TEXT: BattleCorps
  CASE WHITE:
  STARS IN THE TIME 
  OF DREAMING
  Ilsa J. Bick
  
  BattleCorps
  Stars in the Time of Dreaming • Page 
  South Bruny National Park, Tasmania 
  Terra 
  15 July 3062
  Night came very early to the southern tip of Tasmania, and by the 
  time the last smudge of crimson bled away they’d already made 
  love twice on blankets spread upon a deserted beach of snowy-
  white sand. Afterwards, they were too sated and too lulled by the 
  ceaseless susurration of the Tasman Sea to bother with the tent, 
  not right away. Still, a chill wind skimmed the water on its way 
  inland, carrying a scent of steel and brine. So they wrapped up in 
  three blankets, cocooning every square millimeter of their naked 
  bodies, leaving only a small woolen oval to halo their faces so they 
  could gaze at a sky milky with stars. 
  Jack lay on his right side and Clara on her left, and every now 
  and again, they would trade soft, gentle, lingering kisses some-
  how infinitely tender and so intimate that he was aroused all over 
  again. Clara smelled warm and salty and sweet and a little wild. 
  He luxuriated in the silken feel of her skin, the steady throb of her 
  heart, and he pulled her closer. 
  Suddenly, Clara gave a little gasp, not of passion but wonder. 
  “Jack, look!” 
  A thick seam of improbably pale green light stitched an arc 
  across a background of glittery stars. The fireball was so close 
  they could see its flesh boiling away in smoky pillows of gray 
  and fluorescent green; the fireball hissed and sizzled, friction 
  skinning it, flaying the meteor alive. Suddenly, it disintegrated, 
  breaking apart with a whump, exploding into whitish-green 
  streamers: not like fireworks, but like something alive repro-
  ducing by fission, a series of fiery beads on an ever-lengthening 
  string. 
  And then the glowing fragments were gone, so far away when 
  they hit the sea that they made only the tiniest of splashes. 
  “Well.” Jack wasn’t aware he’d held his breath until he let go of 
  it in a rush. “I’ve never seen anything like that. Not exactly some-
  thing you’d wish on, is it?”
  “I don’t know about that,” Clara said. Her voice was thoughtful. 
  “How do you mean?”
  
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  Stars in the Time of Dreaming • Page 
  She took her time answering. “Well, you know the medicine men 
  of some of the Aboriginal tribes believe that a child’s spirit rides 
  down to Terra on a shooting star. That’s how the child finds its 
  mother, and the streamer is like a dreaming track that marks the 
  spirit’s way.”
  “Really.” He took a few moments to digest this. Was she saying ...? 
  “Do you think that’s what’s happened?” he said, and was sur-
  prised when his throat clogged with emotion. He swallowed and 
  aimed for something light and funny, but his voice was still hoarse. 
  “Because I’m telling ya, with a fireball like that, he’ll be a bruiser.” 
  She laughed, and when he held her face in his hands, her cheeks 
  were wet. “Or maybe she’ll be a handful,” she said.
  “Well,” he said, gathering her in his arms, only carefully as if she 
  might break, “just in case the kid’s gotten lost along the way … 
  let’s make some fireworks of our own.” 
  Pulling back, she studied his face. “You’re sure?”
  “Absolutely.” And then he silenced her, kissing her thoroughly 
  and deeply, telling her how he felt with his body, and they didn’t 
  talk again for a long time. 
  But later, as she slept, Jack stared at the crystal-bright stars and 
  thought: Then. It happened right then.
  As it turned out, he was right. 
  v v v
  The feeling returned six years later, as he and Clara made des-
  perate love on the sands fringing the Altjira Sea on New Earth. In 
  that instance, however, he was going back to Terra and he couldn’t 
  change her mind about remaining on New Earth for another month. 
  An old physician-mentor, Dr. Claude Gaynes, had invited Clara for 
  a visit, and as he’d been her commanding officer back in the day 
  before she went on inactive reserve—as well as a dear friend—she 
  told Jack she couldn’t refuse. 
  “It’s a month,” she said. “What can happen?”
  Plenty. That’s what he wanted to say, but even though he had a 
  very bad feeling about it, he let her go. Really, he couldn’t stop her, 
  never could. But they made love and while there was no shooting 
  
