Eight light-minutes from Wayfarer Station, Ensign Kumagai broke comms discipline. “Lieutenant McPherson,” she said into her helmet mic, “how're you holding up over there?”
The two pilots had been assigned a long patrol together, investigating possible long-range sensor traces that might, in some possible world, be Vasudan warships operating under EMCOM, but were more likely smugglers making a clandestine navigational adjustment before popping back into subspace, and even more likely the phantom signatures of natural subspace flux. It was long, tedious work with dozens of micro-jumps that left ship and pilot equally exhausted, and the ever-stingy Alliance was loath to assign more than the bare minimum complement to it. There'd been a time, long before Kumagai or her wing leader had even enrolled in flight school, when solo patrols were the norm, but even the Alliance brass had to acknowledge the psychological cost of being so totally alone so far in the black.
McPherson's reply was slow in coming, almost ten seconds by the mission clock. Kumagai saw the feed from his cockpit camera on her comms board long before she heard his voice. When he spoke, it was abrupt and clipped – military precision, even by his standards.
“Rosemary, Maverick. Clean scope. Status nominal.”
Callsigns. Brevity code. Saints and ancestors. Well, if that's how he's going to play it...
“Maverick, Rosemary,” she replied, her voice as cool as his was irritable, “please retransmit. I do not copy.”
McPherson's reply was quick this time, and what had been a vague tinge of annoyance had grown into open hostility. “I said my status is nominal. Do you have a problem with your communication system?”
Just like baiting pirates in Antares. He was making this almost too easy.
“No, sir,” she said, “my comms are functioning properly.”
For just a moment, it appeared as though “Maverick” McPherson were about to live up to his callsign. Hot anger shot through his face, visible even through the staticky radio signal, but he brought it under control just as quickly – almost as though he'd had practice. When he spoke, it was the belabored speech of narrowly controlled rage.
“Are you going somewhere with this, Ensign?”
“I'm an Umbrist, sir,” she replied, and there was no hint of emotion in her voice. “We're always going somewhere.”
The face on Kumagai's dashboard winked out, replaced with a textual notification. SECURE CHANNEL OPEN. SOURCE DELTA 1, AUTHORIZATION A-MCPHERSON. It was a relatively empty gesture, since both fighters' black boxes would record everything, anyway; even so, these patrols were what passed for privacy out here, and pilots and their superiors had long ago developed a tacit understanding about them.
Ensign Kumagai took one hand off her flight stick long enough to accept the connection, and McPherson's scowling face returned. She waited, just for a moment, for her wing leader to make the first move, but she wasn't particularly surprised when he didn't. He'd made lieutenant on the strength of his tactical analysis.
“I saw you and Charon at the gym,” she opened.
“We were sparring,” he coutered, and there was a sharp note of scorn in his tone. “Check the log if you want.”
There'd be no point in that, and they both knew it. Charon – Lieutenant Susan Weyman – was probably the only pilot in the squadron who really got along with Maverick, and the two had been sparring partners almost as soon as they'd come aboard. This latest assignment – a glorified traffic stop in a backwater system – had done a number on his already surly mood, and the two of them had taken to disappearing into the gym even more than usual.
“You beat the crap out of her, sir.” Rosemary made it a simple statement, and let his mind fill in the rest for her.
“She let me blow off some steam,” Maverick retorted. “If you want to accuse me of anything, Ensign, go through official channels.”
But that wasn't it at all, and this time, she let him see her smirk.
“So you have some steam to blow off, sir?”
The comms static was audible. Maverick looked down, utterly defeated.
“Dammit, Kanna.”
Rosemary answered that in a matter-of-fact tone, confident that radio compression would hide the twinkle in her eye.
“Umbrists don't really believe in damnation, sir. But we do believe in doing whatever it takes to confront the problem at hand. That's why Skunk asked me to have this little talk.”
She delivered that little bombshell with pointed exactness, and her ship's radio distorted his groan into something animalistic. “He put you up to this?”
Rosemary nodded. “That's right. I'm only following orders, sir. So, why don't you tell me what's on your mind?”
A long silence followed, during which the grey blip of a navigational marker winked into existence on her sensor plot. Both pilots made themselves busy verifying the subspace vectors that would take them to the next leg of their patrol, but there was only so much he could do to delay.
“Fine,” Maverick said at last. “After this jump, we'll sort that shit out.”
“I'm holding you to that, sir,” she said. Before he had a chance to change his mind, she cycled back to their initial frequency, which would go into the ship's log unencrypted. “Ensign Kumagai, Delta 2, standing by for subspace.”
When McPherson replied with his half of the call, she couldn't help but think he sounded relieved.