by Ian Douglas
“That’s not—”
“Would he have hit you if anyone was there?”
She struggled with the thought for a moment. “Well…no.”
“Then he can control himself. Don’t you see? He hits you because he can, because he knows he can get away with it, and it’s a way of exercising power. And it’s not just the hitting. Words can hurt as much as fists sometimes, you know? What the downloads I’ve been looking at call emotional abuse. And the way he spies on us, tries to go through our private cyberfiles…” John shook his head, feeling desperate. “That’s why I’ve got to leave, now. I just can’t take it any longer. If I don’t leave now—”
“I know, son. I want you to go.”
“But I don’t want to abandon you.”
“You’re not. I told you to go, didn’t I?” She managed a smile. “Don’t worry about me. I’ve been thinking…I’ve been thinking about my sister in San Diego, maybe going up and seeing her.”
“If you do, Mom, don’t come back. Please?”
“We’ll see. As for you…you’ll be careful?”
“As careful as they’ll let me be.”
“It’s just that…Wouldn’t the Navy be…well…cleaner?”
He laughed. “No muddy foxholes on a high guard cruiser, that’s for sure. But, no. I’ve wanted to go with the Corps ever since I read Ocher Sands.” He’d liked the downloaded drama so much that he’d bought the hardcopy book as well. He’d been enticed by the fact that it was about his great-grandfather, “Sands of Mars Garroway,” and his grandmother, Caitlin. But he’d been permanently hooked by the tales of Marine men and women serving off-world, on the moon, Mars, and the Jovian satellites.
“I hear it’s awfully hard. The training, I mean.”
He reached down, picked up a flat stone the size of the palm of his hand, and sent it skipping out across the waves three…four…a fifth skip before it sank. “Yeah. And I’ll tell you the truth, Mom. I don’t know if I can cut it. But I know I have to try.”
“I imagine with that kind of attitude, you’ll make it. I’m proud of you, Johnny.”
“Thanks, Mom. Are you…you’re sure you’ll be all right?”
“I’ll be fine. Will you be okay?”
“Sure! Plenty of fresh air and exercise? Plenty to eat? And plenty of friendly, helpful drill instructors to remind me of Dad in his more emotional moments, just so I don’t get homesick.” He didn’t add that Lynnley would be there too. His mom knew he and Lynnley had been seeing each other, but he didn’t think she would understand their pact. She might think he was joining the Marines just because Lynn was joining, and that wasn’t the way things were at all.
“One question, son.”
“Shoot.”
“Do you still want to be assigned to space duty?”
“Well…sure. I’ll take SMF if it’s offered. That’s where the real excitement’s at, you know.”
She made a face. “Yes. I know. But you might be gone…a long time.”
“Probably. A couple of years, maybe, for a hitch on Mars. That’s not so bad.” He hadn’t told her that he’d already dreamsheeted for Space Marine Force duty with the recruiter. Not that he was all that likely to land a space billet, but he wanted the chance, and bringing that bit of news into the conversation would…complicate things.
“Let’s just wait and see what happens, okay?” he told her.
She smiled. “Okay.”
They turned around and began strolling back up the beach toward the steps leading up the cliffs to the house.
IP Packet Osiris
En route, Mars to Earth
1847 hours Zulu
Dr. Traci Hanson was still furious, two days after she’d left Mars. How dare they interrupt her work at Cydonia? There couldn’t be anything so demanding of her particular attention and expertise back home that warranted dragging her away from the Cydonian xenocomplex, to say nothing of the sheer, insane cost of stuffing her on board a constant-g packet that would have her back on Earth within a week.
“The hell of it is,” she growled at one of her cabin mates, “the institute ordered me home, but I think your people are pulling the strings.” She was lying on her couch, flat on her back and feeling miserable.
Gunnery Sergeant Athena Horst snorted. “Who? The Corps?”
“No. The Pentagon. The government. Hell, whoever it is who’s running the show these days.”
“You didn’t do so hot in civics in school, did you, babe?”
