She forced a cough, enough to clear her throat, and then spoke into the comm channel suspended directly above her lips. “Dance1 to Dance2. What's your status?”
“Dance1, our systems are nominal. Holding course at minus 18 minutes to Caribbean flight grid.”
“Copy that, Dance2.”
It was a meaningless exchange, and Janise knew it. Nonetheless, she had just killed about 13 seconds.
She looked again at the flight pattern, and she recognized that right now they were probably as close to the AFD as they would get. At that instant, they were separated from Atlanta by 350 kilometers. She mused over a diversionary course correction, one that would take them to the heart of the federated district in 7 minutes.
Strike hard, strike fast, she thought. Open all the weapons ports and let the bastards have it! Turn Dome into a heap of ash!
It was a headline-grabbing stunt for certain, the kind of event that would not soon be forgotten. But in the end, she knew, it also wouldn't amount to a hill of difference. They'd rebuild Dome within a few months, send Front Guard's special services units throughout the PAC wiping anyone with the word dissident upon him right off the face of the planet, and that would be that.
Moreover, by destroying Dome, she'd likely be taking Bryan Drenette down with it. There was a time when the thought of that concept would not have bothered her, but at this moment, the pain was so strong that the visions of wiping out the AFD were tossed from her mind's eye.
She spent the better part of the past three hours trying her damndest to block the image of that man from her mind. The issue of Bryan Drenette's place in her life, the feelings she held for him, the past they shared – all of it was shuttered the moment she walked away from him in TriCentennial Park.
Or at the very least, it should have been.
She cursed herself for allowing her mind to take a bloodthirsty little detour to the AFD. She tossed back the shroud from the emotions and the memories she tried to bury. Needed to bury.
Regarding the Chief of Domestic Security, one issue resolved itself long ago: Janise never loved the man. Love for a man who signed the death warrants of so many citizens railroaded through the overtrial style of justice was impossible. She knew it from the first day, and she understood all along that if she ever crossed that line, she would abandon the principles that brought her to the AFD in the first place.
Despite a lack of love – and a firm belief that Bryan was deeply passionate about her and would do her bidding at any cost – Janise brought every manner of physical enticement to their relationship. That they both had a common goal of undermining the PAC was not sufficient. She had to appeal to every exotic, erotic and sensual intuition a man might possess. She even shamed herself in an effort to lure him into a bond founded upon mutual treason.
Janise remembered how, after she first came to the AFD and secured a job as a designer for a martial arts Subgroup provider, she began several weeks of monitoring Drenette's off-hours routine. It was a difficult process since Bryan was equipped with a barrier scan.
She resorted to good old-fashioned early 20th-century style detective work: She hid around corners, wore disguises, and asked a few hundred very discreet questions. It was not until she discovered his penchant for the adventure clubs that Janise found a way to insinuate herself.
It was not an experience she looked back upon with any degree of fondness, her embarrassment lessened only by the knowledge of what she and Second Sunrise ultimately gained from her initiative.
He’s gone, Janise recited her. He’s gone, and we’re done.
40
N
ot done, however, was Bryan Drenette's work. And he was ready to reactivate his SS link and enter a vital search protocol – with nanite hunters clearing his way past security blocks and those irritating genetic chasers – when a twang he heard thousands of times interrupted his concentration.
With Drenette's permission, his aide entered, staring with suspicion through the shadows of a dimly lit office.
“Good evening, sir,” the man said. “You're here quite late tonight.”
“The hour got past me as I was playing catch-up and, well ... I'm comfortable here. Might bunk for the night. Wouldn't be the first time.”
“I could order some dinner for you.”
“No thank you. Good night.”
Bryan wondered what annoying questions must be racing through his aide's mind, and he could not blame the man for suspicions that something was out of sync. Drinking vodka before lunch and sitting by himself in the dark.
Bryan thought about pouring himself another vodka, then said to no one: “Maybe he'll just chalk it up to trouble in my love life. He wouldn't be totally wrong.”
His tapped his Fountain, then said, “Time?”
Immediately the amp's hologram displayed a digital presentation of the time for each of the PAC's five corporate standard zones. He thought for a moment, calculated Janise's flight time to Second Sunrise, and the mission specs beyond that. His final role in this conspiracy had to be completed within 20 minutes, or the mission would be doomed.
And it would have been so simple to back out right now.
I can save her, he told himself repeatedly. The mission will fail but she'll be alive. Isn't that what should really matter?
All he had to do was nothing. The Caribbean flight grid would remain intact, the passing Sprints would be detected, and they would have to make a hasty retreat before they could be blasted into the sea like so much driftwood.
And she'll never forgive me! She'll never come back to the AFD, and she'll sooner kill me than make love to me again.
Bryan cursed himself for even beginning to tread this ground. They both knew any real success at undermining the PAC would mean the dissolution of what Janise often referred to as their “mutual necessity.” He was not her boyfriend; he was not her lover; he was not even her friend. She referred to them as “accomplices.”
