by Ian Douglas
Ten minutes later, Garroway, Armandez, and Ramsey were walking along a long, curving corridor, following downloaded directions to the Warhurst apartment. They found the right hab halfway around the curve, and Garroway palmed the announce panel.
The door slid open a moment later, and a pretty, young, blond woman admitted them. She was quite nude, save for a clinging flicker of holographically projected rainbow light. “Hi!” she said brightly. “I’m Traci. Mike’s busy screaming at the viewall right now. C’mon in! Can I get you guys anything?”
“Not right now, thanks,” Garroway replied as they entered the hab. Curving, transparent walls looked out into the sunlit waters of the coral reef. The ceiling was also transparent, and the apartment was brightly illuminated by the shifting patterns of azure-tinted sunlight flashing down from the surface some ten meters overhead.
“Damn it, I think we’re overdressed, Aiden,” Armandez whispered to him as they followed Traci into the living room.
Garroway recalled that some of the colony worlds were a bit on the prudish side when it came to casual social nudity. “Don’t worry about it,” he told her. “Lots of folks here and in the Rings go around in their skin all the time. Doesn’t mean sex, or anything like that.”
“On Ishtar we’d’ve been eaten alive by bitewings and drilleribbons,” she told him. “There’s a reason the gods created us with clothing!”
Garroway was about to ask her about that, but was interrupted by a shout from the entertainment well on the far end of the living area. “God damn those assholes!”
The E-center was curiously antique, featuring a large, slightly curving viewall within which an illusion of threedimensional reality was projected. Michael Warhurst was on the sofa with another young woman, both of them nude, the former Marine shaking his fist and shouting at the screen.
“Hey, Gunny!” Garroway called. “What’s got you so riled up?”
Warhurst turned in the couch, then jumped to his feet. “Garroway, you son of a bitch! Welcome to Earth!”
“Thank you. Good to be here.”
“And it’s Lieutenant Ramsey now, is it? Welcome to my humble abode. Sir.”
“Thanks, Gunny. What the hell are you watching?”
Warhurst waved at the viewall dismissively. “Fucking politics. They’re about to vote on whether or not to bring you guys back home.”
“Oh, really?” Garroway said, intrigued. “What about the Xul?”
“That’s just it. It’s uni-fucking-lateral retreat. Declare victory and go home . . . and pray the SOBs don’t decide we’ve gone soft and drop a few rocks in our laps.”
“So where’s it stand?” Armandez asked.
“Hard to say, yet. Things kicked off when that über- bitch Yarlocke called for a vote.”
“On what?”
“The usual. The Xul aren’t so bad. Bring the boys and girls home. Make kissy-face with the Xulies, and everyone’ll be happy. But then the Senator from Ishtar dropped a bomb on the assembly a little while ago.”
“Yay! That’s my daddy!”
“Really?” Warhurst looked surprised. “Senator Armandez?”
“I’m Nikki Armandez,” she said.
“Well, I’m delighted to meet you! Your dad’s really something, let me tell you! A real ball of fire.”
“He’s a former Marine,” she told him. “When he gets into speech-maker mode, he can be . . . formidable.”
“I know. He was great! He told how the last MIEF op discovered a link to the Galactic Core, and how we needed to go there—in force—to find out what the Xul are really all about. He’s calling for a compromise—send in the Marines and Navy, but include a peacemaking team as well. Madam Senator Über- bitch and her puppies have been fighting the proposal tooth and nail, but I think it’s going to carry. At least it was. One of Yarlocke’s people just raised a motion to delay.”
“Is that why you were screaming ‘assholes’ a few minutes ago?” Ramsey wanted to know.
Warhurst grinned. “Yeah. I guess I got a little riled.”
“What good would a delay do?” Garroway asked.
“I’m not sure what her idea is. Maybe Über- bitch wants some time to do some private arm- twisting.”
“The motion was just defeated, Mike,” said the other woman in the apartment, still seated on the sofa.
“Oh? Great! Shit, you gotta excuse me. Manners. You’ve met Traci, there. And this is Kath.”
