Duty, Honor, Planet: 01

by Rick Partlow

  And now, on the verge of the biggest step of her career---of her life!---and on the verge of a probable war, she'd let not one, but two men crawl into her head. This was not how she'd planned things.

  Looking up, she caught a glimpse of Jason being led into the next room by that O'Keefe woman and sighed deeply. More complications. But none of her business. She should just get another drink and forget she'd even seen it.

  Right. Cursing herself loud enough to draw a few curious stares, she pushed off from the wall and began making her way to the door they'd exited through.

  "What?" Jason's jaw dropped open. "But how?" He shook his head helplessly. "Didn't you have the treatments?"

  "Glen did," she told him. "I assumed you had, too."

  "No," he told her numbly. "In the military, they give them to the females---something about testosterone level and male aggression, I think. But...the last time was over five months ago! Wouldn't you have known back on Aphrodite?"

  "When I didn't get my period, I thought it was because of the stress," she explained. "Then, when we went into g-sleep, the chemical stasis slowed down the gestation period. I almost lost the baby then---I was so sick when we came back into Earth orbit that they flew me straight to a medical center. That's when I found out. Because of the g-sleep, I've still got six months till it comes to term."

  "Are you..." He hesitated, his guts churning with indecision and shock. "I mean, you're not going to..."

  "It's too late to legally abort it," she said, anticipating his question, a flash of stubborn anger in her eyes. "And I wouldn't even if I could."

  "I wouldn't want you to," he assured her, shaking his head desperately. "That's not what I was saying."

  "What are you saying, Jason?" She fixed him with a dark, questioning gaze.

  "Look, I realize my responsibility in this," he said, throwing up his hands. "I'm not trying to run out on it. If you want the fetus transferred to a surrogate, I'll pay for it and I'll take the responsibility for putting the baby up for adoption. I'll pay for foster care until the agency finds an adoptive family. I'm not in a position to raise a child alone, so that's all I can do."

  "That's very adult of you," she replied, facing away from him, staring at a shelf of books that had suddenly become fascinating. "I suppose adoption is the best idea. If the baby's parents," there might have been a catch in her voice, or maybe it was his imagination, "can't be together." She turned back to him. "They can't be, can they?"

  There was a pleading tone in her voice that tore him apart, but he shook his head, trying to meet her eyes.

  "No," he told her. "I guess they can't."

  She made a show of straightening her dress, giving her an excuse to look away for a moment, and when she met his gaze once more, her face was hard and cold.

  "I thank you for your generous offer, Captain McKay," she said, "but I've told Glen about the pregnancy and we've decided to keep the child and raise it together."

  "I see," McKay said, breathing out a deep sigh. "Is there anything you need from me?"

  "Yes," she said. "We need you to stay away. As far as anyone will know, this child is ours. Do you understand?"

  He nodded, not trusting himself to speak. Anger, relief and a sharp disappointment fought for supremacy within him, all drowned out by the incredible notion that he was going to be a father, if only an absent one.

  "I..." he finally choked out, "I'll do what you want." There was moisture in his eye, and he had to blink it back as he stumbled away from her, wanting more than anything to leave.

  But he hesitated at the door, looking back at her, pain in the set of his mouth.

  "Please," he said. "What...?" He trailed off, words failing him.

  Something softened in her eyes and he thought he saw something of the compassion that he'd once found in her.

  "It's a boy, Jason" she told him, knowing what he was trying to ask. "It's a boy."

  And then he was out of the room, back in the hallway but still light-years away. A son. He was going to have a son.

  * * *

  Jason sat in silence as the tiltrotor drew away from the O'Keefe mansion, climbing higher into the night sky. An incredible panorama of stars beckoned enticingly through the side window of the darkened compartment, but his eyes were locked sightlessly onto the back of the next seat, trying to divine the mysteries of the universe in its grey leather depths.

  Beside him, Shannon waited patiently, knowing he was going to talk but not wanting to push him. She'd settled into her seat and was about to let the rhythm of the plane's engines lull her to sleep when he finally looked her way, decision in his eyes.

