by Rick Partlow
McKay's hand froze centimeters from his handgun...
"...and that this was the trigger?"
McKay froze...
...and bolted upright in bed with a violent grunt, every muscle in his body tensed to the point of cramping, covered with a thin sheen of sweat. He clutched instinctively at the place under his left arm where his gun should be before he realized again that he was back in his room in the governor's mansion and it was---he glanced automatically at his wristwatch---well after midnight, local time.
He took in a deep breath and slowly let it escape, trying to slow down his triphammer heart rate as he settled back onto his pillow. He should, he knew now, have taken advantage of the fact that Valerie had cancelled all her planned activities for tomorrow and made use of his free night to get roaring drunk. At least then he would have been able to sleep through the night. He had tried to work some of the tension out with Shannon, but he hadn't been able to get the day's events off his mind and concentrate on her. She'd understood, and told him she'd be there for him if he needed her, which was good to know. Then he'd gone back to his own room to try to rest.
But rest wouldn't come; his sleep had already been interrupted twice by the nightmares. This last one had been mild compared to the first: in that one, Gomez had been replaced by the animated corpses of casualties from his platoon on Inferno, intent on blowing up Jason and Shannon to avenge their own death.
Had he handled this situation the right way, he wondered? Or had he just gotten lucky? The fact that all of them weren't dead right now, he was certain, was more attributable to the quick thinking of his team and of Nathan Tanaka than to any decision he had made. When he cut through all the psychological defense mechanisms, he knew in his heart that he was simply scared shitless and had been ever since Inferno. He feared not his own fate so much as he feared that once more he would lead those that trusted him to their deaths, and have to live with it after.
Sighing heavily, he gave up on sleep and looked around for his clothes. The air was too Goddamned conditioned and recycled in this place anyway. He'd be spending too much of the next few months breathing shipboard air---he needed to get outside. He hesitated as he reached for his shoulder holster, slung over a chair back. Would he need it for a walk in the garden?
Shrugging, he slipped into it anyway. The thing about a gun, he remembered Grandpa McKay saying more than once, is that you'll be a lot better off having it and not needing it than needing it and not having it. Grandpa was a real throwback, but McKay hadn't known him to be wrong about much.
He pulled his khaki shirt over the holster, then found a jacket in the closet. Though the mansion was in a much more temperate clime than the Wastes, it was still high desert; and, if it was anything like the deserts he'd visited on Earth, it would get pretty damned cold at night.
The halls of the mansion's guest wing were dark and deserted as he padded silently down them, letting the shadows swallow him up. Did he need to think this through, he wondered, or stop thinking? Sometimes, he felt like he thought too much, although he doubted he would have been able to get his advisors in college to agree with that proposition.
Jason wandered out of the guest wing, through the wheel-like hub between the wings of the building, and finally out a set of open double-doors into the large gardens behind the mansion. Roland Sigurdsen had plenty of connections with the corporations that helped fund the colonies under the umbrella of the Republic Resources Development Council, and it was clear from the lavish way he'd poured money into the mansion that he exploited them to their fullest. The garden covered nearly an acre, its perimeter marked by a hand-cut stone wall, decorated by classical-period statues, but the extravagance wasn't in the size or the decoration, but in the flora itself: all were Earth plants and flowers, which meant that all were produced from genetically engineered seeds grown specifically to adapt to the conditions on Aphrodite. As much as the engineered food crops cost, engineered decorative plants, being far rarer, were a level of magnitude greater in price.
Just from what Jason could see by the soft gleam of the nightlights that lined the path, the garden must have represented about a hundred thousand dollars in seed money alone. Of course, Sigurdsen hadn't paid it, and it likely hadn't come out of colonial funding, either. No, it was much more probable that it had come in the way of "donations" from the local multicorps representatives, in exchange for letting them walk all over the environmental and labor regulations in the mines and on the corporate farms. Or maybe, McKay reflected, he was just getting cynical in his old age.
Yeah, right.
He paused next to a round, polished stone bench and took a deep breath of the chill night air, slowly letting it out. He was finally beginning to relax.
