by R. M. Meluch
The bright blue eyes squinted in concern, and he leaned sideways to look past her. “Where are you? I thought y’all were going to Zoe.”
It shouldn’t surprise her he knew where she was going. John Farragut always kept track of his people.
“We made it. We’re here. We’re on Zoe. This is our ship.” She moved aside to give him a better view of the devastation of Spring Beauty’s control room.
Glenn had slipped away from the LEN camp to contact him privately on the Beauty’s resonator. She knew the admiral’s personal res harmonic by heart.
“This planet is under invasion,” Glenn told him.
His immediate question: “Are you safe?”
“Yes. We were attacked on approach. They haven’t followed us down.”
John Farragut put on his admiral’s face. “Roman?”
Glenn hesitated. “Maybe. I don’t think so.”
She told him her story.
At the end, he asked, “Did you report it?”
“That’s the trick, isn’t it? The local authority is the LEN. This—” she flicked her hands at the wreckage around her—“is a LEN vessel. This planet is a LEN protectorate. The LEN knows.”
“What’s the LEN doing about it?”
“The LEN isn’t addressing it at all. According to the LEN, I drove us into a cluster of space rocks.”
Even Manny the pilot hadn’t spoken in Glenn’s defense. The pilot had clammed up entirely, not about to cross the people who hired him.
“I’m so mad I could cry.”
“You’re not a crier.”
“I may start.”
Sliding into self-pity was easy. She shook it off.
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you . . .
Glenn played back the Beauty’s camera records for John Farragut. She didn’t need to narrate. The admiral had been in enough furballs and knew the difference between blundering into natural objects and coming under attack.
At the recording’s shattering end, he said, “Nice landing.”
“I’m proud of it,” Glenn said. “The LEN are charging me with hijack and suing me for damages to the ship.”
“Shoot ’em.”
“Aye, aye,” she said. Thought, I love you.
“Take me for a walk.”
Glenn dislodged the res chamber from its console and carried it out of the ship, imager-side out, for a tour around the wreckage.
She stepped carefully through wilted, charred vegetation. The ground was seared black underfoot. But already the forest was closing back in to heal the wound.
As Glenn circled around the ship’s stern, Farragut’s voice under her arm sounded, “Ho. Back up. What’s that?”
Glenn stepped slowly backward until Farragut said, “Stop. There. Bring me in.”
Glenn moved the res chamber closer to an odd piece of wreckage wedged into the ship’s fuselage. It was black, metallic, curved. It looked manufactured. It wasn’t anything that belonged to the Beauty.
“Looks like you got a bug in your teeth,” Farragut said.
“I’m setting you down,” Glenn told him. She propped the res chamber against a fallen tree, then stepped into the picture and tried to wrestle the large metal shard out of the Beauty’s fuselage. She couldn’t budge the fragment at all, much less pull it free.
A chuckle sounded from behind her.
“I can hear you, John!” It pissed her off that he thought she was cute. She kicked the metal. That only jammed her shin.
She stalked back to the fallen tree, picked up the res chamber and brought John Farragut close up to see the thing stuck in the Beauty.
Farragut spoke the obvious. “That’s not a meteorite.”
The metal was an oily shade of black, clearly manufactured, fashioned in a curve, bearing an artificial design shallowly etched into it, almost like a talon of a clawfoot from a piece of antique furniture.
“Local make?” Farragut asked.
“No. There’s no manufacturing here. No industry on this world at all. No commerce. Honest to God, John, ‘Edenesque’ is the word that comes to mind. Except for these.” She swatted something small and pincered on her arm. “The native sapience is primitive. I was thinking the orbs were someone’s mock aliens. But who would do that?”
Farragut dismissed anyone’s first thought, “Rome can do better than that.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“The League will say it’s ours.”
“No doubt,” said Glenn, then, just to be sure, “It’s not the CIA, is it?”
Farragut’s immediate expression of reassurance turned suddenly hesitant. He’d been about to dismiss the idea of U.S. involvement. Didn’t.
