General Jackson “Longshot” Hunter has been in the intelligence game for decades. The head of Alliance SpecOps, he’s done everything in his power to prevent his operatives from suffering the personal tragedies he has–sometimes successfully, sometimes not. With war with the Imperium looming on the horizon, Hunter faces the greatest fight of his life: to protect a man he’s come to regard as the son he never had and to save humanity from itself–and a threat long dead.
The story in Longshot takes place largely during the events if Redeemer and was an experiment from several years ago in centering a story on Jack Hunter, the chief of Alliance SpecOps and the chief of military intelligence back on Epsilon. It’s part character study, part background, part thought and timeline organization. Chapter 1 is a little bit of all three wrapped up in a packet.
Enjoy.
One
The middle-aged general dusted some snow off the dark gray headstone and straightened, staring at the few words carved into the polished granite.
Madeline Terrel Taylor, born August 23, 2213, died July 17, 2255. Beloved.
“I’ve been doing what you’ve asked, Madeline,” the general whispered softly. His breath steamed in the chill January air as he stood in the snow, in the shadows of the oak tree planted over the ashes of another woman he’d loved and lost. “I’ve been watching over him as best I can, but he’s not ready to learn the truth. He’s not ready for that yet. I’m sorry.” He laid a gloved hand against the cold stone, squeezing his eyes shut against the sting of the wind. “He’s out on the frontier where you met his father, doing his job. He’s one of my best, Madeline. You’d be proud. You’d be very proud.”
He stooped to lay the flowers in his other hand down against the stone, then turned his gaze toward the oak, his throat growing tight even though his fiancée had been gone these twenty-seven years. “I’m doing my best, Mai,” he said. “I’m trying harder than Roger ever did to make sure they come home at the end of the day. I won’t let any of them suffer like we did, like Kath and Joe did. I’m trying not to let it happen.”
Jackson Hunter swallowed hard against the lump in his throat. “God forgive me for the times I’ve failed no matter how hard I’ve tried.”
Wind stirred the oak’s bare branches and he exhaled a sigh. He wasn’t a religious man by any stretch of the imagination, but he had to believe that there was something beyond mortal life, even if he wasn’t sure what it was. Little signs like the wind through those branches made him feel like she’d heard him, somehow, from somewhere beyond the grave.
“I miss you,” he whispered, his voice all but lost in the sound of rustling branches. “I miss you both.” One more than the other.
There were days when he wasn’t quite sure which of the two he missed more.
He closed his eyes and lingered a moment longer before he turned and walked down the hill toward the walking path below. Another man in an ESF-issue peacoat stood on the path, waiting in polite silence for his commander’s pleasure.
“You’ve been waiting,” Hunter said.
“Not long.” The young man smiled faintly and inclined his head. “Only a few minutes.”
Hunter nodded slightly. “Did you get through?”
“Yes sir. Message delivered and, if I know him as well as I think I do, taken to heart.”
“What time was it there?”
“Late. Early. A little of both.” They began to walk down the path toward the cemetery gates. “Hard to say if I woke him or not. I can never quite tell.”
“Text would make that hard,” Hunter observed drily. His aide laughed.
“I suppose so. He answered quickly enough, so I’m thinking if I woke him, he wasn’t that deeply asleep.” They lapsed into silence for a dozen steps, then Allyn Cyne turned his blind eyes to his commander and asked, “Permission to ask a personal question, sir?”
One corner of Hunter’s mouth twitched. “Go ahead.” What harm could it do, after all? He’s already gone toe-to-toe with me once and won. Whatever he’ll be asking can’t be that bad.
“Who were they, General?”
Part of him had expected the question, though the fact that Cyne had picked up on the fact that he’d gone to that site to remember two people and not just one caught him slightly off-guard–a real hazard when one was the commander in charge of intelligence operations for an interstellar confederation. He stared at Cyne for a moment, then shook his head slightly. “Curious, are you?”
“A little, sir,” Cyne said.
Hunter smiled despite how much his heart still ached, even years after the two women he’d just gone to visit had died. “One was my partner,” he said softly. “The girl that I would’ve been married to about six weeks after that last mission, if she’d lived. The other was a friend.”
“A dear friend, I imagine,” Cyne observed, his hands tucked into the pockets of his coat, his shoulders slightly hunched in the chill wind. “You don’t strike me as the type to visit the graves of casual acquaintances. Men and women who’ve served under you, yes, but not people you simply knew who are gone now.”
It was true. He didn’t even visit Jonah Frank’s grave that often, and they’d have been brothers if Joe had survived that same mission that had robbed him of Maida. Hunter shook his head slightly. “She started out as someone I simply knew of,” he admitted softly. “Then her husband vanished and she came to us. I was the one they assigned to the case.”
“Taylor’s mother,” Cyne said softly. “You were visiting his mother’s grave? Does he–”
“He doesn’t know anything,” Hunter said. “And it’s going to stay that way.”
“I don’t–”
“It’s all right,” Hunter said, cutting off the word understand. “You don’t have to. Just know that there are reasons for it and leave it at that.”
“You visit his mother’s grave,” Cyne said again, his voice curious and full of wonder all at once, as if the blind man was trying to sort out what it could all mean. Hunter couldn’t help but smile a small, rueful smile as he shook his head.
“I’ll tell you someday,” he promised softly.
“But not today, sir?” Cyne was grinning again.
“That’s right,” Hunter said. “Not today. Now tell me what Redeemer had to say to us when you made your request.”
He let Allyn deal with the Resistance lead because the blind man had worked with him in the past, back when Cyne was still stationed in the Borderworlds, at the tiny Alliance post on Caldin. They’d built some kind of rapport, the two of them, and it was more than worth the inconveniences that Cyne imposed on them where the Resistance was concerned. Any advantage that we can leverage at this point that keeps operations secure and the agents in the field safe is worth some strange requests–like writing a report on paper and then asking me to burn it after I’ve read it. I suppose I’ve honored stranger requests.
“He said I didn’t need to ask,” Cyne said simply. “He and Mr. Taylor have gotten close, I think.”
“You think?”
Cyne shrugged slightly. “It’s a highly educated guess. There’s no way for me to be certain unless I’m there to observe them firsthand, but I think it’s a safe bet.”
Hunter nodded slowly, eyes sliding shut for a moment as they drew closer to the cemetery gate. “Well, I’ll trust your judgement, then,” he murmured. “Since I don’t have much more than that to work from.” Other than what I know about Aaron Taylor, and everything I know about that boy is that he’s starved for purpose and friendship in more than a few ways.
They were a lot alike, the old general and the young man he’d sent out into the Borderworlds to do the single most important job he could give to any of his agents: to be the only real, powerful help that the Alliance could give, officially or unofficially–to those fighting against the threat of Imperium domination, to be the eyes and ears of the Alliance intelligence chief on the ground, in the trenches, working with and fighting for the Resistance.
I wish I could be out there, too.
“You’re quiet, sir, but your thoughts are…evident.”
“Delicately put, Cyne.” Hunter shook his head slightly. “Don’t mind an old man’s thoughts. They’re not of any consequence.”
“Somehow I doubt that,” his aide said softly. “Nothing you do is of no consequence.”
I’d like to think that some things are.
Deep down, he suspected that his aide was closer to right than he was.
