Cowboy Fourteen
Kathleen (Katy) Reynolds
(Mischief, Cat)
By Jack
Katy flew off my wing during The War. Saved my bacon more times than I can remember. Though whenever you’ve got a few hours I’m sure she could give you a good rundown. Real detail oriented girl. I owe her my life in every way that matters. She was a pilot when it all started you know. Had been for a real long time. I sometimes used to tweak her about being an old lady. She’d tell me to stop calling her a lady. I miss flying with her.
You know Katy was a half-century veteran of the United States Space Force when The War started? She’d actually flown Blackhawks when they were frontline fighters. She had some serious experience. I should have been assigned to her wing, not the other way around. Aneerin was adamant though. All new Cowboys had to learn the ropes from original Cowboys, no matter how much experience they had. We were the first American unit under Peloran command, so we did what he said. But I learned a lot more about ropes from Katy than I ever taught her.
Mischief is fun. Kathleen Reynolds according to her dossier. In a lot of ways we get along like a house on fire. She joined us after the first Battles of Alpha Centauri, and was the first Cowboy to fly a Hellcat. We got her upgraded to an Avenger in time, but it took a while. The Russians complicated things. She flew on my wing for a long time, and even after she got her own command, she remained close. We saved each other’s lives more times than I can count.
Kathleen Reynolds is an old lady. Or so I like to tell her. She grew up in Iowa, on some family farm near Dubuque. She spent her youth dragging boys into cornfields or barns to keep her daddy and brothers from seeing them, and from what she tells me never thought about leaving home. She loved it. Then the Peloran made Contact and her world changed. She was one of the first to take the Peloran Treatments, and got the real shiny side effects. Like I said, she’s an old lady. Not that she acts like it, but I enjoy teasing her on the subject. And she happily rubs it right back in my face. Katy’s got one very important rule, you see. Always give better than you get. That’s why we named her Mischief when we first met her.
Me and Katy fought together before she joined the Cowboys, you know. She was part of the Space Force detachment defending Fort Wichita, while I was one of the Marines that came out of hyperspace and helped save her shapely rear end. I like to remind her of that regularly, and she likes to question my intelligence regularly. Purely coincidental, I’m sure. She became the first Space Force pilot to join the Cowboys, and she had more experience than any of us. Best of all, she could hide a teaching moment behind a wicked sense of humor and a deprecating air that never once questioned the crazy politics that left inexperienced pilots like us in command of a veteran like her. She was pretty much the perfect wingman. She’s saved my life more times than I count, though she’s always quick to suggest that I could get closer if I took my boots off. Yeah. I love her, too.
Kathleen Reynolds was a blonde bombshell of a cheerleader from an Iowa farm town when she was young. She had flower and butterfly tattoos all over her body, and the round curves of a girl just beginning to mature into a woman. She was still in high school, you see. Maybe first year of college. Her stories from back then are a little fluid on time frames, probably to protect the guilty. She was living life to the fullest, and proving to everyone that blondes really did have more fun. She traveled all over Earth and beyond, from Mercury to Pluto. She was on a mission to see and do everything she could. She loves to tell the stories of her wild youth to everyone. But she told me the why. She had a condition that Earth’s most advanced medicines had no cure for. She was literally living like she was dying, because she knew tomorrow would never come and she wanted to leave no regrets behind when the time came.
Kathleen Reynolds grew up in a world where people still questioned whether or not there was alien life out there. She grew up in a world where she was dying of a condition no medicine could cure. Then the Peloran made Contact and changed everything. They brought new medicines with them, and Katy jumped at the chance to see if they would work. She was one of the first to volunteer for the full round of Peloran Treatments, and she got the very best results from them. Not only did they cure the condition that was going to kill her soon, but they also cured ALL of conditions that would ever have killed her in time. She stopped aging. Her body froze in that middle stage between girl and woman, where the roundness of youth mixes with the curves of age. She was going to remain twenty, or maybe eighteen, for the rest of her life. Oh, did she ever take advantage of that.
