was the vision of a dozen faces: men and women, all of them young, all of them looking to her for leadership… all of them dead. And all because of her.
Chapter Ten
“The world breaks everyone and afterward, many are stronger in the broken places. But those it cannot break, it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure that it will kill you, too, but there will be no special hurry.”
Aphrodite’s lesser moon was a white sliver that hung low in the evening sky above the faraway mountains, like a signpost leading Jason and Val toward their goal. McKay shook his head sharply, trying to keep himself awake despite the droning of the rover’s motor and the gentle swaying of its suspension over the rolling sand of their path through the Wastes. It felt as if he’d been driving through the desert for days, though they’d only set out early that morning and had shared the driving chores.
Jason glanced beside him at Valerie O’Keefe, curled up in the passenger’s seat, snoring softly. They’d spent the past two weeks living the Neolithic existence in their cave home, dragging it out a few days past the limit he’d set for them and stretching their supplies to the breaking point, simply because neither of them really wanted to leave. It had been a healing experience not having to think about the Invaders or the future or the loved ones they’d lost. They’d spent a lot of time talking, but it was small talk and childhood reminiscences: even now Jason was hard pressed to remember a word of it. Mostly, they’d spent their days exploring their surroundings and their nights exploring each other.
It was, he reflected with an ironic chuckle, every teenage boy’s fantasy: stranded on a desert island with a beautiful woman and nothing but sex to pass the time. The problem was, he wasn’t a teenager anymore, and it seemed somehow… empty.
McKay’s reverie was brought to an abrupt end by the unmistakable glint of lights ahead. A few more curves in the road, and the glint solidified into the square-framed window of the Mendozas’ farmhouse less than a kilometer away. Jason slowed the rover’s pace, cut the main headlamps, and leaned over to shake Valerie awake.
“What is it?” She rubbed at her eyes, sitting up.
“We’re here,” he announced, nodding towards the cracked windshield.
“Thank God,” she sighed, grateful at the prospect of being able to get out of the rover.
Jason shook his head. “Don’t be thanking anybody yet. It looks like they’ve got company.”
She followed his gaze and immediately noticed the shape of an old, beat-up utility truck parked at the side of the dome-shaped farmhouse.
“There are not many of the farmers who could afford a vehicle,” she noted, her voice sharing some of the concern McKay already felt.
“I’d better check this out,” Jason decided, angling the rover off the dirt road and taking it over a butt-busting course across the rocky, sandy ground.
He guided the vehicle in a wide arc around the farmstead and came up on it directly behind the barn, out of sight of the main house. Cutting the engine, he let the rover coast down the last twenty meters or so to the rear of the barn, cut the wheel around, and pulled in with the passenger side against the unadorned, buildfoam wall.
“Wait here,” he told Valerie, sliding out of the vehicle and drawing his pistol from its shoulder harness. “If I’m not back in five minutes, or if you hear anything, get out of here.”
“I won’t leave you,” she insisted, shaking her head.
He shut the door, hand resting on the open window. “If I’m not back in five minutes, there won’t be anything to leave.”
“Be careful, Jason.” She covered his hand with hers. “I love you.”
“I… I’ll be careful,” he assured her, pulling away and heading out into the night.
McKay moved cautiously around the curve of the barn, trying to concentrate on watching for threats, but he couldn’t quite suppress the question nagging at the back of his mind.
Why, he wondered helplessly, couldn’t I tell her I loved her?
Because I don’t, came the obvious answer. But, even so, in this situation where anything could happen, why couldn’t he mouth the words, just to make her feel better? Maybe it was just that, despite the obvious physical attraction between them, he couldn’t bring himself to
And maybe, he told himself angrily, I should forget that kind of psychobabble and get on with what I’m doing before I get myself killed.
As he came around the side of the barn that faced the farmhouse, Jason saw that the rear of the building was dark but for the built-in chemical striplight over the back door, glowing in green solitude. No one was in sight and the rear windows were unlit, but the depthless night around them could be concealing legions for all he knew. Deciding enlightenment wasn’t about to strike momentarily, Jason pushed off the barn wall and sprinted across the gap between the buildings, braking against the side of the farmhouse with his free hand, trying hard not to lose his balance and smack into the wall with his shoulder.
Jason found, to his disbelief, that he was close to hyperventilating. Here I am, he shook his head, about to piss my pants over what’s probably nothing more than a bunch of farmers guzzling moonshine and bitching about the weather. Gripping his pistol tighter, he fought to get his breathing under control before he moved again. The cool night air tickled his throat and he had to struggle mightily not to cough, but finally he was confident enough to edge slowly around the curve of the farmhouse, keeping low, his sidearm at the ready. He felt his boot brush against something weighty and giving and nearly jumped out of his skin before he saw that it was only a half-empty bag of fertilizer.
As Jason glanced back up from the intruding sack of manure, a faint glow from around the arc of the side wall brought him up short, and he found himself suddenly less than a meter from the side window, its clear-plastic pane opened inward. Back against the wall, he inched toward the portal, straining to make sense of the muffled rumble of male voices within.
“You have disappointed us, Jorge,” one of the men inside intoned in a Central American dialect of Spanish that McKay, trained in high Castillian with a smattering of Mexican, could barely make out. “The O’Keefe assault was planned for over a year. It required us to call in every favor, exhaust every resource and commit our best men. Had it worked—had Gomez gotten access to the orbital shuttle—we might have acquired the resource our movement has dreamed of for the past ten years: a starship.” The man’s voice seemed oddly familiar to McKay, but the dialect and the machine-gun pace with which he spoke made it difficult for Jason to place.
Whoever the speaker was, his words raised the hackles on McKay’s neck. So
“How can you blame this on me?” McKay heard Jorge Mendoza’s plaintive reply. “It was your ‘soldiers’ who failed. I was not brought in on your plan, I was not invited to participate, I was ordered at gunpoint. My wife and children were threatened! How can you hold me responsible?”
“If you were committed to our cause, we would not have had to force you, Jorge!” The other voice became strident, and even more familiar.
Curiosity overcoming his caution, Jason decided to risk a peek into the window. Edging closer, he turned away from the opening—putting his left shoulder against the wall, his head turned as far toward it as he could— then slowly leaned back until he could see inside through the corner of his left eye.
Besides the gently-glowing striplights built into the interior of the building, the only illumination in the living room came from a relatively high-tech lamp that Jason realized must have cost the Mendozas a pretty penny: he recognized it as a methane-burning device that could be fed raw manure to produce the fuel it used for lighting. The