"I just love the night air," the voice came from behind him. He didn't remember moving, but suddenly he was crouching behind the bench with his gun in his hand, pointing it at Valerie O'Keefe.
"Shit." He started breathing again, stuffing his pistol away as he rose to his feet.
"Didn't mean to startle you," Val apologized, seemingly unaffected by his reaction. "I just couldn't sleep---and, like I said, I love the night air out in the desert." She shrugged, sitting down on the bench. "It's so...clean. And clear." She looked up at the night sky. "You can see so many stars."
"Yeah," he murmured, surprised at how civil she was being, but a bit annoyed at having his solitude disturbed. "Well, I guess I'd better get back inside." He started to turn back toward the mansion, and was surprised again to be stopped by her hand on his arm.
"Don't go yet," she asked him, her voice earnest and almost pleading. As he moved back, the glow from the ring of chemical lights at the base of the bench lit up her face and he noticed the tracks of dried tears staining her cheeks.
"Ms. O'Keefe..." he began.
"Valerie," she told him, letting her hand slip off his arm and fall back into her lap. "Please call me Valerie."
"Uh..." he stammered, "okay, Valerie." The name seemed to stumble awkwardly off his lips. "Anyway, it's kind of cold out here, and you're not exactly dressed for it," he pointed out, actually noticing the light blouse and mid-thigh denim skirt she was wearing only after he made the comment.
"I'll be fine," she insisted. "Sit down for a minute."
Against every ounce of better judgment in his body, Jason eased down next to her, feeling the chill of the stone bench even through his fatigue pants.
"The real reason I came out here," Valerie confessed, not looking at him, "is that I saw you from my room, and I wanted to talk to you." She met his gaze hesitantly, and the words she spoke seemed to have to claw their way free of her throat. "I wanted to thank you for saving our lives today. And apologize for the trouble we've given you since this whole thing started."
Jason shrugged. "Hell, it was probably just as much my fault as it was yours." Actually, he thought to himself, it was probably mostly your boyfriend's fault. But that, he decided, was best left unsaid.
"I just wanted you to know," she went on, "that just because I don't approve of the way that the government is using the military doesn't mean I don't respect it...and you. If you and your people hadn't acted so quickly, we would have all been killed."
"We only did what we had to do," he told her honestly. "I've got to admit to you, Ms. O'Kee...Valerie, that when I saw that big lump of plastique, I was thinking more about my ass than my duty."
She shook her head, seeming not to hear his reply, her eyes focussed on an unseen memory.
"I can't understand men like him," she murmured softly. Men like who? Jason wondered. "How could he do it?" she asked. "Didn't he know that I---that we were trying to help his people? To help all the emigrants?"
Okay, he got it now. It was Gomez she was talking about. But did she really want an answer to those questions? And if she did, how much of an answer did he have? He wasn't a sociologist, just a soldier.
"My old military history professor back at UC San Diego," he said, framing the best reply h
e could muster, "used to call men like Gomez 'the horsemen'---men like Attila the Hun or Adolf Hitler; the men who believe that might makes right, who want what someone else has and would rather take it by force than work for it. He said that no matter how far humanity advances, and no matter how civilized we think we are, there'll always be the horsemen waiting in the wings to catch us with our guard down."
He could see the old man in his mind's eye---Dr. Hans Gabriel had been well over a hundred, but he was still out on the campus jogging track every morning at six, his long white hair tied back in a ponytail. Someone had told him that the Doctor had been in the US Army during the Sino-Russian War.
"Every generation, Dr. Gabriel said," Jason went on, recalling one of Gabriel's lectures almost word-for-word, "there's always a call from those that think we've come too far to need a military anymore, that we've tamed the horsemen forever---bred the trait out of us. They're always well-meaning and idealistic, and it's hard to disagree with their reasoning. But they're wrong, every time."
"I just thought," Valerie sighed, looking up at the heavens, "that things might be different now."
