She reached her locker, with X J KANTU stencilled on the front, and finished stripping off her flight suit in dark silence. She secured it into its compartment. In a battle alert, she could release it and suit up in seven seconds.
“Look, I’m staying in your face here,” Chill persisted. “I care about you, dammit, Xandri. We’ll talk about this later.
“Yeah, sure,” she said tightly, reining in an angry response, and slammed the locker door shut with the heel of her hand. As she turned her back on him and headed for the shower, he was already turning his back on her.
Once he was gone, she reversed her steps and returned to her eagle. She sat in the cockpit and played back the external data recordings. Nothing out of the ordinary, except nine seconds of uncharacteristic silence on her part.
But this wasn’t just a hallucination. She knew real pain when she felt it. Besides, even if her brain was lit up like a xrismas tree from bioviruses, it could never dream up something like this. She needed to speak directly to the General, and the thought put a sour taste in her mouth. She checked the time on the wall comscreen—0800 hours. She hadn’t seen him in over a year, but she knew exactly where to find him.
Xristian Jefferson Kantu stared with disapproval at the broken, overset yolks of his micken eggs. A two-hour, early morning strategy session with President Hartwell had soured his appetite for breakfast, and given him a nasty mood to enjoy it in. The news from Earth was worse than usual, and the fears that had cramped his stomach for months now tightened their clutch on his innards.
Fears for the world of his birth, which was fast degrading past the capacity for spaceflight. Fear that the hordes of Chimese would overrun USAM once Hartwell announced the Last Flight from Earth.
He kept it all bottled inside him—no one on Mars but he and Hartwell knew just how bad the future was.
A voice cut through his dark thoughts.
“General, sir.” He felt the air move on a vigorous salute, but he didn’t look up.
“Xandri,” he said, without much warmth. The General was a man of fixed habits who compartmentalized his life, and his niece certainly didn’t fit into the 0800 breakfast compartment. Not to mention that the last time they’d met, she’d accused him of letting her parents die when she was twelve. He picked up the antique silver knife and fork he always used—the gift of Thomas Jefferson to a beautiful slave who bore him a son, Xristian’s ancestor—and attacked his mabbit bacon. He liked to eat as terran a breakfast as he could.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, sir. I have some intelligence I knew you’d want asap.”
He raised his eyes and quickly assessed her. Bulkier with muscle, but tired and a little scared around the eyes. She looked like she was just coming off patrol. Her uniform was rusty with the dust that, these days, seeped through seals and housings too worn to stop it. Her voice was husky with the powdery tones of a fighter who’d breathed too much of it in the high adrenaline situations of combat.
And tight with nervousness and residual anger.
“I believe the Chimese are field-testing a new shielding force that works on visual distortion.”
He put down his knife and fork and quickly checked to make sure no one was listening. He needn’t have worried. Around them the base dining hall buzzed with conversation, but no one ever came near the Generals booth during his breakfast unless they had to or felt driven to career suicide.
“Go on,” he ordered, gesturing her into the seat across from him. “I’m listening.”
“I witnessed it on patrol, sir. I’ve come right from the docking bay.”
“You witnessed it? And the rest of your team?”
“No one saw it but me, sir.”
“Oh? And what did you see?”
“I was out with alpha strike team, chasing a Chimese dragon back from the Kennebunk Elevator to the Coprates massif.” She told him what had happened, forcing herself to include the parts she knew were impossible.
“So a properly locked laser totally missed its target?”
“I didn’t miss, sir. The laser hit but did nothing.”
“And no one else on your strike team saw this green dragon.”
“No, sir. They reported nothing. They were engaged against ground forces at the time.”
“Does your instrumentation back you up?”
She paused. “No, sir.” At the expression on his face, she leaned toward him and burst out passionately: “I can’t explain this, but it’s not a psych problem, I promise you. It was real!”
As a general in the Corps of Engineers, he had to give her report serious thought, because there were parts that made sense to him. His micken eggs had gelled stubbornly into their irregular shape, and he scowled at them while he cut into them. He ate in silence for several minutes while Xandri sat stiffly across from him. Neither mentioned their last encounter.
“We’ve had intelligence that the Chimese are trying to develop shielding as an effect of a Rierson field,” he finally said. “Send a pulse through a nonlinear material like space. The pulse frequency stretches as it travels and creates a chirp. We’ve already tested an antichirp process where we send a time-reversed chirp, a scalar wave. The waves condense in a high-energy laser pulse that compresses into a shell membrane at a certain distance from the wave emitter. If we could build a stable scalar wavetrain emitter, we’d have an energy bubble that destroys a portion of whatever touches it and repels the rest. But we couldn’t build one, so I know the Chimese can’t do it, and in any case it wouldn’t change the position of your eagle. So there’s really no physical explanation for what happened out there.”
“How do you know it so certainly, that the Chimese couldn’t do it?”
“I’ve got intelligence.”
Then she did what she always did, since the day he took her in and finished raising her because there was no one else to do it. She got angry and crossed the line and disrespected him. “With respect, sir, you don’t fight them out in the field. You’re in here, where things have solutions and the universe has laws. I’ve seen the Chimese pull plenty of mabbits out of their asses.”
“That’s enough, Lieutenant,” he cut her off. He reined in his own flare of anger, trying to be fair to his brothers only child while the general in him refused to stand for the insubordination. “Leave it with me and I’ll investigate.”
At that moment, in Independent ForShing, DaQing opened the hatch of his coffin and slung himself up and onto the entrance sill. Someone had drawn obscenities on the hatch again—the war and the military were very unpopular among many of the ForShing Yan—but he had nothing left to clean it with. It hardly seemed to matter, anyway. Secretly, he too wished the military rulers of Independent ForShing would sue for peace with the Americans. He banged a cloud of dust off his boots and stored them in their cubby inside the entrance. He swung himself all the way in so he was sitting on his sleeping mat.
A dim light had flickered on when he opened the hatch, and he didn’t turn it up now. Instead, he lay back with a groan of exhaustion and pulled Jiao’s jade angel from its place at his heart. Her great-great-grandfather had been a high-ranking official at the Imperial Court, and he visited Queen Victoria during her Jubilee. He had the angel carved from a piece of ancestral jade while he was in London, and gave it on a gold chain to his beautiful young wife in Beijing. Jiao had cherished it. She loved the Western myths about these benign protective spirits who could also be mighty and terrible. But of course, the jade angel hadn’t protected her.
DaQing lay with the little piece of stone crushed against his forehead, trying as he so often did for some magic to lose himself in time.
The magic never worked; here he was still. Their life together over, destroyed in the collapse of their apartment complex while he was out on patrol. Now he lived alone, in one of the tiny cubicles known as coffins, like a million others China had gratefully offloaded onto her ForShing colony, without worrying too much about its ability to aeroform and build infrastructure, and to provide food and space for all those mouths.
DaQing tucked the jade angel back against his own breast and sat up. He ordered the light higher and
