by Ben Weaver
“Don’t say that.” I took her into my arms, hugged her so tightly that I thought I’d break her ribs. “I’m sorry I had to order you away. I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.” She broke the embrace, brushed hair from her eyes.
It dawned on me then that she had arrived, yet my tablet had remained suspiciously silent. I crossed to the instrument, examined the status panel. No problem there. “Did you check in?” I asked her.
“I haven’t had a chance.”
“How did you get on board without checking in?”
She tapped her temple.
“Why did you do that?”
“It’s a long story. But for now, let’s just say I don’t want anyone except you guys to know I’m here. Not just yet.”
I stroked her cheek. “I want to hear this long story right now.”
She started wearily for my latrine. “I need a shower, something to eat, then I have a few things I need to do. Look, I know it sounds all clandestine, but I’ll explain everything in a few hours.”
Halitov turned a wary glance on me as Jing removed her boots, unzipped her utilities, then padded into the latrine. Once she had turned on the water, he stage-whispered, “She’s the traitor!”
I smiled. “Maybe you are.”
“I’m serious!”
“Maybe she’s helping Sheffield and Ishmar. By manipulating the bond the way she does, she can be a fly on the wall pretty much anywhere. So they’re using her as a spy.”
“Or maybe that’s her cover. She’s a traitor. But she lies to us and says she’s working for them.”
“Or maybe she did something back at Columbia that she doesn’t want anyone to know about yet. Sound familiar?”
“We can play these guessing games all night,” he said, then finished his drink. “Why don’t you slip into the shower with her and find out what’s going on—because if you don’t, I will.” He pried himself up, turned for the latrine.
I steered him toward the hatch. “Go get cleaned up. Have a cup of coffee or something. I’ll call you when we’re ready to get a bite.”
“I’m telling you, Scott. She’s a woman of sinister beauty. Don’t trust her.”
“A woman of sinister beauty? Where the hell did you read that?”
“In one of my comic books, but I’m telling you, it’s true.”
“See you, Rooslin,” I said, then pushed him into the corridor.
I went to my gelrack, sat, fell back onto the mattress. The sound of running water, the cool comfort of the rack, and the vodka’s numbing bliss took me back to my childhood, to quiet nights lying in my bed at home, listening to Jarrett breathe and to my father watching holos in the living room. Soon, the water stopped running. Jing toweled off, came over to the gelrack, and crawled on top of me.
“We have a chance now,” she said, leaning over me. “Let’s not waste it.”
Water dripped from her hair and onto my cheeks. As she reached to wipe it off, I pulled her down and gave her the kiss I should have given her when we were on Vanguard One’s OBS deck. I felt neither guilt nor regret. I felt that being with Jing was what Dina wanted for me. I felt a future in that kiss. And, as we began to explore each other’s bodies, I couldn’t help but smile.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am very sure.”
“That’s good. I like a man with a purpose.”
I could describe in gratuitous and pornographic detail how Jing and I made love—which would no doubt thrill someone like Halitov—but the cries, the dampness of our skin, and the knots we tied ourselves into as we rocked toward climax were not as important as the fact that we had finally exposed those feelings lying deep inside us. We had risked everything with each other. In fact, the moment would have been perfect, were it not for Halitov’s warning echoing in my head. Don’t trust her.
Afterward, we just lay there, staring at the overhead. I hoped she thought I was a good lover. She seemed to enjoy it, but I didn’t have the courage to ask. Of course, I didn’t have a lot of experience, and it occurred to me then that she had not been taken aback by my aging, nor had it hindered her desire to be with me.
“I’m having sex with the battalion commander,” she finally said out of nowhere. “Whoa, I’m a bad girl.”
“I’m not exactly the battalion commander anymore.”
She rolled over, glanced emphatically. “What exactly are you?”
“Look at me.”
“I have. And Rooslin, too. Isn’t there anything they can do?”
“Yeah, they’ve relieved me of my command. Rooslin and I are going to be combat consultants working with Colonel Beauregard. Our days in the field are over.”
“No, they can’t do that. That’s not right. They’ll be wasting you. Have you talked to Ms. Brooks?”
“I’m having trouble reaching her.”
“That’s odd. Vanguard One’s sitting a couple thousand kilometers off our port bow.”
“Then they just got here.”
“I think so. But never mind them. I’m thinking about the Minsalo Caves on Exeter. You said the aging reversed itself when you were there.”
“It did, but the effect is temporary. What am I supposed to do? Spend the rest of my life living in a cave?”
“I think you and Rooslin have to go back. I think that if there’s an answer to this problem, it’s there.”
“Beauregard was recalled from Exeter. The moon is still controlled by the Alliances. We wouldn’t even get close.”
“I can get us in there.”
“I don’t know. Maybe Ms. Brooks has come up with something.”
“And if she hasn’t? What’re you going to do? Play professional victim?”
“No, I just—”
“Oh, no. Here it comes.”
“I’m going to do my duty until I can’t do it anymore.”
She snorted, raked fingers through her hair. “And I’m going to do whatever I can to help you, whether you want the help or not. Because if you don’t, then you’re being selfish. There are, in fact, other people who care about you.”
