Tailspin, page 82
He went quiet, turned his screens off, stood and paced the room. Standing by the window, General Canlas ran a hand through his hair. “At the moment, we have two choices.”
Malaki and I traded glances. “They are?” she asked, her voice shaky.
“Pull you from the OOF program now,” he said. “Or let you climb as far as you’re obviously going. When I pass you to headquarters for assignment, you prove to me you can take orders.”
I would much prefer he did the second one. Malaki’s breath hitched, her emotion on her sleeve. This was everything she’d fought her whole life for. I knew it. If they took us out of the helo program, any training they could give us—he wouldn’t. Her father said we had his full backing. This was all for show, wasn’t it?
Malaki swallowed, and she took my hand in hers.
O’Conner saw this, didn’t react in any other way.
“You need that final year’s study under your belt,” General Canlas said. “Prove to yourselves you can do this and to them.”
“Sir,” Malaki said and let go of me. “Yes, sir.”
“Dismissed, Canlas,” O’Conner said. “Wait outside to assist Airman Korolyov back to bed.”
I saw her face change then. She stood. Dipped her head and backed away. Her eyes lingered on me just a little.
When she had gone, I turned back to O’Conner and the general. “Sir?” I asked ever so cautiously.
“I will leave you in O’Conner’s capable hands. I need to speak with my daughter.” General Canlas also dipped his head my way. Was there a hint of a smile there? I almost thought there was.
I stared then at O’Conner and waited while the general left. Confused, so very confused. He had authority, but O’Conner commanded him?
“I checked the rest of your history,” O’Conner said and moved around to his chair, sitting.
“I don’t have much history of anything,” I said, my stomach twisting still.
“No, you don’t.” He frowned. Deep lines crossed his forehead. “Your father died on the wall, correct?”
The thought of my father, out there, in the midst of the fight for their lives. My heart sank. “The last major wall breach, yes, sir.”
“You were ten, correct? Hadn’t even gotten your keystone?”
“Yes and no, sir.”
O’Conner sat back, resting his arms on the padded cushions of his chair. “What do you recall of him?”
“Sir?” This was really personal. I tried not to think of my father, my childhood, and I sure didn’t like to talk about it, especially with someone I didn’t know.
“I know it’s never talked about,” he said. “Malaki said you only ever talked about him twice, once when delirious, and once when she asked.”
He’d asked Malaki about my real father? Why? Silence stretched out as I thought about what to say.
“He loved my mother,” I said in the end. “He loved me. He was a good man. He wanted to do everything he could to protect us.”
“He taught you a lot in your time as a child, even though you perhaps think he didn’t.”
He couldn’t know that, could he? I had so many questions running through my mind. Who was O’Conner? Who was he to my family, to my father? I tried to see him, his stats; nothing showed up.
“Do you know how he died?” he asked me, his eyes piercing though they weren’t so harsh anymore.
I shook my head, emotion burning my soul from the inside. “No, I was too young, due to go for my keystone like you said. I only knew he never came home.”
“I thought about coming to see you,” O’Conner said. His head lowered, just like his voice.
“See me?” I felt my world drawing in even closer. My mouth was so dry, my lips cracked, and I could taste blood. “Why would you want to see me, sir?”
O’Conner put his hand in his pocket and pulled out an old-fashioned wallet. He took out a piece of paper and he held it out to me. “We had this taken at Ground School many years before you were born. Most pictures are digital, but I wanted to keep this the old-fashioned way, print. I’m glad I did—there’s not many pictures of us at all anymore.”
Us? I took the paper, turned it over. A black-and-white image of six men stared back at me. A very much younger set of men. I stared at it, recognizing my father third from the left.
“What is this?” I asked, and the photograph shook in my hands.
“Our unit,” he admitted. “Well, your father’s unit. He was in command of us.”
I ran a finger over the image of my father, feeling the tiny cracks in the paper. I hadn’t any pictures of him, nothing at all. His face, though younger, hadn’t changed much to when I recalled last seeing him, in uniform, about to run out the door. He’d stopped, dropped to his knees, and I’d run to him. Giving him one last hug.
My heart hammered in my chest, and I sucked in ragged breaths. “You were there?” I asked. “At the wall?”
O’Conner nodded. “Yes.”
“You saw him die?” There was pain across his face. I couldn’t help it, but I pushed. “So I’m here only because…”
“For many reasons, but not just because I owe him.” He lowered his head. “And that I do. I owe your father my life.”
“Please tell me everything,” I said and met his eyes with mine, hoping finally he’d give me the answers I’d craved. “What happened?”
“Your mother was a scientist,” he said. “A very, very good scientist, one of M-Corp’s finest.”
I couldn’t even digest that. My mother was a scientist?
“She protected you, when your father died, when the teams fell apart. She never ever let on to you what was going on with her. She broke down. She couldn’t process losing him. Her mental stability was rock bottom. She stopped functioning, and all her work went out the window. Couldn’t even dress herself or look after you. So Michaels stepped in. We assigned Tsomak to you and her.”