“I’ll see if I can get someone to talk to me,” Farragut said. “I don’t think that’s one of ours. You probably have a first contact on your hands.”
First contact used to sound exciting. Glenn gave a sorry smile. “Those never go well for us.”
“Whose flag is on the ground?”
“No one’s. Kiwi drones were the first explorers on world. They turned up a sapient native species. The planet’s been flags’ off ever since. The only feet on the dirt are international scientists. And one scientist’s wife.”
“Is anyone in orbit getting this treatment?”
“There’s no one in Zoe’s orbit. This is the back of beyond. The LEN puts their ships on the ground. There are only six of them. The Beauty makes seven.”
“And none of them noticed these things on their way in?”
“No. This is the first time anyone was attacked coming or going.”
“What hit you could be the vanguard for something bigger,” said Admiral Farragut.
“Nothing followed us down,” Glenn said. “I don’t know how to read that. They’re hostile, they can get between stars, but they can’t shoot and they can’t land? All they could do was ram. I’m afraid they’ll try to ram us on the ground next.”
Farragut told her, “I’m sending someone.”
Flight Leader Ranza Espinoza reported to the ship’s hospital for a physical. Her leave had been cut short. She sat on the exam table, cooling her bare heels and twiddling her toes, waiting for permission to get dressed and return to duty.
It could not take that long for the medics to figure out she was healthy.
Ranza was built like a line backer. Big shoulders. No hips. Gap teeth. Bushy hair. Silver-gray eyes.
She crossed and uncrossed her bare toes. Listened to the ship around her. The metal partitions were thin. Sounds carried easily, and Mack was never actually quiet. Now she was all kinds of loud. And it wasn’t just the shouting on all decks. Supply barges clunked against the wings. The ship’s displacement chamber cracked away like a thunderstorm.
Dock doors clattered as transports arrived and two companies of the 89th Fleet Marine Battalion stormed aboard like they were taking a beach.
Ranza could hear the Mack’s new XO from the land of Oz calling out in his best American Old West voice: “Stampede!”
Real smartass, that one.
Since the war, the Marines had been deployed in the U.S. Pacific Northwest on reconstruction detail. Finally they were coming home.
The 89th Battalion’s home base in Kansas was never home like the space battleship Merrimack was.
Merrimack was bound for the edge of the galaxy. Best speed. Unless you wanted to get reassigned, you got your ass back on her today. You miss the boat this time, you can kiss Mack good-bye for the rest of your tour.
The lowing of livestock in the lower hold meant this was going to be a very long trip.
Heavy boots clanged against deck grates at a run, with shouts of “Clear ladder!” just before the thump of a duffel bag dropping down the shaft and the squawk of someone who didn’t clear fast enough.
And why weren’t the medics clearing Ranza out of this exam room so they could poke at those guys?
Ranza curled her toes. Sniffed antiseptic sme
lls. She banged on the partition with the side of her fist. Called, “Hey! Yous guys forget me or somethin’!”
Didn’t hear nobody hurrying on the far side.
They forgot her.
Ranza called louder, “I’m havin’ a heart attack in here!”
In no real big hurry a med tech sauntered in. Young. Snotty. He turned his back to her, fed something into the database. He glanced over Ranza’s stats, then eyed Ranza with a gluey smile. “Had fun ashore I see.”
Ranza never liked the guy. She knew the type. Only in the service to line up a position in the private sector. He looked at her with the kind of sleazy, smarmy attitude that insinuates something.
“Can I get dressed?” Ranza said.
“I guess.” The tech shrugged with one shoulder. “You flunked the physical.”
“Did not.” Ranza sat straight up, her muscular arms akimbo, broad shoulders spread their broadest. Did he want to see how many med tech curls she could do?
“MO will be right with you.” The skinny tech walked out.
Ranza threw a specimen jar after him. Pity it was empty.
She’d been spending her leave on Earth, most of the time with her three kids and her mom—who was raising Ranza’s three kids. And Ranza had had some fun.
