The Assignment
The orders arrived at 2147.
Kira Vance was sitting on the floor of her apartment with her back against the sofa and a half-eaten tray of rice and fish going cold on the low table beside her. The apartment was small. Two rooms and a viewport that looked out over the coastal sprawl of the fleet residential block, the lights of the reconstruction grid stretching south until they dissolved into the dark of the Pacific. She had lived here for three years and had never once felt like it was hers.
The pad pinged. She did not look at it for a long moment. She knew what it was. She had known the assignments were going out this week, and she had known her own billet was coming, and she had spent the last four days telling herself she was not nervous and then not sleeping anyway.
The rice was cold. She pushed the tray aside.
She picked up the pad.
The orders were exactly what she had expected. Lieutenant Commander Kira Vance, Tactical Officer, UENS Hope, CV-003. Reporting date: Year 12 Day 1, Prometheus Station, slip 3. The commissioning ceremony would be the same day. The ship would be active the same hour.
She read the orders three times. Once for the name. Once for the ship. Once for the fact that she had been waiting for this since the day she finished the tactical pipeline. The only thing left to wait for was a warship that did not exist yet.
The warship existed now.
She set the pad down on the low table with the screen facing up. The text glowed in the dim apartment. She looked at it the way she would look at a sensor return she had not expected: with the part of her brain that did not trust data until it had been cross-referenced twice.
The bottle was in the cabinet above the sink, behind the rice and the cooking oil and the small jar of spices her mother sent her every six months whether she needed them or not.
It was her aunt’s brand. A small-batch whiskey from a distillery in the Appalachians that had survived the invasion because it was too small to be worth targeting and too remote to be worth looting. Sarah Vance had brought a bottle of it to every family dinner for the last year before she left. Kira had been nineteen the last time she poured a glass of it at her aunt’s table and Sarah turned the glass in her hand and said, The smartest thing a tactical officer ever did was distrust silence.
It was not a toast. It was not a lesson. It was something Sarah had said to herself while looking out the window, and Kira had written it down afterward in the small leather notebook she kept in her jacket and had never thrown away.
She poured two fingers into a glass that was not clean and stood at the counter and did not drink it for a full minute.
The records search was a habit. Once a month for eleven years. Sometimes more, in the bad weeks.
She pulled up the terminal on her desk. The login was automatic. The search was saved to her favorites bar. Sarah Vance, Sanctuary Research Expedition, Year Zero. Last known location: Kuiper Belt research outpost Aurelia-7. Status: Declared Lost, Day 6 of the invasion. No remains recovered. No transmissions received. No closure.
The results returned in half a second. Thirty-two documents. She had opened every one of them at least a hundred times. Cargo manifests from the expedition’s supply runs. A personnel roster that listed her aunt as Administrator. A final comms log entry from Aurelia-7 dated six hours before the Vethrak arrived in the inner system. A routine check-in, logged by a junior tech on the night shift, nothing flagged, nothing wrong.
Kira had read the junior tech’s name so many times that she would have recognized it in any font, in any language, in any context. She had read the cargo manifest so many times that she knew which crate her aunt’s second pair of boots was stowed in.
She closed the search. She opened it again. Thirty-two documents. Same files. Same nothing.
The glass was half empty. She had been drinking and had not registered it.
The call from her mother came at 2230.
Elena Vance lived in a small house in the rebuilt district outside Osaka. She kept a garden. She sent the spices. She had told Kira, five years ago, that the search was not helping her and that perhaps it was time to let go, and Kira had nodded and said nothing and continued the search the next month and the month after that.
Tonight her mother did not ask about the records. She asked about the assignment.
Kira told her. Tactical officer. UENS Hope. The commissioning ceremony.
Her mother was quiet for a beat. Then she said, Aunt Sarah would have been proud of you, Kira. She said it the way she always said it when Kira achieved something, which was as a kindness and also as a benediction and also, Kira had long suspected, as an apology for asking her to stop searching.
I know, Kira said.
She did not say the rest. She did not say: I am going to a warship and I do not know why I feel like I am going looking for her. She did not say: I cannot stop searching. I cannot stop. The day I stop is the day I admit she is dead, and I have not buried her. She did not say any of it, because her mother had buried her sister eleven years ago and Kira was not going to dig the grave up again.
They talked for another ten minutes about the garden and the peppers and whether Kira had eaten dinner. Kira said she had. She had not, but the rice had gone cold and the whiskey had stopped tasting like anything and she did not want to explain either of those things.
She ended the call. She finished the whiskey. She stood at the viewport with the glass in her hand and the orders still glowing on the pad behind her and looked out at the city.
Outside, the reconstruction grid was a net of lights thrown over the dark.
Eleven years of work. Eleven years of rebuilding cities and laying keels and training officers who did not know what they were training for. Eleven years since the invasion. Eleven years since the woman who had taught her to distrust silence had walked onto a research vessel and not walked off.
Kira set the glass on the sill.
In the glass the last trickle of whiskey caught the light from the port and turned amber for half a second before settling.
She picked up the pad. She read the orders a fourth time, not for the name or the ship or the meaning but for the simple fact of them: black text on a gray screen, a room assignment and a reporting time and a chain-of-command diagram that placed her name under Captain Yuki Tanaka, whom she had never met.
A ship that did not exist yet.
A tactical billet she had spent her career training for.
A question she had been asking for eleven years, holding the same thirty-two documents the way a child held a blanket.
She closed the pad.
I am going to a warship, she thought, and I am still looking for her. I do not know how to be both of those things at once.
The city hummed. The whiskey dried on the glass. Outside the viewport the reconstruction grid went on replacing dark with light, block by block, the way it had every night for eleven years, and Kira Vance stood at the window and did not sleep and did not search again and did not try to make the two halves of herself agree with each other.
If you enjoyed this story, you can follow the main story arc in The Exodus Rush, the first book in The Vethrak Requiem series.