Angel Flight

When I was a kid, the only things that interested me were girls and partying with friends.  We never thought about war.  Who would ever attack us?  The answer of course was the Shang.  After that, we all volunteered, expecting a Short, Victorious, War against the alien menace.  Instead, we got War Without End.  You learn the measure of friends in times like those.  True friends stand beside you, and you beside them, in the eternities of boredom and instants of terror that defined The War.

Enterprise

"Two pair," Swan said with a smile and dropped her cards on the table.

Jack Hart scowled at the two kings and flung his cards down in disgust.  The other four Cowboys groaned as well, scattering their failed hands on the table, and Lieutenant Dawn DeMarco gathered up her winnings.  The bottle caps clattered against each other, and Swan bestowed a look on her opponents that reminded Jack of her namesake.  She sat tall and erect, a true daughter of the Outer Colony world Camelot, and even her standard Marine duty uniform couldn't shroud the lithe beauty of her frame.  She surveyed the field of battle before her, and then turned the eyes that were much older than her twenty-some year old face to challenge the other Cowboys.  "Another hand?" she asked.

Jack chuckled and swept the cards up with a deft motion.  He began to shuffle, smiling as their eagle eyes watched to make certain he didn't load the deck in anyone's favor.  He chuckled again and shook his head.

"What?" Cat asked from her side of the table, peering at him suspiciously.  He met her gaze, fingers flickering between the cards in a blur as they passed between his hands.  Captain Kathleen Reynolds was night to Swan's day, unruly hair forever rebelling from any attempt to control it.  She had the undeniable rumpled air of the young college student she'd once been, stepping out of the Iowa barn she'd grown up with.  Her eyes were just as old as Swan's though, and Jack knew they had over a century of flight time between the two of them.  Jack wondered again at the vagaries of the universe that left him of all people in command of a pair of such veteran pilots.

Jack snorted and glanced towards the rest of his pilots.  Fox, Crane, and Snake had each lived about as long as he had, though they'd grown up a lot faster than he.  Jessie James owned a farm in Kansas, though there was the hint of a rogue in his eyes set in his weatherworn face.  The face of Buckaroo Banno was plastered all over the California surfing magazines, first as a surfer and then as the owner of surfing stores, but Ken was a Free Japanese through and through.  When the time came to fight the Chinese conquerors of the homeland he'd never seen, he and his people had volunteered with amazing determination.  And while Louise Mattioli's long, slender limbs branded him a native Martian, his slick, back hair gave him the look of a lawyer.  Appropriate since he was a lawyer in his day job before The War.  The Peloran had given them all very fitting callsigns.

"It's just good to have the band back together," Jack said with a waggle of his eyebrows and the cards fluttered from one hand to the other.

"I'm just glad to have space to stretch out in again," Snake returned, eyes scanning the ready room as if looking for a lawsuit he could file.  No.  Jack had to give it to the man.  He didn't actually live up to the stereotype of the soulless lawyer, but everybody still gave him a hard time.  He gave just as good as he got.  But this time, he truly wasn't looking for a lawsuit.

Jack followed the man's gaze, eyes running over the snarling wolf symbol hanging on the bulkhead.  It belonged to the Texas Marine Corps Fighter Attack Wing 112, renamed the Cowboys hundreds of years ago.  His eyes flittered over to the flag of the United States of America hanging on one bulkhead.  It was a familiar flag to him, thirteen stripes for the original Colonies that founded America, and forty-nine stars for the States that led America out of the Second Great Depression.  Above it, the single star Republic of Texas flag had looked odd to him when he first volunteered, but the Lone Star flag had grown on him in the last two years.  "I do love Cowboy Country," he echoed Snake's assertion.