the regiment.

“Is that really wise?” Annerose asked Schenkopp, who passed her a beer once they were in the mess. They hadn’t even taken off their armor except for their helmets, so they were covered from head to toe in red dust stuck to them with dried gore.

“Poor Blumhart’s group didn’t see any action, since the captain made ‘em stay here to guard the mine,” Linz said, appearing to lean on her shoulder. “They’ll make sure there’s no surprises coming our way.”

“Drink and be merry now,” Schenkopp said. “If imperial reinforcements show up without our own fleet to counter them, we’re extremely fucked.” But he said this with a broad smile on his face, and he raised his own glass. “Prosit!”

There were about five million thoughts running in all directions through Annerose’s brain at that very moment, but the first and foremost of them was, unfortunately, that Schenkopp looked very good, filthy under the harsh electric lights, and so he must be right. “Prosit!” she said back, and knocked her glass on his.

“That’s the spirit,” Linz said.

The celebratory mood was contagious, despite any of her misgivings, so Annerose was soon mildly drunk.

“I gotta say, Müsel,” Schenkopp said, “you really did a miracle with that crashing the ship move.”

“Really?” she asked.

“Things were not going so well for us on the ground. Being outnumbered four to one, approximately.”

“Did I hit that many of the tanks?” she asked.

“Well, you know, you plowed through a bunch of them, and you split the forces, and you knocked up a wall of sand that reduced visibility to zero, so they couldn’t shoot at us accurately anymore. All things that ended up giving us a massive advantage.”

“I would have preferred to stick to the original plan,” she said.

“Using the guns?”

“Yeah, I guess there was someone who locked us out of being able to have full computer control on the ship.” And, thinking of the way that the imperial forces on the ground had immediately turned and began shooting, she added, “And someone was probably able to send a warning radio transmission, as well.” She was still annoyed by that, but Schenkopp grinned at her.

“What, don’t you think that this was more exciting than any bland bombing run could have ever been?”

“I think it was less effective,” she said.

Schenkopp laughed. “I’d like to see a more effective strategy. Takes balls to crash like that, anyway.”

“Are you glad you let me join the regiment?”

“Don’t know what I’d do without you, Müsel,” he said, sounding genuine. But when did he not sound genuine? That was the problem, wasn’t it?

Her thoughts were muddy with alcohol and exhaustion and the billion things she had to think about: Reinhard and Kircheis; the looming threat of imperial ships arriving from Iserlohn; the hostile planet they were trapped on; the fact that she had survived when a good number of the Rosenritter hadn’t; the fact that she had, personally, with her own hands and axe, killed tens of people today; the untold numbers more who had died by her orders. It all weighed heavily on her, so when Schenkopp stood up to sing some half bawdy, half melancholy song, she slipped out of the crowded mess and into the hallway, where she leaned heavily on the wall, just trying to get her thoughts in order.

She was tired enough that she really should just go to bed, but the frantic energy that had spurred her through the day had left in a rush, so the idea of convincing her legs to even move her steadily down the hallway was one she had to think about and consider very carefully before she could act on it. She stood there with her eyes closed for so long that the singing in the mess ended and the sounds turned to applause and then to general yelling and more celebration.

The door swung open, letting out even more sound, and Annerose cracked her eyes to see who had come into the hallway. It was Schenkopp.

“My singing offend you that much?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I’m just exhausted.” She straightened up.

“See, if you drank more—“ Schenkopp said with a grin.

She shook her head. “I’d prefer that at least one officer be both awake and not blindingly hungover tomorrow. I’ll take that sacrifice for the team and head to bed.”

He chuckled. “I’ll walk you to your room.”

“Thanks.”

They started down the empty hallway, the sounds of celebration fading out behind them, until there was just the sound of their heavy footsteps and the now familiar and comforting whirr of the ventilation.

“How did you like your first real action?” Schenkopp asked.

“I don’t know,” Annerose said. “I…” She hesitated. The rush of it all, the feeling of the axe in her hands, giving orders and feeling like she had been on the extreme precipice between life and death— it had all been thrilling and real in a way that almost nothing else had felt like before. She had felt wholly there, like a different kind of creature who could do absolutely anything. All the restraints that had been acting on her— polite behavior, careful reasoning, human civility, everything else— they had all fallen away. They came back to her now, of course, and made her feel overwhelmed or guilty or some other emotion that she couldn’t put words to. But the primal yell she had let out when she first brought the axe down into someone’s chest— that scream had made her throat raw, and she could still feel it.

“Nothing else quite like it,” Schenkopp said. “You did good.”

“You already said that.”

“Just making sure you knew.”

“Thanks.” She glanced up at him. “I get what you meant, about the feeling of the regiment.” She didn’t think that some other random assemblage of Alliance soldiers would have the same hot, bubbling bloodlust and joie de vivre that the Rosenritter had. No one else would have smiled and called her a crazy bastard when she suggested crashing the ship they were all riding. No one else would have leapt around with axe in hand quite so willingly. She had, though. What did that make her?

He chuckled. “You’re one of us.”

“For better or for worse, I guess.”

“Better, for sure.”

“I liked being out there with you,” she said after a second. “I almost asked you not to send me out by myself, you know.”

He chuckled. “I’ll take that as a compliment and not just your insecurities talking.”

“No,” she said. “I just meant—“ The heat was rising to her face. “You look natural with an axe. Suits you.”

“I could say the same to you.”

“Never thought I’d look natural covered in blood.”

“That suits you, too.” They had arrived at her room, and they were hesitating outside of it. She found it hard to believe she looked anything but terrible, and probably smelled worse, except for the fact that she undeniably thought that Schenkopp looked very good, and he was in the same state that she was. Some of her exhaustion had faded on the walk— probably just leaving the chaotic environment of the mess had helped— and she suddenly felt as though, if she needed to, she could run another five miles, so long as Schenkopp was there with her. He was grinning at her in that funny way he had.

“I’m filthy,” she said. “I should take a shower before I go to bed.”

“Well, I’ll leave you to it, Lieutenant Commander.”

He gave her a cheeky salute and started back off down the hallway, humming one of his familiar, bawdy songs. Annerose suddenly felt like she couldn’t bear whatever this was between them anymore. She balled up her fists at her sides. She wasn’t Annerose-who-didn’t-want-things, not anymore. She was standing in the hallway, covered with other people’s blood, and she didn’t want Schenkopp to walk away, not now.

“Walter!” she yelled after him, her raw throat hurting at the effort.

He stopped and turned, looking at her. Her face felt like it was on fire, but she held open the door to her room and said, “You should get clean too, Captain.”

“Is that so?” he asked, but laughed and came back over.

He was so close to her, and he really did look good, and she was feeling crazy and wild and tired and energetic all at once. She hooked her fingers underneath the breastplate of his suit and pulled him into her room.