Uh-oh.
That was it, wasn’t it?
The moment the ship’s Medical Officer, Mohsen Shah, stepped through the hatchway, Ranza cried, “Don’t tell me I got VD.”
Mo gave a slow sideways nod. “V yes. D no. You are being pregnant.”
“No!” She guessed it was a little late to be using that word. “You mean to tell me that son of a bitch was shooting live rounds?”
“Yes. Is there being something you are wanting to be telling me about this man?”
“Not really,” said Ranza.
“Let me be speaking plainly—” Mo began.
“You can do that, Mo?” said Ranza.
The gentle placid Riverite doctor could meander all over the park before he completed a thought, and by the end of it Ranza often forgot what he was supposed to be saying.
Someone else answered. “I can.”
Ranza turned to the other guy who had just entered the compartment. “Oh, thank God.” An interpreter.
Rob Roy Buchanan. The ship’s tame lawyer. Straight talker. Nice guy. Late thirties. Looked a whole bunch younger. Rob Roy was a long, tall reed with a slouch like a teenager. His rank was lieutenant, but he wasn’t a line officer. He was Merrimack’s Legal Officer. Most of the Marines called him the First Mate because he was married to the captain.
It didn’t occur to Ranza right away to wonder why there was a lawyer in her examination room.
“Look, Mister Buchanan,” Ranza started, “tell Mo to just inc the little zygote and lemme get back to work. ’Kay?”
Naval regs did not permit little passengers to serve on board space battleships. And Ranza didn’t want any kid of hers in harm’s way either. That was why God invented incubators.
Rob Roy Buchanan hesitated. The lawyer might be able to speak plainly, but he wasn’t doing it now. Something wasn’t right. There was definitely something wrong here besides pregnancy. Ranza tensed up.
“Flight Leader,” Rob Roy began.
Uh-oh.
He called her Flight Leader. Not Ranza.
He’d gone formal on her. Not good. Not good. Not good.
“If this embryo leaves your body alive by artificial means and the father is a Roman citizen, then Rome legally can—and absolutely will—take immediate custody.”
“It’s not Roman!” Ranza said. Afraid she shouted.
Rob Roy’s voice stayed calm, even a little apologetic. “Yes, it is. And Rome has the right to claim it under peacetime interstellar law.”
“Then declare war!” Ranza cried. And this man was supposed to be smart.
“I’m sorry, Flight Leader.”
“This kid is mine!”
“Right now it is,” Rob Roy agreed. “As long as it stays in your body, you have legal control—even to terminate it—”
“No!”
“That choice is entirely your own. But once the embryo is in the incubator, you’ve given Rome another citizen.”
Ranza looked from the Medical Officer to the Legal Officer, helpless. Each wore the same pained sympathetic expression.
“No,” she said. Went on the offensive. “What makes yous so sure I did a Roman?”
“Romans always shoot live rounds,” said Rob Roy.
“He told me he was Italian.”
Mo Shah said, “The male contributor to this embryo is not being in the League DNA database. That is meaning Roman.”
“Could be alien,” Ranza suggested. Bet they didn’t think of that, did they? “Ha. So there.”
Rob Roy gave a faint smile.
Mo said, “That is not being physically possible. There is being no such thing as ‘alien DNA.’”
“Then where do little aliens come from?” Ranza said. Got him there.
But Mo went on, “Aliens are having their own chemistry and their own genomes. ‘DNA’ is being that specific genome unique to life originating on planet Earth.”
“Sure. Fine,” Ranza said quickly. She didn’t have time for this. She had to get to her post. “I’ll adopt it out.”
“Transfer the embryo?” Rob Roy asked.
“Yeah. I can give it up. My mom’ll prefer that anyway.”
“You may,” Rob Roy said. Sounded awful iffy. “But it has to be to a Roman woman.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Ranza said.
Rob Roy never lost patience. “Legally, it does.”
“I can do it in secret! I won’t tell yous about it.”
