and, like I said, I love the night air out in the desert.” She shrugged, sitting down on the bench. “It’s so… clean. And clear.” She looked up at the night sky. “You can see so many stars.”
“Yeah,” he murmured, surprised at how civil she was being, but a bit annoyed at having his solitude disturbed. “Well, I guess I’d better get back inside.” He started to turn back toward the mansion, and was surprised again to be stopped by her hand on his arm.
“Don’t go yet,” she asked him, her voice earnest and almost pleading. As he moved back, the glow from the ring of chemical lights at the base of the bench lit up her face and he noticed the tracks of dried tears staining her cheeks.
“Ms. O’Keefe…” he began.
“Valerie,” she told him, letting her hand slip off his arm and fall back into her lap. “Please call me Valerie.”
“Uh…” he stammered, “okay, Valerie.” The name seemed to stumble awkwardly off his lips. “Anyway, it’s kind of cold out here, and you’re not exactly dressed for it,” he pointed out, actually noticing the light blouse and mid-thigh denim skirt she was wearing only after he made the comment.
“I’ll be fine,” she insisted. “Sit down for a minute.”
Against every ounce of better judgement in his body, Jason eased down next to her, feeling the chill of the stone bench even through his fatigue pants.
“The real reason I came out here,” Valerie confessed, not looking at him, “is that I saw you from my room, and I wanted to talk to you.” She met his gaze hesitantly, and the words she spoke seemed to have to claw their way free of her throat. “I wanted to thank you for saving our lives today. And apologize for the trouble we’ve given you since this whole thing started.”
Jason shrugged. “Hell, it was probably just as much my fault as it was yours.” Actually, he thought to himself, it was probably mostly your boyfriend’s fault. But that, he decided, was best left unsaid.
“I just wanted you to know,” she went on, “that just because I don’t approve of the way that the government is using the military doesn’t mean I don’t respect it… and you. If you and your people hadn’t acted so quickly, we would have all been killed.”
“We only did what we had to do,” he told her honestly. “I’ve got to admit to you, Ms. O’Kee… Valerie, that when I saw that big lump of plastique, I was thinking more about my ass than my duty.”
She shook her head, seeming not to hear his reply, her eyes focussed on an unseen memory.
“I can’t understand men like him,” she murmured softly. Men like who? Jason wondered. “How could he do it?” she asked. “Didn’t he know that I—that we were trying to help his people? To help all the emigrants?”
Okay, he got it now. It was Gomez she was talking about. But did she really want an answer to those questions? And if she did, how much of an answer did he have? He wasn’t a sociologist, just a soldier.
“My old military history professor back at UC San Diego,” he said, framing the best reply he could muster, “used to call men like Gomez ‘the horsemen’—men like Attila the Hun or Adolf Hitler; the men who believe that might makes right, who want what someone else has and would rather take it by force than work for it. He said that no matter how far humanity advances, and no matter how civilized we think we are, there’ll always be the horsemen waiting in the wings to catch us with our guard down.” He could see the old man in his mind’s eye—Dr. Hans Gabriel had been well over a hundred, but he was still out on the campus jogging track every morning at six, his long white hair tied back in a ponytail. Someone had told him that the Doctor had been in the US Army during the Sino-Russian War. “Every generation, Dr. Gabriel said,” Jason went on, recalling one of Gabriel’s lectures almost word-for-word, “there’s always a call from those that think we’ve come too far to need a military anymore, that we’ve tamed the horsemen forever—bred the trait out of us. They’re always well-meaning and idealistic, and it’s hard to disagree with their reasoning. But they’re wrong, every time.”
“I just thought,” Valerie sighed, looking up at the heavens, “that things might be different now.”
“I know what you mean,” McKay said, leaning back with her but thinking of another sky. “When I was in college, I used to rent a sailboat on the weekends and take it out into the bay at night and just lie back and look at the stars for hours. I thought that if I could get up there someday, that everything would be better somehow. That having done something as incredible as travelling to another star would give everything a whole new perspective. That’s why I joined the Marines, really—I’m not good enough with math for the Fleet, and I wanted more than anything to get up there.” He chuckled softly. “I guess I forgot that no matter what else changes, human nature usually doesn’t. We could leave all the old prejudices and the old boundaries back on Earth, but the one thing we couldn’t leave behind was ourselves.”
