by John Bowers
Hugh Povar was practically shivering.
“Will you look at those tits!” he whispered. “I could kiss those once and die happy forever! Nick, have you ever seen anything like that?”
Nick nodded. “Once. What you’re looking at is a Vegan woman.”
Hugh stared at him in awe. “You mean it’s true? There’s no such thing as an ugly Vegan?”
“Yep. One hundred percent true.”
Hugh turned to stare at the blond beauty again, his breath coming in short gasps. “What do you suppose she’s doing here?” he asked.
Nick didn’t answer, but pushed himself away from the building and planted his feet. The blonde was headed directly toward them, and as she approached she broke into a smile. As Hugh Povar watched in stunned disbelief, she threw her arms around Nick’s neck and pulled him down for a long, leisurely kiss. After fully thirty seconds she pulled back and smiled up at him.
“Thanks for meeting me,” she said in a husky, sensuous voice.
Nick kissed her back. “Thanks for coming.”
The blonde turned her devastating eyes on Hugh, who gulped weakly and stood rigid as stone.
“Another U.F. Marshal,” she said with a smile.
Nick nodded. “Suzanne, meet Hugh Povar. Hugh, this is Suzanne Norgaard. My girlfriend.”
Chapter 2
“What a quaint little town!” Suzanne exclaimed as they strolled east from the train station. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s pretty.”
Nick nodded. “It’s fairly typical of this region. Hell of a lot nicer than Kline Corners, don’t you think?”
Suzanne laughed. “Interesting that you mentioned Hell and Kline Corners in the same breath. They do have a lot in common.”
Kline Corners was a small, dusty cow-town on the Sirian frontier. Nick had been posted there for just over a year, where he had met Suzanne and her daughter Kristina. The U.F. Marshal’s office had been eliminated following the Missibama elections, when Lucius Clay was elected President and immediately began to consolidate all the states into a single entity called the Sirian Confederacy. Sirius 1 had been seeking independence for several years, and the unified Confederacy satisfied Federation requirements for autonomy. The United Federation Marshal, once the most powerful law enforcement agency on Sirius, was no longer needed.
Nick had been reposted to Alpha Centauri; Suzanne and Kristina had chosen to leave as well, because Sirian attitudes toward women were practically medieval.
“Did you get Kristina settled in?” Nick gave Suzanne a squeeze around the waist.
Suzanne sighed. “I left her at Orbital Station 6 on Terra,” she said sadly. “Nathan had already arranged for her passage down to the planet. She sent me a message two days later that they had hooked up. Nathan has a small flat in London and they’re going to live together.”
Nick glanced at her in surprise. “You’re okay with that?”
She smiled weakly. “It’s Nathan. He’s a good boy. And Kristina’s already older than I was when she was born; so…”
“It’s just tough letting go.”
“Real tough.”
“If it helps any,” Nick said, “I have all the confidence in the ‘verse in Nathan. He’s strong and decent and he loves your daughter. He’ll take good care of her.”
“I know.”
As they walked east, the street gradually angled downhill. Trimmer Springs was built on a shelf in the side of the mountain, with peaks on the south end and a steep cliff on the north…with an unrestricted view of the Trimmer Plain. To Nick it seemed the town was sitting down with its back to the mountain and its legs hanging over the edge. Trimmer Springs was a mile long, but only nine blocks wide.
“So where are you taking me?” Suzanne asked with a gleam in her eye.
“Home,” he said. “To our very own house.”
“We have a house?” Her green eyes lit with excitement.
“Yes, Ma’am. A real house with a living room, a kitchen…and a bedroom!”
She laughed delightedly. “You can’t wait to show me that last one, can you?”
He shrugged, feigning innocence.
“Well, after being cooped up in a starship for two weeks, I figured a woman like you would probably be going out of her mind with sexual desire.”
“A ‘woman like me’? What kind of woman would that be?”
“A horny woman.”