"I know what you mean," McKay said, leaning back with her but thinking of another sky. "When I was in college, I used to rent a sailboat on the weekends and take it out into the bay at night and just lie back and look at the stars for hours. I thought that if I could get up there someday, that everything would be better somehow. That having done something as incredible as travelling to another star would give everything a whole new perspective. That's why I joined the Marines, really---I'm not good enough with math for the Fleet, and I wanted more than anything to get up there." He chuckled softly. "I guess I forgot that no matter what else changes, human nature usually doesn't. We could leave all the old prejudices and the old boundaries back on Earth, but the one thing we couldn't leave behind was ourselves."
"Oh!" Valerie pointed up past the mansion roof. "Look at the shooting stars!"
Jason followed her stare to the bright sparkle winking out in the night sky, then tracked backward along its path till he saw a cluster of the flashing streaks coming down almost directly overhead.
"That's funny," he muttered. "There wasn't anything in the dailies about a meteor shower."
"It's so beautiful," Valerie said, and McKay could have sworn she snuggled up closer to him.
"Yeah," Jason agreed, finding himself staring at her rather than the starfield above. Her auburn hair spilled over her shoulders, the pale skin of her neck glowing in the chemical light. "Beautiful."
Her gaze drifted away from the sky and back to his face. Jason had a sudden jolt of fear that she would see through his eyes to the stirring of desire behind them and recoil in horror. Maybe she should be horrified, he thought to himself. He knew he shouldn't be feeling this, not for her and not now. But she didn't recoil, and she didn't seem the least bit horrified. Instead, the look in her eyes was more akin to hunger. Her hand moved from the cold surface of the bench to the warmth of his face as she stroked his cheek, giggling at the day's growth of stubble that tickled her palm.
"We shouldn't be doing this," Jason blurted, trying futilely to will himself to get up and walk away. "This isn't right."
"No," she agreed, leaning in to cover his lips with hers. "It isn't right at all."
This, he told himself, was not happening, not to him. It just wasn't possible. He had never been the type of guy to keep a string of girls hanging around in prep school or college---he'd had a grand total of four girlfriends through his twenty-second birthday. He'd always been the loyal, good-guy type that everyone wanted to set their sister up with. Through four years in the Marines, though he'd frequented the government-licensed escorts at the Rec centers, he'd avoided preying upon the "farmer's daughters"---the Marine slang term for young, vulnerable colonists of both sexes. As an enlisted man, he'd been called "St. Jason" by his buddies.
And now, in the most responsible position he'd ever held, he had not only entered into a potentially serious relationship with his second-in-command, but he was making out on a garden bench of a colonial governor with the senator's daughter he was assigned to protect.
Sorry, he whispered silently to the spiritual bureaucrats in charge of his fate, but you seem to have me confused with some other Jason McKay.
And then, as if to prove his point, something about the size of a bus fell out of the sky and came within about ten meters of squashing them flat.
"Holy shit!" Jason squawked as they both tumbled sideways off the bench in a tangle of arms and legs, finally rolling off of each other and coming to a half-crouch as they stared at the thing in stunned disbelief.
It was teardrop-shaped and made of some kind of dull metal, though patches of burned and melted foam suggested it had once been covered with something else; and a ragged, torn section of black cloth from the top of it fluttered in the breeze like a crow's wing.
"How the hell..." McKay gaped at the thing, which had dug itself a three-meter deep trench in the middle of the governor's prize rose bushes. He'd been about to ask how the thing had gotten there, but his questioned was answered in the next moment, when another of the pods glided in out of the night on a thirty-meter black parasail and crashed into the upper floor of the governor's mansion.
"Oh, my God!" Valerie screamed. "Glen!"
Jason was too preoccupied to note how ironic her concern was considering what they'd been about to do, but he did feel a sinking feeling in his gut---not unmixed with a pang of guilt---when he realized that Shannon, too, was in the building. He jumped to his feet, hearing alarm sirens wailing from the guard barracks off to the west side of the mansion, and was about to rush back inside when a loud series of sharp bangs stopped him in his tracks.
A line of explosive bolts arrayed around the waist of the pod popped like a string of firecrackers and the bulbous shape began splitting along the seam, the blasts from the bolts enveloping everything for ten meters around in a wreath of grey fog. McKay wanted to run---wanted suddenly, worse than anything, to get away from this thing---but the spectacle playing itself out before him seemed to hold him enthralled, unable to move. A dark recess of his mind expected some eldritch horror to emerge from the opening pod, covered in slimy tentacles.