“Only the federal government can afford to give us a cruise back to Earth in such luxury,” Hanson said with a sneer, glancing around the cramped, gray-green compartment that was quarters to her and three Marines for the duration.
“Well, they’re not my people. We’re as much in the dark about this redeployment as you are.”
“I was talking with Lieutenant Kerns a little while ago,” Staff Sergeant Krista Ostergaard put in. “The scuttlebutt is that we’re being reassigned to a new mission. An out-Solar mission.”
“That means Llalande,” Master Sergeant Vanya Barnes said. “Shit.”
“You don’t want to go to the stars, Van?” Ostergaard said.
“I don’t want to be gone twenty years.”
Horst shrugged. “Hell, why not? The time’ll pass like that,” she snapped her fingers, “thanks to old Einstein. And it’s not like we have families back home.”
“The Corps is home,” Ostergaard said.
“Fuckin’-A,” Horst said, and she exchanged a high-five hand slap with Ostergaard. “Semper fi!”
Hanson frowned and looked away. She was uncomfortable with these women, with the posing and the brassy-cold hardness of body and of mind that she was coming to associate with all of the members of this peculiar subspecies of human known as U.S. Marines.
The Osiris was a small vessel, mounting an eighty-five-ton hab module normally outfitted for eight people, two to a cabin, not counting the AIs at the controls. A small lounge area, a galley, and the communications suite completed the amenities. For this passage, though, the admin constellation of Marines on board, composed of six women and six men, had been packed into the four compartments, with the one extra slot—for the ship’s sole civilian passenger—provided in the lounge. Hanson had been given a choice of sleeping there or in one of the two compartments assigned to the women. She’d chosen to share quarters because the lounge, which connected all four cabins and the galley, was less than private, with Marines of both sexes tramping through at all hours of the vessel’s artificial day and night.
She’d begun regretting the decision within hours of boosting out of Mars orbit. These female Marines made her nervous with their bad-ass attitudes and nanosculpted bodies. They were rough, strong, and as foul-mouthed as their male Marine counterparts, flat-chested and hard-muscled, with technically enhanced eyes that seemed to look right through her.
They’d been polite enough, true, but her forced incarceration had left her irritable and sour. She was at least a borderline claustrophobe, and none of the compartments on board the Osiris was larger than a small bedroom. It wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d been in free fall; even the tiniest hab compartment seemed roomy with three-dimensional floating space in microgravity. But the steady one-g acceleration—three times what she was used to after a year on Mars—kept her pinned to the deck, and most of the time strapped into her couch. She didn’t understand how Horst and the others could move about with such casual disregard for the acceleration dragging at them every minute of the long ship-day.
Then something one of the Marines had just said managed to register in her weight-numbed mind. “Wait a minute,” she said. “What was that about Llalande?”
“Llalande 21185,” Barnes said, staring at her with her peculiarly dark nanoaltered eyes. “It’s a red dwarf star about eight light-years from—”
“I know what it is,” Hanson snapped. “We’ve been watching it from Mars. What did you mean about an out-Solar mission there?”
/> “Stands to reason, honey,” Ostergaard said, grinning. “That’s where the action is. My money’s riding on a relief expedition. You’re an archie, right?”
“Xenoarcheotechnologist,” she replied.
“Whoa, the lady’s using damned big words,” Barnes said.
“Positively sesquipedalian,” Horst said, with just a hint of a sneer.
Ostergaard laughed. “I’ll bet a month’s pay they want you out on the Llalande planet to check out the xenotech they’ve been finding. Right, Marines?”
“Fuckin’-A,” Barnes said. “Assuming there’s any left when we get there, ten years from now.”
“I’m not going to Ishtar!” Hanson said. She didn’t want to admit it, but these people were scaring her now. “My work is here, on Mars.”
“You’re not on Mars now, honey,” Horst reminded her. “You’re en route to Earth on very special orders. Either you really pissed someone off back there or you’re headed for Ishtar.” She grinned, an evil showing of teeth. “And maybe both!”