“Oh!” Valerie pointed up past the mansion roof. “Look at the shooting stars!”
Jason followed her stare to the bright sparkle winking out in the night sky, then tracked backward along its path till he saw a cluster of the flashing streaks coming down almost directly overhead.
“That’s funny,” he muttered. “There wasn’t anything in the dailies about a meteor shower.”
“It’s so beautiful,” Valerie said, and McKay could have sworn she snuggled up closer to him.
“Yeah,” Jason agreed, finding himself staring at her rather than the starfield above. Her auburn hair spilled over her shoulders, the pale skin of her neck glowing in the chemical light. “Beautiful.”
Her gaze drifted away from the sky and back to his face. Jason had a sudden jolt of fear that she would see through his eyes to the stirring of desire behind them and recoil in horror. Maybe she should be horrified, he thought to himself. He knew he shouldn’t be feeling this, not for her and not now. But she didn’t recoil, and she didn’t seem the least bit horrified. Instead, the look in her eyes was more akin to hunger. Her hand moved from the cold surface of the bench to the warmth of his face as she stroked his cheek, giggling at the day’s growth of stubble that tickled her palm.
“We shouldn’t be doing this,” Jason blurted, trying futilely to will himself to get up and walk away. “This isn’t right.”
“No,” she agreed, leaning in to cover his lips with hers. “It isn’t right at all.”
This, he told himself, was not happening, not to him. It just wasn’t possible. He had never been the type of guy to keep a string of girls hanging around in prep school or college—he’d had a grand total of four girlfriends through his twenty-second birthday. He’d always been the loyal, good-guy type that everyone wanted to set their sister up with. Through four years in the Marines, though he’d frequented the government-licensed escorts at the Rec centers, he’d avoided preying upon the “farmer’s daughters”—the Marine slang term for young, vulnerable colonists of both sexes. As an enlisted man, he’d been called “St. Jason” by his buddies.
And now, in the most responsible position he’d ever held, he had not only entered into a potentially serious relationship with his second-in-command, but he was making out on a garden bench of a colonial governor with the senator’s daughter he was assigned to protect.
Sorry, he whispered silently to the spiritual bureaucrats in charge of his fate, but you seem to have me confused with some
And then, as if to prove his point, something about the size of a bus fell out of the sky and came within about ten meters of squashing them flat.
“Holy shit!” Jason squawked as they both tumbled sideways off the bench in a tangle of arms and legs, finally rolling off of each other and coming to a half-crouch as they stared at the thing in stunned disbelief.
It was teardrop-shaped and made of some kind of dull metal, though patches of burned and melted foam suggested it had once been covered with something else; and a ragged, torn section of black cloth from the top of it fluttered in the breeze like a crow’s wing.
“How the hell…” McKay gaped at the thing, which had dug itself a three-meter deep trench in the middle of the governor’s prize rose bushes. He’d been about to ask how the thing had gotten there, but his questioned was answered in the next moment, when another of the pods glided in out of the night on a thirty-meter black parasail and crashed into the upper floor of the governor’s mansion.
“Oh, my God!” Valerie screamed. “Glen!”
Jason was too preoccupied to note how ironic her concern was considering what they’d been about to do, but he did feel a sinking feeling in his gut—not unmixed with a pang of guilt—when he realized that Shannon, too, was in the building. He jumped to his feet, hearing alarm sirens wailing from the guard barracks off to the west side of the mansion, and was about to rush back inside when a loud series of sharp bangs stopped him in his tracks.
A line of explosive bolts arrayed around the waist of the pod popped like a string of firecrackers and the bulbous shape began splitting along the seam, the blasts from the bolts enveloping everything for ten meters around in a wreath of grey fog. McKay wanted to run—wanted suddenly, worse than anything, to get away from this
