Chapter Text
RWR, LWR, IRST, Force Emission Sensor, RWR again. Michael’s focus shifted between the sensors, less seeing them, more feeling their outputs through his neural-electronic connection. The ship’s systems injected him with another hit of Force-Enhancement Serum-14, or “Melange” as pilots and navigators called it. He felt its effects immediately and while their FB-182 “Arrowhead” was quarantined from the cosmic force, his connection to its systems strengthened and he could better communicate with Rachael.
“Any unusual gravimetric readings?” He asked through the connection. She was in the crash couch to his right but from her high dosage of Melange and inherently stronger force connection she was fully integrated into the ship’s systems and thus physically unconscious.
“No, though it’s hard to tell with the debris cloud here. Even a half-calibrated mass damper should make a fighter look like less than a tea-pot.” She said, a little frustration rolling off of her emotions.
Michael wasn’t a particular fan of the dataspace that navigators occupied, it laid one bare and exposed, both physically and mentally. Once you were in, information flowed in a two-way street for any users plugged-in. Still it was fine given his company. He mused that this was likely why couples were assigned to these roles. They could deal with the exchange without too many issues.
He snapped back to the present when the IRST picked up a thermal bloom just barely apparent from the inner orbit of a gas giant three light minutes away.
“f*ck, someone was manuvering out by Planet Delta.” He relayed to Rachael.
“Got it, hold on, I think I’ve got some grav signatures.” She said as the ship’s hyperspace sensor dipped into an entirely different dimension, and with her force enhancement, found several imperceptibly tiny mass shadows nestled into the immense mass shadow of the gas giant.
Michael snorted, “Textbook move. Got ourselves some rookies.”
He could feel Rachael’s adrenaline begin to course through her and her almost giddy excitement.
“Time to show them why we won SAC Strike Comp five years in a row.” Michael said, a smile creeping onto his face.
Racheal reflected his emotions and said, “In twenty seconds, impulse of two-thousand meters per second once that moon gets in our way.”
“Of course dear.” Michael drawled.
“That’s Major dear to you Lieutenant Colonel honey.” She said, humor reflected in her emotions.
It was moments like this that Michael lived for. Out with the love of his life doing what they both loved, flying. While he didn’t like the neural-electronic connection, seeing her like this with the happiness radiating off her was intoxicating.
“Now.” Rachael said as the moon eclipsed them from their pursuers.
In an instant Michael powered up the reactor, made a quick thirty G burn, powered-down the reactor, and then radiated their waste heat into the moon’s surface, using a wide angle beam to make the additional thermal radiation look like sunlight.
“Anything notice us?” He asked.
“No, those sats you found an hour ago were obscured by Planet Echo. We should be good.” she said.
The move kept them at a flat angle from the detected craft, putting the upper reaches of Planet Delta’s atmosphere in between them, preventing IRST scans from finding them.
Their path slingshotted them towards Planet Bravo. They would make their final burn on the far side of Delta, accelerating to a few tenths of a percent of C and then coast until they were ready for terminal maneuvers in roughly twenty hours.
The installations around Planet Bravo were radiating heavily and Michael and Rachael had been carefully cataloging them for their final run.
They could’ve gone in fast, like many of the other crews, but the objective wasn’t immediately pressing so they could take their time. Of course there was taking time and then there was studying Purgil Migration patterns and masking a hyperspace jump among the herd.
They had already spent the best of two days on the mission and it was taking its toll.
After the burn Michael said, “Take twenty, you need the rest.”
Rachael sighed, saying, “Yeah, administering suppressant.” One of her injectors fed her the Force Suppressant, taking her out of her Melange induced fugue.
She unstrapped from her crash seat, loosened her well fitting pressure suit and went back from the co*ckpit to use the head.
When she was done she laid down on the bunk in the small compartment behind the co*ckpit.
“Can you-” she asked.
“Yeah, gimme a second.” He said, taking a deep breath. “Silver Chrysanthemum.” he said, using the psycho-implanted code phrase to knock her out. It was efficient, if a little unnerving but the Union wasn’t about to let force users run around without a few fallback options.
He checked his sensors and the radiative emissions around Planet Bravo and waited.
Another wave of radiation passed over their ship.
“We’ve got two minutes until they start picking us up.” Rachael said.