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  star to fire the sky, the feeling he got was exactly the same: It hap-
  pened right then.
  But he didn’t know for sure, and now he couldn’t ask her because 
  that was five months ago: the very last time he saw her before the 
  Word of Blake buttoned up Terra and everything went to hell.
  
  BattleCorps
  Stars in the Time of Dreaming • Page 
  13 March 3068
  …breahnk, breahnk, breahnk… 
  …what …
  …breahnk, breahnk, breahnk… 
  …big…bang…breahnk, breahnk, breahnk…explosion, there was 
  an explosion and then…breahnk, breahnk, breahnk…head…I hurt ... 
  …breahnk, breahnk, breahnk…something screaming in an atonal 
  bleat loud enough to hurt…breahnk, breahnk, breahnk…and now 
  there was a queer smell… her senses swam…scorched metal and 
  the stink of something swampy…breahnk, breahnk, breahnk…
  Groaning, Clara tried opening her eyes, but her lids were so 
  heavy breahnk, breahnk, breahnk and the noise was too loud, spik-
  ing her ears breahnk, breahnk, breahnk… 
  She came to, slowly, her eyelids lifting by degrees, and that hurt 
  because her head was sodden and ached. She didn’t even know 
  how long she’d been unconscious. An hour, a few hours, half a 
  day…? 
  But now something must be terribly wrong because she was 
  floating; she shouldn’t be floating but there was that … that bang 
  and then the ship rocked with explosions and then she was flying 
  across the room and she remembered the collision of her body 
  with an unyielding titanium bulkhead … 
  Must’ve hit my head pretty hard to pass out. 
  Her thoughts churned like gooey taffy, breahnk, breahnk, breahnk 
  but she recognized the smell now, something metallic, rusty, wet …
  Blood, it’s blood…  
  No. Her awareness slammed back in a rush, sensation suddenly 
  blasting along her nerves, gusting as from a fiery hot wind. Even 
  in the dim, ruddy glow of emergency lights—even as the breahnk, 
  breahnk, breahnk of alarms bit at her brain—she saw that sickbay 
  was awash in blood. Blood filmed her face, stinking of wet copper, 
  and because gravity had failed, more cohered in oily globules un-
  dulating like something alive. Her hair was matted with gore and 
  dragged in thick, sticky tendrils across her nose and mouth. A sour 
  ball of panic pushed into the back of her throat, and she gagged at 
  the taste in her mouth. The blood was thick, salty and cloying. 
  
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  The blood tasted like death. 
  Was she bleeding? What about…had it…? “Please, please…” She 
  pawed at her uniform, twisting, straining to see if maybe there 
  was an open wound or worse… Calm down, can’t do anyone any 
  good if you can’t calm down…
  Her gray Com Guard uniform was spattered with blood, but 
  other than her head she wasn’t in pain and she didn’t think she 
  was bleeding. Shaking, she managed the buttons of her smock 
  and anxiously scanned her belly. Her abdomen was smooth and 
  at first glance, she didn’t see anything. No gashes, though there 
  might be bruises; the light was so bad, she couldn’t really tell. 
  Still, something might have happened. The damage might be 
  internal. She willed herself completely still and directed her focus 
  inward, imagined all her senses coalescing to a single bright laser 
  point and held her breath, waiting, hoping…
  “Butterfly kiss,” and then she nestles her cheek against Amy’s. 
  Her daughter’s skin smells sweet and warm like honey, and as she 
  blinks, her eyelashes skim Amy’s cheek, and Amy giggles…  
  Come on. Her lungs were burning, her heart thudding in her tem-
  ples, and she was forced to take a shallow sip of air. Come on… 
  There: a slight flutter, and then another… 
  “Oh, thank Blake,” she said out loud, though she wasn’t particu-
  larly religious. For a moment and despite everything, she basked 
  in a wave of relief. Where there was life, there was hope. She still 
  had that, at least.
  First things first: She had to get out of here, figure out what hap-
  pened, get another message to Jack. He’ll have gotten the first one 
  and he’ll be there, waiting…
  Another wavering globule of blood broke against her face, shat-
  tering into a million tiny droplets. Still repulsed but no longer 
  panicked, she considered this. Irrespective of volume and despite 
  weightlessness, once blood was removed from a vein or artery, it 
  clotted, without fail, after about five minutes. 
  But this… She skimmed a few of the errant globules into the 
  palm of her left hand the way she gathered foam in the bath for 
  Amy and blew clouds of bubbles or gave her giggling daughter a 
  soapy beard. 
  
