“Yes sir,” piped up from different voices, in different spots from around the room. Demi listened with particular focus for Kalus’ voice, which he heard with a surprising lack of sarcasm.
“Good. Then let’s get back to the ship. Weather’s clear on the bridge for the next hour so we’ll eat on the go. We depart for Saturn immediately,” Demi told them. Sheets folded back instantly. The Dogs of War leaped from their cots in their underwear, each scrambling for the uniform hung beside them. “Sophia.”
“Yeah?” she answered, while she wiggled her navy suit pants up over the soft curve of her waist.
“Your assignment today is to transplant everything inside Howard’s brain about the SkyLine Launcher into your own. I need you ready to fire in two days. Understand?” asked her Captain.
“Understood,” Sophia gave a driven nod worthy of her family name. She waited until Demi turned away to take the gulp more appropriate for the way she felt. Pressured. Nervous. Shaky, under the weight of several worlds.
The Cerberus’ first day back in the SkyLine was largely uneventful. It was spent in shifts of waking and sleep to maintain a healthy alertness for the crew. Each of them spent a shift of three Earth hours up on the top deck. Cyclical two-hour periods of sleep were mandatory to assure everyone on the crew got a collective six hours of rest, Demi was sure to remind the crew often. How the Dogs spent their waking, free hours, however, varied from member to member.
Kalus sat with Howard in the armory, deep in the belly of the ship. He picked the researcher’s brain for every detail he could spare about Dragons. He wanted to know it all. The thickness of their scales. Their fields of vision. Their wingspans, arm and talon lengths, and accurate range of Chrysum fire from their razor jaws. It was beyond easy to eat up the whole of their free time that way. Howard never tired of describing the beasts and effective tactics against them he’d seen in the field. Kalus never tired of tweaking his disassembled tools accordingly.
Sophia sat in the cockpit of her deployable Cerberus head. She ran her fingers over every control stick, button and lever. She committed the function of each to the memory of not just her brain, but her body. She wouldn’t rest until its functions were as automatic to her as walking down a staircase. She paid particular attention to the intricacies of the SkyLine Launcher, which she tore Howard from Kalus several times to explain to her. Its motions were so much more fluid than anything else her craft was equipped with, to match the nature of the device. The two linked control orbs were able not only to spin in any direction but also move freely inside a network of suspension wires.
Lilia forced herself to rise from the helm, starting at increments of fifteen minutes. Each time she left the Cerberus to fly itself, she managed to stay away from it longer. Each time it eased her nerves to see she had, in fact, calibrated the autopilot course correctly. A simple mistake could, after a period of several hours, lead to catastrophe. However unlikely she knew it to be, Lilia kept imagining the ship tearing straight through the Outer Rings of her home planet. She d
ared say nothing to anyone of it. She knew if Kal or Captain Demi had to tell her one more time she was there for her own ability and not that of her brother, they would combust.
Captain Demi himself spent most of his free time locked in his office. His fellow Dogs wondered often what mission details he still had to decipher or configure, and even took several bets. The one thing none of them put money on, however, was the truth. His time in confinement had nothing to do with the mission. It had everything to do with his Arms Specialist. The thoughts followed Demi from his office late that day, up onto the deck of the Cerberus for his shift at watch.
Even so troubled, Demi couldn’t help but smirk the second he stepped up into the open world of rushing blue light. The SkyLine screeched around the ship in a perfect tube, yet there wasn’t the slightest hint of a breeze. The temperature, too, was perfectly pleasant inside the translucent shield around the Cerberus. Demi paced over to the railing on the edge of the massive ship. It took a full minute to reach it, which astounded even him as the ship’s Captain. No amount of training could prepare one for the mass of a true WCC Warbringer.
Demi rested on the rail, eyes out on the blackness beyond the blueness. Space; the Milky Way. An endless sandbox of shimmering crystals soon to be tainted by its first war. Through it, Demi searched for the tiny orange orb with a dark stripe across it. He figured, with the planet only a day’s flight away, he should be able to see Saturn. The hard mines made of steel, where ice and darkness made hard people like Kalus. Demi couldn’t imagine what it had been like, not really. There was no reconciliation between the Chrysum mines of Saturn and the rolling riverlands of France’s countryside, where he’d grown up.
They were children at slightly different times, in very different circumstances. One heaved buckets of shimmering minerals down ice and steel caverns in the dark. One walked open-field miles to dig new trenches for his parents’ struggling crops in the sun. Demi thought hard about the endless twists of fate that had united these two, born three planets away from one another. He couldn’t decide if the Universe was countless chance and ripples or if there really was a sort of cosmic blueprint lying around somewhere.
“Can I join you?” Demi flinched at the sound of the voice. He almost gave his neck a cramp in how fast it cricked to the side. It was too late for him to object; Kalus had already rested his elbows on the rail beside him.
“Your watch isn’t for three more hours,” Demi said to him. He couldn’t believe the shaky sound of his own voice. Come on, Demitri, he said to himself, like his pop used to before he left for the WCC. Captain Demitri, he reminded himself, in his own voice alone.
“That’s not what I asked you,” said Kalus. His eyes seemed to wander the blackness for a moment too, though with more purpose than Demi’s. He found what he was looking for immediately. The orange orb with the stripe. Saturn.
“I…don’t think it’s a good idea,” Demi forced himself to say.
“That’s…not exactly what I asked either,” said Kalus. In the center of his black pupils, a tinier orange dot glared alive. It gave him an almost ghostly air as he said, “You have the power to order me away. I’m asking if you’re doing that.” Demi thought on it for a heavy moment. He took a few slow, heavy breaths to decide.
“Not yet. I hope I won’t have to,” he said. Kalus hoped the same. Fleeting as the supporting crew was, they somehow seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at once. They never came to the deck though.
“You won’t. Long as you don’t mind some company,” said Kalus. “I just…wanted to see it, from the outside.” The somber hue of his tone was so alien, Demi couldn’t bring himself to send him away, even when Kalus’ hand inched under his. After a few seconds, the warmth felt too pleasant to want it to end. Demi closed his grip firmer around Kalus’ thin, deft fingers. Hands that create- that saved them back on the bridge.
“It’s…always different from the outside,” said Demi after a while.
“Sure is,” Kalus said. His green eyes remained sunken, even while his lips smiled. “You know… The day I met you was the first time I saw Saturn like this.” Demi turned him a suspicious brow.
“I thought you ran with scrappers, before I recruited you for the Dogs?”
“Nope. That was Lilia,” Kalus told him. Demi choked on whatever he was about to say, and instead burst into a rare, genuine laugh.
“You’re…kidding, right? he sputtered.
“How do you think she flew that scrapper ship like that, when we came to save your ass?” Kalus asked. While his face said he appreciated the irony as much as his Captain, it also said he was serious.
“I…I thought she was just a prodigy,” Demi admitted.
“Well, she is. But she’s also very experienced. My contribution to our survival on the Rings was mostly thievery. I mean sure, I raided the less guarded armories and repurposed some custom gear for…less-than-savory customers, but Lil did most of the heavy lifting. She was the real outlaw. Of course, she just flew the ship. Told the scrappers outright she didn’t want to know what they were doing or where her pay came from, so long as it came,” Kalus told his Captain.
“And here I acted like I knew everything about the two of you when I recommended you to Marcus,” Demi chuckled. “He’d kill me if he knew.” They shared a brief laugh until a deep breath of preparation made Kalus sullen again. Demi almost told him not to say it, whatever it was. He wasn’t quite fast enough.