Traci Hanson was used to having things her own way, to charting her own course and the hell with what others thought. It had gotten her this far, head of mission research at the Cydonian complex, and only a few scars the worse for wear. If they thought they could just order her to drop everything to go haring off to the stars, they were crazy. What did they think AIs were for?
Robinson. She would take this up with Robinson as soon as she got back.
Or…as soon as she was able to get up and walk around again, after this brutal week of acceleration.
Then she remembered that the packet’s acceleration matched the gravitational acceleration of Earth itself, that this hell was going to go on and on.
Shit…
Headquarters, PanTerra Dynamics
New Chicago, Illinois
United Federal Republic, Earth
1455 hours CT
Gavin Norris had never seen a demonstration like this. The chanting throngs filled the circular PanTerra Plaza and spilled over into all of the surrounding thoroughfares. Police in full armor were everywhere, trying to maintain order and keep the main walkways open. The demonstration, he gathered, was an anti-An gathering, and tempers were burning high. Pro-Anners were there as well, and demonstration and counterdemonstration were threatening to erupt into full-scale civil war.
Norris ignored the chanting crowds as best as he could, making his way toward the slender, black pinnacle that was his destination. The PanTerra Building soared two kilometers into the thin, cold air of the midwestern sky, rising from the Highland Park district to look down on a cloud-mottled Lake Michigan to the east and the still empty ruin of the Barrens to the south.
The destruction of Old Chicago during the UN War a century ago had killed millions—no one would ever know the precise death toll—and extinguished one of the largest and most prosperous cities on the planet. Plutonium from the reaction mass heating grid of the French spacecraft that had broken up above Lake Michigan had scattered radioactive dust southwest across the city, leaving a poisoned footprint fifty kilometers long burned into the soil of northern Illinois. Detox robots and crews in sealed crawlers continued to work both in the desert ashore and in the waters offshore, but the most optimistic calculations indicated that the Barrens would remain hazardous for another five centuries at least.
North of the Barrens, though, the rebuilding had been proceeding with an enthusiasm born of victory in the determination not to see the brawling, big-shouldered city of Sandburg’s poem forever extinguished. The cities of Highland Park and Waukegan had merged, becoming the nucleus of the new metropolis. The lake itself was all but dead now, but construction had begun extending out over the water almost as soon as the radiation there dropped to reasonable levels.
The PanTerra Building, with its distinctive black panther logo perched high atop the revolving dome that housed its executive suites, had foundations sunk deep within the bedrock beneath what once had been open water. The PanTerra Plaza consisted of open grounds and pavement immediately in front of the main entrance, centered on a towering water fountain symbolizing the Spirit of Chicago.
The demonstration was well under way by the time Norris approached the building. All traffic—ground and air—had been blocked from the Highland Park district as far south as Central and as far west as Sheridan, and the slide-ways had been turned off. He had to park his flier at a port garage near Central Park and walk five blocks through streets packed with thronging mobs. When he saw how packed the plaza was, he turned away and found an entranceway to the transit levels. Most of the major buildings in New Chicago were connected by floater tubes beneath the ground level.
An elevator took Norris from the PanTerra Building’s transit access bay to the lobby. A separate elevator, one with a security check panel that tasted the DNA on his palm and electronically probed his briefcase and his clothing, took him then to the 540th floor, so far above the demonstration that the mobs simply vanished into the geometrical intricacies of street, building, and plaza.
Allyn Buckner met him in another lobby, this one with soaring, curving walls that were either completely transparent or remarkably large and seamlessly joined viewall panels. The PanTerran panther hung above the entrance to the conference center, ten meters high, muscles rippling in realistically animated holography.
“Mr. Norris,” Buckner said, extending a hand. He was a thin, acid-looking man with an insincere smile, one of the small army of PanTerran vice presidents whom Norris had dealt with in the past. “Thank you for coming in person.”
“Not a problem, Mr. Buckner,” Norris replied. “You never know who’s got access to your VR link codes. I prefer face-to-face.”