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  Hunh. Much of this blood was clotted and still more was tacky, 
  just beginning to clot. And some was fresh, and she knew it wasn’t 
  hers, so it had to be… 
   “Dr. Gaynes?” Her voice was small, barely audible even to her, 
  and no match for the alarms. Gaynes had been right there; they’d 
  been trying to figure out a way to smuggle her onboard one of 
  the DropShips, or maybe have her take Gaynes’ place as combat 
  surgeon and get down that way before taking off… 
  Can’t think about that now; one disaster at a time, the alarms are 
  still going and we’re not under thrust because the gravity’s gone, 
  and that means there might not be anyone left on the bridge to…
  “Gaynes?” she called again, louder this time, straining to be heard 
  over the alarms that were still ringing breahnk-breahnk-breahnk. 
  She was aware of an icy blackness blooming in her chest, a pre-
  monition as cold as empty space and utterly dead: Almost five 
  hundred crewmen, I can’t be the only left, I can’t… I’ve got to get 
  off the ship, I’ve got to… 
  Sickbay was in the Vision of Truth’s very core, well-protected by 
  armor and astern of the bridge but aft of the twenty-five DropShip 
  bays that gave the Potemkin-class its distinctive look of a denuded 
  corn cob. She had no way of knowing what was going on outside 
  the ship; she had no access to a viewscreen, and other than hail-
  ing the bridge, she wasn’t expert enough to tap into a command 
  channel. And if she hailed the bridge, what would she say? Hey, 
  there, I’m alive, can I get off now?  
  Probably not.
  On the other hand, she might be able to make her way to a 
  DropShip or lifeboat, maybe get off another message to Jack—but 
  she wasn’t going anywhere until she found Gaynes. 
  Unlike the bridge, the ship’s sickbay had a clear ceiling and floor 
  as well as transparent forward and back compartments because, for 
  some reason no one really understood, patients recuperated more 
  quickly under those circumstances. A circle of workstations stood in 
  the precise center; routine examinations were performed forward in 
  a partitioned bay to her left while four trauma bays lined the wall to 
  her right. These gave way to a deep alcove to the rear where surger-
  ies were performed and the sickest patients held and monitored.
  She’d drifted close to a chair that was bolted to the deck, and 
  now she grabbed for it, anchoring herself in midair as she turned 
  
