by Ian Douglas
More crucial by far was the Senate vote. Two hundred fifty-one senators were present, either physically or in sim—a quorum. Twelve had abstained, a surprisingly small number, actually, given how politically charged this issue was. She’d thought a greater number would hesitate to associate their names and public voting rec ords with either side of the question.
Of the rest, 121 had voted in favor of Senator Armandez’s proposal, and 118 had voted against it. The measure had carried by three votes.
Three votes! . . .
It was frustrating, yes, but it was also, she was beginning to realize, encouraging. A three vote difference, with twelve fence-sitters? There were plenty of ways she could use that to her political advantage—calling in favors, twisting some arms, and a bit of simple, old-fashioned, out-shouting of the opposition. She could use the closeness of this vote to bring pressure to bear on the Appropriations Committee, and maybe find a way to further hamstring the MIEF’s logistical support, or the fleet itself. . . .
And there was the matter of non-Commonwealth stellar nations, and their participation in anti-Xul operations.
Yes. That would do the trick.
It was clear that the electorate simply didn’t understand what was truly at stake, here . . . nor did they understand just how enormous, how complex the Galaxy actually was. There was no way Humankind could grasp the size of the thing, much less rule it.
Yarlocke was ambitious, but she was also a realist. With just a little more support within her party, she would be able to take the final steps to eliminate the Presidency of the Commonwealth. The Senate would rule . . . and she would rule the Senate. With the battle-hardened Marines of 1MIEF under her direct authority, she would bring the other star nations of Humankind into line.
Let the Xul have the rest of the Galaxy. Humans would reign supreme within their own small, comfortable pocket of colony worlds . . . and Cyndi Collins Yarlocke would reign supreme over Humankind. It would happen.
For a moment, across the gulf of the Senate floor, her eyes locked with Alexander’s. I’m going to bring you down, she promised him in her thoughts. I’m going to bring you down, the electorate will side with me, and there will be a new way of managing this tired, old planet, I swear to you!
No, it wouldn’t be much longer. . . .
11
2906 .1111 Orlando Beach
Florida, Earth
2225 hrs, local
A week later, under a dazzlingly star-filled night sky, Garroway lay with Nikki on the beach, holding her, tasting her, savoring this time with her. Towers ablaze with lights lined the northern skyline two kilometers away.
Much of the seacoast metropolis of Orlando was raised on networks of pylons extending far out over the ocean. Once, five centuries before, the Florida Peninsula had been twice its current length and breadth, stretching into the Gulf of Mexico for another full 350 kilometers almost all the way to the Commonwealth state of Cuba.
Numerous Floridian cities, including the surface portions of Miami, St. Petersburg, and Jacksonville, had been built up atop broad, nano-grown pylons anchored in shallow water, usually on the foundations of the long- sunken buildings of earlier cities. Orlando had the distinction of being built both on solid land and over the water. A region once occupied by a sprawling entertainment complex was now given over to public housing, and glowed against the skyline to the north. The narrow knife of the Glades Peninsula stretched toward the southeast, once the highland spine of South Florida and now given over mostly to mangrove swamps and isolated sand dunes facing the boom and rumble of the surf. High in the southern sky, the lights of EarthRing looked like a dusting of stars compressed into a slender thread stretched up and over from the western horizon to the east, a gossamer strand impossibly remote and delicate.
Garroway and Armandez lay on the sand above the lap of the waves and gently explored each other’s bodies.
It had been a good week. Expensive, but a good week . . . and they still had another week to go before their leave expired. They’d spent most of the time at Gunny Warhurst’s place, with side trips to see some of the more spectacular sights on old Earth.
Together, they’d stood atop the Verrzano Dike, the 25th- Century engineering marvel holding back the cold waters of the Atlantic from ancient, sacred Manhattan, and they’d visited the even more ancient Great Wall, stretching through the heart of the Hegemony’s homeland. They’d played tourist and purchased a lowest- highest tour package, exploring the Marianas Abyss in a submarine, and, later that same day, flying to the visitor’s pavilion at the top of Everest, where glaciers still gleamed beneath a dazzling, empty blue sky.
Three days ago, Nikki had finally talked him into renting a sailboat. They’d been in Egypt, visiting the Commonwealth Protectorate that included the awesome stone monuments on the Giza Plateau, and they’d taken a side trip to Siwa, on the shores of the Sahara Sea. The experience, Garroway thought, had been as close to flying as it was possible to come without an aerospace craft or being in zero-G. The waters of the manmade sea were crystalline, the bottom a surreal landscape of sculpted banks and dunes racing past beneath the AI-controlled vessel’s keel.
Politics—even the ongoing cold war with the Islamic Theocracy that still embraced the rest of Egypt—had seemed remote indeed on that crystal sea. The citizens of the Theocracy in Egypt had been only too happy to sell the off-world tourists overpriced tour packages, exotic food, and expensive trinkets. The same in North China. Off-world, ancient political stresses still lay just beneath the surface, but the ordinary people continued to do business with tourists coming down- Ring.
