by Rick Partlow
Jason’s mouth dropped open as he saw that the bag contained the twin silver bars of a captain’s insignia.
“But sir…” he began to protest, coming to his feet.
“Don’t worry, McKay.” Mellanby shook his head, underhanding the other bag to Shannon. “There’ll be enough promotions and medals to go around.”
Shannon’s eyebrow shot up at the first lieutenant’s bar in the bag.
“Well, that’s more back pay I won’t have time to spend,” she mused.
“The medals will be awarded upon your return,” the Colonel explained, sitting on the edge of his desk. “There’ll be a big, public ceremony, which should make it easier to recruit troops to your new command—they’ll be volunteering in droves.”
“Colonel Mellanby.” Jason swallowed hard, glancing uncomfortably at Shannon. “Could I speak to you in private for a second?”
“Of course, Captain,” the man said. “You’re dismissed, Lieutenant Stark.”
“Yes, sir.” She saluted, casting a curious look at Jason.
“Wait for me,” he mouthed as she went out. She gave him a nod as the door closed. He took a deep breath and turned back to Colonel Mellanby.
“Out with it, son,” the Snake prompted, that almost benign look passing almost imperceptibly across his face once more.
“Sir,” Jason blurted out, “I would like to recommend that Lieutenant Stark be given command of the team.”
“And why is that?” Mellanby inquired, the set of his eyes giving a hint that he had anticipated this turn of events.
“Sir, I didn’t do shit out there,” Jason said. “I was out running around the desert with my head up my ass while she was leading those troops in an attack on the Invaders. She drove them off the planet and all I accomplished was nearly getting myself and Ms. O’Keefe killed. She’s demonstrated that she’s more qualified to hold this position than I am.”
“Is that so?” Mellanby folded his arms, regarding Jason with an amused expression. “Tell me, son, what was your stated mission on Aphrodite?”
“Well, to keep Valerie O’Keefe safe, but…”
“And is Ms. O’Keefe alive and well at this point?” Mellanby asked pointedly.
“Yes, but…”
The Colonel held up a hand. “I agree that Lieutenant Stark is a fine officer and a good leader. That’s why I recruited her. And what she accomplished on Aphrodite was admirable, as her medals will attest in the near future. But you were the commanding officer, and your duty was to keep Ms. Valerie O’Keefe safe no matter what. You did that duty against heavy odds and that’s what’s important.”
“I made mistakes,” Jason protested, shaking his head, looking away at a vision of Valerie with Huerta and his thugs assaulting her. “I made misjudgments that could have gotten people killed.” He faced the Colonel once again. “I was just lucky.”
“The Vikings had a saying, McKay,” Mellanby told him. “Better a lucky captain than a good one. Look,” he pushed off of his desk and stepped up nose-to-nose with Jason, “whatever mistakes you made back there, you overcame them and accomplished the mission. That’s part of becoming a leader—it’s part of growing up.” He clapped Jason on the shoulder, and McKay had a heartbeat’s vision of his father congratulating him after a high-school football game. “I’m counting on you to keep on accomplishing the mission… Captain McKay.”
“Yes, sir.” Jason nodded slowly. “I won’t let you down.”
“I know you won’t, son.” The Snake showed his teeth. “Because if you do, I’ll rip out your liver with my bare hands and eat it raw.”
“What was that all about?” Shannon asked him as he emerged from the office. He smiled and slipped an arm around her shoulder.
“I’ll tell you later,” he promised. “Want to go catch some lunch? Somehow, I don’t think I’m going to have much of an appetite tonight.”
* * *
“A toast.” Senator Daniel O’Keefe raised his glass with a flourish, wearing his best Campaign Smile. “To Captain McKay and his brave and resourceful band for safeguarding my Valerie’s life at great risk to their own.”
“Hear, hear!” A rumble of approval rose from the herd of VIP’s gathered around the banquet table as they came to their feet with an annoying scrape of chair legs on wooden floor.