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  a slow pirouette. Inky pools of shadow stained the walls and floor, 
  and she had trouble seeing much of anything. A glance at the dark 
  workstations confirmed that she could forget hailing the bridge. 
  No power there, either.
  Then, for the first time, she noticed that the ever-present back-
  ground hum of machinery and circuits was absent. 
  No power means no life support. Cold twists of fear knitted her 
  gut. If we were close to Terra, it’s only a matter of time before we 
  get pulled in, burn up… I’ve got to get off the ship, I’ve got to get 
  off…
  “Gaynes?” She was shaking now, and her voice was ragged, bare-
  ly a strained whisper. Then she saw something man-shaped in a 
  thick finger of shadow spilling along the deck, but… She frowned. 
  She could’ve sworn that was an access corridor to points rear of 
  sickbay toward the cargo bays, DropShips and engine rooms. But 
  if that was Gaynes… 
  “Gaynes, are you all right?” She pushed off from the chair, drifting 
  closer. She made out two arms and a chest, a head and a swirling 
  curl of… hair? That was wrong. Gaynes’ hair wasn’t that long, and 
  he was lying down, and that didn’t make sense either, not with-
  out gravity, unless maybe he was pinned by a chair or something. 
  She swam toward the shape, squinting to make out details in the 
  gloom. “Gaynes, are you—?” 
  At that exact instant the alarms abruptly cut out, leaving in their 
  wake a ringing silence. Her heart thumped in mingled relief and 
  renewed hope. Has to be someone else alive, or else the alarms 
  wouldn’t have cut out. There was no tug of gravity’s return, but 
  maybe the engineers were making repairs and they could get 
  underway, get down to Terra or, at worst, take the lifeboats and 
  escape pods. But things were going to be all right, they had to be 
  all right. 
  Then a bank of paneled ceiling lights popped on one by one, 
  emitting a thin electric hum. Weak yellowish-white lights washed 
  across the bloody gloom—and then she finally understood what 
  that furl of impossibly long hair was.
  And then there was nothing at all in the way of her scream. 
  
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  Com Guard Potemkin-class troop cruiser Vision of 
  Truth 
  Somewhere above Terra 
  13 March 3068 
  1630 hours, GMT
  Fuck, but somebody shoulda known you don’t launch an assault 
  on Friday the 13th.  
  Still, near as Mackie could tell, things had gone okay, the whole 
  fleet jumping in at a pirate point behind the moon, heading for Terra 
  full burn, ready to kick some Word of Blake ass. A cakewalk, right? 
  Only the next thing he knew, the Vision maybe took a hit or, 
  equally bad, something exploded somewhere because one of the 
  engines, the number two he thought, either crapped out or was 
  blown completely to smithereens.
  And then the Justice—one of their ships! Leastways that was 
  the chatter coming over his bud right before the comm went 
  down—Justice let them have it: opened up wide with autocan-
  non and lasers. Hit them broadside. Fuck knows how many decks 
  got trashed, vaporized, all the air and anything not nailed down 
  sucked right out in the explosive decompression. 
  And the kicker? Mackie shoulda been dead. Thing was he’d been 
  making time scuttling down from the bridge to bay seven because 
  one of the DropShip’s comm systems was hiccupping and he was 
  a communications tech (glorified term for scut puppy). Only he’d 
  taken a little side trip, jogging to crews’ quarters because he’d 
  been tanking on coffee half the damned day and most of the night 
  before and so he had to…wait for it…yes, take a leak so bad his 
  eyeballs were floating.
  That whiz saved his goddamned life. How screwed up was that?
  When things starting going boom, he’d just finished, savoring 
  that wonderful moment of relief at the very end of a good piss. 
  Not as good as sex, but hey… He tapped, had hold of the zipper 
  and was pulling if you can believe it, and then next thing he knew 
  …blam! 
  The first explosion sent him crashing face-first into the wall just 
  above the head, like he’d gotten booted in the ass. Damn lucky he 
  didn’t zipper off his dick.
  
