Free Starfist: Wings of Hell by David Sherman & Dan Cragg Page A

it had begun. “My brave Marine,” he remembered her saying to him as she gave him a parting kiss. It seemed like only yesterday, but they had parted, what, six or seven years ago now? He’d thought of her often since then through all the lonely and hellish days and nights the men of Thirty-fourth FIST had endured. Now he found himself overwhelmed by a flood of emotion.
    “She is fine. Corporal, what do your friends call you?”
    “Uh, Joseph?” He glanced again at Conorado, who nodded.
    “May I call you Joseph? You may call me Sonia.” She laid a hand on Dean’s shoulder and smiled.
    “Yes, ma’am, sure.”
    “Good. Captain, I’d like to talk to Corporal Dean privately. Can you let him drive me back to Mainside? I can deliver my message on the way.”
    “I’ll have the first sergeant make the company landcar available. Be back in time for reveille,” Conorado said with a wink. Dean’s face flushed.
    “He’ll be back very soon,” Sonia said as if to reassure Conorado, but totally missing the joke.

    “Whew,” Lew Conorado sighed, after the pair had departed. “What do you make of all that, Owen?”
    “I like the lady, and if I’m not mistaken, Lewis, our Joseph Finucane Dean’s message has something to do with another lady.”
    “Yes, a matter of honor, I take it. You’re getting to know us humans rather well in your old age.”
    “You aren’t hard to understand, once someone gets to know you.” Owen leaped gracefully onto the corner of Conorado’s desk and stood there wobbling, regarding him intently with his huge eyes.
    “How are you feeling, Owen?” The Woo was showing his age. He was not as agile as he once was and he’d often reminded Conorado that he was nearing the end of his life span.
    “Tolerable, skipper, tolerable. That envoy lady, she’s some special dish, ain’t she?”
    Conorado scowled. “Owen, where’d you pick that up? You’ve been spending far too much time in the goddamned barracks.”

    Once seated in the landcar, Sonia turned to Dean. “Take your time driving me back to the port, Joseph. What I have to tell you may take a while. Is there someplace along the way you can pull off and we can talk?”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “Please, Joseph, call me Sonia! That ‘ma’am’ stuff makes me feel so old.” She laughed. To Dean she appeared very young, certainly under forty.
    “Well, it just is…you’re some kind of ambassador and I’m just a Marine corporal, ma’am, so I feel really awkward calling you anything but ma’am.” Dean shrugged. “It’s the way we’re brought up in the Corps, I guess. Anyway, would you call me ‘Joe’? Joseph is what my mom used to call me all the time.”
    “Where do your parents live, Joe?”
    “They’re dead. My dad died a long time ago and my mom just after I enlisted in the Corps. I was an only child, so I guess the Corps is my family now. How about you?”
    “My particulars are of no importance in this,” she replied. Then she asked, “Do you have a sweetheart?”
    Dean glanced hard at Sonia sitting muffled in a huge parka, her breath steaming in the cold. “Well…Are you cold? The heat’ll be up in a minute. Sometimes it gets so hot in these cars it blasts you right out—”
    “A handsome man like you should have someone, Joe.”
    “Well, over in Bronnys, that’s where we go for liberty, Bronnoysund, there are some nice girls, but you know, we Marines are off on deployments so much…” He left the sentence unfinished in the hope that she would change the subject. He wasn’t about to tell this sophisticated lady anything about Big Barb’s and what went on there. Not that he felt guilty about it, but he sensed that a place like Big Barb’s was totally alien to a person like Sonia Motlaw.
    They pulled into a roadside park. It was at least a meter deep in snow but the landcar plowed easily through it into the empty parking lot. “This is a nice place when there isn’t any snow,” Dean offered. He put the