“Historical analogues for an alien combat cipher?”

Palin shrugged. “One never knows, Evan. One never knows.”

Lt. Jennifer Samuels tried to make herself relax as she sat in the cockpit of the fighter. She couldn’t quite make the preflight jitters go away, something she hadn’t experienced in years. Not since her first shuttle flight.

Come on, Sam, she chastened herself, this is what you wanted, what you trained for. Don’t lose it now.

The words sounded nice, but they didn’t make her any calmer as she sat there.

Archangel One was parked alongside the other Angels, and she could feel them staring at her as they checked their own fighters. She knew they were questioning if she was up for it, just as she was wondering the same thing.

She’d already heard how Commander Michaels had cornered the captain and all but risked court martial over her assignment to the flight. The worst thing was, at that moment, she wasn’t sure she blamed him. Michaels was a legend; he’d been with the Angels almost from the beginning and had tallied up a long list of victories flying under the command of Captain Weston.

The captain, even more so. Between the two of them, they had been responsible for some of the greatest victories of the Block War, and on Earth. Their names were synonymous with the Archangel Flight Group, even as the flight group had become synonymous with victory in the postwar world.

Powerful images to live up to, yet that was what she’d wanted to do, ever since the first reports of Archangel missions filtered out through the news. In a world wired for sight and sound, it had still been a riveting image of the war when the government public relations people began releasing the unedited mission records of the flight group.

For a nation struggling with the first devastating defeats of the World War and the oppressive weight of the Block’s troops pushing in from all sides, the Angels had been one of the symbols that turned things around.

Samuels had to wonder, now that she was confronted with what she had wished for, how well she was going to stack up against those giants.

“Nervous?”

Samuels jumped. Or rather, she jerked and went flying off the seat in the null gravity. Her quick reflexes let her hook the cockpit canopy with her fingers and push herself back as she looked to the source of the voice. She almost wished she’d just kept flying off when she recognized Commander Michaels.

“No, sir,” she told him evenly.

“Bullshit,” he snorted in response. “Lieutenant, let me clue you into one thing, something Weston told me before my first flight.”

She swallowed at his tone.

“You can bullshit yourself all you want, I don’t care. You can lie to your mates about how scared you are, ’cause, Lord knows, they’re going to lie to you.” He flashed a crooked grin, then looked serious again. “But I’m the honcho of this circus, and if I ask you a question—any question—you can damn well bet I have a good reason for asking. So when I ask, you give me the truth. We clear?”