Their modulated Radar Cross-Section could only help them for so long as they approached the objective and the network of sensors and Combat Space Patrols that surrounded it.
“Prepare for high-G maneuvers.” Michael said, his seat shifted a bit so that when they went into their high burn blood would stay in his torso, head, and arms.
“Weapons check.” Rachael said, and both of them checked over their payload and weapons.
Standard planetary strike package. Five missiles on a rotary launcher in the forward bay and twenty MAnuverable Reentry Vehicles on racks in the rear bay. One of the missiles was an anti-starfighter Excalibur, two were Casaba Howitzers, one was a unitary X-Ray Laser, and the final was an anti-starship neutron bomb.
Along with their heavier weapons they had twenty-four kinetic kill missiles spread across four different weapons bays, two on the spacecraft’s waist, and two on shoulder stations. Two more bays held Forty Decoys that could emulate a wide variety of objects and ships in various spectrums from gravitational to radar.
“All systems ready, I want you putting some noise out there. They’ve got some tactical level users at least and maybe a strategic level one.” Michael said.
“Got it, I’ll start screaming once the Taozin Cloak is gone.” She said back in the ship’s systems.
“Good, going loud in T-minus ten.” Michael said, the ship helpfully projecting the countdown.
He started warming up the reactor projecting the thermal radiation rearwards out into space. It would be obvious but the nearest sensors in that direction were at least a couple light minutes out so it wouldn’t matter.
The timer hit zero and he said, “Beginning.” and threw the throttle to a crushing 85G acceleration. Immediately the Ship’s boosted plasma torch ignited in a bright white line of ionized particles stretching two-hundred kilometers behind them and growing fast. The dampeners on the ship shifted from minimizing its grav signature to preventing them from being turned into red paste. Still he could feel at least 5G of force on his chest as his pressure suit tightened and created low pressure zones to manage his blood flow.
The threat warning receivers lit up as every ship in the threat sphere locked onto them.
“Excalibur” Michael said as he selected the Excalibur and gave it the order to launch.
The rotary launcher shifted to the appropriate position, the weapons bay opened a crack and the weapon was blasted off with compressed gas, quickly falling behind before its own torch ignited, rocketing ahead to meet the patrol craft and starfighters of the OpFor group.
“They’re smoking.” Rachael said through her efforts to f*ck with the force users of the OpFor. The ships were deploying canisters of highly reflective nanomachines ahead of them to obscure the Excalibur’s firing solution and X-Ray penetration.
“Won’t help them.” Michael said as he slaved the Excalibur to the grav sensor. They still had light seconds between them but the hyperwave connection combined with a final data pulse from some quantumly entangled particles would ensure they could get a hit. Furthermore this was a newer Excalibur model, losing some of its capability to target numerous spacecraft in return for utilizing tungsten plasma jets similar to the Casaba Howitzer. This meant that the smoke wouldn’t help much and the energy shields the OpFor boasted would be useless against the relativistic shotgun.
“Detonating in 3… 2… 1… Final adjustment, firing.” Michael said, as his Visor Display simulated the flash and radiation readings from the Excalibur’s Five Megaton Common X-Ray Package and the jets of plasma that reached out to intercept the light ships.
Twelve were caught in the .1 light second kill radius of the Excalibur and eleven had been registered destroyed with the final, a patrol ship, coming off as damaged.
“Bruiser,” Michael said as a KKM was ejected from a launch bay and burned at 250G towards the stricken patrol craft.
“We got missiles.” Rachael said as the ship informed Michael of the increasing number of thermal blooms.
“Active protection system to max, reroute from grav dampening.” He said, feeling an additional G of force on his chest as the lasers began to fry the electronics of the incoming missiles.
“Rachael, manage interceptions, we’ll use this to sneak our MARVS in.” Michael said.
He handed off the KKMs to Rachael and took control of the MARVS in the rear weapons bay. Rachael began launching KKMs, keeping them in parallel to the Arrowhead at the same acceleration, if a few hundredths of a light second out. Michael emulated this with the MARVS. Their engines weren’t especially powerful and they couldn’t match the KKMs but the ruse didn’t have to last forever.
At the same time he adjusted the stealth settings of the MARVS to emulate the KKMs instead of trying to keep them as stealthy as possible. He integrated them into the screen that Rachael was forming, using their linked minds communicating specifics of moves so the illusion was seamless, creating a sphere of interceptor missiles.