“Hi!” Kath said. She was a striking redhead. “Mike’s told us all about Aiden! Why don’t you guys shuck your skins and get comfortable?”
Armandez elected to keep her underpants on, a concession to deeply ingrained Ishtaran modesty taboos, but Garroway and Ramsey stripped down to match their hosts. Their uniforms and shoes vanished into a hopper that would disassemble them into component atoms and grow them anew, without travel grime or wrinkles.
“There’s going to be a public vote!” Traci called out. “You want to chime in?”
“Oh, good,” Warhurst said, taking his seat next to Kath. “About fucking time! Binding?”
“No. But I guess the Senate wants to know who’s going to be pissed off by what decision.”
Warhurst sighed. “The Net. The best and the worst thing ever to happen to Commonwealth politics.”
“How do you figure, Gunny?” Garroway asked.
“The best because it allowed a true representative democracy. The entire electorate—whoever happens to be linked into the debate, anyway—can cast their votes and have them tabulated immediately. The Senators up there in the Ring can see in a few minutes which way the political winds are blowing.”
“Wetting their fingers and sticking them into the wind,” Ramsey suggested.
“That’s about it. But it’s the worst thing because a few hundred years ago it got so slick they decided they didn’t need the House of Representatives to balance out the Senate. That happened, oh, gods. Long time ago. Twenty-five, twenty- six hundreds? Back when it was the United States of America running things, the legislative branch of the government was divided between House and Senate. A law passed by one might get shot down by the other, so there was a great balance of power going on . . . and they acted as a check against the power of the executive branch, right?”
“If you say so,” Garroway replied. “I’ve never really figured out how they got anything done in pre-Commonwealth times.”
“Yeah, well, once the citizens could vote on any resolution, they decided having a two-house legislature was redundant. The House split off and became a regulatory body just for the individual states, while the Senate passed laws concerning the entire Commonwealth. Over the years, the Senate became way too powerful. Hell, there’s talk about the President being little more than a figurehead now, kind of like British royalty, back when they still had them.”
“You think things would be better with House and Senate still battling it out with each other?” Ramsey asked. “Making back-room deals, that sort of thing?”
Warhurst shrugged. “Maybe. So far as I’m concerned, anything that paralyzes the government, keeps it from passing new laws and raising new taxes, is good!”
“Mike is a bit of a reactionary,” Traci put in.
“Yeah, but he’s my kind of reactionary,” Garroway said, laughing. “How do we vote on this damned thing? And what are we voting on, again?”
Warhurst indicated a palm contact on the arm of the sofa. “Slap your hand down there. Your AI will access the Net for you. The vote is on . . . let’s see . . . ‘Should 1MIEF be sent to the Galactic Core, together with a peace envoy in an attempt to end the current state of hostilities? Yes, no, or protest.’ ”
Garroway was used to voting through a full-immersion e-connect, rather than this antique viewall connection, but when he placed his hand on the palm connect, a window came up in his mind, just as it would have with a full- sim link. But the thought-click key that would register his vote was blocked.
“Wait a sec,” he said, reading the m
essage scrolling past his awareness. “There’s another motion up.”
“Yeah, I see,” Warhurst said, eyes narrowing. “Damn the bitch!”
“What?” Armandez asked.
“She’s calling for a motion to block all votes from active- duty military. That means you guys.”
Ramsey chuckled. “Well, it wouldn’t do to have active-duty personnel vote on whether or not they’re going to go into battle, would it?”
“Yeah,” Garroway said. He laughed. “ ‘Do you jarheads want to charge up that fucking hill and take it away from some very nasty and well- armed customers, yes or no?’ ”
“Yeah, except that the über- bitch knows the military would vote a resounding yes,” Warhurst said. “She’s hell- bent on shutting down 1MIEF, one way or another.”
“Well, sure,” Ramsey said. “The military knows how happy the Xul at the Core will be to see our peace envoy.”
“And how long the peace would last afterward,” Garroway added. “Whatcha guys think? Twenty minutes?”