The Peloran saved Kathleen Reynolds’ life with their advanced medical treatments, and Katy was suitably happy with the change in her future fortunes. She graduated from school, whether it is high school or college tends to shift depending on which story she’s telling at the moment, and then cast herself out into the worlds. All of them. She spent the next five decades of a life she never expected to have traveling everywhere she could. Camelot. New New York. Disney Planet. You name it, she probably went there. She wanted to do and see everything there was to do and see, and she gave it a real go. She has said more than once that she would have been happy to keep partying like that for the rest of her very long life. But sometimes we change life, and sometimes life changes us. She is most certainly an example of that.
Kathleen Reynolds saw a lot of things while she was touring all over the worlds. Yes, she saw a lot of parties, but she also saw less enjoyable things out there. What exactly she saw and where she saw it tends to change based on which story she is telling, but she got an eyeful of some of the colonial shenanigans going on out on the rim of human expansion. No major government admits the scope of the competition that waged for the outer colonies back then. They certainly never call it a war, but Katy says it was a war. They conducted it out beyond the core colonies where most people never saw or heard of it, but Katy traveled far enough from Earth in her quest to see everything in living color. And that changed her world. It changed her. It changed what she needed to do with the life the Peloran gave her.
Kathleen Reynolds came home from her five-decade party celebrating the life the Peloran gave her and volunteered to serve in the United States Space Force. Many people think the USSF has more in common with the Space Guard than other “real” military services like the Navy or the Marines, but they miss how many deployments the Space Force actually goes on. They are actually one of the first defenses usually deployed to protect a new colony, since their fighters take far fewer resources to support than expensive starships. Katy found herself on a new tour of the outer worlds, and she racked up some impressive experience protecting people from the kind of things she saw on her previous tour. Most of it is still classified, to the point I can’t even write it in my own diary without breaking the law, but she did good out there. A lot of real good that helped real people and changed worlds for the better.
Kathleen Reynolds started flying back when the Blackhawk was still a frontline starfighter, and gained promotion after promotion over time until the brass gave her the Spittin’ Kittens. They were a Hellcat squadron often sent out to protect high-value colonies, and she found her niche. The brass left her in command of that squadron for decades, shuffling them from planet to planet as the needs of the service commanded. That wasn’t the career death sentence it was before Contact by the way. The increased lifespans filtering through the military and other parts of society back then meant that commanders weren’t aging out and retiring anymore. The only way to get a command was to build something new, or inherit the spot of a dead man or someone who fraked up badly enough to get themselves cashiered. That made command positions rather more stable than they had been, and Katy proved that she could do stable if she meant to.
I do not know where Kathleen Reynolds and her Spittin’ Kittens were when The War came upon us all. The Space Force may be a joke, but their lawyers will chase you to the ends of the worlds if you violate their security regulations. Best lawyers in the free worlds. No joke. So I absolutely do not know where she was. And anyone who says I am in possession of documents that revealed her location at the time is absolutely wrong. That said, I have heard she was engaging in aggressive negotiations with the Chinese in the outer colonies when the Shang were coming to attack Earth. You must understand that this was a de-escalation mission, not a fight, definitely not a war, and nobody won, but the Chinese left. Katy’s squadron was called back to Earth for rest and relaxation for a successful mission. That is why they were in Earthspace when the Shang attacked us.
Kathleen Reynolds and her Spittin’ Kittens were resting and relaxing at the beach when the Shang attacked us. They had to weather the fall of Yosemite Station like everybody else in America, though less debris hit their spacebase than western spacebases. The local automated defenses were able to burn most of the debris up before landfall, reducing property damage to a minimum, and Katy and her people got to their fighters and launched with only minor difficulties. They actually beat some of the ready fighter squadrons into the air, though they were not exactly in their regulation uniforms at the time. A local news crew recorded their scramble from the beach to the fighters, though the segment that made air required some strategic placement of black bars. It was one of many videos later spliced together by the military showing our brave men and women going to war. They called it a moral boosting video. They were not wrong.