“Mm. And you aren’t particularly horny yourself, you’re just thinking of my welfare?”
He winked at her. “Just doing my civic duty, Ma’am.”
As the street continued downhill they passed the church. Situated in the geographic center of town, it was a large building, occupying most of a city block, with a six-story bell tower in the front. As they walked past, Nick didn’t bother to look up. Across the street opposite the church sat a community park that covered two square blocks. It looked cool and inviting, lots of green grass, stubby pines, and willow trees. Small children chased each other in circles while a couple of bored parents watched.
“That’s a nice park,” Suzanne observed. “I don’t think I’ve seen a real park since I was a kid. There was nothing like this around Kline Corners.”
“There wasn’t much of anything around Kline Corners,” he said, “except desert and scrub.”
“Ooh, a statue! I love sculptures. Let’s take a look.”
Still holding Nick’s hand, she veered off the sidewalk, dragging him along. He felt his throat tighten as they approached the bronze figure, and his face slowly fused red. The base stood about four feet high and the statue itself was exactly five feet ten inches. The figure depicted a helmeted soldier with a sniper rifle at his shoulder, peering through a telescopic sight at a downward angle. Suzanne’s eyes were wide with curiosity as she studied the lines etched into the bronze.
“That’s really good work. It doesn’t look like it’s been here very long; it hasn’t even turned green yet.”
Nick glanced up at the figure and then away, feeling his heart beat a little faster. Suzanne didn’t seem to notice.
“Who is he?” she wondered aloud. She walked around to the front of the figure and found the inscription plate, reading slowly. As she read, her eyes widened in amazement, her voice trailing off.
“Private first class Nick Walker, Echo Company, Thirty-third Star Marines…”
She turned to him in stunned amazement.
“Nick…this is you!”
He took a deep breath and nodded, his face flaming.
“I was hoping you wouldn’t see it,” he said lamely.
“Why would you hope that?” Her eyes returned to the bronze plate and she continued reading. Nick turned and stared across the street.
“…nineteen November, oh four thirty-six, held off overwhelming rebel forces for thirty-one hours until reinforcements arrived…mm-mm-mm-mm…is credited with saving Trimmer Springs from being overrun and preventing rebel forces from flanking the main line of defense…mm-mm-mm…was awarded the Crimson Cross for wounds and the Galaxy Cross for courage above and beyond…” She closed her mouth and blinked. “Fifty-one men.”
She took a step back and turned to him.
“Nick, why did you never tell me about this?”
He turned back to face her, his mouth tightly clamped. “I didn’t know about the statue until yesterday.”
“I don’t mean that. You won the Galaxy Cross! Isn’t that one of the highest awards the Federation can offer?”
He shrugged. “Killing people isn’t something you brag about.”
Suzanne caught his expression and the excitement faded from her eyes. She walked over and pulled him into her arms.
“Now I understand the nightmares.”
Nick rested his chin on her shoulder and nodded. She pulled back and kissed him.
“If you don’t want to talk about it, then we won’t talk about it.”
He grinned feebly, blinking mist out of his eyes.
“I just wish they hadn
’t put up the damn statue,” he said. “Most of the people I killed that day still have relatives living around here.”
The house sat on the extreme north edge of town, a small, two-bedroom bungalow with a low front porch and surrounded by a wooden fence. In the rear, a lawn extended sixty feet from the back door and then dropped away sharply beyond the fence; from there the ground sloped at a forty-degree angle until it ended in a sheer cliff a hundred yards from the house. The view of Trimmer Plain was spectacular, an unrestricted vista of rolling grassland that stretched miles into the distance. Seeing it for the first time, Suzanne Norgaard sucked in her breath.
“I can’t believe it!” she gasped. “It’s even more beautiful than Vega!”
“Sure beats the hell out of the Sirian Outback,” Nick agreed.