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  Instead, he did one hell of a face-plant. Whap! There was a 
  crackly, crunchy sound like someone’d stomped on a buncha 
  eggshells, then his face went nova with pain like to melt his skull. 
  Blood gushed down his throat and spurted over his chin, dripped 
  onto his uniform, and he was choking, spluttering blood spray. His 
  vision blurred with tears and then he was staggering like a drunk, 
  every movement delivering a bone-rattling quiver of pain that hurt 
  right down to his fillings. 
  The alarms shrieked as emergency lights flushed an angry crim-
  son, and there were more bangs after that, more explosions, and 
  they were much worse because he was weightless by then, grav-
  ity totally kaput, so every shock wave sent him careening against 
  the walls like a pinball, rattling around like a pea in an empty, well, 
  can before everything just…stopped. 
  Near as he could figure it, Vision now was dead in the water, 
  alarms drilling holes in his brain and nobody home on the bridge. 
  He knew because that’s the first thing he tried, hacking into a com-
  mand channel to figure out what the fuck went down. Got squat. 
  Hell, he figured half the crew was either splattered or doing a little 
  unscheduled EVA without suits.
  There was one only thing about which he was one hundred per-
  cent certain. His nose was busted. From going to the goddamned 
  can. 
  How unreal was that?
  v v v
  Right about then, Mackie noticed something else: no vibrations. 
  Oh boy. He pressed himself against a bulkhead and held himself 
  very still, breathing in shallowly through his mouth. 
  Nothing. 
  Mackie exhaled his held breath through parted lips very, very 
  slowly and he felt as if something more essential were escaping 
  than just carbon dioxide and water vapor and whatever else came 
  out when he emptied his lungs. It was like he was letting go of 
  hope because he knew exactly where the ship had been when it 
  was hit and where they’d been going.
  Astrophysics 101: Orbital velocity depended on balancing Terra’s 
  gravitational pull against the ship’s inertia. The speed a ship need-
  
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  ed to maintain orbit depended on altitude. Now, considering that 
  the ship had zip in the way of engines but was pretty close to 
  Terra; had really, not to put too fine a point on it, been screaming 
  in at full burn…well. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to get 
  that one. Game over, man.
  Although from the ground, the results might be kind of beauti-
  ful—and how sick was that.
  v v v
  So, okay: For the time being, he needed to make his way forward 
  because he sure as shit wasn’t going back where he knew there 
  was enough radiation to flash-fry his nuts. Yeah, sickbay was a 
  good start: shielded, access from all points, and only five decks 
  between it and the bridge. Hell, at the very least, he could maybe 
  scare up a doc to fix his nose.
  Which was why he was headed that way when the alarms cut 
  out and a second later, he heard the woman scream.
  v v v
  Horror blasted through Clara, searing her brain—and she couldn’t 
  stop screaming, screaming, screaming. 
  Gaynes was cut in two. Everything below his legs was on the 
  other side of the emergency door that had slammed down with the 
  ruthless efficiency and force of a guillotine. Pressure in Gaynes’s 
  abdominal cavity had forced bowel through his diaphragm and 
  then out his mouth. What Clara had mistaken for shanks of hair 
  were instead blood-soaked ropes of extruded small intestine that 
  billowed under weightlessness like bloated worms. 
  The image burned itself onto her retinas. She wanted to tear out 
  her eyes. She reeled back, spinning away, clamping down on her 
  screams, trying desperately not to vomit—
  And that’s when she saw the crewman barreling into the blood 
  mist that still drenched sickbay. As he hit the blood, he let out a 
  yell: “What the hell is all this shit, are you all right, what the fu…” 
  His voice died as he got a good look at Gaynes. The crewman’s 
  face was bloody, but she glimpsed enough skin to see the color 
  dribble away, and his eyes go buggy with shock. 
  