  "Shannon," he said.

  "Yes, Jason." She sat up and met his gaze.

  "Back there...I...Ms. O'Keefe, she..." He chewed his lip, searching for words.

  "She's pregnant," Shannon declared softly. Jason's eyes popped open.

  "Yeah," he confirmed, afraid to ask her how she knew. "She's pregnant."

  "What are you going to do?" she asked. He tried to read something in her eyes, but they were swallowed up in the shadows, unfathomable.

  "I'm going to do what she wants," he told Shannon, trying once more to convince himself it was the right thing. "I'm going to stay away."

  Chapter Fourteen

  "Where are they?"---Enrico Fermi.

  A scorching, dry wind swept across the plateau, sifting the charred remains of the Aphrodite spaceport and scouring the side of the small, preform dome with sand and dust. Jason blinked away a spray of wind-born dust that had found its way behind the lenses of his sunglasses as he waited for Shannon to slide out of the groundcar's passenger seat.

  "Good Lord," he whispered, surveying for the first time the devastation Shannon's attack on the port had caused. The port control building and the laser launch platform were gone as if they had never existed, only an irregular black spot on the sandstone surface marking where they'd been, and everywhere was strewn the wreckage of the shuttle that had exploded.

  He felt Shannon shudder as she came up beside him, and he slipped an arm around her, realizing the memories this place would hold.

  "I'll be okay." She gave him a grateful hug, and then they stepped through the door of the dome hut and into the welcome respite of climate control.

  "Afternoon, sir, ma'am." A straight-backed, dark-haired young Marine officer came off his chair and saluted them.

  "Hey, Ari," Jason said, returning the salute. "Having fun out here?"

  "Oh, loads, sir," Lieutenant Shamir, leader of the Patton’s Marine Reaction Force, replied, shaking his head ruefully. "And don't think I'm not counting the hours till my team and I switch with Gunny Lambert and the troops at the orbital base."

  Shamir had taken command of Gunny Lambert’s Reaction Force when their numbers had been filled out back on Earth. Lambert had been worried that he would be stuck with some wet-behind-the-ears butterbar, but Shamir was an good man, who had seen plenty of combat as an enlisted man before going to OCS.

  Once the Patton had arrived insystem almost two weeks ago, she'd immediately dropped a prefab laboratory into a high orbit, and the Marines had been divided into two teams, one assigned to guard the ground base against any of Huerta's group that might still bear a grudge, and the other to the orbital lab to serve mostly as gophers for the scientists. Jason and Shannon had spent their time shuttling between the two labs, waiting for answers, while Vinnie, Jock and Tom were busy assisting in relief efforts for the colonists.

  "Captain McKay!" Rhajiv Mandila, the team's chief pathologist, looked up from a bank of instruments and noticed their entrance. "I'm glad you've come---I've been leaving messages for you on the orbital lab for days now!" The researcher was a homely, horse-faced man with the shoulders of a dockworker, but one of the best minds the Republic had to offer.

  "Sorry, Doc," Jason explained. "Between getting the investigation teams set up and coordinating supply drops for the surviving colonists, we haven't had a lot of spare time."

&nbs
p; "Well, you need to make time for this." He waved a hand at the bank of instruments behind him. "I've got the results back from the DNA analysis on the tissue samples of the Invader biomechs."

  "'Biomechs?'" Shannon repeated, brows furling.

  "It's a term we've come up with to describe the things," Mandila explained.

  "Are they machines?" Jason shook his head. His gaze wandered to the back of the laboratory, where one of the Invader corpses lay in a clear plastic coffin, suspended in chemical preservatives. He winced involuntarily at the sight of those shark-black eyes, looking no more lifeless in death than they had in life.

  "It's difficult to explain," Mandila sighed.

  Ari laughed. "Yeah, he's been trying to explain it to me for three days now."

