This just might be the moment when the mystery was finally ended, the reality revealed.
Humans, Marines in combat armor, were coming down the ramp now. One, an officer, conferred for a moment with the officer in charge of the section waiting on the Hangar Deck.
And then the first Turusch drifted into view.
Allyn felt a stab of disappointment. The thing was wearing what presumably was the alien equivalent of an e-suit, a three-meter-long cylinder floating on grav-lifters. The tank was rounded front and back, and there was nothing like windows or a canopy through which she could glimpse the creature inside.
An armored Marine combat walker stalked down the ramp beside it, a protective measure, no doubt. If that floating tube suddenly started smashing into bystanders or equipment, a single megajoule pulse from the walker’s main gun would puncture the Tushie’s protective shell and it would choke on oxygen. That, of course, was why the creature was in the e-suit; she’d heard speculation that the things lived in a reducing atmosphere, though she didn’t know what the gas mix was. Oxygen would be a deadly poison to them.
A second floater tank appeared, emerging onto the ramp, closely escorted by another Marine walker.
So … this seemed to confirm the scuttlebutt that said the Tushies were completely nonhuman, that they couldn’t even breathe a standard gas mix. That meant that humans and Tushies weren’t fighting over the same real estate … unless, of course, they breathed the witch’s brew of sulfur compounds that made up the Harisian atmosphere. According to Naval Intelligence, though, the Tushies were the front-line forces for the mysterious Sh’daar, fighting at their orders. Even less was known about the Sh’daar than was known about the Turusch.
The ring of armored Marines in front of the shuttle parted to let the floater tanks pass through, then fell into columns behind them. The cylinders and their escorts vanished into a side passageway a moment later.
Scuttlebutt had it that the Marines on Haris had gone through a lot to capture those two prisoners. Not only that, rumor insisted that the America battlegroup had been deployed to make sure those prisoners were returned to human space; recovering them, apparently, had a far higher priority than rescuing the civilians trapped on Haris. That sucked, but she knew how the military mind worked. You had to know the enemy before you could fight him. Who’d said that … Sun Tse? She thought so.
“Commander Allyn,” a voice said in her head. “We’re ready for your debrief.”
“Very well,” she said. “On my way.”
She would have to see if anyone on the debrief team could tell her more about her squadron … or about America’s new and alien passengers.
MEF HQ
Marine Sick Bay
Eta Boötis IV
1745 hours, TFT
“We’re not done with this, Lieutenant,” Dr. George told him.
Gray scowled. “Yes we are. Sir.”
She shrugged. “You’ll be kept on limited duty until you complete the therapy to my satisfaction, or to the satisfaction of a medical review board. That means you’re off the flight line.”
She’d switched off the electronic feed to his internal circuitry, banishing the vivid lucid dreams of Manhattan. Gray was on a recliner in Anna George’s office, which had the relaxed air of a wood-paneled library. That would not be real wood on the bulkheads, of course. The entire base had been nanogrown from local raw materials five weeks ago.
But there was no practical way to tell the difference.
“There is nothing wrong with me! I … I freaked a bit when those things were crawling on me down there on the planet. But I’m okay now.”
“Lieutenant Gray, I’ve entered a provisional diagnosis in your record of PTED. That’s post-traumatic embitterment disorder, and it is potentially serious. It has little or nothing to do with what happened to you outside the perimeter yesterday, and everything to do with the events that led you to enlist in the Navy.”
“Okay, I’m carrying a grudge, if that’s what you mean, sure. I was tricked into the service, my whole life was taken away from me, I lost my wife, why shouldn’t I be bitter?”
“Good question. My question for you is … who do you blame? The Periphery Authority? The med staff at Columbia Towers? The Navy? Society in general?”
He didn’t answer.
“I suggest that you begin digging inside yourself for some answers. You had a responsibility in what happened as well.”
“I was not responsible for Angela’s stroke!”
“No. Certainly not. But you’d chosen to live on the Periphery, without healthcare, without a socially sanctioned means of support. You then chose to try to bargain with the Authority, to help your wife.”
“What would you have done?” The words, nearly, were a sneer.
“That’s not the question. You and I are completely different people, with different backgrounds, different experiences, different … programming. You made certain decisions. Some were good. Some were not as good. You need to figure out why you did what you did, why you made the choices that you made … and then you need to see where you go from where you are right now.”
“What does any of this have to do with me being on the flight line?” he demanded. “I’ve been doing my job. My duty.”
George leaned back in her seat, and appeared to be thinking about it. “Of course you have. No one is saying otherwise. But … do you understand the sort of responsibility with which you’ve been entrusted? What’s the typical warload on your Starhawk, when you go out on patrol? I think they used to call it a force package?”
He shrugged. “Depends on the mission parameters. Usually it’s anything between twenty-four and thirty-two Krait smart missiles. And we generally carry a PBP and a KK Gatling.”
“How big a punch on a Krait?”
“Again, it depends. We usually carry a mix, five to fifteen kilotons. More or less for special operations, special mission requirements.”
“So what happens if you get mad someday and fire off a fifteen-kiloton nuclear warhead while you’re still inside one of America’s launch tubes, or maybe on the flight deck?”
“That would never happen!” He was angry at the mere supposition.
“Why not?”
“Well, there are interlocks to prevent that from happening, a munitions release inside the ship or an accidental warhead arming, for one thing. For another … well, damn it, if you don’t trust me with those things, why the hell did you turn me into a pilot?”
He’d actually wondered that for a long time. When he’d been taken into custody by the Peripheral Authority, he’d been handed over to the Department of Education for a series of skills downloads and aptitude testing. He’d scored high—“off the scale,” according to one of the soshtechs—in three-dimensional visualization, navigation, and conceptualization, plus lightning-quick reaction times and low fear thresholds. They’d fast-tracked him from an uneducated Periphery vagrant to pre-flight training level with downloads in spaceflight engineering, basic astronautics, and military history in six months of download hell. They’d followed that with a year of basic Navy OCS at the Academy, then flight training in California and on Mars.
The