Hmmph! Accomplices who made passionate love dozens of times. Accomplices who never had arguments. Accomplices who proclaimed to share a heartfelt devotion to a common cause.
Love was not a consideration in the beginning. Janise took six weeks to reveal her objectives to the security chief. She did so in mid-sex, a lazgun's barrel resting against his neck – just in case she was wrong about the man.
That night forced Bryan to take a vital step backward, reexamine what he thought he entered into, but ultimately agreed to be Janise's “accomplice” under the cover of a relationship between two upstanding young professionals in the AFD. No emotional attachment, he warned himself at the time. This is about larger issues. We're going after what I've wanted most of my life. We're going to bring down the PAC. And then the cover will end.
Bryan didn’t understand how he became so weak, to allow a dynamic as unstable as love to procure his senses. Love meant indulgence; love meant happiness; love meant embarrassment.
His most profound embarrassment rose from the shadows and tortured him.
…
…
“Where did you find this brand of ice cream?” She asked him. “I've been craving this stuff for years. I even checked for it on the WorldMarket once.”
She savored this variation on raspberry-mango twirl, shutting her eyes with each taste. Ducks swam alongside as their punt moved lazily through the central canal of TriCentennial Park.
“I have the right kind of influence,” Bryan told Janise, and he closed up the now-empty picnic basket that included rolled chicken and steamed vegetables. “But then, you've always known that.”
He was sweating on this otherwise breezy, cool spring day.
After moments of silence, after passing beds of irises in bloom along the water's edge and after experiencing the powerful aromatic rush from a bramble of confederate jasmine hanging from a pedestrian bridge, Bryan reached into a pants pocket.
“You must know by now there's no business here today,�
� he said softly. “I don't have information for you. But there are some things that ... um, a thing I need to tell you.”
Janise was mystified only for a split second, and as his hand came out of the pocket and clearly contained a ring case, she put down the ice cream bowl and held her hand against the picnic basket.
Bryan saw coldness at first, and then she smiled.
“My father was a good man,” she said firmly. “I haven't told you much about him. It's difficult, sometimes. But his words ... I've always lived by them. They steer me through each day. He told me that in life, each of us must commit our soul to the fulfillment of that which is just. There is no greater purpose that a single man or woman can make in the incredibly short time we have on this world. When I finally made my commitment, I knew I was forsaking all others.
“I can have no partner in that quest. Only accomplices.”
…
…
Bryan replayed that awkward moment thousands of times in the two years since he attempted to proclaim his love and propose marriage.
Her words, although far more subtle than what she could have offered, stung him deeply.
And yet, 721 days later, as he sat in darkness inside the most feared building in the Pan American Community, as he reengaged his link to the MassGrid and began his dangerous journey toward the Caribbean flight grid, Bryan Gibson Drenette knew he was more deeply in love with this woman than ever before.
His stomach growled, but the only hunger he felt was the desperate need to wrap her body against his just one more time.
The thought of opening the flight grid frightened him.
He strongly encouraged himself to abort this mission.
41
A
t that same instant, Janise let out a long sigh. They crossed the peninsula of Florida.
She knew that although their chances of success were slim to begin with, they were without hope of any kind if Bryan did not succeed in punching breaks through the Caribbean flight grid at the coordinates they established months earlier. Without those breaks, their Quinnian booster trail would be detected, and an alarm would be sent through the PAC's air defense network signaling unauthorized penetration. The trail would be easy to track from that point, and PAC Sprints would be on top of them long before Barbados would be threatened.
The flight grid was one of the things she despised most about the PAC's style of government. Although the protectorates were exempt from many of the trade laws of the PAC right from Day One, the corporate government ensured that it would maintain strict control over inter-island commerce – and lock other ECs out of the spoils – by enveloping the region inside the flight grid. All sea and air transportation – commercial, private, military – required full clearance in advance for movement into or out of the Caribbean. It was a contentious issue in the early days of the ECs, especially where the South American Community was concerned, and rumors swirled for years that the Americas would go to war over the region. Only the SAC's brutal and quick-strike takeover of Antarctica from the international consortium that allotted mining and harvesting rights seemed to balance the power.
“Mickelsby, prepare a lock on grid entry coordinates and begin initial descent to 9,000 meters,” she ordered.
“Locked in,” the navigator responded. “Dance1 to Dance2, prepare descent path and follow our lead through the interface.”
“Dance1, we copy that.”
Janise nudged her head to the right, looked over her shoulder. The soldier closest to her was Jeffrey Lange, one of the few on this mission who was not a Front Guarder by trade but whose enthusiasm and willingness to go into it knowing the ramifications made him an easy learner. She could not tell whether this man, who turned 24 two weeks ago, was frightened. He carried neither the steeled eyes of determination nor the pale cheeks of terror. And he did not acknowledge his captain, keeping his concentration squarely on the SVF above him.
She could feel the Sprint begin its drop in altitude, and she almost broke the silence with laughter as she realized that they were entering that legendary but wholly ludicrous region of the sea known as the Bermuda Triangle.