“Honestly, I haven’t seen anything close to this since I was growing up. When my parents moved to Sirius they settled at Kline Corners and I never left.” She turned to Nick and embraced him, pressing her face into his shoulder. A stiff breeze sweeping up from the plain buffeted her hair.
“I’m so glad I decided to come with you. This is going to be so much better than Sirius.”
Nick kissed her hungrily, sucking at her full lips.
“It’s sure going to be a lot less lonely for me,” he said.
“For me, too.” She smiled. “Over the last year I kind of got used to having you around. If I had stayed on Sirius, with you and Kristina both gone, I would have been miserable.” She took his hand and led him toward the house. “Are you on duty?”
“Yeah, but I’ve been here two days and haven’t done squat.”
“Then…you don’t have to get back to work right away?”
“Not right away.”
They stepped inside the house and locked the back door. Suzanne led him into the kitchen.
“You hungry?”
“I think I missed lunch,” he admitted.
She turned to face him and began unbuttoning her blouse. He watched silently as she finished, then untied the string around her waist, pulling the blouse open to reveal her bra in all its glory.
“I wasn’t talking about lunch,” she said softly.
He nodded and reached for her with both hands.
“Starving,” he said.
* * *
Luther Nelson had been a U.F. Marshal most of his adult life. Now fifty-one, he had opted for retirement rather than face the rigors of another posting. His last ten years had been spent on Alpha Centauri in five different assignments. He’d been posted to Trimmer Springs twice, the first time at the height of the rebellion that brought Nick Walker there as a Star Marine. Now his second posting to the same town was about to end, and he was thrilled to be turning the office over to the same man whose statue stood prominently in Center Park.
Nelson looked up as Nick walked in the door a little before four in the afternoon. He leaned back in his chair and clasped his fingers behind his head, which was smooth and pink except for a grey fringe around his ears.
“Get the little lady settled in?” he grinned as Nick dropped into a chair behind his own desk.
“Sure did,” Nick said with a weary sigh.
Nelson grinned. “You were gone long enough.”
Nick smiled but didn’t respond.
“When do I get to meet her?”
“Tomorrow, maybe. She’s sleeping right now. Long trip.”
“Hah. Long reunion, if you ask me.”
“I didn’t ask you.”
Nelson hooted.
“Don’t forget,” he said. “Town meeting tonight. Got to introduce the new U.F. Marshal.”
“Oh, Christ, do you have to?”
“Yes I do. They want to get a look at you. And you need to know all the principles. Sooner or later you’ll be butting heads with most of them.”
“Are they all wackos? They look like wackos.”
“Only about half of them. The rest are just eccentric.”
“Christ.”
“Actually it’s not that bad. Only about twenty percent of the residents are religious freaks. The rest are just ordinary Federation folks. And most of the religious freaks are good people, just a little odd.”
Nick shrugged. “I guess they can’t be any worse than some of the creeps I ran into on my last two assignments.”
Nelson shook his head. “Don’t make that call yet. Like I said, most of them are okay, but the ones that are not okay will give you fits. Trouble is, they’re not like regular felons—you can’t arrest them just because they don’t like you.”
Nelson swiveled his chair around and pulled open a small nitro-cooler, extracted a bottle of cold water, and opened it. He swung back to face Nick and took a long drink.
“The name of the game around here is religion. You have your traditional Christians, pretty much all Protestants, who built the church across from the park. Then you have the other two groups. Cults, according to the Christians.”
Nick nodded. “We called them Freaks in the war. The Homerites and the…what’s the other one called?”
“The Groaners. They’re the ones you want to watch out for.”
“Seems to me I should watch out for all of them. Those two were the backbone of the Rebel Coalition a few years ago.”
“They were nearly all of it,” Nelson told him. “They don’t like each other much, but they have one thing in common—they hate the Federation even more than they hate each other.”
