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  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 government had spent something like two thirds of a million creds to raise him from squatter to fighter pilot. And they didn’t trust him?

  “It’s not about trust, Lieutenant. It’s about your emotional stability, about whether or not you’re going to have a bad day someday, maybe get pissed off at someone else in the squadron, and in an emotional moment you make a bad decision.” He started to protest, and she gave him a hard look. “It has happened before, hasn’t it?”

  “You mean when I decked Howiedoin’ at SupraQuito? That was handled NJP.”

  “‘Non-judicial punishment.’ I know. It’s in your record.”

  “So I did my time. Got scolded by the Old Woman, restricted to quarters, and lost a month’s pay.”

  “But it was a bad decision on your part, wasn’t it?”

  “The ba
stard had it coming.”

  “And you’re getting angry and defensive right now, just talking about it. Am I right?”

  He was about to tell George to shut up and get out of his face, then realized she was trying to provoke him, trying to prod an emotional reaction out of him. “Don’t tell me what I’m supposed to feel,” he said quietly. “My mind is still my own. So are my feelings.”

  “Up to a point, Lieutenant. Up to a certain, and limited, point. What I’m trying to establish is that you boost down those launch tubes almost every day with more firepower at your fingertips than has been expended in all of the wars fought by Humankind since World War I. The jihadist nukes that took out the city centers of Paris, Chicago, and Washington were in the ten- to twelve-kiloton range. The one that got Tel Aviv was a little more, twenty kilotons or so. Your commanding officers—and the Confederation government—need to know that you are stable, competent, and reliable. Naval space aviation requires cool reasoning, a clean organic-cyber network connection, and emotions that are under control. No hotshots. No show-offs. And no one who’s going to go off half-cocked when someone calls him a name, like Prim or monogie.”

  Fresh anger flared for an instant. His fists clenched. “Okay!” He forced his fists to relax, then said, more quietly, “Okay. Look, if I’m a risk, a threat to the Navy, kick me out! Send me back to the Periphery!”

  “Is that what you really want?”

  The reply stopped him cold.

  The Authority might have been swinging its mass around when it brought him in, but the truth was that Trevor Gray had really started growing when he joined the Navy. Hell, you could romanticize the free life of the Periphery…but what “free life” really meant was constant raids by other clans and families, near-starvation in the winter if you didn’t have a big enough stock of nano for food, clothing, and clean water, and a short, brutish life span that generally ended with a gang fight, with an accident, or with disease and exposure, all without the healthcare to see you through.

  He missed his friends, the others in his TriBeCa Tower family. But in exchange, he’d received an education, social standing, implants, and a purpose…not bad for a filthy gutter kid from the Manhattan Ruins.

  “It’s not about what I want,” he insisted, though the words sounded uncertain even to him. “Why even bring me in in the first place? I wasn’t bothering anyone out in the Ruins.”

  “The Confederation is dedicated to bringing the benefits of technic civilization to all of its citizens,” she told him.

  “Bull. They wanted someone who could fly Starhawks. If they don’t want me to fly, they can send me back to where they found me.”

  “It’s not that easy, Lieutenant, and you know it. You—” She broke off in mid-sentence, listening.

  “What is it?” Gray asked. She appeared to be receiving a base announcement of some sort. Gray’s in-head circuitry was attuned to the naval Net on board the America, not the Marine version in use here.

  “It’s time for us to evacuate, Lieutenant,” she told him. “They’re ordering us topside, right now, to the transports.”

  “So where does that leave me?”

  “I’m recommending continued therapy, Lieutenant. With me, or with therapy teams on the America, or back at Mars, it doesn’t matter. But you’re going to need to break that PTED cycle before you launch in a Starhawk again.”

  And he was dismissed. A Marine escort led him to the shuttle, and he never saw Anna George again.

  He did know, however, that he was going to spend a lot of time thinking about just what it was he wanted out of the Navy, and about what the Navy wanted back from him.

  Chapter Eleven

  26 September 2404

  MEF HQ

  Landing Pad

  Eta Boötis IV

  1807 hours, TFT

  “This way, Lieutenant,” said the escort, a young Marine corporal. The name showing high on the right chest of his combat armor was Anderson. “This Choctaw is slated for the America. You’ll be able to rejoin your squadron there.”

  Gray looked out past a sea of thronging people, civilians, most of them. The large majority were women, most of them veiled inside their clear helmets, many completely anonymous beneath the traditional burqas draped over lightweight e-suits. There were lots of children as well, the youngest in survival bubbles, older ones clinging to mothers or older siblings, the oldest trying to look stolid and brave.