For Janise, this was funny in a very personal sense. Her father wrote a tongue-in-cheek novel about the Triangle, a story in which the area was actually the end of a wormhole used by purely decadent aliens from another galaxy. They would scoop up humans, transport them back through the wormhole and use them in bizarre, even kinky experiments involving crossbreeding with dogs. He wrote the book before Janise was born and shortly after her father had enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps. She read it two dozen times over the years, and she always found the satire extremely biting, the slapstick downright hysterical.
A few pages of it right now would have been comforting.
But as she tried to remember some of the most memorable passages, Janise discovered that her mind was blocking it.
Instead, she found herself thinking more of her father, Lt. Col. Kelly Albright, who in the final years of ASTROcom was assigned to head the Marine attachment on the space station Alexi Romanov. During that tumultuous era, Janise was a child, and she remembered how this man who was her hero among heroes towered over everyone. He cut an imposing path at 7-foot-4 and 330 pounds; a man who, it was rumored, carried not the first ounce of fat on his masterfully chiseled physique. A man who needed a split second to make a decision, who relayed orders to his troops with the kind of no-compromise bottom line that whatever he wanted, he got.
And a man who, when alone with his wife and daughter, was little more than a child having the most wonderful time of his life.
He was a man who Janise vowed to emulate in every way, rising through the ranks of the Marine Corps to become the latest in a line of spectacular warriors.
And even though the Marine Corps, along with the other branches, was assimilated into the Front Guard shortly before the PAC was inaugurated, Janise still managed to keep that vow intact. She wore a different kind of uniform, but she played with more advanced weaponry and showed her mettle in a firefight. She carried forth the Albright tag well after her father was buried.
And now, as she fought unsuccessfully to remember passages from a book written by this supremely gentle man, Janise instead recollected a moment out of her childhood – a moment just days before the family was transferred back to Earth and the Alexi Romanov was shut down, the denouement of the colonial era.
…
…
“I'm sorry, Jainey, but we couldn't get French apple this time,” her father said as he presented her birthday pie. “I know it's your favorite, but the reserves are low. All I could scare up was cherry.”
She giggled. “Oh, dad, don't worry about it. I'm 12 years old. It's time for a change anyway. Haven't I had French apple every year since, what, I was about 2?”
“May be, may be! But first order of business when we get back to Columbus Base – it’s French apple a la mode!”
“Mom keeps saying you're going to plump me up like a Thanksgiving turkey before long.”
He sat down next to her and dropped one of his enormous arms across her shoulders. “Your mother knows that I couldn't pull that off, even if for some damn foolish reason I wanted to. The way you spend four hours a day working out on the gyron, you could process a couple of these pies every day and I think you'd burn every gram of fat. You deserve a treat, Jainey.”
He looked down into her wishful brown eyes, and a pink glow fell upon his cheeks. “You're the most wonderfully energetic, vivacious young woman I've ever known. Every sweet reward you ever get in this life will be much deserved.”
She lifted a knife and began to cut a slice. Steam rose from the deep red filling.
She wished her mother could have been with them, but her job on Earth called her back weeks earlier, and Janise insisted on staying with her father until his assignment was ended.
“Dad, are you worried about what's next? I mean, I've been talking to lots
of the other kids, and well, there's been rumors going around. Lots of talk that the unit might be drummed out when we get back. They say you've been causing some problems about closing down the station and bringing the last colonists home. Are we going to be OK?”
For a second, he lost his reassuring smile. But only for a second.
“Jainey, if I were a man who was concerned about what other people might do to me, I never would have fought the shutdown of this station. I simply followed my convictions,” he said, and placed a fist over his heart. “I looked within, I came to terms with what I believed to be just, and I followed the path wherever it led. Sometimes a man must compromise on the trivial issues of life, the day-to-day chores that drive many of us into the ground.
“But I want you to know that Kelly Albright, your father, would never betray his convictions about those things that matter. A few years ago, I couldn't have cared less about the colonial program. But I saw, I learned, and I understood. The issues here are too important, and compromise is not acceptable. Am I worried? No. You and I and your mother will do very nicely back home. We'll live, and we'll love each other. Like I said, the important issues have no compromise. Until the day you are a very old woman, always embrace your convictions, Jainey, and you'll be at peace.”
…
…
The memory ripped her apart deep inside. It was anger all over again. It was fear. It was regret. It was sadness.
But these feelings were not so much for love of her father or of what she was about to do. They were for the end result of following her father's advice: Staying true to her convictions, taking the path wherever it led.
To follow into battle a derelict, grizzled old soldier named Brenn Fuller, and to commit atrocities in the name of the Pan American Community, to which she vowed unflinching loyalty.
She snapped out of her fog as Mickelsby made an announcement.
“Leveling out at 9,000 meters, locking on forward trackers and uplifting viop visual on flight grid. Two minutes to entry.”
Unknown Page 20