The first enemy KKMs that weren’t fried came in from their frontal hemisphere, trying to get a fragment hit and were quickly countered by Rachael who hit them with their own KKMs. Michael ensured that the MARVs moved in sequence with the KKMs, reacting to threats like they were interceptors.
Several more of the missiles passed outside the interception sphere, falling behind, then spinning and accelerating at max burn, using the thermal bloom of the plasma torch to mask them.
Michael punched off five decoys, letting their small engines array them next to the Arrowhead then he shut off the Arrowhead’s engine, used RCS to transition to where the decoys were while the decoys took his place and then turned on the five secondary, ion engines, only burning at 15G, having the Decoys emulate it. To mask this he used another decoy with an obscuring canister to temporarily blind the sensors of the missiles to the swap.
The KKMs didn’t notice the swap, assuming that they were trying to be baited to the decoy formation to the side of where the Arrowhead had been, flying through the cluster of decoys a second too early for their operators to correct the mistake before they were destroyed by Rachael’s interceptors.
Michael reignited the torch and sent the decoys over to Rachael. They might not be ideal but they were a hunk of mass attached to an engine and that could f*ck up a carefully planned attack.
Scanning the ships in orbit Michael picked three, two Missile Cruisers and a Frigate, selecting the Casaba Howitzers and the X-Ray laser. One-by-one the missiles detached, joined by decoys that would mask them out to their one and ten light-second attack radius respectively.
“Ripple Burner, Vampire.” He said, announcing the launch through brevity code.
His attack was interrupted by him having to quickly rotate the ship to burn laterally and dodge a cloud of shrapnel from a KKM.
“Move your interceptor swarm over the howitzers.” He said.
Rachael complied, putting up more decoys and KKMs to continue protecting their ship. Michael launched the last of the MARVs to blend in with this new protective bubble.
The attack swarm neared the orbiting ships and they began to burn to dodge the incoming missiles. Interceptors were launched, trying to prevent the nuclear shaped charges and the nuclear-pumped X-Ray from getting within range.
The KKMs around the attacking missiles responded, playing a game of chicken in outer space, jousting with the interceptor missiles from the ships. Rachael deftly guided the decoys and anti-capitalship missiles to bait and dodge shrapnel clouds, all the while boring in on their targets. The light-lag was starting to become an issue as the protective screen had to rely more and more on their droid brains rather than Rachael’s direction.
The X-Ray got within effective range of the Frigate first with the accompanying MARVs, KKMs, and decoys scattering before the simulated 5 Megaton warhead went off, emitting most of its energy as X-Rays, directed onto where the Frigate would be five seconds into the future.
The Frigate had been making random jinks to throw off the aim of the warhead but it didn’t help as a furious mental assault by Rachael temporarily stunned the pilot. It wasn’t much more than a moment but that was enough to break their nerve and get hit by the concentrated beam of radiation.
The attack burned away the shields and sensors on the attack side and penetrated through the hull, damaging the hypermatter annihilation reactor, forcing an emergency shutdown. It was dead in the water and out of the fight.
Next the Casaba Howitzers got within range of the Cruisers. While their nuclear warheads emitted X-Rays, a Beryllium Oxide filler turned that into heat and pressure, turning a cap of tungsten into plasma and propelling it at a good fraction of C. While the energy shields dealt with the heat, the kinetic force of the plasma was left over, overwhelming the comparatively weak particle shields and punching into the hulls of the ships.
One of the Cruisers was marked as catastrophically destroyed from the detonation of its reactor while the other was only moderately damaged.
Michael immediately noted this and queued the neutron missile to finish off the stricken cruiser, along with KKMs for both it and the Frigate. At the same time he directed the MARVs which had accompanied the attack clouds to decelerate like the missed KKMs, like they were coming around for another target. Except they weren’t. They were decelerating to enter the atmosphere at a desirable speed.
He had the MARVs in the interceptor cloud start accelerating towards the ships, looking like more KKMs on attack runs.
Unfortunately someone figured out the ruse a few seconds later and launches were detected against the MARVS near the planet. He had them drop the disguises, instead focusing on being as hard to detect as possible, coasting, and only burning to avoid impact. It helped but not as much as he would’ve liked. Two of the MARVS winked out of existence.