“I’ve never been called a ‘band’ before,” Shannon muttered to Jason, seated beside her at the center of the table, their dress whites standing out like a neon sign among the collection of tuxedos and evening gowns.
“We get combat pay for this, right?” McKay wondered quietly, glancing around with growing discomfort at the famous faces surrounding him in the vast hall. These were people he’d seen only on Tri-V dramas or the news, a cosmetic surgeon’s wish-list that made him feel distinctly out of place. Hell, O’Keefe’s house was bigger than some museums he’d visited.
“I’m only sorry,” O’Keefe addressed them after the dignitaries had tipped their glasses, “that the rest of your command couldn’t be here.”
“Yes, sir,” McKay explained. “They send their regrets, but after such a long and arduous experience, they needed some time with their families before we head back to Aphrodite.”
“You’re going back?” Valerie spoke for the first time since they’d arrived at the Senator’s Calgary home. She looked, Jason thought, uncharacteristically frumpy in a loose, ankle-length gown, and her eyes seemed somehow sunken and hollow.
Jason nodded. “We’re going to be part of an investigation team to try and find out where the Invaders came from and where they’ll strike next.”
“I never want to see that damned place again,” Glen muttered, taking a long drink of champagne. He didn’t seem to be in the best of moods himself, and Jason was sure he hadn’t seen Glen and Valerie so much as look at one another since they’d arrived.
“So, Captain McKay,” Daniel O’Keefe said, leaning across the table, “what are your plans for the future? Or do you see yourself as a career military man?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Jason admitted. “I really haven’t given much thought to it yet.”
“Well, perhaps you should, young man,” the Senator suggested. In person, he was an impressive man, with a force of personality that reminded Jason of Kenneth Mellanby—it would, he thought, be interesting to put the two men in a room together. “Many successful political careers have been built on the foundation of high-profile military service.”
“I’m not sure I’d be a good politician, sir,” McKay chuckled, taking a sip of champagne. “I’ve got a very low tolerance for bullshit, pardon my French.”
“I can appreciate that, I truly can,” O’Keefe assured him. “But I can’t believe that politics has a monopoly on bullshit. Surely the military has politics all its own.”
“So maybe I’m already a politician, is that what you’re saying?” Jason cocked an eyebrow curiously.
“We’re all politicians, Captain. All of the interaction between human beings, from sex to government to commerce, has its own kind of politics, its own special social rituals. Over millions of years of evolution, we’ve developed rituals for dealing with other human beings without violence—imperfect, to be sure, but improving. One day, however long it may be, we’ll evolve beyond the need for violence to deal with our fellow man.”
“That’s assuming,” Shannon pointed out, “that we’re dealing with ‘our fellow man,’ Senator.”
“There you’ve got me, Lieutenant Stark.” He tipped his glass toward her. “Dealing with your Invaders, assuming they are aliens, will require an entirely new set of rituals and politics.”
“What do you mean, ‘assuming they are aliens,’ Daddy?” Valerie asked him. “I saw one of those things, and whatever it was, it wasn’t human.”
“You saw it,” he agreed, “as did the others, but did you perform an autopsy on it? Who’s to say it couldn’t have been a human who’d undergone extensive restruct surgery and some kind of sophisticated brainwashing techni
que?”
“But who would do that?” Valerie wondered. “Who could?”
“Perhaps a faction of the Belt Pirates,” Daniel O’Keefe suggested. “They might have bribed Corporate employees and gotten their hands on an interstellar cargo ship of some kind. Or, who knows.” He paused, taking a dramatic sip from his glass. “There are those in high places whose fates are inexorably tied to the level of military funding. What better way to ensure the continued increase of military spending than to create a mysterious enemy for them to fight.”
“Those are dangerous words, Senator,” Shannon warned him, her mouth set in a hard line.
“The only dangerous words, my dear,” he countered, “are the ones we’re afraid to speak.”
“That doesn’t seem to be a problem for you, sir,” Jason commented, his smile taking the edge off of the words.