As for the Xul, politics had seemed impossibly distant. For the first time in a long time, Garroway had felt himself relaxing.
There’d not been a flight direct from Egypt to Miami, so they’d flown in to Orlando Beach instead, arriving just yesterday and getting an invitation from Lieutenant Ramsey to come see him at his folks’ place. They were staying in a guestroom there now, and planned to stay for another couple of days before choosing their next tourist destination. Peru, possibly . . . or maybe the huge, undersea ruins at Aguna, off the coast of Okinawa. Garroway was fascinated by Terran archeology as it related to the long history of Humankind’s interactions with extrasolar civilizations—Sumeria and the An, Atlantis and the N’mah, the Xul strikes against Earth scattered across the planet’s prehistory. Baalbek, Tiahuanaco, Titicaca. This seemed like a great opportunity to see at least a few of these legendary places for himself.
But best of all had been getting to know Nikki better. . . .
Sexual liaisons between Marines of differing ranks and experience—in this case a private first class only recently out of boot camp and a gunnery sergeant who’d been in for ten years—were not encouraged within the Corps. There was the very basic issue of an imbalance of power, where a junior might sleep with a se nior either out of fear, or for purposes of manipulation. Either could seriously disrupt the cohesion of a unit.
Still, it was acknowledged that liaisons did happen. Service personnel were urged to use common sense and to avoid entanglements that put a strain on morale, good order, and discipline.
It would have been simpler, perhaps, simply to exclude women from combat duty, or, at the very least, to maintain sexually segregated units. Simpler . . . but impractical.
No one questioned the right of women to fight for their nation or to serve in the military, but the presence of women in combat units had been an issue for debate for the past eight centuries. The advent of nanotechnic enhancements and prostheses and the widespread use of power armor in combat had long ago torpedoed complaints that females lacked the upper body strength or the endurance to compete with males. Reliable contraceptives for both sexes had long since ended the inconvenient need to discharge women who’d become pregnant; deliberately allowing pregnancy while on active duty was a violation of the enlistment contract and grounds for dismissal or even legal action. And within Commonwealth society as a whole, the widesp
read accep tance of casual social nudity had long ago ended privacy issues on board cramped transports or space-limited bases.
But one issue remained, and it was the one issue that science and technology could not address without changing people into something other than human. In Garroway’s experience, men in the military, especially unattached men in the military, tended to focus on just two things—fighting and fucking. They were trained to be proficient at the first; they inevitably preferred the second. When they were engaged in the first, it was often at least subconsciously a route to the second; one’s exploits in combat, told with suitable embellishment in mixed company around a table in a bar or in the squad bay after hours, might easily lead to a happy partnering with a comely squadmate . . . or at least it was perceived that way by the “no-shit- there-I-was” story-tellers in question.
In point of fact, men’s behavior changed when women were around in what appeared to be a basic and incontrovertible fact of human sexual psychology. Training tempered the change, to be sure. Professionalism could overcome the instincts of basic biology. Concepts like honor, duty, and dedication to the Corps were deeply ingrained in every Marine, and guided every thought.
But always there were Marines, men and women both, who managed to overcome training and conditioning and act like idiots in their constant search of a good lay.
In the Corps’ history, there’d been plenty of attempts to alter the sexual equation, from draconian regulations to drugs to suppress libido to using a Marine’s cere bral implant to monitor his behavior. None worked well or consistently. Regulations could be ignored; drugs tended to suppress the very qualities in combat personnel the Corps needed; technology was susceptible to ingenious tampering. Garroway had done his share of that sort of thing back when he’d been a PFC, learning the codes that shut his personal AI monitor down when he wanted to break or bend the rules.
Control issues came and went in cycles. Ten years ago, when Garroway had joined the Corps, there’d been a lot of effort put into using platoon AIs to observe and report the behavior of individual Marines; now, Marines were simply warned not to screw up, to be careful, and to be discreet. No doubt it would come full-circle again some day, as yet another technological fix was applied to the problem.
Most individual Marines of both sexes and all ranks felt, however, that the issue was self-correcting. Hell, Marines didn’t like micromanagement to begin with, and attempts to use technology to control the way they thought and acted and, especially, how they interacted with their fellow Marines would simply lead to more and more clever attempts to circumvent whatever strategy the powers- that-were had in mind.
None of this particularly mattered to Garroway as he drew Nikki Armandez close and kissed her, his left hand holding the back of her head, his right gently cupping her buttocks. Rules didn’t matter, not here, not now. They were on leave and what they did with one another during their down time was their own damned business. The kiss deepened . . .
“Attention, all 1MIEF personnel!”
The voice, transmitted through his implant, sounded like a shout in his ear. He jumped, releasing Armandez at the same moment she pushed back from him. He saw her widening eyes, and knew she was receiving the same transmission.
“All leave and liberty is hereby cancelled. Effective immediately, all 1MIEF personnel are to return to the transport Hermes, currently at Dock Three, SupraQuito Complex, EarthRing, by the most expeditious transport available.”