What did come out of the gap in the metal, stepping slowly but evenly out of the cloud of smoke into the glare of one of the emergency floodlights, was something a bit more prosaic but no less dangerous: a half-dozen man-shaped figures in heavy, brown-camouflaged armor, arms full of wicked-looking metal objects that were easily recognizable as weaponry. Backlit by floodlights, their shadows looming menacingly toward Jason and Val, the armored figures seemed gigantic: McKay estimated they had to be at least two meters tall.
The lead figure, faceless behind the polarized visor of its full helmet, swung its bullpup-configuration rifle toward them, the bird-cage of the muzzle-brake yawning wide. Jason made a sudden grab for his pistol, sure that he was dead, but the chatter of gunfire behind them distracted both his attention and that of the intruders.
Three of Sigurdsen's hired security force were dashing across the garden from the mansion's rear patio, their compact submachineguns spitting fire as they shot from the hip and on the run. The unaimed volley of ceramic bullets shattered statues and ricocheted loudly off the open pod, but didn't come within five meters of hitting the target. The intruders unhurriedly turned on the approaching guards and returned fire, metallic cases spewing from the actions of their autorifles as they stuttered out a hail of projectiles. Two of the mercs went down immediately, red flowers blossoming on their chests as the invaders' bullets penetrated the soft body armor there, while the third dove behind a low wall. The invaders seemed to ignore McKay and Valerie, intent on pouring a volume of fire into that barrier to deal with the more immediate threat.
The hysterical paralysis that had gripped him a moment before gone, Jason realized that the time was right to take advantage of the distraction and get the hell out of there. Without a word, he gra
bbed Valerie O'Keefe's hand, yanked her to her feet and took off at a dead sprint. The mansion---much as he wanted to get to it, to Shannon and his team---was out of the question: there were already a full dozen of the armored troops between them and the house, and the pods seemed to be landing everywhere. That left two possibilities: the guard shack or the garages. He made up his mind immediately: the guard shack would draw too much attention---they had to reach the garages.
The continuing rattle of automatic weapons fire dogged their heels; and, as they rushed out the closest gate in the garden wall, the dull stutter was punctuated by the rolling roar of an explosion. Jason jerked his head around, risking the possibility of a misstep to sneak a look back at the mansion. Near the area where the pod had crashed, a red crackle of flame had begun to lick across the mansion’s roof, and he could see a dark wisp of smoke wafting into the starlit sky. He resisted the urge to scream a curse at the gods, knowing he would need all the breath he had, but he knew what that hint of flame meant: if the automatic fire-control systems hadn't already extinguished it, they must have been disabled by the crash of the enemy pod. Shannon and the others were trapped, with fire on one side and the invaders on the other.
His body wanted to turn back, run into the teeth of the fight and die with them. What kept him running away from it was something he hadn't thought a great deal about in the last few years---his duty.
"Jesus," he heard Valerie hiss, then felt her stumble and fall into him, taking them both down. He managed to fall into a half-kneeling position and catch her before she hit the ground, but he could see that her eyes were not on him but the growing conflagration back at the governor's mansion. "What can we do?" she asked him, the agony in her voice mirroring the pain in his soul.
"Nothing," he snapped, pulling her to her feet. "We've got to get out of here now or we'll wind up dead---or worse."
Her eyes seemed to widen at the idea there was something worse than death that could happen to them, and she followed him without argument as he led her across the lawn at a right angle to the mansion. The garage was a high-ceilinged, prefab structure with large windows lining its long sides; at this hour, it was deserted and dark but for the emergency floodlights that had snapped on with the onset of the still-wailing alarms. McKay ignored the roll-up doors that took up most of the building's front wall, heading instead to one of the smaller, side entrances. The lock was a complex, security-coded affair that looked too complicated to pick, so Jason blew it apart with a double-tap from his pistol, then kicked the door in. The interior of the garage was threateningly dark, the glow from the chemical ghostlights shattered into elongated shadows by the hulking metal shapes of various groundcars and cargo trucks.