Kathleen Reynolds was the only Ageless member of the Spittin’ Kittens during her tenure in command of the unit. She spent decades teasing everything she could out of her limited precognition to the point that she could feel danger coming hours ahead of time. The advantage that gave her squadron on their long deployments in the outer colonies cannot be overestimated. As a reward for constantly outperforming their sister squadrons, they received more than their fair share of the hardest missions. And yet Katy’s influence held their casualty rates down to one of the lowest records in the service. That is why the military chose to test the newest, best, and still very experimental supersoldier treatments on them when The War came upon us all.
The American military tested their newest supersoldier serum on the Spittin’ Kittens after The War began. Kathleen Reynolds led them out on numerous combat operations over the next few months, and they soon proved that they could fight nearly as good as her. Their long campaign culminated in the tumultuous Battle of Fort Wichita, when she personally shot down six Shang fighters and organized one of the many flanking actions that eventually forced the Shang to retreat before they could destroy the orbital fort. That earned the Kittens a complete set of priority tech upgrades from the Peloran fleet, which Katy quickly took advantage of. She turned the Kittens into even more of a nuisance to both the Shang and the Chinese fleets from Earth to Alpha Centauri in the months that followed.
I met Kathleen Reynolds at Alpha Centauri, after we Cowboys got approval to poach from other units to make good our combat losses. She volunteered to join us, for reasons she did not share at the time, and proceeded to pass every test we gave her. Including showing me a thing or two about starfighter combat. It was one of the most enjoyable fighter duels I’ve ever engaged in. She showed me moves I didn’t know existed, and I still maintain I could have beaten her, but Charles called it after an hour of me chasing her score. She was fun to spar with, both with weapons and words, and it absolutely did not feel like an hour had gone by. I wanted her on my team so bad after that, and I guess she felt the same about me.
The Marines would have been happy to shift Kathleen Reynolds over to us at her full rank so she could take over, but the President wanted us as we were, so she asked Katy to take a courtesy demotion to the rank of captain. Katy agreed, because when the President asks you for a favor, you do that thing she wants and get a card you can turn in in the future. Katy then proceeded to give us five decades worth of tips and training to help us bone up on starfighter tactics. It was veterans like Katy who honed us into the superior combat unit that everybody recognizes as the Cowboys. We were good before we got her, you understand. She and the others just made us far greater, and I was happy to fly with her on my wing. I used to say we were lucky to have gotten her, but I realized later that luck had nothing to do with it in time. Katy picked us for her own reasons. She kept those reasons to herself for a long time.
Girls are complicated. I know that, but Kathleen Reynolds took complications to a whole extra level. There was always the bouncing cheerleader in her. And there was the hard-bitten starfighter pilot and squadron commander as well. But there was something else she buried real deep and it was the real reason she joined us at Alpha Centauri. She didn’t tell me for years, but when she did it brought so much of her into sense. She had a dark secret, you see, one that had haunted her childhood until she buried it deep in a closet for no one to see. Looking back on it, it explains why we got along together so well, right from the start. I guess she felt safe with me. She thought I would accept her for who she really was. I guess I did, and when she told me, I found out why. We were interested in the same things, you see, even if our reasons were different.
Kathleen Reynolds hid a dark secret her entire high school life. She wanted to be a cool kid, so she buried it down deep so no one could see it. But I’ve seen the pictures, and they are amazing. She actually wore glasses as a kid. Honest-to-God reading glasses. Her eyes didn’t accept the corrective treatments back then. And she used them to read actual paperbound books. Here’s the kicker. They weren’t romances. She thought those were stupid. What she loved to read were tales of daring and adventure in the outer reaches of space. With big A Aliens. She even had an “I Want To Believe” t-shirt. No joke. I’ve seen the picture. Glasses. Book. And t-shirt. She was a real science fiction geek, in an age where most people had stopped believing we were ever going to find anyone out there. She believed there was someone out there and she wanted to meet them.
