Duty, Honor, Planet

sentence hanging, unwilling to verbally execute two hundred men and women.

“We tried to call for air support on the way to the mansion,” Lambert told Shannon. “Nothin’ but dead air.” He shrugged. “Course they might have been jammin’ us.” He was trying to sound hopeful, but not succeeding. Shannon shared his pessimism: despite the best efforts of Republic researchers, the only way to send a message faster than light was to write it down and stick it in a starship. If the Mac was gone, they were a long way from the nearest help.

“Is it possible,” Captain Trang asked, speaking for the first time in the impromptu meeting, “to set up some kind of mobile transmitter? Perhaps we could take the radio from one of the vehicles and set up a temporary position far enough away from here to be safe. Then, after the mobile unit transmits and moves on, we could listen for a response here, at our leisure.”

“That’s not a bad idea.” Shannon said thoughtfully. “Sergeant Lambert, have some of your people dismount the radio from the APC. We’ll work out the rest of the details later.”

“What about after that?” Vinnie wanted to know. “Are we going to lay low, or try to do something?” Silence greeted his question, as Shannon considered the matter.

“It might be prudent,” Tanaka suggested quietly, “to send out a scout.”

“Yeah,” Shannon agreed, grateful to have that decision put off. “We’ll send out a recon team. Two men, on those dirt bikes. They’ll take the transmitter with them and head into the desert. After they make the transmission, they can head for Kennedy and look things over.”

“Who’s going?” Jock wanted to know.

“I was a qualified commo geek in the Corps,” Vinnie threw out.

“It’s yours, Vinnie,” Stark told him. “And we’re going to need someone who’s familiar with the territory.”

“I will go,” Captain Trang volunteered. “I have flown over every inch of this planet at one time or another.”

“You sure you want to take the risk, Captain?” Shannon asked him. “It’s our job, after all.”

“Call it a hobby.” The mercenary captain smiled humorlessly.

“All right then,” Stark concluded. “We have a plan. You two leave tomorrow night. Try to get some sleep, and get something to eat. We’ll outfit you in the morning.”

The group broke up, scattering to find places to sleep. As they walked away, side by side, Shannon saw Jock nudge Vinnie, shaking his head.

“Damn it, it’s just not fair, mate,” he said with a laugh. “You have all the fun.”

Chapter Eight

“Man never made any material as resilient as the human spirit.”

—Bern Williams

Jason McKay woke up shivering furiously, huddling under the suddenly inadequate blanket against the bone- chilling cold of the rock floor beneath him, trying to squeeze his eyes shut to keep out the intrusive sunlight that threatened to pry them open.

Hold on a second, something in his dormant consciousness protested. Sunlight?

His eyes popped open and he bolted upright, immediately aware of the jarring facts: it was the morning after the alien attack; he was sitting in the small mountain cave that they had taken shelter in late the night before; he was Goddamn freezing; and he was alone.

“Shit,” he hissed, snatching his pistol from the ground beside him and coming to his feet.

Where the hell was Valerie O’Keefe?

Cautiously, yet with a mounting sense of urgency, Jason ducked out of the low, rounded cave mouth and emerged into the still-gentle light of the morning sunrise. Greenish-brown scrub surrounded the cave entrance, thickening into a nearly-impassable tangle of thorns and roots on either side of the narrow game trail that led down the steep slope to the clearing where he’d parked the rover.

McKay scanned carefully around him, but the rover wasn’t visible from his position and he could hear nothing but the moan of the wind through the mountain pass. They were still in the foothills of what the discoverers of this world had named the Edge Mountains, but the jagged peaks all around seemed sharper and more rugged than any he’d seen on Earth. The harsh, white light of Tau Ceti threw the dark crags into sharp relief against the yellow sky, raising the hackles on McKay’s neck as his hind-brain rebelled against the notion that he was actually on another world, eleven light-years from Earth. There was just something inherently wrong about that notion that at once frightened and excited him.

“Fucked up and far from home,” McKay muttered.

Shaking his head clear of such esoteric rumblings, Jason carefully negotiated the path down the hill, kicking loose dirt and rocks as he half-walked, half-slid along the barely-existent trail.

How the hell, he wondered, had they ever made it up this at night?

He managed to reach the bottom of the hill on his feet after about ten meters of a half-controlled slide, then took a moment to regain his balance and listen again for any sign of trouble. Farther down the draw and away from the howl of the wind, he began to hear some kind of activity down in the clearing—nothing frantic or violent, just a faint creak of metal and the sound of shuffling feet.

Probably just Valerie getting a drink of water, he told himself—but no use taking chances. He hugged the edge of the path as he slowly made his way around to the perimeter of the clearing, the rear end of the parked rover finally coming into view. Last night, he had made an attempt to camouflage the vehicle with brush, hoping to avoid being spotted from the air or from orbit, but the brush had been pulled away from the rear of the rover and the tailgate was down.

Resting on the lowered rear hatch were one of the water jugs and the bulk of Valerie O’Keefe’s clothes. A wide grin forced its way across Jason’s face as he advanced further and saw Valerie standing to the side of the tailgate, naked, giving herself a sponge bath.

The right thing to do, he knew, would be to turn away and go back to the cave till she was finished. The decent thing would have been to at least back around the corner and announce his presence. Instead, he halted just out of sight and treated his eyes to a nice, long look.

She was, he allowed honestly, very nice to look at. She obviously kept herself in good shape, and either nature or a surgical bodysculpt—he suspected the former—had been kind to her as well. Letting his gaze travel up the soft curve of her hip to her full, rounded breasts, Jason was a bit surprised by the natural response that was pressing against the inside of his fatigue trousers.

He hadn’t been this instantly aroused by the sight of a naked woman since high school, and he actually had to concentrate to keep himself from having a potentially embarrassing accident.

Well, McKay, he thought to himself, there’s only two ways to go here: forward or backward. A wise man, a prudent man, would retreat and keep things less complicated. A balls-to-the-wall, aggressive Marine type would seize the moment and throw caution to the wind. You’re not one of those Marine type of guys anymore, are you?

“Morning!” he said with cheerful loudness, stepping out into the clearing.

“McKay, you bastard!” Valerie shrieked, dropping the wet rag she’d been washing with and snatching her shirt off the tailgate to hold against her chest in a vain attempt at modesty. “Damn it, turn around!”

“I don’t want to turn around,” he told her honestly, slipping his pistol back into its shoulder holster as he advanced slowly toward her. “I like this view.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be an officer and a gentleman?” she demanded, arching an eyebrow, but noticeably less upset than she had been a moment before.

“Is that what you want me to be?” he asked her, stopping only centimeters from her, feeling the heat of her body and seeing the flush of her cheeks and shoulders. “A gentleman?”

“No,” she whispered hoarsely, shaking her head.