It wasn’t going to come to that. It couldn’t.
“You need to get out of the house for a while?” Lynnley asked him. “I thought we might fly out to Pacifica. Maybe do some shopping?”
John glanced back at the front door. He could hear the faint and muffled echoes of his father, still shouting. “You stupid bitch! This is all your fault! …”
“I … don’t think I’d better,” he told her. “I don’t want to leave my mom.”
“She’s a big girl,” Lynnley said. “She can take care of herself.”
But she doesn’t, he thought, bitter. She can’t. He felt trapped.
After talking with the Marine recruiter over an implant link three days ago, he and Lynnley had gone to the Marine Corps recruiter in Tiburón the next day and thumbed their papers. In less than three weeks they were supposed to report to the training center at Parris Island, South Carolina. Somehow he had to tell his parents … his mother, at least. How?
More than once in the past few years, Ellen Garroway Esteban had left the man who was, more and more, a stranger. Two years ago John had tried to get between his parents when his father had been hitting his mother and he’d received a dislocated shoulder in the subsequent collision with a bookcase. And there’d been the time when his father chased her out of the house with a steak knife … and the time she ended up in the hospital, claiming to have fallen down the stairs. John had begged her to pack up and leave, to get out while she still could. Others had done the same—her sister Carol in San Diego, the social worker who’d counseled her after her stay in the hospital, Mother Beatrice, their priest. Each time, she’d agreed the marriage was unsavable and nearly left for good … but each time, she found a reason to stay or to come back home.
One day, John was terribly afraid, she was going to come back home and Carlos was going to kill her. It would be an accident, of course. Injuries he inflicted on others always were.
John hated the thought of leaving his mother, of just walking out and abandoning her. He felt like a coward for running away like this. At the same time, he knew there was nothing else he could do to help her. Goddess knew, he’d tried, but, damn it, she kept coming back, she refused to press charges, she covered up for her husband when the police showed up in response to his panicked calls, made excuses for his behavior: “Carlos is just under a lot of stress right now. He can’t help it, really …”
His mother would have to decide to help herself. He would be gone.
But not just yet. “No,” he told Lynnley. “You go ahead. I’d better hang around and see how this plays out.”
“Suit yourself,” she told him. “Just remember, you won’t be able to protect her when you’re with the Corps off on Mars or someplace.”
“I know.” Am I doing the right thing?
He wished there was an answer to that.
3
5 JUNE 2138
IP Packet Osiris
En route, Mars to Earth
1337 hours Zulu
Colonel Ramsey lay snug within the embrace of a linking couch, only marginally aware of the steady, far-off vibration that was the packet’s antimatter drive. It converted a steady stream of water into plasma and hard radiation, blasting it astern to accelerate the blunt, bullet-shaped vessel with its outsized heat radiators at a steady one gravity. Twenty hours after boosting clear from Mars orbit, the Osiris was already traveling at over 700 kilometers per second and had covered well over 25 million kilometers.
Within his thoughts, stroked by the virtual reality AI of the Osiris communications suite, he was in a huge auditorium, the Pentagon Briefing Center, located some kilometers beneath the Potomac River. The faint, steady thrum of the packet’s main drive, starcore furies rattling just above the level of detectability in deck and titanium-ceramic bulkheads, was all but submerged by the incoming sensations of the padded auditorium seat, the murmured conversations and rustling movements of people around him, the glare off the big screen behind the podium, magnifying the features of the speaker.
“Gentlemen, ladies, AIs,” General Lawrence Haslett said, addressing both those gathered physically in the briefing center and the much larger audience present electronically as well, “as of zero-nine-thirty this morning, Operation Spirit of Humankind is go. President LaSalle signed the executive order authorizing the Llalande Relief Expedition, and both House and Senate approval are expected by tomorrow. Admiral Ballantry has cleared the use of our newest IST, the Derna, for the op, and given the orders to begin rigging her for the voyage.”
Haslett, Army Chief of Staff for the UFR/U.S. Central Military Command, gripped the sides of the podium as he spoke, his words as clear as if he were physically standing in the cramped comm suite on board the Osiris. It was hard for Ramsey to remember that the images he was seeing were already ten minutes and some seconds old. That was how long it took the comm lasers bearing the sensory data to reach Osiris from Earth.
“I needn’t tell all of you,” Haslett went on, “that this is a singularly important deployment, demanding diplomacy, tact, and a clear set of mission objectives and priorities.” He paused. “I also needn’t remind you that time is very much against us. While the FTL communicator on Ishtar provides an instantaneous link with the comm array on Mars, it will take ten years, objective, for the Derna to reach the Llalande system. By that time, of course, anything can have happened. New Sumer may have fallen, almost certainly will have fallen, if the situation continues as it has for the past few weeks. We need to proceed on the assumption that our colony will have been overrun by the rebels by that time, and craft the expeditionary force’s orders with that in mind.”
A chirp sounded over Ramsey’s implant, a question signaled from someone in the audience.
“Yes,” Haslett said.
“Yes, sir,” one of the men seated in the auditorium, an Aerospace Force colonel, said, his image thrown up on the big screen at Haslett’s back. Biographical data scrolled down the right corner of Ramsey’s vision, identifying him as Colonel Joshua Miller. “If the Llalande contact mission is already doomed, what’s the point of sending another ship out there? Is this a punitive expedition?”
“Not punitive, Colonel Miller. Not solely punitive, at any rate. You must know what the polls are saying about the situation on Ishtar.”
“I didn’t realize we were running our wars according to the poll numbers,” another officer put in, and a number of people in the auditorium chuckled.
Haslett scowled and cleared his throat. “The mission commander will have full discretionary powers to deal with the situation as he sees fit, once he arrives at Ishtar. We will be sending along firepower enough that a full range of possible military options will be available.”
“They’d damned well better,” the woman on the recliner to Ramsey’s left muttered, sotto voce, as if the people within the virtual reality transmission playing itself out within their heads might hear. “It’s a hell of a long way to call for reinforcements if the Marines get into trouble!”
“You noticed that, did you?” Ramsey said, and smiled. Major Ricia Anderson was his executive officer within their constellation. “This op is going to be a logistical nightmare.”
“Nothing new there, Colonel. The Corps always gets the short end.”
“Seal it, Rish. I want to hear.”
“This operation was originally conceived as a task force comprising a single Marine expeditionary unit,” Haslett was saying in response to another question. “The Ishtar garrison is a Marine unit, and Spirit of