Duty, Honor, Planet

the access road, turning it into a landscape of shadows. Somewhere overhead, a local nightflyer cried plaintively, a haunting, hollow sound that made the hair on the back of Jason’s neck stand up.

Jason switched on the flashlight, panning its beam across the plateau, looking for Valerie, but saw nothing but a few scrub bushes growing out of the weathered rock. He scanned back and forth again, starting to get concerned. She wouldn’t have gone off the cliff, would she?

“Are you looking for me?” He heard her voice from behind him and turned to see her leaning, arms crossed, against the rock wall behind him, just to the right of the access hatch.

“Guess so,” he admitted, extinguishing the light and stepping over to her. “Is everything okay, Valerie?”

“That’s a funny question for you to ask, Jason,” she said, cocking her head toward him. “Of all people.”

“Yeah,” he muttered, leaning back against the rock face beside her. “Look, I’m sorry if…”

“Sorry about what?” she interrupted. “Sorry you found Shannon alive again? I doubt that.”

“No, I’m not sorry I found her alive,” he told her without hesitation. “And I’m not sorry I still have feelings for her.”

“And what about me?” she asked him softly. “Don’t you have any feelings for me?”

Jason grimaced, feeling like a first-class bastard.

“I do care about you,” he sighed. “I’m not saying I don’t.”

“But you don’t love me,” she finished for him, her voice resigned, her face lost in the shadows.

“You told me you weren’t sure if you’d ever been in love,” Jason reminded her. “Or if you even knew what it was. Well, I’m not sure I know any better than you. I can’t tell you why things work between some people and not between others. I just know that I have something special with Shannon, something I’m not ready to give up. You and I…” he shook his head. “We couldn’t have any kind of future. You have your career waiting for you back on Earth, and Glen.”

“Glen.” Valerie laughed sharply, humorlessly. “Oh, yes, I’ve got Glen, lucky me.”

“He cares about you, Val,” Jason told her.

“He doesn’t care about anybody but himself,” she muttered bitterly.

“He came to me,” Jason told her. “He was worried about you—he wanted me to talk to you, make sure you were okay, since you wouldn’t talk to him.”

“Glen came to you?” Her head came up in surprise.

“It couldn’t be too easy for him.”

“No,” she agreed, “especially with you.”

“Give him a chance,” Jason urged her. “God knows, none of us is perfect. And he loves you.” Hesitantly, he put a hand on her shoulder, saw her look up at his touch. “Look, Val, what you and I had was special. We needed each other. We couldn’t have survived without one another. I’ll never forget it, and I’ll never forget you. But things are different now. We both have other people who are counting on us to be there for them.” He let his hand slide off her arm, shaking his head. “It just wouldn’t be right.”

“What if,” she replied softly, “I don’t care what’s right? What if I don’t care what anyone else thinks or needs? What if all I want is to tell everyone else to go to hell and just be with you?”

“I’m sorry, Val.” Jason sagged back against the rockface, feeling helpless and very sad. “I just can’t do that.”

“I guess I’m sorry, too.” She pushed away from the wall and stepped over to the entrance hatch, hugging her arms to herself. She took one final glance back at him, almost as if she held out one last hope that he might ask her not to go, and then she ducked back inside and was gone.

Jason stared up at the starscape, rhythmically smacking the flashlight against his palm. The mountain air was cool and clean, and the stars were painfully beautiful. He felt like staying out here for a while, clearing his mind of all the confusion and pain—but back inside, Shannon was in bed, waiting for him, and he didn’t want to let her down. Not again. He headed back inside, shutting the door behind him.

* * *

Tom Crossman paced into the shelter’s control room, hands stuffed in his pockets, boredom written in his expression. Nearly three months of unchecked growth had turned his hair from a barely-regulation cut to its more natural mass of wavy brown, and his mustache was a bushy handlebar beginning to droop over his jawline. If someone had told him when he enlisted that someday the military would allow him to wear his hair however he wanted… But right now, he would have willingly endured a high-and-tight just to get back to Earth—or anywhere. 

Falling onto the couch, he saw Vinnie sitting in front of the commo panel, headphones hanging half off, chin resting on his hands. Somehow, he’d managed to retain his buzzcut—God knew how. Probably scraped it off with a Goddamned combat knife, the psycho motherfucker. Jock was at the small table, nose buried in an old-style hardcopy book.

“Whatcha reading, Jock?” he asked, not really caring but feeling he’d go nuts if he didn’t talk to someone soon.

“Something I found in a closet,” he said, sparing Crossman a glance. “S’about some bloke who deserts the army for a sheilla. It’s called, ah…” He turned the book around and checked the title. “A Farewell to Arms.”

“Any good?”

“Better than whacking my wanker, I guess,” he muttered, settling back into his chair and his book.

Tom sighed, realizing Jock was a lost cause. Oh, well, maybe he could get a rise out of Mahoney.

“How long you going to sit there and eat static, Vinnie?” Tom asked him. “I mean, you been wearing those things for a month and you ain’t heard shit yet.”

“I don’t want to spend one more minute in this Goddamned hole than I have to,” Vinnie clipped off tersely, eyes still glued to the wall. “Got a problem with that?”

“Gosh,” Tom said, shaking his head. “You guys are just a laugh a minute, aren’t you?”

“Why aren’t you with your sweet little senorita?” Jock looked back up from his novel. “She finally dump you?”

“Nah,” Crossman said. “Rosie’s okay. But she’s spending a lot of time with that Mendoza lady and her kids— guess ’cause they can talk Spanish to each other. I hung out with them for a while, but I can’t follow it when they start jabbering a hundred klicks an hour, and it gets kind of boring after a while.”

“Hell,” Jock grumbled, “I’ll talk Spanish to her—I’ll speak fucking Greek if she wants. I haven’t touched a sheilla since we left Earth.”

“It’s good for you, Jock,” Vinnie grunted. “Builds character.”

“Thanks loads, mate,” Gregory shot back, scowling at him, “but I’ve got plenty of character already.”

“Y’know,” Crossman said, rubbing the stubble on his jaw, “this reminds me of when my parents stuck me in military school.”

“You went to military school?” Vinnie’s eyebrows shot up.

“Oh, yeah, man, two whole miserable years,” Crossman said. “I was what you might call a problem child. Anyway, this place was co-ed, of course, but it was about two hundred klicks into the middle of nowhere, right at the edge of the Rockies Preserve, and there was only two girls in the place—one of them was a lesbian and the other was a Muslim Fundamentalist.”

“Ouch.” Jock winced sympathetically. “So you had a pretty lonely two years, huh?”

“No way, bud.” Tom laughed. “I studied the Koran for a whole semester and had that Muslim babe believing I was Mohammed’s long-lost cousin.”

“Damn, I am impressed.” Jock tipped an imaginary hat to him. “Anyone who could…”

“Shut up!” Vinnie snapped suddenly.

Tom and Jock turned, frowning in confusion, and saw Vinnie’s hands pulling the radio headphones over his ears, eyes wide.

“What is it?” Tom sat up straight on the couch.

“Shut the hell up!” he reiterated. “Jock, go get the LT—now!”

Gregory didn’t question his partner—he knew that tone of voice. Before Tom could ask him what was going on, the Australian was off his seat and out of the room.

Jason shifted in his position, trying to get more comfortable against the rough surface of the plateau as he