“If that,” Ramsey replied.
“Okay,” Warhurst said. “That measure passed. So you guys don’t get to vote. Sorry.”
“Well, you vote for us,” Armandez said. “Five or six times apiece!”
“Wish I fucking could.” He put his palm down on the connector, then motioned to the women. “C’mon, girls. You get to vote, too. Civic duty, and all that.”
“If we vote ‘yes,’ ” Traci said, “does that mean you’ll be going back out there?”
“No, honey, it doesn’t.” He sighed. “I wish to hell it did. But I put in my twenty, and I’d need a special waiver to re- enlist.”
Traci, then Kath registered their votes. A recess for dinner, meanwhile, had been declared on the Senate floor.
“This’ll take a while,” Warhurst told them. “Hey! Let me show you around the place!”
The tour of the apartment didn’t take long, since they’d already seen all there was to see except for the bedroom, bath, and storage areas. When they returned to the main living area, which included the entertainment center, a small galley, and sitting and eating areas, Armandez walked into the center of the room, looking up at the ocean surface visible through the overhead transparency. “This is simply gorgeous!” she said. “Is it expensive?”
“It’s free. Veterans’ benefits.” He shrugged. “Anyway, the expensive real estate is up on shore.”
“Tell me about it,” Ramsey put in. “My parents are at Orlando Beach.”
Warhurst winced. “Ouch.”
“They’re rich. They can afford it.”
“Well, they’re putting up more and more of these complexes out here at sea, especially on places flooded after the icecap melt. The individual apartments are grown as single units ashore, hauled out to a submerged platform with pontoon ballast tanks, and fastened down.” He waved a hand at the transparent wall, and a vast, shadowy depression in the sea floor lined with coral. “Like the view?”
“It’s certainly not what I thought of as Earth,” Armandez said.
“There’s a hell of lot more ocean on Earth than there is dry land,” Warhurst told her. “This view is more typical of the place than, oh, central Iowa, say.”
“Is that a crater out there?” Garroway asked, pointing. “Maybe a souvenir from 2314?”
“Nah. This area used to be an island right off the southern tip of Miami Beach proper. There was a seaquarium here . . . kind of like a theme park with trained whales. The historical downloads say that that pit over there used to be a public amphitheater for performances.”
“Ha!” Ramsey exclaimed. He pointed to a cloud of colorful reef fish descending past the transparency. “So now it’s a terrarium where fish watch you.”
“Never thought of it that way,” Warhurst said, “but, yeah. Exactly.”
“We saw them building something on the sea floor outside of Miami,” Armandez said. “Was that more living habs?”
“You probably saw where they’re building the new big fish-farm complex up at Fisher Reef. The ocean’s still recovering, you know, not only from Armageddonfall, but from what humans did to it in the centuries before. They say something like eighty percent of all marine species had been wiped out or were on the point of extinction when the Xul attacked, and the mini-ice age that followed must have killed a lot more. Nowadays, they’re using sea farms more for reintroducing genegineered species than for food. Most of our food comes from nanufactories now, just like up in the Rings.”
After a light meal, they ended up in a hot tub. Kath elected to stay in the entertainment center, watching the Senate channel, but Nikki finally overcame her modesty enough to lose the last of her clothing and join Garroway, Warhurst, Ramsey, and Traci in a large tub of scalding hot water.
“I just can’t get over how gorgeous all of this is,” she said, leaning back and looking up through the ceiling at wheeling fish and dancing light. “I never knew Earth was like this.”
“First time down?” Warhurst asked.
She nodded. “I got as far as EarthRing when my father got elected a few years ago. Then I joined the Marines, boot camp on Mars, and duty stations all over this part of the galaxy ever since.”
“Well, this is how the other half lives.”
“Gare said you don’t like it here.”
He shrugged. “It’s pleasant enough, I guess.”
“He misses all of his old Marine buddies,” Traci said, moving close to him and taking hold of his arm with a playful pout. “We’re not good enough for him!”
