Cally's War

On the shuttle, Jay’s PDA and his AID beeped at the same moment. Since the message was urgent, and their game was not, the game autopaused and opened the incoming file.

Jay was the first to react, not being surprised by the news. Unfortunately for him, reactions honed in the brutally Darwinian environment of battle do not fade as long as the body is fit. Tommy Sunday was very fit.

The desperate flying tackle knocked Sunday out of his seat, but the blow that would have shattered his trachea never landed, skidding harmlessly aside off of a raised forearm.

In the enclosed confines of the freight shuttle’s cockpit, Tommy’s size was not an asset. Still, in the wrestling match that followed, Jay’s hand-to-hand training in the gym, while excellent for what it was, couldn’t match a combat veteran’s front-line down and dirty fighting experience, kept honed by regular training. Humans didn’t fight like Posleen, true. But Tommy knew to within a hair what his own body would do, and had ingrained a few dirty tricks the other man had never heard of.

Later, Tommy could never precisely describe the sequence of moves in that cramped, desperate fight. At least, he never told it the same way twice. All he was really sure of was that by the time Papa O’Neal came through the door to find him sitting beside Jay’s body, catching his breath, his groin was on fire with pain and Jay was missing an eye, had two broken fingers, a broken neck, and was suffering from a severe and permanent case of dead.

“Did you send it through to Earth yet?” the older man asked matter-of-factly, stepping over the corpse to get to the communications equipment.

“No, not yet.” Tommy shook his head, getting up and easing gingerly into a chair.

O’Neal harrumphed and tapped at the keys for a few moments, encrypting the data and sending it through a roundabout system of radio relays that sent it out to Earth as a three times repeated squeal of noise embedded in a routinely intercepted voice signal.

“What do we do with him?” Tommy nodded at the body.

“Put him in the cargo hold. It’s nice and cold in there. He’ll keep.” He rummaged through a shirt pocket for his tobacco pouch. “Never waste a perfectly good corpse if you can avoid it. You never know when you might need one.”

“What about Cally?”

“You obviously didn’t see the end of the message. Warm up the engines just in case, but…” His face was bleak as he inserted a plug in his cheek and repocketed the pouch.

Tommy picked his AID back up and had it display the file so he could read it, this time thoroughly, down to the codes at the bottom that meant, in the judgment of her PDA, that capture of the agent was imminent, rescue or escape unlikely, presume any future transmissions compromised.

“Hey, buckley’s always pessimistic, right?” he said.