“Touche’, Captain.” O’Keefe laughed. “Ah! And here’s dinner!”
McKay looked up and saw the servants bringing in their first course on motorized, wheeled carts.
“Funny,” he heard Shannon whisper in his ear, “I thought we were dinner.”
“…and so I told my producer, ‘Bill, I can’t fire the guy, he’s a fucking computer construct!’”
McKay tried to laugh politely at the joke, but the Tri-V drama director who’d told it seemed to be doing enough laughing for both of them, so he searched desperately around the room for Shannon. Dinner had gone surprisingly fast, considering the amount of food they’d been served, and afterward they’d moved into another chamber of the labyrinthine house for cocktails. He’d kept on the move, trying desperately to avoid being cornered by Valerie or worse, Glen, but in the process had discovered just what incredible bores famous people could be.
Finally, he spotted Shannon in a corner nursing a Tom Collins and struck out across the room toward her, but was cut off midway by Valerie O’Keefe.
“Jason,” she said, the same hollow expression on her face, “I need to talk to you. It’s important.”
“Uh… all right,” he acquiesced, realizing he was trapped. “What is it?”
“Somewhere a bit more private,” Valerie insisted, then headed off for the room’s nearest exit, an open archway that led into a library.
Senator O’Keefe, Jason observed as he scanned shelf after shelf of antique books, had a collection to rival Governor Sigurdsen’s—just from where he stood he could see five first-editions that were each worth more than his annual salary.
“Okay,” he said, turning his attention back to Val, “I’m here. What’s wrong?”
“I’m pregnant,” she told him without warning, “and I’m almost certain the baby’s yours.”
Shannon downed the last of her drink in a single swallow, savoring the bite of the liquor as it burned down her throat. This whole affair had been a fiasco. She had stood in corners, either literally or figuratively, since she’d arrived. Hell, the only reason any of these snobs had talked to Jason was because his face had been in the news—when they’d each made their obligatory pass by him, he’d been ignored almost as much as she.
“So much for positive press for the military,” she muttered to herself, setting the empty glass down on a lampstand.
The worst part was, Nathan hadn’t as much as shown his face. The fact that she wanted to see him again troubled her. She was a person who was used to certainty in her life. She’d decided on a military career at age fifteen, much to the chagrin of her parents, and that had been that. First Cambridge University, then straight into Spacefleet Officer’s Candidate School, no doubts, no hesitations. It had been the same story with men. There’d been a special boy in high school, but when she’d left Ireland for college, she’d left that relationship behind along with that phase of her life. At Cambridge, she’d played the field, concentrating on studies, never letting any one man get in the way of her goal, never letting any one of them farther than a few centimeters inside her.
And now, on the verge of the biggest step of her career—of her life!—and on the verge of a probable war, she’d let not one, but two men crawl into her head. This was not how she’d planned things.
Looking up, she caught a glimpse of Jason being led into the next room by that O’Keefe woman and sighed deeply. More complications. But none of her business. She should just get another drink and forget she’d even seen it.
Right. Cursing herself loud enough to draw a few curious stares, she pushed off from the wall and began making her way to the door they’d exited through.
“What?” Jason’s jaw dropped open. “But how?” He shook his head helplessly. “Didn’t you have the treatments?”
“Glen did,” she told him. “I assumed you had, too.”
“No,” he told her numbly. “In the military, they give them to the females—something about testosterone level and male aggression, I think. But… the last time was over five months ago! Wouldn’t you have known back on Aphrodite?”
“When I didn’t get my period, I thought it was because of the stress,” she explained. “Then, when we went into g-sleep, the chemical stasis slowed down the gestation period. I almost lost the baby then—I was so sick when we came back into Earth orbit that they flew me straight to a medical center. That’s when I found out. Because of the g-sleep, I’ve still got six months till it comes to term.”
“Are you…” He hesitated, his guts churning with indecision and shock. “I mean, you’re not going to…”
“It’s too late to legally abort it,” she said, anticipating his question, a flash of stubborn anger in her eyes. “And I wouldn’t even if I could.”