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  “Aww, fuck me.” He scuttled back with little crablike motions, 
  scrambling for some sort of handhold. “Shit, shit…”
  He was just a kid, maybe twenty, tops, scared to death and his 
  nose was smashed and off-kilter to the left. There was blood 
  smeared over his face and on his neck, and clots the consistency 
  of grape jelly speckled the neck of his uniform. But he was the 
  first living person she’d seen and that, combined with some of 
  the ship’s power coming back, somehow made her better able to 
  control herself. 
  More importantly: He might know how to get them both of out 
  of here. He’d made it to her, right?
  “Hey, hey.” She moved until she blocked Gaynes’s body from his 
  view. “It’s okay. I’m a doc, I’m Clara, and you’re…” Her eyes flicked 
  to his smeared name badge. “McAndrews?”
  “Mackie.” His voice was nasally, as if wads of cotton had been 
  stuffed up his nose. He was also skinny, all elbows and angles, and 
  when he swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbled. “Communications 
  tech.” He added, unnecessarily, “I broke my nose.” 
  “Yeah, I can see that. Do you know what happened?” She lis-
  tened with dimming hope as Mackie told her about the engine 
  blowing and then the hits they’d taken broadside, and the Justice. 
  Mackie might be mistaken about what he’d heard, but it made a 
  sort of awful sense and would explain the timing, too. Their ship’s 
  engine goes, and then the Justice finishes them.
  She said, “Did you hear if they got out a distress? Have all the 
  lifeboats gone?”
  Shaking his head, Mackie snorted, masticated something, made 
  a face, and then spat out a gob of clot on the breath of a curse. 
  “Dunno. We’re just dead in the water.” He added, “We were head-
  ing right for Terra, you know. I mean, we’re talking right down her 
  throat.”
  Jack…Amy… Clara felt that deep-down flutter again, and she 
  closed her eyes, putting a protective hand over her belly. The flut-
  tering subsided after another few seconds, and when she opened 
  her eyes, she saw that Mackie was staring, his eyes clicking from 
  her face to her abdomen then back. 
  She said, “I don’t suppose you know if we made it into orbit 
  or…”
  
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  Mackie’s mouth tugged into a grimace. “Way I figure it, one of 
  three things is gonna happen. One, we’ve already skipped right off 
  the skin of Terra’s atmosphere, and we keep on tumbling until we 
  get power, which might be never. Gives us time, but not a lot. Two, 
  there’s an outside chance we were high enough and going fast 
  enough that we slipped into orbit, and then we can hang out here 
  for, oh, a couple two-three centuries.”
  “Or three,” she said, her tone already a little dead, “we burn up.” 
  She paused. “But the lights…”
  “Are just lights. Don’t count if we don’t have life support, or 
  enough juice to power up an engine.” Mackie wiped away goo 
  from his chin. “And you got to think there’re big chunks of the ship 
  just gone, and that means we’re open to space.” 
  “Why would that matter?” But she saw why. No life support also 
  meant no heat. With huge sections of the ship open to the deep 
  cold of space, their heat would bleed away like marrow sucked 
  from the remnants of a cracked bone.
  Still, she snatched at the slim hope that the lights meant some-
  one was in charge somewhere. There was still time. Maybe they 
  could get to a DropShip or further forward or…
  She gasped as the ship reverberated with a faint rumble, enough 
  to visibly shake free some of the blood adhering to sickbay’s walls. 
  But when she looked toward the air vents, there was no corre-
  sponding rust-colored bloom. Still no air, but if there’s power… 
  When she met Mackie’s eyes, she knew that she wasn’t imagin-
  ing things. “What was that?” she asked, and then when the rumble 
  came again and stronger: “What is that? Are those DropShips?”
  He shook his head slightly. “No. Maneuvering thrusters, I think…
  yeah, and now…” The rumble grew louder and more sustained. He 
  pulled himself to a bulkhead and spread his palm over the metal 
  as she did hers to her belly. 
  Feeling for signs of life… 
  “That’s an engine,” Mackie said, and his lips split in a grin. “We’re 
  moving!”
  “To where?” she demanded. She was afraid to hope, but she 
  couldn’t help it, and her belly knit then twisted as a squirt of adren-
  aline shot through her veins. “Are we breaking off, getting away?”
  