Nick studied a stylus lying on his desk, picked it up and played with it. He had done his homework on the starship coming in from Sirius 1, mining the ship’s database for information about Trimmer Springs. The section on the cults hadn’t been extensive, but he’d learned a little, and he had some personal memories as well. Both the Groaners and the Homerites had come from North America when Alpha 2 was first settled, and as luck would have it, settled in the same region.
Outwardly they looked very much alike, living a lifestyle similar to the Amish on Terra, but their outlook was a lot less peaceful. Both groups were seeking some sort of Utopia, a planetary paradise where they could establish a theocratic government. When it came time for Alpha 2 to choose a government each had submitted a proposal for leadership, but the planet at large had rejected them. Determined to be taken seriously, they had joined forces and recruited a surprisingly powerful militia, conducting raids and even atrocities that overwhelmed several other regions of the planet. Alpha Centauri had no military power to speak of, so the Federation had sent the Star Marines.
The Rebel Coalition, as it became known, had been surprisingly well armed and trained—to this day Nick didn’t know who had funded them—and used guerrilla tactics, which meant there was no “front line” and made it very difficult to track them down. The Star Marines had taken nearly two years to suppress them, and technically it still wasn’t over. No formal war had been declared and no formal treaty signed; the rebels had simply quit fighting when their losses became too high to continue.
But the two groups together—Groaners and Homerites—still numbered over a quarter million souls, so it wasn’t completely paranoid to fear they might renew the rebellion sometime in the future.
“I have a pretty good idea how much they hate the Federation,” Nick told Nelson. “I have the scars to prove it.”
Nelson nodded soberly. “I know you do. And that statue over there in the park? They’re not too fond of that, either.”
Chapter 3
The town meeting was surprisingly well attended. As Nick walked onto the stage with Marshal Nelson and took a chair, he estimated four hundred people in attendance. The meeting was held in the community room of the Trimmer Springs church. Nick and Nelson shared the stage with several other people, including Mayor Robinette and Police Chief Jerry Dwyer.
As he waited for the meeting to start, Nick studied the people milling about. Roughly half of them were, as Nelson had said, “regular Federation folks”.
The remaining half, mostly men but including
a few women, were from the two religious cults. They stood about in small groups, talking among themselves and eyeing one other with suspicion. Here and there Nick saw a gunbelt; from what Hugh and Nelson had told him, these were probably Groaners. The Groaners were more aggressive than the Homerites, and had contributed a higher percentage of their men to the rebel forces during the war. They had also suffered the heaviest losses.
At five minutes past eight, the mayor called the meeting to order. As people took their seats, they segregated themselves into three distinct sections, each group keeping clear of the others. The “normal” people—those wearing more modern clothing, who were probably either Protestant or not religious at all—seemed relaxed and curious, and Nick saw smiles at the mayor’s opening remarks. The rest sat in stony silence, glaring, nonresponsive to the mayor’s jokes. Nick felt his blood pressure rise as he waited to see how this was going to go.
Mayor Robinette concluded his opening remarks and got down to the business at hand.
“Tonight’s meeting,” he said, “is a special event. As many of you are aware, Marshal Nelson is retiring this week and will be returning to Terra. Tonight he will introduce his replacement. So at this time, please welcome Marshal Luther Nelson.”
The “regular” people applauded politely as Robinette took his chair and Nelson approached the podium. In the cult section, Nick saw a teenage girl clapping, but she stopped when a severe looking older woman slapped her hands. Nelson placed both hands on the podium, as if to steady himself, and cleared his throat nervously.
“Well, folks, thank you for coming out tonight,” he began. “I’ve enjoyed serving you for the past two years, but my assignment is over and it’s time to move on. Before I go, I want to introduce my replacement, the man who will represent the U.F. Marshal for the next two years. He’s a little bit younger than me…” Grins and some laughter. “…but he ain’t no rookie. This will be his third assignment as a U.F. Marshal and he was in the Star Marines before that.
“So, rather than listen to me flap my gums, will you all give a big welcome to your new United Federation Marshal…Nick Walker!”