UEFg Indus
Agincourt Extraction, Day 1

Two days' mandatory rest.

It is enough to drive some of the pilots to guilt. The crews of the Indus and Yangtze will spend those days on frantic repairs, press-ganging GTVA crew and equipment into the effort under the watchful eyes of Federation Marines. The Gloire is already gone, thrusting out on a separate vector as a decoy.

But the Wargods' pilots are on mandatory rest. Time enough to realize that they have done what was once thought impossible: they have thrown a shoe into the gears of the Alliance war machine. They are heroes.

They gather, Indus and Yangtze fliers alike, in the Indus' starboard wardroom. The chalk goes down, the drinks go out (pure cometary water from the Agincourt), and their pent-up fear and anger dissolves in a groundswell of euphoria. They spar and laugh together, drunk on testosterone and relief.

When the affair dissolves, the pilots scatter to their bunks, and the lights go down for ship's night, Lorna Simms and her wingman are left, circling each other warily around the perimeter of one of the chalked rings as if they are marking out territory. 

"Nice flying out there, rook," Simms says. She steps into the ring, lean and long-limbed, her motions laconic.

Across the ring, Laporte matches her. In the shadows of ship's night she is a dusky fey shape, quick and precise, like a raven. "Thanks, boss," she says.

They fight, sparring at first, until the inevitable tangle and fall into a grapple. Simms locks her wingman's right arm into a triangle hold, and Laporte taps out. They roll free, panting. The bruises left by Laporte's fingers mark her captain's neck.

They lie side-by-side in silence for a moment, tense but still.

"So do you want to tell me what's eating you?" Simms says.

"Sir?"

"Why you spend half your sleep cycle muttering like a street prophet?"

"Hey," Laporte says, indignant. "My dad was a street prophet."

That gets a laugh from Simms. "Your dad was a pilot, and he's dead. He doesn't care."

"Yeah. You read that in my jacket?"

"It's in there. Deck accident followed by a bad fire a few years back, right? Inhaled superheated air, lungs burnt to hell. Ugly."

"Yeah. And my mom, you read that too?"

"Died of a respiratory infection last year, right? Couldn't get the meds she needed because of the Tev strikes."

"Yeah." Laporte shrugs eloquently, as if to say: it happened to someone else.

Simms rolls on to her side and eyes her wingman like a surgeon sizing up a wound. "So are you out for revenge? Is that what's chewing at you?"

Laporte gets to her feet. "Maybe I'm just crazy. Get up, sir. You're up one, but the night's still young."