We Cowboys were working with the aliens when Kathleen Reynolds joined the Cowboys. I was happy to work with them because they were helping us take the fight to our enemies. Katy wanted to work with them because she had always wanted to meet them. She had spent most of her adult life getting into places where she could meet them. All those parties? The decades of time in the Space Force on the outer reaches of human space? She wanted to meet aliens. And when given the chance, she jumped at the opportunity to join a fighter squadron that was actively working with them. There are so many layers to that girl. I absolutely love her. And I have never regretted fighting at her side. Well. Almost never. I mean... there’s been some crazy times. And Katy sure does love her some good crazy times. But I guess I do too.
Kathleen Reynolds fought under me throughout The War. I walked with her on more planets than I count with my boots on, and we brought law and justice to millions of people. Maybe billions. We fought in space, we fought in the skies, we fought on the ground, and we fought the law when the law was wrong. And let me tell you, those Chinese had a lot of wrong laws they enforced on the Hyades colonists. Katy was right there with me as we bulldozed those laws, and the unspoken laws behind them. She brought books to children, and constitutions to adults. She fought the battle of ideas and brought light to people that didn’t even realize there was a light out there. And she braved the people who wanted her burned at the stake for bringing those forbidden ideas to their worlds. She was fearless, and she never stopped.
I fought with Kathleen Reynolds all the way to War’s End. And yes, that does include the Hyades Heart. She was there at the end of it all, when we found out what we had fought the better part of two decades for. She was at my side that day, just as she had been at so many others before. And so many after as well. I swear she has a nose for trouble, and she jumps in with both feet when it comes. Again and again and again, if you compiled a list of all the greatest hits of the Hyades Campaign, you would find her name there again and again and again. And the picture next to her name would have the smile of the head cheerleader who kissed the quarterback on prom night. Fearless. Brassy. Victorious. Flippant. Sexy. Crazy. She was all that and a box of chocolates.
Lots of people have publicly speculated about the nature of my and Kathleen Reynolds’ relationship during The War. And later as well. They are not veiled at all. Now part of it I understand. There’s the personality I project, and the one she inhabits like a second skin, and we really do get along like a house on fire. And fighting a War together tends to break down a lot of barriers. There’s no such thing as a private bedroom when you’re out fighting on some God-forsaken rock. You shut your eyes wherever you find a flat piece of ground or a good tree, and you wake up a few hours later. Sometimes someone’s laying up against you for warmth, or for shelter, or whatever. Yeah. We slept together. A lot. But she was the perfect wingman when I faced my deepest fears and told Julie and Alex what they meant to me. She bled to save them that day. She loves those girls and would never do anything to hurt them. I guess that’s another reason I love her.
I am Kathleen Reynolds’ number one fan. I couldn’t tell you how many times we’ve gotten together since War’s End. She has a nose for trouble, and we’ve hit it more times than I can count with a whole box of crayons. She’s a perfect battle buddy, and I trust her at my back any time the bullets fly. We’ve gotten into situations way too tight for our own good again and again and again. I’ve patched up her sucking chest wounds, and she’s held my leg in place while it healed. We’ve held each other together when everything else was falling apart. And sometimes we didn’t make it out the other side. We have died together, and we will again with smiles on our faces. I know because I’ve seen the footage. I would happily live or die with her, and that has taken us through situations nobody should expect to survive. Even people like us.
Kathleen Reynolds is not afraid to die in the pursuit of justice. She has proven that again and again on worlds all across human space. She will never give up. She will never surrender. She might be beaten, but she will always come back. She is inevitable. If I had to point to one person who exemplifies what a Cowboy is, who all of us should look to for an example, it would be her. Because she will never stop, whatever the cost. She has hung her hat all over human space, and she has brought justice to those who needed it. She has protected those who needed it. And she has given her life when that is what it took to honor her oath. Katy is a Cowboy. Katy is the best of us. Never forget that.