He gritted his teeth. Not hitting targets would hurt their score. He had the targets organized by type and not all were created equally. The nukes were kept on the larger, softer targets like cities and above ground factories, but he found two targets where the nukes could easily be substituted. A dam and a bridge. Launching three KKMs he targeted one at the dam and two at the bridge, aiming for its support pillars.
At full burn they could get to the planet a lot faster than the MARVs when needed and they didn’t have to slow down as their tungsten bodies meant that the atmosphere wasn’t a massive issue and wouldn’t tear them apart.
They were beginning to leave their opportunity to strike and OpFor knew that. Using this Michael had Rachael launch almost all of their KKMs and Decoys at the planet, masking the decoys as KKMs and hoping the opposition thought they were trying the same trick again.
At the same time the neutron warhead got within two kilometers of the damaged cruiser and detonated, showering the crew and electronics with a high dose of neutron radiation. If it had been real the crew would’ve started throwing up blood immediately and died within minutes as their cells were torn apart on the atomic scale. What mattered in the moment was that every system onboard was toast.
The Frigate detonated as their hypermatter storage tanks were ripped open. The remaining MARVs on the attack vectors diverted towards the planet with the KKMs being retasked to protect them or hit other targets like strike craft attempting to intercept the attack clouds.
The new one that was meant to look like the primary strike cloud was getting the lion’s share of the attention. Doctrine was to degrade planetary defenses first before initiating an orbital strike and while they had been proven to disregard that the opposition commander reasoned that after the cruisers were taken out the time was optimal for a strike.
Almost no attention was being paid to their Arrowhead at the moment. Rachael was putting on one hell of a show with the decoy cloud. A feint within a feint within a feint. The decoys were on the outside, simulating KKMs though not as well as one might have assumed, limiting themselves to interception moves that equaled the max acceleration of a MARV. The KKMs were on the inside, poorly disguised as MARVs.
The ruse worked because it was seen through.
“All warfare is based on deception.” said Sun Tzu and Michael thought about that mirthlessly as the orbital defenses were fixated on the ruse that they thought they figured out. They were too fixated to notice the MARVs disguised as KKMs had gone dark, using debris to make adjustments into the planet.
They knew Michael and Rachael had targets in both Hemispheres so two separate attacks made sense. Direct attacks were best by avoiding having the MARVs decelerate and spend an unnecessary amount of time around the planet and vulnerable to interception. A few late nights configuring the particle shields of a MARV years ago had meant such an attack was entirely unnecessary.
Acting like debris the MARVs entered the upper reaches of the atmosphere and extended their particle shields as a gliding body, skipping across the surface like a stone, turning themselves into repurposed hypersonic glide vehicles, allowing them to travel around the planet while using the atmosphere as cover from sensors.
At this point the attack was out of their control and the onboard computers of the MARVs would have to suffice. Rachael plotted a hyperspace jump and Michael extracted them from the system. The whole engagement lasted less than ten minutes.
“And the winner of the USAC 2102 Strike Competition is… from the Grey Ghost herself, VAH-117, the Nighthawks!” General Briggs announced.
The crowd cheered as Michael and Rachael waved and smiled as they came up onstage.
“Good to see you, General.” Rachael said, extending a hand and giving the silvered man a firm shake.
“Ah Strike Comp has never been the same without you two. Every year you pull off the most batsh*t insane attacks. I’m surprised at how mellow this one was.” He said, chuckling.
“Ah well, kids kinda got in the way.” Michael said, grinning.
“Yeah, well the three of the little gremlins look way cuter than their parents. I can tell you that much.” Briggs said, eliciting wider smiles from the couple.
Some things never changed. Water was wet and parents were always proud of their kids.
“Got anything you want to say?” He asked, handing the microphone to Rachael.
Michael could feel a little bit of hesitation roll off of her but it was replaced with confidence and determination.
She got up to the podium testing the mic, turning to Michael and saying, “Oh honey should you really be saying that? The mic might be on.” just loud enough for it to be caught.
Michael reddened a bit at his wife’s joke but chuckled as the crowd erupted in laughter.
With a conspiratorial smile she turned to the crowd, saying, “It’s good to be back. It’s been a long nine years in the reserve and seeing some familiar faces really takes me back.”
Someone in the back yelled, “SHOW US YOUR KIDS!”