  "They're not mechanical in the sense you're probably thinking of," the pathologist told them, "with circuits and servomotors, but they're just as much the product of an assembly line as that pistol you're wearing." He nodded at Jason's sidearm. "I don't know if either of you are familiar with current cloning technology..."

  "Assume we're not," Jason sighed, getting impatient with the man.

  "Well," Mandila said, raising a finger didactically, "as of about fifty years ago, we've had the ability to clone individual human tissues in a lab---we can grow muscle, nerve, even brain tissues in a vat and transplant them back to the donor. But this," he waved back at the preserved corpse, "is a level of sophistication above that---at least fifty to a hundred years beyond what we can do now."

  "So they're clones," Jason deduced.

  "Not like the ones you might have seen in science fiction movies." The pathologist shook his head, a look of professional disapproval on his face. "That fantastic nonsense about taking a DNA sample and producing a full-grown life-form. No, someone or something cloned each tissue individually and assembled them like a biological robot---I'd venture to guess they must have used some extensive nanotechnological manufacturing technique."

  "That's pretty damned advanced compared to their weapons technology," Shannon observed.

  "Especially when you consider that the biomechs aren't a hundred percent biological---most of their skeletal structure has been reinforced with artificial material, but nothing as sophisticated as what you might expect from the biological part of their construction." He hunted around on a line of sample trays and came up with a swatch of shiny metal. "Nothing more advanced than corrugated aluminum."

  "You're kidding," Jason muttered.

  "You might think so," Mandila acknowledged, obviously pleased with his little presentation. "Also, there's a microcomputer built into the communication centers of the things' brains---we think as a method of remote control. Now, I'm about the furthest thing from a computer expert on this expedition, but I sent one of the units up to our technical crew, and they tell me the technology is at least fifty years behind what we have."

  "Curiouser and curiouser." Shannon rubbed her chin thoughtfully. "Maybe that backs up your idea," she told Jason, "about them being short on supplies. Maybe they've been scavenging whatever they could, no matter what level of technology it represented."

  "That's one possibility," Mandila said. "But that's not the end of it. I was trying to tell you when you came in; we've completed our analysis of the biomech's DNA—or rather, the DNA which was used to produce the creatures' living tissue." He hesitated dramatically, looking each of them in the eye in turn. "It's human. Human right down to the last chromosome."

  * * *

  "Oh, Captain McKay! Captain McKay!" Jason looked back and groaned inwardly as he saw the squat, hefty bulk of Dr. Andre Kovalev waddling down the corridor, his movements absurdly exaggerated in the half-gravity of the spinning tin can that was their temporary research base. The physicist was a pleasant enough man, but his penchant for long-windedness was as well-known among the mission's staff as his love for loud, tasteless shirts.

  "Hi, Dr. Kovalev." McKay forced a smile. "What can I do for you?"

  "Captain McKay, I have been looking for you since I heard you'd come back up from planetside," Kovalev said, clapping his hands with delight. "I trust you found your visit with Rhajiv's staff fruitful?"

  McKay nodded. "Actually, Doc, I came back up because the Space team found something in orbit---I'm on my way to the docking bay right now, as a matter of fact."

  "Oh, wonderful, I'll come with you!" Kovalev enthused. "I've been hoping we'd have some time to talk."

  Jason winced. He'd really wanted to use the walk to the bay to think---Mandila's revelation had given him a lot to digest---and he couldn't do much thinking if he had to engage in a tete-a-tete with the loquacious Dr. Kovalev. Only one thing to do, much as he hated the idea.

  "So, Doc," Jason said, "I've been meaning to ask you---could you explain to me one more time just how exactly the Eysselink drive works? I've never been too clear about it and I think a better understanding of it might help me figure out how our ships are being pirated."

  "Oh, certainly, certainly," Kovalev assented cheerfully. More than anything else, the physicist loved to lecture---and getting him started on a monologue would give Jason time to think. "It's an old idea, really---originated back in the 1980's as a piece of scientific speculation called the 'Alcubierre Spacetime Inflation Warp Drive.' The original idea was to use strong, exotic fields with negative energy density to inflate the space behind a starship and deflate the space at its front..."