“Shit!” Garroway exclaimed.
“And double shit,” Armandez added, her chest heaving, her face flushed. “They can’t do this to us!”
Garroway sighed. “They can and they will, love. Let’s see what the hell’s going on.”
Using his personal AI to initiate an uplink, he tapped into the platoon net back on board the Hermes. Orders, he saw, had just come through. The expeditionary force was returning to Cluster Space. And then . . .
“My God,” he said aloud.
“What is it, Aiden?”
“We’re going to the Core. Xul Central. . . .” Eyes closed, he continued to scan the posted data. “The damned idiots want us to make peace! . . .”
She was linking in now. “Debarkation in two more days,” she said.
“Yeah. But they want us on deck as soon as we can get our asses up to the Ring. Wait a sec. . . .”
He opened another window and pulled down another page . . . a listing of departure times for Ringport shuttles.
“It’ll have to be a transport,” he told her. “The elevator takes three days. Let’s see what’s available. . . .”
There were, in fact, a steady stream of shuttles bound for the Ring from various sites all over Earth. There was nothing from Orlando Beach, he saw. No Ringport. But a shuttle was leaving in two hours from Freeport, and in three from Atlanta. Passenger bookings were already starting to fill them both up as other Marines logged in.
“Looks like a lot of service personnel are all reserving Ringbound seats in a hurry,” he said. “It’s going to be a zoo.” He wondered just how many Marines were ashore right now, on leave from the Hermes. Eight or ten thousand at the very least, he guessed. He skipped ahead through the listings. The next Freeport shuttle was scheduled to leave in nineteen hours . . . at 1820 hours tomorrow. They could catch a local flier down to Miami, then take the skimmersub back to Freeport. That meant leaving Orlando Beach . . . he did a quick back-calculation . . . by 1200 hours tomorrow.
No problem. He entered data into the reservation pages, waited for confirmation, then relaxed.
“Okay, Nikki. We’re booked for an up- shuttle to the Ring tomorrow.”
“Damn, it, Aiden! We had another week coming!”
He shrugged. “Hey, that’s the Corps. We belong to them. They say ‘jump,’ we say ‘aye, aye,’ and ‘how high?’ In this case, all the way up to the Ring.”
It was just as well, he told himself. Booking that passage had just pulled a lot of credit from his financial storage. The Corps would reimburse him for expenses, but he was running just a little tight right now; that Marianas-Trench- to- Everest-Peak tour had been a bit on the expensive side, as had been the sailboat rental. His personal credit was boosted automatically by 150 points each day—his particular service pay grade—and Nikki’s by 55, but neither of them had much saved up for big-ticket items like taking a suborbital out to Okinawa to see the underwater Aguna ruins.
In fact, the two of them would have had to put themselves on a pretty tight leash to make their credit reserves last for another week, even if they stayed with Lieutenant Ramsey or Gunny Warhurst.
He looked up at the stars overhead. Yeah, and truth to tell, he didn’t like Earth all that much. The people didn’t even know they were at war, though they were happy enough to drain a serviceman’s credit. It was time to get back to his world, the Corps.
Nikki seemed to be reading his thoughts. She reached for him, sliding her hand along his side, from ribs to thigh. “At least that means we don’t have to go back right away. We have some time for us.”
Again, he drew her close. “My thought exactly, Marine. . . .”
3006.1111 UCS Hermes
Dock Three, SupraQuito,
EarthRing
0805 hrs, GMT
“They’re starting to check in,” Cara told General Alexander. “It may be a while before they can all book passage back, though.”
“And lots of them will try to squeeze in a few more hours of freedom.” Alexander thought for a moment. “You may need to establish a muster- aboard time.”
“We could also send some aerospace transports down, and pick them up directly.”
“True. If I know my Marines, though, they’ll be spread all over the planet right now, seeing the sights, getting into trouble, and drinking and simming themselves senseless.”
An image of Earth, minus the swaths and swirls of cloud cover, opened in his mind. Thousands of green pinpoints appeared, scattered across the globe. “The majority of our pe
rsonnel are in time zones Zulu minus five through minus eight,” Cara said, “which means it’s the middle of the night for most of them.”
Briefly, Alexander considered the link- simmed globe. Damn, he thought. A little leave time . . .
He dismissed the thought, as though slamming a door. It had been . . . how long since he’d set foot on Earth’s surface, on the surface of any world, for that matter? He knew he could check his personal log and find out in an instant, but chose not to do so. Electronic simulations and virtual realities made it possible to feel as though he’d left the labyrinthine passageways and compartments of the Hermes and was walking the open surface of a planet, but the illusion, he knew, was not, could never be, reality.
Someday, perhaps . . .
“We’ll give them twelve hours,” he told Cara, “and see where we are. I don’t want to send the transports down unless we have to.”
“Aye, aye, General.”
Alexander felt the AI depart from his consciousness.