  “All of these people are going to the America too?”

  “These are, yes, sir. They’ve been sending them up by the shuttle-full for hours now. I hear they’re packing them into every ship in the battlegroup.”

  Gray looked at a nearby child of perhaps three, squalling inside her e-suit’s bubble helmet as her mother held her, bouncing her up and down. The inside of the bubble was nearly opaque with moisture from the screaming, though Gray could still make out the child’s red and contorted face. “It’s going to be an interesting trip home.”

  “Yes, sir,” the corporal agreed with considerable feeling.

  Not all of the people boarding the shuttle were women and children, however. There were a few men sprinkled in among them. One, a couple of meters away, wore a black e-suit with a green-and-yellow patch of the Mufrid Defense Militia, a local group that worked as military auxiliaries in support of the Marines.

  Gray found the fact that so many women were wearing burqas over their e-suits interesting. Only the most conservative and traditional of Islamic women still wore the things, which were supposed to conceal the woman’s shape and keep her from offending—or tempting—male believers. Individual cultures tended to determine for themselves what was properly modest and what was not, and the women of those Islamic states on Earth that had accepted the White Covenant tended not to wear veils or similar heavily concealing garb. The Haris colonists, though, appeared to have reverted to form-hiding drapery, even when the woman was wearing a head-to-toe environmental skinsuit and bubble helmet that could not in any way be described as sexy.

  “How many are there?”

  “God knows, sir. Six or seven thousand, I heard. They’re even bringing them in from the other Mufrid colonies out there.”

  Gray had heard that there were five other outposts on Haris besides the main colony-research station called Jauhar, or Jewel, and that two of those outposts had been incinerated by the Turusch during the past few weeks. Three, however, had not been attacked, and the Navy was trying to get as many women and children out of those surviving bases as possible.

  As Gray and his escort started across the field, falling in with the women and children, he heard a low and menacing rumble from the civilians on the perimeter. They’d completely ringed in the landing field, and were blocked from approaching the grounded Choctaw shuttle by a painfully thin line of armored Marines. This crowd, most of them men, had been silent at first, but they were becoming more agitated now. One man was standing on a balcony overlooking the landing field and the mob, shouting something incomprehensible.

  “What’s he saying?” Gray asked.

  “Beats the hell out of me, sir,” the corporal replied. He looked nervous, staring across the crowd and fingering the stock of his laser rifle.

  “He is saying,” said the male civilian with the MDM patch on his shoulder, “that this is blasphemy in the eyes of God and the Prophet, may his name be forever blessed…and that those who return to Earth and to Earth’s oppression…” The man broke off the translation, listening, then shook his head inside his bubble helmet. “I don’t think you really want to hear this, sir.”

  “Maybe we should hear,” Gray said. He was measuring the distance they still had to cross to reach the waiting Choctaw, wondering what the chances were that he would make it on board with this pass, or if he would have to wait for the next ride out.

  “He is saying that it is God’s will that we all stay and face the aliens, that…that Shaitan waits to devour us all on Earth….”

  “God help us,” the corpor
al muttered.

  The civilian looked at Gray, and extended a gloved hand. “I am Sergeant Muhammad Baqr,” he said. “Militia, attached to the Marine 4th SAR/Recon.”

  “A pleasure. I’m—”

  “Lieutenant Gray, I know. I was part of the hopper team that pulled you out of that tangle of shadow swarmers last night.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  Abruptly, four Marines appeared on the shuttle ramp ahead. One was holding up his hand, his helmet moving slowly back and forth. There was no more room on that Choctaw, and he was stopping the queue.

  Screams and cries arose from the waiting civilians, and the men outside the perimeter began shouting and shaking their fists. The Marines began backing the civilians away from the ramp, gesturing for them to get back.

  “I don’t like the looks of this,” Gray said.

  “Very bad,” Baqr agreed. “Very bad…”

  The ramp pulled back inside the Choctaw, and the hopper began to rise, a spooling whine coming from its power plant, navigation lights winking, broad, flat wings unfolding. A stone, hurled from the mob outside the perimeter, struck the glossy black hull and bounced off, as a ripple in the nano-sheathing spread out from the point of impact. Another rock followed, and missed.

  The mob surged forward.

  “Back!” a Marine on the perimeter line shouted. “Get back!”

  But the mob began breaking through. One of the Marines fired, the laser a bright flash, and then people in the mob were screaming and cursing. More rocks flew, most of them hitting the civilians still lined up at the landing pad.

  The roar of the mob was deafening as they shouted in unison, “Allahu akbar!”

  God is great.