“I know. Let’s get up.” And even as I rose, my tablet sounded with an incoming message.
“I’ll bet that’s her,” said Jing.
“And I’m gambling with you,” I said, reading the screen.
Ms. Brooks requested that Halitov and I meet with her privately aboard Vanguard One. Unfortunately, Halitov had had way too much to drink and had passed out in his quarters. I shared with Ms. Brooks Halitov’s “illness,” and she said we could delay the meeting for an hour or two, but no more than that. Jing and I dragged Halitov into the shower, where he swore up a storm as the hot spray brought him back from the underworld of Tau Cetian spirits. While Jing went off to fetch him some coffee, I made sure he got dressed.
“What? You’re going to stand there and watch me?” he asked.
“This meeting is important,” I said. “That is, if you actually give a shit about your future.”
“Oh, I still have one of those? I could’ve sworn they took that away from me.”
“Just get dressed.”
He pulled on a pair of boots. “So did you talk with Jing?”
“Yeah, we talked.”
A smile played over his lips. “Did you enjoy the…conversation?”
“None of your business, all right?”
He winked. “I knew she’d be good. Just look at the body on her. I’m sure you got all the information you need to make your determination. One piece of advice, though. Screw her, yeah. Trust her, no.”
“Here’s the coffee,” Jing said, keying open the hatch. She read our expressions. “What’s wrong?”
“Uh, I forget to tell you that I wanted tea,” Halitov said as I winced over the lame explanation.
While me and Mr. Tea Drinker caught a shuttle for Vanguard One, Jing went off to take care of “some things.” I glanced absently through a viewport at the void
of space while Halitov rambled on about us walking in there and issuing Ms. Brooks a list of our demands. When he was finished, he asked if I agreed.
I glanced lazily at him. “What’re you talking about?”
“You’re not listening to me,” he said, then shook his head vigorously. “You never do. Why do I bother?”
“Rooslin, I’m sorry. I’m just…tired.”
“You’re not tired. You’re old. And we have to do something about this. That’s why we have to go in there and make our demands.”
I looked at him. The son of a bitch was right. And Jing had been right. I was playing professional victim because I thought it was my duty. It wasn’t.
So when we walked into Ms. Brooks’s office, where she was just finishing up a conversation with Colonel Beauregard, I approached quickly, saluted the colonel, then turned to her, a heartbeat away from shouting our demands. Then the honorable soldier took over, damn it. “Hello, ma’am. I just wanted to thank you for sending down that Force Recon team. They saved our lives.”
“You’re very welcome, Major.”
“Yes, we appreciate that. But we’re tired of being lied to and screwed over by you people.”
Ms. Brooks looked aghast. “Major—”
“You promise everything, deliver nothing. You want us to be combat consultants? Unless you can help us get reconditioned, we might be dead in a month.”
“Major—”
“I’m hoping you have answers for me, because if you don’t, the captain and I are going to walk through that hatch—and we don’t care if you arrest us for going AWOL.”
“Major, please—”
“At least we won’t be used anymore.”
Her eyes grew even wider. The colonel’s pipe slipped from his lips.
The honorable soldier had finally spoken his peace.
5
Halitov looked as dumbfounded as Ms. Brooks and the colonel. The sheen in his eyes told me that going AWOL had not occurred to him. More than that, his nervousness confused me; after all, wasn’t he expecting a general court-martial? That might land him in prison just the same.
“Ma’am, you’ll have to excuse him,” said Halitov. “We had a rough time at Columbia.”
“Don’t make excuses for me,” I snapped. “And you’re calling our op there a ‘rough time’? That’s the understatement of the year.”
“Calm down,” ordered Colonel Beauregard, his thick shock of gray hair looking freshly buzzed, his frown lines deepening for a moment before he retrieved his pipe. “I’ll have both of you thrown in the brig before you get a chance to go AWOL.”
“Sorry, sir,” said Halitov.
I gave my former XO an incredulous look, but then I understood: he assumed the colonel and Ms. Brooks had read his scan report and knew about what had happened at LockMar Randall. He had finally come to the realization that insubordination would not help his case. But that realization had come on so quickly that it left me standing there, alone in my fury. He had always been the hothead.
“Major…Scott…” began Ms. Brooks in a soothing voice. “You’ve been through a lot, we know. And we promised to help with getting you reconditioned. We’re going to keep that promise.”
“When?”
“And how?” asked Halitov, though his tone hardly held a challenge. “You’ve found another conditioning facility?”
“No, but our researchers have developed a series of treatments that should stabilize your aging until we can recover the remaining facility on Exeter.”
“But the quake there caused permanent damage,” I said, avoiding the fact that the quake had most certainly been created by the Wardens themselves, as part of their plan to kidnap cadets and turn them into Wardens. “Paul said that alliance scientists were trying to get the facility back online, but from what I’ve read, they haven’t. What makes you believe you can repair it when they can’t? Was our intell corrupt?”
“That information is classified,” said the colonel. “But suffice it to say that we have one new piece of data that the alliances don’t have. I was en route to Exeter to launch a new attack when they struck Columbia. We’re going back to Exeter. Soon.”
