Chapter Six
“Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to the eyes of men. Silently and imperceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we grow strong or weak; and at last some crisis shows what we have become.”
“This particular brand of ‘political’ activity,” Jason surmised, surreptitiously slipping his right hand inside his open overshirt and letting it drift toward the butt of his shoulder-holstered pistol, “wouldn’t happen to be the Panamanian Liberation Front, would it, Mr. Gomez?”
“For the sake of argument, Lieutenant,” Gomez said with a wave of his hand, his smile much too confident for Jason’s comfort, “what would you say if I told you you were right? And what would you say if I told you”—his dark eyes glinted with a madness McKay had seen for one brief moment in the eyes of a terrorist on Inferno before the man had gone down to a hail of bullets—“that there was five kilos of plastic explosives taped to my chest, and that this”—he produced, with the flourish of a stage magician, a small plastic box about the size of a comlink—“was the trigger?”
McKay’s hand froze centimeters from his handgun, his eyes focussing so tightly on that plastic device in Gomez’s hand that they could have been hooked to the RHN reporter’s camera zoom control. With his free hand, Gomez pulled up the hem of his shirt, revealing a large, grey lump of putty taped across the lower part of his torso. Beside him, Jason could hear Valerie’s sharp intake of breath and feel the vibrations as Glen began to shake uncontrollably. The RHN reporter lowered his camera and began slowly backing toward the door.
“It is an interesting feeling controlling one’s own destiny, Lieutenant McKay,” Gomez told him calmly.
“For the sake of argument, Lieutenant,” Gomez said with a wave of his hand, his smile much too confident for Jason’s comfort, “what would you say if I told you you were right? And what would you say if I told you”—his dark eyes glinted with a madness McKay had seen for one brief moment in the eyes of a terrorist on Inferno before the man had gone down to a hail of bullets—“that there was five kilos of plastic explosives taped to my chest, and that this”—he produced, with the flourish of a stage magician, a small plastic box about the size of a comlink—“was the trigger?”
McKay’s hand froze centimeters from his handgun, his eyes focussing so tightly on that plastic device in Gomez’s hand that they could have been hooked to the RHN reporter’s camera zoom control.
“…what would you say if I told you that there were five kilos of plastic explosives taped to my chest, and that this”—he produced a small plastic box—“was the trigger?”
McKay’s hand froze centimeters from his handgun…
“…and that this was the trigger?”
McKay froze…
…and bolted upright in bed with a violent grunt, every muscle in his body tensed to the point of cramping, covered with a thin sheen of sweat. He clutched instinctively at the place under his left arm where his gun should be before he realized again that he was back in his room in the governor’s mansion and it was—he glanced automatically at his wristwatch—well after midnight, local time.
He took in a deep breath and slowly let it escape, trying to slow down his triphammer heart rate as he settled back onto his pillow. He should, he knew now, have taken advantage of the fact that Valerie had cancelled all her planned activities for tomorrow and made use of his free night to get roaring drunk. At least then he would have been able to sleep through the night. He had tried to work some of the tension out with Shannon, but he hadn’t been able to get the day’s events off his mind and concentrate on her. She’d understood, and told him she’d be there for him if he needed her, which was good to know. Then he’d gone back to his own room to try to rest.
But rest wouldn’t come; his sleep had already been interrupted twice by the nightmares. This last one had been mild compared to the first: in that one, Gomez had been replaced by the animated corpses of casualties from his platoon on Inferno, intent on blowing up Jason and Shannon to avenge their own death.
Had he handled this situation the right way, he wondered? Or had he just gotten lucky? The fact that all of them weren’t dead right now, he was certain, was more attributable to the quick thinking of his team and of Nathan Tanaka than to any decision he had made. When he cut through all the psychological defense mechanisms, he knew in his heart that he was simply scared shitless and had been ever since Inferno. He feared not his own fate so much as he feared that once more he would lead those that trusted him to their deaths, and have to live with it after.
Sighing heavily, he gave up on sleep and looked around for his clothes. The air was too Goddamned conditioned and recycled in this place anyway. He’d be spending too much of the next few months breathing shipboard air—he needed to get outside. He hesitated as he reached for his shoulder holster, slung over a chair back. Would he need it for a walk in the garden?
Shrugging, he slipped into it anyway. The thing about a gun, he remembered Grandpa McKay saying more than once, is that you’ll be a lot better off having it and not needing it than needing it and not having it. Grandpa was a real throwback, but McKay hadn’t known him to be wrong about much.
He pulled his khaki shirt over the holster, then found a jacket in the closet. Though the mansion was in a much more temperate clime than the Wastes, it was still high desert; and, if it was anything like the deserts he’d visited on Earth, it would get pretty damned cold at night.
The halls of the mansion’s guest wing were dark and deserted as he padded silently down them, letting the shadows swallow him up. Did he need to think this through, he wondered, or stop thinking? Sometimes, he felt like he thought too much, although he doubted he would have been able to get his advisors in college to agree with that proposition.
Jason wandered out of the guest wing, through the wheel-like hub between the wings of the building, and finally out a set of open double-doors into the large gardens behind the mansion. Roland Sigurdsen had plenty of connections with the corporations that helped fund the colonies under the umbrella of the Republic Resources Development Council, and it was clear from the lavish way he’d poured money into the mansion that he exploited them to their fullest. The garden covered nearly an acre, its perimeter marked by a hand-cut stone wall, decorated by classical-period statues, but the extravagance wasn’t in the size or the decoration, but in the flora itself: all were Earth plants and flowers, which meant that all were produced from genetically engineered seeds grown specifically to adapt to the conditions on Aphrodite. As much as the engineered food crops cost, engineered decorative plants, being far rarer, were a level of magnitude greater in price.
Just from what Jason could see by the soft gleam of the nightlights that lined the path, the garden must have represented about a hundred thousand dollars in seed money alone. Of course, Sigurdsen hadn’t paid it, and it likely hadn’t come out of colonial funding, either. No, it was much more probable that it had come in the way of “donations” from the local multicorps representatives, in exchange for letting them walk all over the environmental and labor regulations in the mines and on the corporate farms. Or maybe, McKay reflected, he was just getting cynical in his old age.
Yeah, right.
He paused next to a round, polished stone bench and took a deep breath of the chill night air, slowly letting it out. He was finally beginning to relax.
“I just love the night air,” the voice came from behind him. He didn’t remember moving, but suddenly he was crouching behind the bench with his gun in his hand, pointing it at Valerie O’Keefe.
“Shit.” He started breathing again, stuffing his pistol away as he rose to his feet.
“Didn’t mean to startle you,” Val apologized, seemingly unaffected by his reaction. “I just couldn’t sleep—
