and fed her ponytail down through her mask and then pulled it the rest of the way off and tossed it on the love seat nearest the dinner table. She shook her head and ran her fingers through her hair, letting it fall on her shoulders. 'I've worn that thing for so damned long, sometimes I forget I'm wearing it.'
Dee looked at the woman's face closely and didn't have to study it at all to recognize her. The milky white skin, the long, straight black hair, her nose, her mouth, the dimples in her smile, her deep brown eyes, there was no better likeness of her mother other than her mother that she had ever seen. Dee felt faint, very faint.
'What the . . . ?' She had no words, and she wavered in front of the dining chair.
'Oh. I figured you'd already know,' Ahmi said. 'Sit down, child, before you fall down and hurt yourself. I just can't understand why they wouldn't tell you at your age.'
'Who, who are you?' Dee didn't understand at all what was going on. Her mind spun wildly, trying to grasp at an explanation that made sense, but there wasn't one she could wrap her mind around. Why did Elle Ahmi look just like her mother, Sehera Moore?
'Why, I'm your grandmother, of course.'
Chapter 19
July 1, 2394 AD
Ross 128, Arcadia Orbital QMT Facility
Friday, 3:13 PM, Earth Eastern Standard Time
'Goddamned deja vu all over again, hey, Tommy?' Corporal Danny Bates told the gunnery sergeant. Tommy didn't think it was ha-ha funny. He thought it was funny in that 'Oh shit' kind of way. They had yet to meet any human forces the entire time they had been on the surface. On the other hand, the resistance from the autosnipers and AA cannons had been a real pain in the ass.
'Yeah, Danny, if you consider there ain't nobody here, anywhere. At least last time Top and the colonel got to let go some rounds,' Tommy told his longtime friend. The fact that they had met no resistance at the hangar entrance, or the corridor leading inward to the inner rings of the facility, or finally to the elevator leading up into the QMT control room, or anywhere, was just goddamned eerie. It was too goddamned eerie, and it gave Tommy the skin-crawls.
'LT? We got nothing up here. We found what should be the control room, but there is nothing here at all.' Suez checked his suit's sensors again, and the only movement they could detect was each other and the occasional automated janitor bots.
'Gunny, just hold tight. The
'Roger that, sir.' Tommy motioned to PFC Howser. 'Drop a QMT locator, Howser.'
'Roger that, Gunny.' She pulled a QMT beacon out of a compartment on the side of her e-suit, popped the safety, and dropped it on the floor. The beacon flashed a red light on and off once about every two seconds. They all backed away and stood at ready.
The blinking red light flashed to green, and then a bright flash of light filled the room briefly. There was a sound of crackling and sizzling like that of bacon frying in a skillet. The next thing the marines knew, there were three Navy chief warrant officers standing in front of them.
'Gunny,' the lead warrant officer, a CWO-4, nodded to Suez and then turned to his men and started jabbering about finding the membrane ripple controller and the wavefunction transfer initiator. The three men scanned every inch of the control room and then began pulling panels off of circuit boxes and searching through drawers and cabinets.
'Chief, if you need any extra muscle, just ask. Otherwise, we'll be over here standing guard,' Tommy offered the technical specialists.
'Thanks, Gunny. I was hoping we'd have better luck, but this control room looks like it hasn't been used in months. You should see the one back at the Oort.' The chief