  Jason let the man's voice fade into a background drone as his thoughts travelled back to the conversation he'd had with Shannon on the way back to the city.

  "You don't really believe him, do you?" she'd asked him, a troubled look on her face.

  He shook his head, glancing away from the dirt track for a moment. "Who? Dr. Mandila?"

  "No," she sighed. "Senator O'Keefe."

  "Oh." He'd had the same troubling thoughts. "Well, there are other possibilities. If they are scavengers---well, a couple colony vessels were among the ships that disappeared. That could have afforded them access to human DNA."

  "But we don't know that they're scavengers," she pointed out. "We don't know that they're behind the ship disappearances. All we know is that they, whoever they are, made those things out of human DNA."

  "Well, what other explanation is there?" He shrugged helplessly. "Even if I were to assume some rogue elements of our government were behind this, how would they have technology that our best biologist says is still at least fifty years away?"

  "I don't know," she admitted. "All I'm saying is, we shouldn't rule out anything at this point."

  "...but none of this would have been possible," Kovalev's voice crept through his reverie once again as they boarded a lift car, "without Adam Eysselink's discovery of the gravimetic wavelength of energy, which made possible the use of gravimetic fields to produce the spacetime inflation effect. His detection of hyperphotonic particles in antimatter reactions back in '41 was the true breakthrough..."

  The lift car lurched upward, toward the station's central core and his thoughts returned to Shannon's words, and to the worry that gnawed unceasingly at his gut. What if O'Keefe were right? What if the government were behind all of this? Or the multicorporations? Certainly the multicorps had enough of a stake in the continued production of military hardware, and the big ones, like Republic Transportation, were almost part of the government.

  Yet his logical mind rebelled at the idea of some vast government conspiracy. He'd heard so many of those cock-and-bull stories in the barracks from the Waco Cultists and the Elvis Worshippers, about how the government was controlled by socialist alien homosexuals, that he couldn't buy it anymore. He knew Shannon didn't seriously believe it, either, but she'd been unusually quiet during the drive back to Kennedy. They hadn't quite made it back to the city when they'd gotten the call from Gunny Lambert, on the orbital research station. He hadn't given them too many details, just told them the Space team had found something interesting in orbit and they might want to come up and take a look.

&n
bsp; They'd docked in the station's north lock and Shannon had gone on immediately to the bay at the opposite pole. He'd stayed back in the station's control room long enough to contact the Patton and given Captain Patel an update on Mandila's discovery, which had delayed him just enough to fall prey to Dr. Kovalev and his atomic mouth.

  "...of course," the physicist went on, his voice breaking slightly as the liftcar passed into zero gravity and the tip of his beard bounced playfully against his chest, "it took the work of Constance Decatur with the concept of electromagnetic lensing technology to focus the hyperphotons off the antimatter reaction into the drive field. Which left the problem of the tidal forces inherent in this kind of warping of the fabric of spacetime. While we can shape the Eysselink field to reduce these forces, we have not, as yet, been able to eliminate them altogether---the best we have been able to accomplish is to focus this tidal disruption into a straight-line acceleration analog proportional to the energy being pumped into the field. This necessitates the unfortunate inconvenience of the g-tanks, which I personally find..."

  "Hey, here we are," McKay interrupted, feeling the car come to a halt. "Thanks for the explanation, Doc, I really appreciate it. Maybe we can talk more later."

  "It was my pleasure, Captain," the man assured him, beaming, as they kicked out of the lift and floated into the station's auxiliary docking bay.

  Shannon, he saw, was there already, along with Gunny Lambert and two of the orbital station's department heads: Sandra Cerrano, a senior investigator for the Spaceflight Safety Commission, and Dr. Kwane Munfimi, the expedition's chief xenobiologist—all gathered around a massive, dingy-white object, its semi-ovoid shape somehow familiar to McKay, but its outline oddly lumpy and irregular. It took Jason a moment to realize what the thing was: an unopened Invader drop-pod.