you see yourself as a career military man?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Jason admitted. “I really haven’t given much thought to it yet.”
“Well, perhaps you should, young man,” the Senator suggested. In person, he was an impressive man, with a force of personality that reminded Jason of Kenneth Mellanby—it would, he thought, be interesting to put the two men in a room together. “Many successful political careers have been built on the foundation of high-profile military service.”
“I’m not sure I’d be a good politician, sir,” McKay chuckled, taking a sip of champagne. “I’ve got a very low tolerance for bullshit, pardon my French.”
“I can appreciate that, I truly can,” O’Keefe assured him. “But I can’t believe that politics has a monopoly on bullshit. Surely the military has politics all its own.”
“So maybe I’m already a politician, is that what you’re saying?” Jason cocked an eyebrow curiously.
“We’re all politicians, Captain. All of the interaction between human beings, from sex to government to commerce, has its own kind of politics, its own special social rituals. Over millions of years of evolution, we’ve developed rituals for dealing with other human beings without violence—imperfect, to be sure, but improving. One day, however long it may be, we’ll evolve beyond the need for violence to deal with our fellow man.”
“That’s assuming,” Shannon pointed out, “that we’re dealing with ‘our fellow man,’ Senator.”
“There you’ve got me, Lieutenant Stark.” He tipped his glass toward her. “Dealing with your Invaders, assuming they are aliens, will require an entirely new set of rituals and politics.”
“What do you mean, ‘assuming they are aliens,’ Daddy?” Valerie asked him. “I saw one of those things, and whatever it was, it wasn’t human.”
“You saw it,” he agreed, “as did the others, but did you perform an autopsy on it? Who’s to say it couldn’t have been a human who’d undergone extensive restruct surgery and some kind of sophisticated brainwashing technique?”
“But who would do that?” Valerie wondered. “Who could?”
“Perhaps a faction of the Belt Pirates,” Daniel O’Keefe suggested. “They might have bribed Corporate employees and gotten their hands on an interstellar cargo ship of some kind. Or, who knows.” He paused, taking a dramatic sip from his glass. “There are those in high places whose fates are inexorably tied to the level of military funding. What better way to ensure the continued increase of military spending than to create a mysterious enemy for them to fight.”
“Those are dangerous words, Senator,” Shannon warned him, her mouth set in a hard line.
“The only dangerous words, my dear,” he countered, “are the ones we’re afraid to speak.”
“That doesn’t seem to be a problem for you, sir,” Jason commented, his smile taking the edge off of the words.
“
McKay looked up and saw the servants bringing in their first course on motorized, wheeled carts.
“Funny,” he heard Shannon whisper in his ear, “I thought
“…and so I told my producer, ‘Bill, I can’t fire the guy, he’s a fucking computer construct!’”
McKay tried to laugh politely at the joke, but the Tri-V drama director who’d told it seemed to be doing enough laughing for both of them, so he searched desperately around the room for Shannon. Dinner had gone surprisingly fast, considering the amount of food they’d been served, and afterward they’d moved into another chamber of the labyrinthine house for cocktails. He’d kept on the move, trying desperately to avoid being cornered by Valerie or worse, Glen, but in the process had discovered just what incredible bores famous people could be.
Finally, he spotted Shannon in a corner nursing a Tom Collins and struck out across the room toward her, but was cut off midway by Valerie O’Keefe.
“Jason,” she said, the same hollow expression on her face, “I need to talk to you. It’s important.”
“Uh… all right,” he acquiesced, realizing he was trapped. “What is it?”
“Somewhere a bit more private,” Valerie insisted, then headed off for the room’s nearest exit, an open archway that led into a library.
Senator O’Keefe, Jason observed as he scanned shelf after shelf of antique books, had a collection to rival Governor Sigurdsen’s—just from where he stood he could see five first-editions that were each worth more than his annual salary.
“Okay,” he said, turning his attention back to Val, “I’m here. What’s wrong?”
“I’m pregnant,” she told him without warning, “and I’m almost certain the baby’s yours.”
Shannon downed the last of her drink in a single swallow, savoring the bite of the liquor as it burned down her throat. This whole affair had been a fiasco. She had stood in corners, either literally or figuratively, since she’d arrived. Hell, the only reason any of these snobs had talked to Jason was because his face had been in the news— when they’d each made their obligatory pass by him, he’d been ignored almost as much as she.
“So much for positive press for the military,” she muttered to herself, setting the empty glass down on a lampstand.
The worst part was, Nathan hadn’t as much as shown his face. The fact that she wanted to see him again troubled her. She was a person who was used to certainty in her life. She’d decided on a military career at age fifteen, much to the chagrin of her parents, and that had been that. First Cambridge University, then straight into Spacefleet Officer’s Candidate School, no doubts, no hesitations. It had been the same story with men. There’d been a special boy in high school, but when she’d left Ireland for college, she’d left that relationship behind along with that phase of her life. At Cambridge, she’d played the field, concentrating on studies, never letting any one man get in the way of her goal, never letting any one of them farther than a few centimeters inside her.
And now, on the verge of the biggest step of her career—of her life!—and on the verge of a probable war, she’d let not one, but two men crawl into her head. This was not how she’d planned things.
Looking up, she caught a glimpse of Jason being led into the next room by that O’Keefe woman and sighed deeply. More complications. But none of her business. She should just get another drink and forget she’d even seen it.
Right. Cursing herself loud enough to draw a few curious stares, she pushed off from the wall and began making her way to the door they’d exited through.
“What?” Jason’s jaw dropped open. “But how?” He shook his head helplessly. “Didn’t you have the treatments?”
“Glen did,” she told him. “I assumed you had, too.”
“No,” he told her numbly. “In the military, they give them to the females—something about testosterone level and male aggression, I think. But… the last time was over five months ago! Wouldn’t you have known back on Aphrodite?”
“When I didn’t get my period, I thought it was because of the stress,” she explained. “Then, when we went into g-sleep, the chemical stasis slowed down the gestation period. I almost lost the baby then—I was so sick when we came back into Earth orbit that they flew me straight to a medical center. That’s when I found out. Because of the g-sleep, I’ve still got six months till it comes to term.”
“Are you…” He hesitated, his guts churning with indecision and shock. “I mean, you’re not going to…”
“It’s too late to legally abort it,” she said, anticipating his question, a flash of stubborn anger in her eyes. “And I wouldn’t even if I could.”
“I wouldn’t want you to,” he assured her, shaking his head desperately. “That’s not what I was saying.”
“What are you saying, Jason?” She fixed him with a dark, questioning gaze.
“Look, I realize my responsibility in this,” he said, throwing up his hands. “I’m not trying to run out on it. If you want the fetus transferred to a surrogate, I’ll pay for it and I’ll take the responsibility for putting the baby up for adoption. I’ll pay for foster care until the agency finds an adoptive family. I’m not in a position to raise a child alone, so that’s all I can do.”
“That’s very adult of you,” she replied, facing away from him, staring at a shelf of books that had suddenly become fascinating. “I suppose adoption is the best idea. If the baby’s parents,” there might have been a catch in her voice, or maybe it was his imagination, “can’t be together.” She turned back to him. “They