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  “Hang on, hang on.” Mackie was fumbling a communications 
  bud into his ear. “Just a sec. Let’s see if the command channel’s 
  back…” He closed his eyes, listened and then he was nodding. 
  “Got it, I got it, I got the bridge and…” His voice trailed away, and 
  then his face crumpled. 
  “What?” Dread seized her heart. “What are they doing? 
  What…?”
  But in the next second, as blood rained onto the deck and she 
  felt gravity’s fingers on her flesh, she had her answer.
  She blurted, stupidly, “But they can’t! We’re still here! We’re still 
  alive!”
  “Yeah?” Mackie’s eyes were already a little dead. “Like that 
  counts? We’re nobody, man.”
  A protest rose to her lips, but she silenced it before giving it 
  voice. He was right. They were nothing: just the faceless cogs driv-
  ing a machine of war as every soldier before and after them would 
  be.
  This had all been a mistake: she shouldn’t be here; she was inac-
  tive reserve, had been pressed into service well before she’d even 
  known or realized that she and Jack had…
   Desperate, she said, “I want you to do something for me,” and 
  then she told him what and why. Not all the gory details. Not even 
  that she and Gaynes had smuggled out word to Jack so he could 
  clear out with Amy. She told him just enough. Maybe it was unfair. 
  He was just a kid, after all.
  Tough shit.
  When she was done, he was silent for three seconds, five. Then 
  he said, “I don’t know if I can do that. It’s not you or the…” Breaking 
  off, he looked away as if he couldn’t bear to look her in the eye 
  any longer. He gestured helplessly toward the banks of still-dark 
  computers. “It’s… I may not be able to figure it out in time before 
  we…” His voice broke not with tears but frustration. “Fuck, I’m just 
  a tech.”
  “You can do it, Mackie,” she said, “you—” Suddenly, she was 
  dropping as gravity returned; she rolled just in time, caught the 
  impact with her shoulder but had the wind knocked out of her. She 
  felt queasy.
  
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  “Here.” A hand on her arm, and then Mackie was helping her to 
  her feet. “Are you…” His eyes dropped to her abdomen, and his 
  grip on her arm tightened. “Is it…?”
  “I’m okay,” she said, though that was far from true because 
  things would never be okay again until, maybe, far into a future 
  she wouldn’t inhabit. “Mackie, we don’t have much time.”
   His features settled into granite. “Don’t get your hopes up. 
  Even if I can, I probably won’t get more than ten, fifteen seconds, 
  max.”
  Not time enough to say all she wanted but time enough for a 
  meteorite to flare to life. Time enough for the passage from dark-
  ness to light. 
  Time enough to make a child.
  “Just make it work,” she said. 
  
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  South Bruny Island, Tasmania 
  14 March 3068 
  0430 hours, GMT+11 (Daylight Saving Time)
  Early fall now on South Bruny, five hours past a spectacular 
  sunset of scarlet and fiery orange washing an aquamarine sky—
  and the thirteenth of March was come and gone. And still, no 
  Clara.
  For about the eightieth time, Jack fished his earbud from a breast 
  pocket. But the reading on the tiny display was the same: Ready. 
  Sighing, he cupped the bud in his palm. 
  Come on, Clara, you got word to me once, you can do it again. 
  The bud was silent.
  He fed the fire with more bloodwood. South Bruny was much 
  warmer in March than July but still chilly most of the year round. 
  Cold nipped his face, and his breath plumed. As the greedy flames 
  ate at the wood, the wood bled crimson sap that boiled and spit 
  hissing sparks that briefly flared heavenward only to blacken and 
  die. Somehow, given this place, that was fitting. 
  He’d quietly and quickly gone about packing up supplies, and 
  then taken himself and his five-year-old daughter off to the island. 
  They’d simply left. Calmly, though, not in a panic because then 
  people would want to know why, and he couldn’t risk that. He’d 
  felt guilty, clearing out of Sydney, but the city was a major target 
  and things might get very ugly. Here, on South Bruny, the only 
  other living beings were the hordes of muttonbirds in their rooker-
  ies along black basalt cliffs that fringed the island. Here, Amy was 
  safe. 
  And, of course, now the world did know.
  Ground stations had picked up the Com Guard fleet hurtling to-
  ward Terra, and he thought they must already have engaged in 
  battle. Was, in fact, nearly certain because he’d tuned in a Terran 
  broadband channel, and a North American announcer had said 
  something—he hadn’t caught all of it—about intense flares visible 
  in the burgeoning twilight there. 
  That was almost two hours ago on the other side of the world. 
  He might not see a thing for many hours yet, if at all. 
  