“Sir, I suggest that before you do that, you weed out the person or people who gave up our encryption codes at Columbia, otherwise—”
“Major, you cite the obvious, and you know we’re working on that.”
“I’ll tell you who I suspect,” began Halitov.
I silenced him with my eyes.
“We’re doing everything we can to address that problem,” said Ms. Brooks. “Though just a few moments ago we learned some disturbing news. Apparently, some conditioned individuals have developed a new talent for manipulating their long- and short-term memories. Our researchers have confirmed it.”
“I thought no one could defy a scan,” said Halitov, perking up over that prospect.
“In your case, Captain, you couldn’t hide your thoughts,” Colonel Beauregard said, aiming his pipe at Halitov. “Technically, you did not disobey orders, but you did misdirect your people. Your actions were selfish, your judgment poor. Perhaps you’ll make a few trips to express your condolences to some of the families.”
Halitov choked up. “Yes, sir.”
“And you, Major,” the colonel continued. “You practically volunteered information.”
I knew I was blushing, but I couldn’t help it. I suddenly remembered when I had been captured aboard the Rhode Island. I had been scanned back then, and I had given the enemy everything they had wanted. “Sir, do we know how these soldiers developed the skill? Were they taught it? Or did it occur naturally? And have we found any data in the Racinian ruins regarding this?”
Ms. Brooks picked up her tablet and thumbed through a few electronic pages until she found the one she wanted. “Okay, here it is. Basically, all we know is that the subjects had specific data cerebroed into their long-term memories. We then asked them to concentrate on hiding the data from our scan. Several of them were successful, yet none of them has been able to explain how they did it. They just said, and I quote, ‘it’s a feeling we have.’”
“What about drugs?” I asked.
“The subjects were able to defy every one we tested on them.”
Halitov’s face tightened in worry. “So let me get this straight. We scan everyone, but conditioned soldiers—we don’t know who—will be able to defy the scan.”
“That’s right,” said Ms. Brooks. “And we can’t round up and detain every conditioned soldier we have. That would leave us vulnerable to attack.”
“Then how’re we supposed to catch these people?” Halitov asked. “Do you have any leads? Anything?”
“We’re working with the people from satnet and with our own communications experts to track transmissions and all chips tawted out prior to the attack,” answered Ms. Brooks. “We have a few other leads—and we’ll follow up on those with some good old-fashioned detective work on the part of officers working closely with conditioned soldiers. It may take time, but we’ll resolve this issue.”
“Is Captain Jing working for you?” I asked.
Ms. Brooks hesitated. “We have many operatives working for us now. I won’t confirm or deny whether the captain is working for us. What makes you suspect she is?”
I didn’t like Ms. Brooks’s tone and decided not to press the issue. “Just a hunch, given her skills.”
“I see.”
“Gentlemen, despite all of this bad news, something promising has come out of the massacre at Columbia,” said the colonel, shifting across the room. “Actually, two things.”
He had my interest. How could something promising come out of all of that death?
“I suspect you two haven’t tuned in to the news feed. Well, fourteen nations—including the United States—have just split from the Western Alliance in protest over the massacre. We’re presently negotiating with them.”
“You mean we might be able to turn them into allies?” I asked excitedly.
“Western Alliance Marines fighting side-by-side with Colonial Wardens?”
“It’s a long shot,” he replied. “But it could happen. We’ll take on what’s left of the Western Alliance and the East. We’ll finally have a fighting chance.”
I glanced at Halitov, who had already brightened. “Sounds good, but you have to wonder if battlefield commanders are going to trust each other—especially now with all of these counterintelligence ops going on.”
“We’re hoping that the idea of us joining forces will pose enough of a threat to make the enemy stand down and accept our independence,” the colonel said. “Whether we’ll actually have to run a joint op remains to be seen.”
“Even more promising is the fact that we’re going to get a majority vote in congress to allow the Wardens to take over the Seventeen System Guard Corps,” said Ms. Brooks. “Given the massacre, opposing senators can no longer let alliance bribes dictate their votes. A vote against a restructuring would, in this climate, be political suicide.” Her gaze focused on me. “So, Scott, all those worries you had about us planning a coup were for nothing. This is going to happen. And it’s going to happen legally.”
“Excuse me, but if I’m understanding this correctly, we lost Columbia Colony and those millions of people, but we gained a real chance to win the war,” Halitov pointed out. “Which makes me think that our traitor and maybe his buddies anticipated this outcome. He’s working for the colonies, but he’s willing to sacrifice millions to win the war.” Make no mistake. Halitov’s gaze burned on Colonel Beauregard.
“Yes, we’re already entertaining that possibility,” Ms. Brooks said quickly. “And if it makes you feel any better, both the colonel and I have already submitted to scans, the results of which are available to you via the daily jump board.”
Colonel Beauregard grinned mildly. “I’m not insulted that you believe I could be a traitor, Captain. These days, I endorse that kind of scrutiny. In fact, when I ordered the crew aboard Vanguard One to submit to scans, I insisted that Paul be the first one on line—just to show the crew that I didn’t trust anyone, even my own son.”