This was echoed by others and Rachael held up her hands to placate the crowd.
Michael connected his tablet to the projector and showed a 2D image of their family fishing. This elicited cheers and whistles as he showed their daughter and two sons and switched to photos of them on-top of some mountain in the Rockies.
Michael took down the photos and Rachael asked, “Satisfied?”
“NO!” was the resounding cry.
“Well I’m afraid we’ll have to disappoint you guys. Still, this was a good year. Some of y’all are even starting to threaten our dominance. We’ll see how that goes next year but plan for some fireworks.” Rachael said, eliciting some chuckles. Her voice switched from her normal faintly Indian accent to Michael’s drawl for a moment, playing the character of her husband.
She handed the mic to Michael who took the podium next, saying, “Like my lovely wife said,'' casting a meaningful look in her direction, “It’s good to be back. Watching some of the replays it's clear that the old-timers have been working hard and there’s some new blood that are looking to cut their teeth. That’s excellent and exactly what SAC needs. Think of it as a way of sticking it to the Strategic Rocket Forces, no offense to any rock-diggers or boomer crews in the crowd.”
There were mock boos at the mention of the Strategic Rocket Forces. Strike spacecraft were always going to be the eternal rivals of the Rocket Forces. It wasn’t as clear-cut as the Cold War days over a hundred years ago, prior to contact, where ICBMs almost completely supplanted bombers.
These days a good hyperdrive on a strike craft could get it to a target as fast as a hyperspace capable missile. Still what the Rocket forces lacked in precision or adaptability, they made up for in shear numbers. Michael read that there had been somewhere north of 300,000 active warheads in the Rocket Forces last fiscal year with those ranging from “Mini” one Megaton MIRVs to Multi-Gigaton continent or planetary shield busters.
With Earth being the “new kid” on the galactic block, it was helpful to be able to glass half of that, or rather a bit more than .1% of it, if the last SIOP effectiveness report was to be believed.
“Anyways, let’s drown our sorrows, as is tradition the first round is on me.” He said to cheers, setting the microphone down.
Rachael had already gotten the trophy, a stylized Zeus with a lightning bolt clutched in his right hand and they exited the stage.
General Briggs got back onto the podium and said, “It’s been an excellent Competition this year, enjoy the rest of your leave.”
Michael and Rachael stumbled into their room, hurriedly undressing each other. Spending two days trapped in a simulator pod and then trying to suppress the emotions in the force had built up some… tension and that hadn’t been relieved by their post-mission shower together.
When most people imagine sex between two force users they usually imagine the mechanics you can get up to with the powers but truth be told it’s far simpler than that. When you can feel the emotions of your partner and feel the pleasure they feel, it completely changes the dynamic of the act. Pleasure builds on itself in a feedback loop with emotions becoming uncoiled and released.
As time passed and the force bond between a couple strengthened it became even more transcendent, with two beings almost literally becoming one in the moment. It was impossible to properly describe the depth of passion, pleasure, and love felt.
Rachael playfully stroked Michael’s hair as they lay in their bed.
“I felt you freeze up for a moment before the run.” Michael mumbled, half asleep as he rested his chin on top of his wife’s head.
Rachael hummed sadly.
“Is it about Nal Hutta?” He asked.
She made an imperceptible nod but he felt her emotions roll over him.
“Do you want to see the shrink again?” he asked.
Rachael was silent but Michael was still feeling the turmoil that was in her. He brushed her cheeks, noting their dampness and not being surprised.
Slowly Rachael said, “I-I still want to fly, they’ll ground me-us again.”
“Hmmm, maybe, for a time, but we’re too valuable. Even still teaching might be a nice change of pace. We can be training new Arrowhead crews within the month if I make the right calls. We’ll be able to fly but what I care about is how you are doing. If you bottle it up too much you’re going to snap and then we’ll be in deep sh*t. Nal Hutta f*cked me up for a while and I’m not half the force user you are.” He said, drawing her closer. Her smooth olive skin blended with his tanned complexion.
She laughed sadly, crying a little more. Michael could feel her reliving the memory, the death, the pain of millions.
He nuzzled closer to her ear and whispered, “Silver Chrysanthemum.”
She relaxed for a second and then she was in a deep, dreamless sleep.
