“That’s not necessary, sir. I don’t need any time,” the commander told him.

Weston half smiled. “In twenty minutes, Commander, you will go down to your room. You will take a quick shower, then go and get a light meal. When this is done, and only when this is done, will I allow you to return to the bridge. Am I understood?”

“Understood, sir.”

“Good.” Weston turned, stepping toward the lift as it arrived with the relief crew. “Then I’ll see you in twenty minutes.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“Doctor…I…”

“What is it, Nurse?” Dr. Rame asked as he took a packet of antibiotics from a cooler and carried it across the med-lab to an operating table. He loaded it into a pressurized pump designed to deliver the drugs, even if they lost rotational gravity.

“What’s going to happen, doctor?”

Rame paused, glancing back at the young woman, then crossed back to the cooler for a supply of morphine. “We’re going to receive injured personnel,” he said as he worked. “If we’re lucky, we’ll receive a great many of them.”

“Lucky?”

“Sandra…If we’re not lucky, they’ll be dead before they get here,” Rame said quite seriously. “You’re too young to have served in the war, right?”

“I served on the USS Enterprise in the last few months,” she said defensively.

Rame nodded. “This will be worse.”

“I almost wish something would happen…the waiting…”

“I know,” Rame said, his voice soft. “Go check the portable power modules and see that they have a full charge. I don’t want to lose instruments or the infrareds if we take a bad hit.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

Rame watched her go. Resigned, he checked the plasma supplies one more time.

“Hey, Steph, you up for a few more kills?”

Stephanos acknowledged the crewman as he approached Archangel Lead. The kills from his last fight had been tallied under his cockpit already, but he ignored the new alien silhouettes that had been painted there. They had always been more for the ground crews than for him, anyway, and he didn’t like to look at them before a fight.

The crewman backed off as Stephanos caught the edge of his cockpit and slowly lowered himself into the fighter. Once he’d settled in a bit, he flipped on the primary power to the computers and opened up the diagnostic windows. They’d already have been run, of course, but Stephanos was old school. As always, he didn’t go out in a plane he hadn’t checked for himself.

Around the bay, the Archangels were mostly following the same ritual, though he knew that some of them were less interested in diagnostics and were just taking a few minutes to communicate with the gods that watched out for crazy aviators.

“Got another one coming up, girl,” he whispered softly to the plane as he ran a hand along the molded control stick. “You up for it?”