“Fuck, it’s not that, baby,” he said, putting an arm around her shoulders. “You know that. But I do miss the Corps, yeah.” He grinned at Garroway and winked. “Screaming at maggot-recruits like this guy.”
“Fuck you, Gunny.”
“Ah. You turned out okay. Medal of Honor? Yeah, you’re doing all right.”
“If they bring 1MIEF home,” Garroway said, “maybe we’ll all be retired.”
“You know that won’t happen,” Ramsey told him. “This peace initiative of Yarlocke’s has about as much chance of success as making peace with a gorgonette.”
“A gorgonette?” Traci asked. “What’s that?”
“Oh, a little critter that lives on the major southern continent of Nu Columbae IV,” Ramsey told her. He held his hand out, palm down, half a meter off the deck. “Stands about yea high. All tentacles, muscle, claws, and teeth. A dozen feeding mouths, each on a separate neck, like a bundle of snakes. When they’re migrating, a pack of ’em will shred a man down to bare bones in a minute or two.”
“They’re herbivores, actually,” Garroway added. He’d never deployed to Nu Columbae IV, a marginally Earthlike world out on the fringes of the Chinese Hegemony, some 72 light years from Sol. Experiencing sims of the vicious local ecology, however, had been part of a Corps survival training program he’d gone through in boot camp. “They don’t eat you so much as grate you into little bloody bits if they feel threatened.”
“Lovely.”
“Right,” Warhurst said. “Just like the Xuls. A hyperdeveloped xenophobic protective reflex. And a very short temper! I hope that peace envoy they’re talking about is wearing decent armor!”
“You think that’s how the Xul started out, a few million years ago?” Ramsey asked. “Kill everything else before it kills you would be a reasonable survival strategy on Nu Columbae, and on a few other worlds I’ve seen as well.”
“That’s what the Excesses think,” Garroway said. The name was derived from “XS,” which in turn came from xenosociology, the science of nonhuman species, how they thought and acted, and why. “If they took that kill-or-bekilled mindset to the stars, maybe they never got rid of it. The Fermi Evidence, y’know?”
“If so, this peace initiative isn’t going to go very far,” Ramsey said.
“Sure it is!” Warhurst replied cheerfully. “It’ll go all the way to the Galactic Core! And die there! . . .”
“Hey, wet people!” Kath
called from the entertainment center. “The vote is being announced!”
“Okay,” Warhurst said, standing up, dripping, stepping out of the deck-level tub. “Let’s go check out the fucking BDA.”
“Yeah,” Garroway said. “This I’ve got to see.”
Senate Committee Deliberation Chamber Commonwealth Government Center, EarthRing
1925 hrs, GMT
Cyndi Yarlocke watched the tabulation figures flickering into a window opened in her mind, and scowled. Damn Armandez and his short-sighted, disloyal interference. And damn Alexander. She turned and looked up, searching the visitor’s gallery. Yes, there he was, sitting alone, leaning forward, fingers steepled in front of his chin, staring straight back at her. This was his doing. It had to be.
Armandez had a daughter in the Marines, in 1MIEF, in fact. Didn’t the short-sighted bastard want to see her safely home from the stars, from constant warfare with the Xul?
But then, Armandez was an ex-Marine himself, and the bond between Marines sometimes seemed to transcend that of family. Yarlocke didn’t understand that, but she recognized that it was true. Alexander must be using a back-channel communications link with Armandez, must have suggested the bare bones of the Armandez Proposal.
The hell of it was, Armandez’s conservatism was being reflected by the electorate, apparently. The votes were still coming in, but, so far, nearly a billion citizens from the inner Solar System had electronically registered their votes on the issue. So far, it was running over seventy percent in favor of the Armandez Proposal, and just twenty-five percent against.
She could dismiss the lopsided tally easily enough. Many of those seven hundred million voters were most likely confused, thinking that by supporting the Pax Galactica going to the Core with the MIEF, they were voting for peace. They didn’t realize that, if the Marines went along, there would be no peace. Alexander, the militarist bastard, would find a way to continue his war.