“Flight Leader, these conceptions are never accidental—”
“Hey! I didn’t know—”
“—on their part,” Rob Roy clarified. “It’s always intentional on the Roman end. They will be monitoring you—”
Ranza looked around as if there were Romans in the exam compartment.
“They will know if an incubator leaves this ship,” Rob Roy said.
Ever since its declaration of independence from the United States in AD 2290, the Roman Empire had been in constant need of population. Even before the catastrophic losses during the Hive years, Rome needed citizens. These days the bulk of Roman citizenry were still mass-produced. Mom and Dad often never met. Eggs and sperm met in vitro and were born from incubators. And there were also outright clones. Cloning was reserved for the brightest, the strongest, and the most beautiful. Beautiful, because Romans openly acknowledged their love of physical beauty. They claimed the bias was genetic.
Not to let their breed stagnate, Rome brought in fresh blood any way she could.
At war’s end there had been two million Roman citizens stranded on Earth. A lot of those Romans were still there—collecting fresh genes for the Roman pool the old-fashioned way before they found their way home.
Ranza had been one of their targets.
Rob Roy told her, “There are only three ways to go from here.”
“Uh,” said Ranza, trying to think. “Can you hit me with those choices again?”
“You can abort it.”
“No.”
“You can give it up to Rome.”
“No.”
“You can carry it to term.”
“You mean have the baby.”
“Yes.”
“An American baby?”
“Yes.”
“For me to keep?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll do that.” And to Mo, “So is this a boy or a girl? I ain’t calling it ‘it’ if I’m carrying this kid the full tour.”
“It is being—” Mo started, stopped. “You are being sure?”
Once you knew the sex, it was hard to turn back.
“Yeah,” said Ranza. “Hit me.”
“You are carrying a boy.”
“Boy,” she murmured. The hefty Fleet Marine lifted her bro
ws. “My mom’s gonna kill me.”
“You’ve made your decision?” Rob Roy asked.
“Yeah. Gotta.” Ranza shrugged her big shoulders and slid off the table to get dressed and collect her things. “See yous guys in nine.”
Months, she meant.
7
KERRY BLUE. TRYING to get her locker to shut.
Each Marine was given a locker into which to stuff all his or her stuff. The locker was built into the Marine’s berth, and it was just large enough to hold subatomic particles.
If your locker don’t shut, whatever is hanging out gets spaced.
Kerry yelled through the thin partition to the men’s side of the forecastle for backup. “Can I get some meat in here!”
She had lots of volunteers. Big guys trooped in to muscle her locker closed. Would have been easier if Kerry knew how to fold stuff, but she didn’t. Kerry smushed. She only ever passed inspection because her mates helped her out.
The guys helping her weren’t much for folding either. But they got her locker closed. Bent the door in the process. The locker door had a distinct outward bow, but it was shut.
The Yurg. Tall, hulking blond guy. Flew as Baker One. The Yurg noticed the empty sleep pod here on the girl side of the forecastle. The empty berth was Ranza Espinoza’s.
“Hey.” The Yurg gave a back-knuckle rap on the empty rack. Asked Kerry, “Is your Flight Leader AWOL?”
“Nah, he’s here,” Kerry said.
“He?” Last time Yurg looked Ranza Espinoza was still a she.
“Cain’s in charge,” Kerry said.
Dak Shepard, Alpha Two, pulled his head back. “Cain’s Flight Leader? Cain? How’d that happen?”
“Ranza’s in a civilian way,” Kerry Blue said.
Cain was just walking in the hatchway. Yurg turned to Cain with a big grin and deep chuckle. “Cain! You dog!”
Cain yelped. “It wasn’t me!”
“Who did that to her!” Dak cried.
“A very brave man,” said the Yurg solemnly.
Cain’s glance fell on the bent locker door in Kerry’s rack. As Alpha’s new Flight Leader Cain said, “Kerry, ballast something.”
“It’s shut!” Kerry cried.
“Your gear don’t fit the dimensions, and I ain’t bending the rules for you.”