“Tsomak was assigned to us?” I thought he loved Mom; my stomach churned. It was all a lie…
O’Conner held his hand up. “Listen, I know what you’re thinking. We saw what was happening; he fell in love with her and you. We tried to remove him, but he wouldn’t move and threatened to leave. In the end, Michaels and he compromised. We gave him other work.”
Questions on more questions filled my mind. I needed to talk to him, my mom.
“Back to your father.” I focused on O’Conner once more, forcing the questions out of my mind. “We were an experimental team, one your mother oversaw, using tech no one had tried before. Tech she’d provided for us. That week we’d been given a new trial life pack, new and faster working. Harder hitting. They were easy to install, so we all did. Or so we thought. If death came gunning for us, we’d have another chance.”
Life pack.
“My father didn’t use his, did he?”
“No.” O’Conner shook his head.
I wanted to vomit.
“If he had, would he still be alive now?”
“That I can’t tell you. Would he have survived that attack? Yes. Would he have lived till now? No one knows. He gave it to you for a reason, Ruslan. That particular day at the wall, it was horrendous; all teams were sent out there to protect the city. We were swamped.” His eyes met mine, and I could see he didn’t want to tell me, but also that he must. “We’d never seen as many mutated monsters ever. There were monsters we had no classification for. The cover above us was swarmed with skellies, zero tippers, and ramkins.”
“I’ve never heard of some of them. But all of them together?”
He nodded. “There was just nothing anyone could do. We needed to pull them back, but we couldn’t. My pilot landed our helo, but the surrounding area was more than a mess. The ground itself moved. When the tunnels started popping up, and there were lantons as well as boral coming up through them, it was clear they were working together.”
“Working together?” That was unheard of. Even I knew that too. They weren’t that sentient now, let alone back then. “The attack from the skies?”
“We were sure. Your father managed to get our teams a clear route back out to the wall, but we were so low on ammo.” His voice drifted as he was clearly remembering. “The call came from HQ. We were to hold the line at all costs. That meant we had to get back in the air, too.”
I asked the most stupid of questions, even knowing what that meant. “At all costs?”
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“At all costs. You’re not stupid. That meant we were all going to die,” he said. “Not just our team, but the guys on either side of us. Our full squad and two others. Your father wasn’t having any of it. He called the other team leads. They ordered us again back into the air. They couldn’t lose us. But only they held the line.”
“Just the three of them, your three leads?”
“I’d never seen anything like it. We backed out in stages as we were trained, suppressing and killing anything that came in for us. The three teams, all twenty-one other men, pulled back, helping each other into respective helos. Then, as soon as we were far enough away, I saw your father turn, and he armed something in his hands. The others did the same. We didn’t know what kind of weapon it even was, but when the blast hit, it blew everything in a hundred-meter radius, took out every critter with it.”
“What happened then?”
“Back up. The helos from Ocean Oil Fields were incoming and they let rip with everything they had, taking out anything that was left.”
“My father?”
“We went back in,” he said and grimaced. “To recover…”
I held up my hand. I knew what they did. They needed any tech that survived.
“They were dead?”
“No.” His face paled. “The life packs failed on the two others; they were too close to the blast. There was barely anything left for them to salvage. It might have worked on your father, might have. We’d be guessing, really.”
“My father was alive too?” I asked and hoped to all the gods he wasn’t going to say anything else. My heart couldn’t take it.
“He was alive enough to talk, but barely.”
It was involuntary, but I let out a gasp. “Sir?”
“He was only interested in you and your mother,” he said. “He babbled on and on about not wasting his life pack, that you needed it. I couldn’t understand why he was so adamant, he gave up something so precious to you, when he might have needed it.”
The CO’s anger was palpable, and I swallowed, understanding his loss along with my own.
“His last words were we needed to encourage her and let him grow. So we did.”
I digested his words.
Silence stretched on and on. It hurt, I hurt, everything inside me hurt. “The other men in your fireteam?” I asked and tapped the picture. “Where are they now?”
“Two are dead. There were a few other missions that went haywire over the years.”
“And the others?”
“RSM, now Lt. General Michaels. He was the one who found you on the street, almost frozen solid.”
I laughed at that. “I almost was,” I said.
“The other, Senior First Lieutenant Reece Marx.” He smiled then. “I married her.”
That wasn’t something I was expecting, the one who Malaki reported to. Not at all, but I couldn’t help stare at the picture. “There’s no woman here?”
“Look closer, she’s there.”
I did, and yes, maybe? You could only just tell a slight size difference. “She hid her gender?”
“For a while, yes. Didn’t want any special treatment, she said.”
“I know someone just like that,” I said. “Mal’s something else.”
“You’re more than friends?”
I laughed and he was thinking that too. “No, no way. I wouldn’t, couldn’t. Even if it was allowed.”
He took the picture back off me. “Things change,” he said.
“No,” I replied adamantly. “She’s family. I only ever want the best for her, and that’s…”
“Yes?”
“Well, it’s not me.”
“How do you know that?”
“Have you seen her flying?”
He brought up another screen then, and there were several drone feeds, my drone feeds, as she flew the 718, and I hurtled towards her and the hesacha. “Have you seen her flying?”
I laughed. “Every fucking single day.”
