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completed its upgrade to the new AIon Mod 5 artificial intelligence, software inserted both into the Starblade’scontrol systems and inside the pilot’s cerebral implants, giving Gregory that superhuman status.

One by one, the other fifteen members of the Black Demon squadron trapped inside the rotating landing bay . . . and then itwas Gregory’s turn. At seventy meters per second, his Starblade flashed through the bay’s broad, open access port, then slowedsharply as it enmeshed within the magnetic capture fields. Gregory felt a sudden surge of gravity as the magfields impartedspin—and spin gravity—once again.

“Demon One,” a voice said in his head. “Trap complete. Welcome aboard, sir.”

“It’s good to be home, PriFly,” Gregory said.

He was surprised to realize that he meant it.

Donald Gregory had very nearly called it quits a couple of years ago. Mentally, emotionally, he’d been in a very bad place.Friends and lovers had taken their fighters out into the void—and failed to return. Survivor’s guilt, they called it. Why had Meg Connor and Cyn DeHaviland died, killed in the flame and fury of space combat . . . while hekept coming back home intact?

It wasn’t fair.

Nearly paralyzed by depression, he’d finally agreed to see a psych, and they’d made some adjustments in his implants . . .as simple as that. He’d resisted the idea, of course, because he felt as though he was being somehow unfaithful to those he’dlost. Stupid. He remembered them now, as he had before.

But the pain was gone. He could think about Meg and Cyn and others without wincing; without internally crumpling into a ball.

Without crying.

He should have seen the psychs earlier. It would have saved him so much pain. . . .

His fighter came to rest on an access membrane in the deck, then began sinking through it. Designed to admit fighters to thehangar deck directly below the flight deck, the membrane closed tightly around his fighter, moved upward, then closed overheadwithout opening the pressurized hangar deck to the hard vacuum of the flight deck.

The cockpit of his Starblade dissolved around him, its nanotechnic components rearranging themselves to let him out.

Slipping off his helmet, he started walking toward one of the hatchways forward and Briefing Compartment 7. Despite the name,the post-mission debriefing would take place there . . . not that there would be much to relate. They’d been on a boringly mundane training flightout to Pluto and back, a flight designed to give some of the younger pilots needed experience in formation flying.

“Hey, Don! Wait up!”

He turned. “Hey, Lieutenant! How’re things in the Furies?”

Lieutenant Julianne Adams was with the Hellfuries, VFA-198, one of six squadrons stationed on America. She was sharp, she was smart, and she was great in the rack. Gregory had held her at arm’s length for a while because ofhis fear that anyone who got too close to him would die. But eventually he’d had those psych adjustments . . . and Julia waspersistent, delightfully so.

He almost called her out on the familiarity of using his first name; normally he insisted on proper military etiquette whenthey were on duty—he did outrank her now, after all—but he was hoping to score some quality time with her later, and he wasn’t about to risk triggeringher notoriously quick temper.

“Boring as hell,” she told him, answering his question. “How was Pluto?”

“Cold. At least I assume so. We didn’t land.”

“I gather the institute’s still worried about contamination, huh?”

“Uh-huh. Flybys only.”

He thought about the squadron’s close passage over the weird, frozen little world, currently about forty astronomical unitsfrom a wan and shrunken sun, so distant that even at near-c the mission had taken eleven hours there and back.

One of the most staggering discoveries in exobiology to emerge from the twenty-first century was the discovery that so manyfrozen balls of ice in the outer reaches of solar systems, bodies like Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus, in fact hidvast oceans of liquid water beneath their surfaces of rock-hard ice. Even distant Pluto had been found to possess such anocean; as with Europa, it was estimated that Pluto contained three to five times more liquid water than all of Earth’s oceans,lakes, and rivers combined. On Earth, after all, water was spread out on the surface in what amounted to a thin film, likethe moisture from a breath blown across a meter-wide mirror-polished steel ball.

But inside Pluto, the hidden ocean extended for some hundreds of kilometers into the depths of an ink-black abyss. What keptthe ocean liquid was still unknown. It might be vast amounts of radioactives inside Pluto’s hot core; it might be leftoverheat from the planetary impact that had created Pluto’s largest moon and left the heart-shaped feature known as Sputnik Planitiaon the world’s surface. But the biggest Plutonian mystery was whether or not life existed within those stygian depths as itdid within Europa and other ice-locked glacier worlds.

There were tantalizing hints; vast stretches of Pluto’s frigid surface were coated with orange-red tholins, the chemical precursors to life. So far, however, Plutonian biology was unproven and extremely difficult to reach. IBRI, the Interstellar Biological Research Institute, was using precision-directed nano-deconstructor clouds to drill a hole through nearly sixty kilometers of ice so cold—surface temperatures on Pluto averaged around -230o Celsius—it was harder and tougher than granite. Reportedly, the pit was nearly complete beneath an enormous surface domedesigned to keep the water down there from boiling into the near-vacuum of the Plutonian atmosphere.

But the IBRI planetary scientists and exobiologists were adamant that no other spacecraft enter Pluto’s cold trace-atmosphereand risk infecting that vast ocean with terrestrial microbes.

Gregory had followed developments on the Pluto project for several years; at one point he’d considered volunteering as a pilotfor the dig. He knew a couple of people on the planetary science team, and might have been able to wrangle a shot at that.

But he’d decided he didn’t like ice that much, especially when it was nitrogen ice on top of literal rock made from water.

“Well,” Julia said, reaching around his waist and giving him a squeeze, “if you’re still cold, I can warm you up.”

“That,” Gregory said, grinning, “sounds like pure heaven.”

It was very good to be home.

 

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