“I wouldn’t want you to,” he assured her, shaking his head desperately. “That’s not what I was saying.”
“What are you saying, Jason?” She fixed him with a dark, questioning gaze.
“Look, I realize my responsibility in this,” he said, throwing up his hands. “I’m not trying to run out on it. If you want the fetus transferred to a surrogate, I’ll pay for it and I’ll take the responsibility for putting the baby up for adoption. I’ll pay for foster care until the agency finds an adoptive family. I’m not in a position to raise a child alone, so that’s all I can do.”
“That’s very adult of you,” she replied, facing away from him, staring at a shelf of books that had suddenly become fascinating. “I suppose adoption is the best idea. If the baby’s parents,” there might have been a catch in her voice, or maybe it was his imagination, “can’t be together.” She turned back to him. “They can’t be, can they?”
There was a pleading tone in her voice that tore him apart, but he shook his head, trying to meet her eyes.
“No,” he told her. “I guess they can’t.”
She made a show of straightening her dress, giving her an excuse to look away for a moment, and when she met his gaze once more, her face was hard and cold.
“I thank you for your generous offer, Captain McKay,” she said, “but I’ve told Glen about the pregnancy and we’ve decided to keep the child and raise it together.”
“I see,” McKay said, breathing out a deep sigh. “Is there anything you need from me?”
“Yes,” she said. “We need you to stay away. As far as anyone will know, this child is ours. Do you understand?”
He nodded, not trusting himself to speak. Anger, relief and a sharp disappointment fought for supremacy within him, all drowned out by the incredible notion that he was going to be a father, if only an absent one.
“I…” he finally choked out, “I’ll do what you want.” There was moisture in his eye, and he had to blink it back as he stumbled away from her, wanting more than anything to leave.
But he hesitated at the door, looking back at her, pain in the set of his mouth.
“Please,” he said. “What…?” He trailed off, words failing him.
Something softened in her eyes and he thought he saw something of the compassion that he’d once found in her.
“It’s a boy, Jason” she told him, know
ing what he was trying to ask. “It’s a boy.”
And then he was out of the room, back in the hallway but still light-years away. A son. He was going to have a son.
* * *
Jason sat in silence as the tiltrotor drew away from the O’Keefe mansion, climbing higher into the night sky. An incredible panorama of stars beckoned enticingly through the side window of the darkened compartment, but his eyes were locked sightlessly onto the back of the next seat, trying to divine the mysteries of the universe in its grey leather depths.
Beside him, Shannon waited patiently, knowing he was going to talk but not wanting to push him. She’d settled into her seat and was about to let the rhythm of the plane’s engines lull her to sleep when he finally looked her way, decision in his eyes.
“Shannon,” he said.
“Yes, Jason.” She sat up and met his gaze.
“Back there… I… Ms. O’Keefe, she…” He chewed his lip, searching for words.
“She’s pregnant,” Shannon declared softly. Jason’s eyes popped open.
“Yeah,” he confirmed, afraid to ask her how she knew. “She’s pregnant.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked. He tried to read something in her eyes, but they were swallowed up in the shadows, unfathomable.
“I’m going to do what she wants,” he told Shannon, trying once more to convince himself it was the right thing. “I’m going to stay away.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Where are they?”
—Enrico Fermi
A scorching, dry wind swept across the plateau, sifting the charred remains of the Aphrodite spaceport and scouring the side of the small, preform dome with sand and dust. Jason blinked away a spray of wind-born dust that had found its way behind the lenses of his sunglasses as he waited for Shannon to slide out of the groundcar’s passenger seat.
“Good Lord,” he whispered, surveying for the first time the devastation Shannon’s attack on the port had caused. The port control building and the laser launch platform were gone as if they had never existed, only an irregular black spot on the sandstone surface marking where they’d been, and everywhere was strewn the wreckage of the shuttle that had exploded.