Wing Commander #07 False Color by William Forstchen (best books to read in life .txt) 📕

"Black Cats!" Etienne Montclair shouted, smiling like a wolf on the scent of prey. Some of the others took up the call as they rose and headed for the door.

A good team, Bondarevsky thought as he watched them go. Maybe not as good as Tarawa's old outfit, but a damned good team. Would any of them make it out alive? The odds were against it.

He saw Sparks and Harper leaning against the far wall, talking, and started toward them, but he never made it there. Alexandra Travis appeared at the door, her usual easy grace replaced by a stiff, awkward gait as she favored her injured side. He moved to meet her.

"What the devil are you doing out of sick bay?" he demanded. "Doctor Manning told me you'd be out of it for at least a week."

She nodded. Pale from her ordeal the day before, her wan complexion offset the dark helmet of her shortcut hair. "I . . . just wanted to come down and see you off," she said, her voice strained. Pain, or emotion? He wasn't sure. "Sorry I have to sit out this dance."

"Don't worry about it," he said. "I didn't want to have to ride out the whole battle in the command plane anyway." His original assignment for the attack had been to the Gratha Command and Control craft that would be coordinating the carrier's Alpha Strike. But with one of his best Strakha pilots wounded, he had changed his mind. He'd fly one of the stealth fighters today, taking personal charge of the squadron in place of Travis.

He would have been happy that the woman wasn't going into battle today, if the position of the carrier itself hadn't been so hopeless. Bondarevsky had been struck by her resemblance to Svetlana—not so much in face or feature as in the way she carried herself, the way her mind worked so closely attuned to his own—but it wasn't until she was wounded aboard the picket ship that he realized how much he'd come to care for her these past few months. It would have been almost too much to bear if she'd gone out there in a fighter like Svetlana, and never come back.

Her eyes met his. "Take care of yourself out there, Jason," she said quietly. It was the first time she'd ever used his given name. "Don't forget, you owe me a date when we get back to Landreich."

His eyes strayed to the swell of her breasts under the khaki uniform she wore, then back to her mocking eyes. "I'll be there," he said. He would have taken her in his arms, but he was conscious of other eyes on the two of them.

"I'll be there," he repeated, and turned to leave the briefing room. It was time for battle.

Flight Wing Briefing Room, FRLS Mjollnir Approaching Baka Kar, Baka Kar System 1141 hours (CST)

"My thanks to you, darlin' of the flight deck, for making sure my wee bird can fly today," Aengus Harper was saying. A last-minute fault had threatened to ground his Strakha and keep him out of the action today, but Sparks had taken personal charge of the techies who had traced the glitch down and corrected it in time for him to go back on the roster.

If Harper was going to die on a suicide mission, he intended to do it in the cockpit of a fighter, not sidelined as he'd been all these years.

Sparks didn't answer. He followed her gaze to where Bondarevsky and Travis were talking, then looked at the tech officer again. "Does he not know, then, that you love him, lass?" he asked.

She met his eyes and flushed. "What makes you say that?" she demanded.

"I've seen the look a time or two before, lass," he said. "Even put it in a few ladies' eyes, from time to time. You'll not be denyin' that you're in love with him, will you now? And for a long time, I'd say."

She nodded reluctantly. "A long time. But he was in love with another pilot back then, until he lost her on the Kilrah raid. After that . . . well, he was just getting over her, and I was just a techie petty officer besides."

"And later?"

"We almost . . . got together once," she told him. "But the timing was still wrong. He made it a rule not to fraternize with the junior officers once he became captain of a carrier . . . and just when I thought he wasn't going to be my ship's captain any more, we drew another assignment together." She looked away. "After that, I decided I didn't want to trade the friendship I knew we had for a romance I wasn't sure we could ever manage. Now . . . it looks like I've lost him again. To another pilot, too."

"You should tell him how you feel, lass."

She shook her head. "Not much point in it now, Aengus. The last thing he needs is to have something like that laid on him now. And everyone says we won't be coming back from this one. So I lose him one way or another . . . better I don't cause him any more grief."

"You're one in a million, Janet McCullough," Harper told her. "And if you weren't head-over-heels for that one over there I might be trying to court you myself."

"Save it, flyboy," she told him. "Or did you forget you've got a launch coming up?"

Strakha 800, VF-401 "Shadow Cats" Approaching Baka Kar, Baka Kar System 1148 hours (CST)

"Eight-zero-zero, good shot," Bondarevsky said. He pushed the fighter's throttle forward and felt the gravitic differential pushing him back into his seat as the Strakha accelerated. "Good shot!"

"Roger, eight-zero-zero," Boss Marchand replied. He checked the status of his cloak and nodded inside his flight helmet. No one he'd ever heard of had ever tried launching a stealth fighter with the cloak on, but it had gone