He allowed his sadness to come out then and he began to silently weep. It had been years since she last had dreams of Nal Hutta and Nar Shaddar, of what they’d done. He remembered it of course but the neural feedback from the force after the strike had been almost too much for him to handle. It had broken Rachael, leaving her in a catatonic state.
When she’d awaken she had constant visions and terrors about the planet. She’d barely been able to stomach food for a month, spending stints in the hospital with an IV and force powers keeping her alive.
He crushed a traitorous thought that this was all punishment for them being responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions. They’d run the gauntlet and delivered over two-hundred multi-megaton warheads from their slaved drones. Combined with targeting critical infrastructure on Nar Shaddaa that led to a collapse of food, water, and power, their final body count likely was well into the billions.
But they had done their jobs. The Hutts fell in on themselves with the decapitation of their leadership and collapse of their economy. An empire that lasted tens of thousands of years had been ended in a month by an upstart only a little more than half a century into their galactic journey.
That mission had shaped future warplans. SAC moved away from the massive, “kill everything”, retaliation that characterized earlier plans to a more measured, proportional attack methodology. Additionally doctrine shifted to keeping spacecraft quarantined from the outside force when the strike was occurring. The greater situational awareness afforded by being connected to the universe at large was offset by the feedback wave that he and his wife had been the unwitting guinea pigs for.
Still, the doctrine of massive retaliation had part of its desired effect. It scared everyone else sh*tless. No major galactic player had ever waged a war in recent memory that had run up more than a few tens of thousands of dead and the Terran Union had just killed Billions in a campaign of shock and awe across Hutt Space all because of the seizure of a couple of colonies and the sale of their occupants into slavery. The only exception was the Yam’rii crisis and that was mainly because the Kalee had come upon a few thermonuclear weapons of mysterious origin.
Strangely after Terran intervention in the settlement, joint training exercises were conducted between them and the Kalee with the Terrans bypassing sanctions on food imports. That move had paid dividends as in the fallout from “Eridani War”, named after Epsilon Eridani where the Terran colonies of Yellowstone and Reynolds were located and sacked, Earth and her colonies had been cut off from imports of certain consumer goods.
In the end not all were of the same mind and the uselessness of the Republic was shown when some of the more militant systems re-opened trade. Earth had become flush with credits as licensing for media had earned a killing and any attempt to cut off that revenue from the IGBC had been met with the threat to conduct “Sudden Urban Renovation” on planets such as Scipio. If Earth couldn’t be loved then maybe she could be feared a little.
They could always do a bit of both and a few credits passed to a talk-show host here and there certainly went a long ways to change the public attitude of the war from being a nuclear holocaust executed against the Hutts to someone finally standing up to slavery. In a similar vein paying for high quality machine tools and technology went a ways in making planets speak with their newfound credits.
In the months and years following their collapse neighboring groups had picked away at the carcass of the dying Hutt Empire. Even the pacifist Naboo had taken Tatooine and a couple neighboring worlds under their nominal “peacekeeping” efforts. Those “peacekeeping” efforts were still in effect during the Naboo Crisis last year.
That Crisis was quite literally a Royal f*ckup. Sith re-emerging, a slow space-dominance campaign, and of course a few ancient, if convenient, surface-to-space SM-3 Block 7 missiles falling into the hands of Naboo Resistance groups, along with enough slug-throwers and AT weapons to outfit a rather large army, courtesy of some funny men in black suits. That of course didn’t mention the “little green men” and the AWOL Terran pilots and crews that had “stolen” their ships to take part in the final orbital campaign.
Having gone from the reserves to such an AWOL position to help the insertion of the Naboo Queen to the planet’s surface hadn’t been Michael’s ideal way of restarting a career on indefinite leave of absence, but it had worked out in the end. He, of course, couldn’t officially paint those Lucerhulks on the side of his Arrowhead but everyone who mattered knew about it anyway so his pride could be sated.
He shifted again in bed, looking at his wife. That had been one of the only occasions he flew without her and the lack of familiarity nearly killed him. She really shouldn’t be back here. His f*ckup had dragged her back and now she was seeing Nal Hutta again.
Michael brushed a lock of hair away from her face. She was beautiful and would remain so for potentially centuries to come, yet he felt urgency as if he wasn’t careful it would slip away. He leaned over and whispered, “I love you. Now and always.”