“Indeed. We can guarantee the security of our conversation here. This way, please?”
Norris jerked his head to the side, indicating the crowds far below. “So, what the hell is that all about?”
“War, Mr. Norris,” Buckner said as he led Norris beneath the giant panther and into the conference suite. “There is going to be a war very soon now. The first war, I might add, to be fought across interstellar distances.”
“Llalande?”
“Of course. The people are quite upset over the, um, slavery issue.”
“There was a pretty sizable pro-An contingent down there too.”
“Religious nuts, Mr. Norris. The lunatic fringe. The people are demanding that the human slaves on Ishtar be freed.”
That, Norris thought, was something of an oversimplification. The number of separate factions on Earth clashing over the issue of contact with the An and the sociopolitical situation on distant Ishtar was simply incalculable. True, the loudest voices right now were those of outrage over the discovery of the Exiles—descendants of humans taken from Mesopotamia thousands of years ago and transplanted to the An world as a slave population. But there were other voices as well. The entire Islamic block wanted all dealings with the An halted…and an end to archeological research both on Earth and off-world that tended to relegate humankind to a less-than-glorious set of beginnings. That was what the fighting right now in Egypt was all about. And then there were the countless religions, cults, and movements worldwide that viewed the An as gods, figuratively or even literally.
But there were also groups who saw considerable profit in closer ties with the An. Most of the major megacorporations of Earth were vying now for the technological spin-offs coming out of the xenoresearch off-world.
And of course that was where the real power lay, Norris thought…not with the “people,” but with the multitrillion-newdollar corporate entities who truly controlled the planet.
Inside the conference suite, Buckner guided Norris to a carpeted, soundproofed room with an elaborate array of viewalls, link centers, and screens. “Computer,” Buckner said, addressing the air. “Security, level one.”
“Security, level one initiated, Mr. Buckner,” a female voice replied. “Do you require a record?”
“No. Switch
off.”
“Switching off, Mr. Buckner.”
“I don’t even like the AIs listening in to some of this,” Buckner explained. “What we’re on to here is so fantastic—”
“Are you sure the mikes and recorders are really off?”
“Of course. The software was developed in this very building. Have a seat.”
Norris sank into the embrace of a chair that molded itself to his back and shoulders. “So, I gather you have another assignment for me.”
“We do.” Buckner took a seat opposite his. “A very important one. A lucrative one.”
“You’ve got my attention, Mr. Buckner.”
“We have been scanning our personnel records for a particular person. You were the first of the troubleshooters on our list. And the best, I might add. You have all of the qualities we are looking for—young, dynamic, ambitious. No family to speak of, no long-term commitments or contracts. Not even any casual lovers.”
Norris raised an eyebrow. They didn’t know about Claire, evidently. Good. “What’s your point?”
“We need a liaison, Mr. Norris, on a very, very special operation.”
“What kind of operation?”
“You’ll be fully briefed later, if you accept.”
“How can I accept if I don’t know what it is?”
Buckner smiled, an oily tug at the corner of his mouth. “Oh, we may be able to offer suitable inducements.”
“Such as?”
“We are offering you a long-term contract. A very long-term contract, in fact. Minimum time—twenty years.”
Norris’s eyes widened. “Is that a business proposition or a prison term?”
“A little of both, I fear. If you accept, you won’t be able to terminate. Not…conveniently, at any rate.”
A twenty-year contract? Buckner must be out of his mind. “This doesn’t exactly sound like a promotion, Mr. Buckner. What are the inducements you mentioned?”
“A nice, round figure, Mr. Norris. One billion newdollars, and a shot at senior management, when you return. Perhaps even a seat on the board.”
“One billion!.” Norris hung on the shock for a comic moment, mouth gaping. “One billion?” Then he heard the rest of Buckner’s sentence. “What do you mean, when I return? Where are you sending me?” He already knew he was going, wherever it was. A billion newdollars? Was the man serious?