“She defies everything the Ocean Oil Fields stands for,” he admitted.
“I know,” I said.
“What about you?”
I hesitated. “In what way, sir?”
“What do you stand for?”
That was a hell of a question. I didn’t know the answer to it, but the words came out of my mouth faster than I could stop them. “I want to make a difference for Niko.”
“I am sorry for your loss, our loss,” he said and smiled softly. “You’ve some healing to do first, but we want you to make a difference too.”
“Sir.” I could only nod. “The X1?”
“You know it’s not the X1. Your tech is something your mother theorized, and was working on, that she couldn’t work on anymore, so M-Corp had others take over.”
“But she’s…she’s in Molsk now with Tsomak?”
“Yes, she is. We’ve encouraged her via any means necessary to get her back on the science saddle. That took some doing, but she is undercover with Tsomak. She’s intel for us and with him for the tech they’re developing there. So far, we believe between her theories, the tech we’ve given you and what they’re doing, that the X1 series will work. We’re just waiting for that gap to be bridged.”
I yawned. I still couldn’t take all of this in. The life packs, the tech was all from my mother and father. “The end goal is for no pain for the DPs, right?”
He nodded. “Michaels wasn’t kidding when he told you we need you.”
“Why all the secrets? Why not just tell me this all from the start?”
“Everything is a test. Your reactions, the way it reacts with you. We’re not joking when we say it’s all experimental. We wanted to understand how it would affect you as a person. Would it take control, go rogue? Would you control it? Would there be a compromise, a working partnership?”
He was talking about Apex. “Him,” I said and smiled. “He has a name.”
“So I believe. Apex.”
I nodded and yawned again.
“You’re exhausted. Go, get some rest.”
I thought of the few things at the academy that had gone right for me amongst all the shit. “Meeting Malaki?” I asked. “My first mission? They were all really you?”
He nodded. “You’ve already outdone yourself, kid. You owe me nothing.”
“I have so much more to ask,” I said, protesting. “The hesacha, the new king?”
“A mission for another day,” he said, and his face fell. “We’re not ready to face him or his pack yet.”
“The new helos?”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “Resourceful young man, trouble with a capital T indeed.” He did smile, though. “You are destined for big things, much bigger than here. Our helos here are expensive. But not like that one. I hope one day your squad will join the Angry Rhinos out there.”
O’Conner glanced at the door. “I’ve already told you more than I planned. But I am glad I could finally speak some truths to you. You deserve them.”
“What are you going to do with us, with me?” I asked as I stood.
“General Canlas and I have no other strings to pull despite our plans. You and Malaki are essentially on your own from here on out. This is down to M-Corp. Once you move on from this facility to do a permanent job…” He paused. “You’re really on your own. I can’t protect you anymore. We’ll be watching. We’ll get the X-series TAP to you as soon as we can. But that’s it, we don’t know how it will work for you, even if it will eliminate the pain. What you do out there will either make a difference or it won’t.”
“Thank you for letting me know about my father,” I said.
“We’ll be watching when we can,” he admitted. “Pass those last exams.”
“Sir,” I replied. “We will.”
He went back to his screens, and though I had so much more I wanted to ask him to do, I backed away, turned the door handle, and I left.
Malaki was pacing the corridor. She ran to me, and I almost collapsed into her arms. “I’ve got you.”
“Good,” I replied. “I’ve got you too.”
She threw her head back to the door.
“They really both have our backs,” I said. “We need to nail those exams, though.”
“You bet your ass we will.” She smiled and helped me back to my bed.
There I rested while she went to grab us some dinner. Once I’d eaten, I felt much better, but then Malaki sat opposite me and pulled out our tablets.
I sighed, long and deep. My whole body and mind exhausted.
“We’ve missed out on too much already,” she said. “Come on.”
I groaned, letting myself yawn. “Okay.” I patted the side of my bed and she scooted in and up. Then, with a lot of hesitation, she pulled up our missing last few weeks of sessions. Carefully, she started on the first one and we read through each of them, talked and worked through them, together.
Those exams are in a few weeks and are going to be nothing but hard. We’d fly through them just like we’d flown through those fire clouds and slain that beast.
***
I had no idea when Malaki had snuck back out of my room, but she had. I rolled over onto my pillow and sucked in air. I was still in a lot of pain, but nothing out of the ordinary.
I heard the door click and turned to see the one person I did not think would come to see me. Lacy.
“La—”
Lacy held a hand up at me, stopping any other words from forming. “Listen,” she said. “Just listen.”
She didn’t come closer. She just stood there, her shoulders slumped. Tears streamed down her face. “Niko’s mom doesn’t want any of you at the funeral tomorrow,” she said. My chest hurt, and I struggled to suck in a breath. “You are coming, right?”
I didn’t know what to say.
Lacy edged forward, her hand resting on her now obviously growing stomach. She was pregnant again? I didn’t know. “Rusty, Niko adored you. I adore you, so does Jasmine. You are not to blame for what happened. I don’t blame any of you or Malaki for any of it.” I held out my hand for her, and she came to me, taking it. “What happened? Will you tell me your side of things?”