  BattleCorps
  Stars in the Time of Dreaming • Page 1
  He could do nothing for Clara except wait and stare at a moon-
  less sky so crowded with stars it was as if someone had dusted 
  the night with diamonds.  
  Amy slept in the circle of his arms. There was something infi-
  nitely precious in the way his daughter surrendered to sleep with 
  perfect trust that he would keep her safe—and that her mother 
  would keep her promise.
  Suddenly, the tiny bud in his palm brrred to life. He was so star-
  tled he nearly dropped it. With trembling fingers, he jammed the 
  device into his ear. 
  “Clara?” He thought he heard something, a faint fizz, and then a 
  voice faint as a bee, and then his body tensed, went rigid, and he 
  said, more urgently, almost shouting, “Clara, Clara, is that you?”
  In his lap, Amy squirmed, mewled like a kitten, and then she was 
  struggling to sit up. “Da… Daddy? Daddy, what’s wrong?”
  “Clara!” He was shouting now. The fizz in his ear was dying, and 
  he thought he heard her. “Clara, for God’s sake, answer me, an-
  swer…!”
  “Daddy! Daddy, look!” Amy had scrambled off his lap, but what 
  made him look at her was her tone: not questioning, not fright-
  ened.
  Enchanted.
  Standing on tiptoes, Amy was pointing at the night sky. “Look, 
  Daddy, look! Shooting stars, shooting stars!”
  And then in his ear, a miracle, Clara’s voice, clear as a clarion 
  bell: “Jack, by the time you hear this…”
  “No.” Jack felt something seismic shift in the very core of his be-
  ing, as if the earth beneath his feet were giving way, opening to 
  an infinitely deep black chasm. His blood iced in his veins, and he 
  thought that his heart must have stopped beating because noth-
  ing could live in such cold, nothing. 
  No.
  At his side, Amy was still crowing with delight, and then he did 
  look. Must look. Had to.
  Clara.
  
  BattleCorps
  Stars in the Time of Dreaming • Page 1
  High above, flowers of scintillating blue and purple streamers 
  scorched the night sky. They spread out in ever-widening bursts, 
  draped into shimmering tangles as the bigger pieces turned to 
  fireballs screaming to earth. And even as he watched, he saw that 
  there were still more ships up there—their plasma trails straighter 
  or arcing graceful swirls as fighters dove and spun, and the night 
  sky was alive with contrails, some brighter than others, as other 
  women and men fought and died in these newborn and fraudulent 
  suns.  
  In his ear, the bud was silent. Clara’s voice was gone.
  His mind swirled with vertigo, and sand bit his knees as his 
  legs buckled, as he teetered on the brink of a darkness blacker 
  than the void. Without realizing it, he’d wrapped his arms around 
  his daughter the way a drowning man snatches at a branch, but 
  whether he held her, or she braced him up, saved him from the 
  abyss, he didn’t know. And it didn’t matter. 
  “Don’t be sad, Daddy.” Amy tugged at his hands. “It’s too pretty 
  to be sad. Come on, Daddy, quick, make a wish, and it’ll be all 
  right, just make a wish!”
  “Clara,” Jack whispered, and then the streamers and brilliant 
  trails and all those falling stars fractured to smeary prisms as he 
  finally let go of hope and his wife and what they’d made together 
  for a future he would never know, and wept.
  v v v
  It rained souls through what was left of the night.
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/BattleTech [multi]/EXTRA/Novels/Battlecorps Novels/Case White - Pt 03 - Stars in the Time of Dreaming - Ilsa J. Bick.pdf