Duty, Honor, Planet

can’t be, can they?”

There was a pleading tone in her voice that tore him apart, but he shook his head, trying to meet her eyes.

“No,” he told her. “I guess they can’t.”

She made a show of straightening her dress, giving her an excuse to look away for a moment, and when she met his gaze once more, her face was hard and cold.

“I thank you for your generous offer, Captain McKay,” she said, “but I’ve told Glen about the pregnancy and we’ve decided to keep the child and raise it together.”

“I see,” McKay said, breathing out a deep sigh. “Is there anything you need from me?”

“Yes,” she said. “We need you to stay away. As far as anyone will know, this child is ours. Do you understand?”

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak. Anger, relief and a sharp disappointment fought for supremacy within him, all drowned out by the incredible notion that he was going to be a father, if only an absent one.

“I…” he finally choked out, “I’ll do what you want.” There was moisture in his eye, and he had to blink it back as he stumbled away from her, wanting more than anything to leave.

But he hesitated at the door, looking back at her, pain in the set of his mouth.

“Please,” he said. “What…?” He trailed off, words failing him.

Something softened in her eyes and he thought he saw something of the compassion that he’d once found in her.

“It’s a boy, Jason” she told him, knowing what he was trying to ask. “It’s a boy.”

And then he was out of the room, back in the hallway but still light-years away. A son. He was going to have a son.

* * *

Jason sat in silence as the tiltrotor drew away from the O’Keefe mansion, climbing higher into the night sky. An incredible panorama of stars beckoned enticingly through the side window of the darkened compartment, but his eyes were locked sightlessly onto the back of the next seat, trying to divine the mysteries of the universe in its grey leather depths.

Beside him, Shannon waited patiently, knowing he was going to talk but not wanting to push him. She’d settled into her seat and was about to let the rhythm of the plane’s engines lull her to sleep when he finally looked her way, decision in his eyes.

“Shannon,” he said.

“Yes, Jason.” She sat up and met his gaze.

“Back there… I… Ms. O’Keefe, she…” He chewed his lip, searching for words.

“She’s pregnant,” Shannon declared softly. Jason’s eyes popped open.

“Yeah,” he confirmed, afraid to ask her how she knew. “She’s pregnant.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked. He tried to read something in her eyes, but they were swallowed up in the shadows, unfathomable.

“I’m going to do what she wants,” he told Shannon, trying once more to convince himself it was the right thing. “I’m going to stay away.”

Chapter Fourteen

“Where are they?”

—Enrico Fermi

A scorching, dry wind swept across the plateau, sifting the charred remains of the Aphrodite spaceport and scouring the side of the small, preform dome with sand and dust. Jason blinked away a spray of wind-born dust that had found its way behind the lenses of his sunglasses as he waited for Shannon to slide out of the groundcar’s passenger seat.

“Good Lord,” he whispered, surveying for the first time the devastation Shannon’s attack on the port had caused. The port control building and the laser launch platform were gone as if they had never existed, only an irregular black spot on the sandstone surface marking where they’d been, and everywhere was strewn the wreckage of the shuttle that had exploded.

He felt Shannon shudder as she came up beside him, and he slipped an arm around her, realizing the memories this place would hold.

“I’ll be okay.” She gave him a grateful hug, and then they stepped through the door of the dome hut and into the welcome respite of climate control.

“Afternoon, sir, ma’am.” A straight-backed, dark-haired young Marine officer came off his chair and saluted them.

“Hey, Ari,” Jason said, returning the salute. “Having fun out here?”

“Oh, loads, sir,” Lieutenant Shamir, leader of the Patton’s Marine Reaction Force, replied, shaking his head ruefully. “And don’t think I’m not counting the hours till my team and I switch with Gunny Lambert and the troops at the orbital base.”

Shamir had taken command of Gunny Lambert’s Reaction Force when their numbers had been filled out back on Earth. Lambert had been worried that he would be stuck with some wet-behind-the-ears butterbar, but Shamir was an good man, who had seen plenty of combat as an enlisted man before going to OCS.

Once the Patton had arrived insystem almost two weeks ago, she’d immediately dropped a prefab laboratory into a high orbit, and the Marines had been divided into two teams, one assigned to guard the ground base against any of Huerta’s group that might still bear a grudge, and the other to the orbital lab to serve mostly as gophers for the scientists. Jason and Shannon had spent their time shuttling between the two labs, waiting for answers, while Vinnie, Jock and Tom were busy assisting in relief efforts for the colonists.

“Captain McKay!” Rhajiv Mandila, the team’s chief pathologist, looked up from a bank of instruments and noticed their entrance. “I’m glad you’ve come—I’ve been leaving messages for you on the orbital lab for days now!” The researcher was a homely, horse-faced man with the shoulders of a dockworker, but one of the best minds the Republic had to offer.

“Sorry, Doc,” Jason explained. “Between getting the investigation teams set up and coordinating supply drops for the surviving colonists, we haven’t had a lot of spare time.”

“Well, you need to make time for this.” He waved a hand at the bank of instruments behind him. “I’ve got the results back from the DNA analysis on the tissue samples of the Invader biomechs.”

“‘Biomechs?’” Shannon repeated, brows furling.

“It’s a term we’ve come up with to describe the things,” Mandila explained.

“Are they machines?” Jason shook his head. His gaze wandered to the back of the laboratory, where one of the Invader corpses lay in a clear plastic coffin, suspended in chemical preservatives. He winced involuntarily at the sight of those shark-black eyes, looking no more lifeless in death than they had in life.

“It’s difficult to explain,” Mandila sighed.

Ari laughed. “Yeah, he’s been trying to explain it to me for three days now.”

“They’re not mechanical in the sense you’re probably thinking of,” the pathologist told them, “with circuits and servomotors, but they’re just as much the product of an assembly line as that pistol you’re wearing.” He nodded at Jason’s sidearm. “I don’t know if either of you are familiar with current cloning technology…”

“Assume we’re not,” Jason sighed, getting impatient with the man.

“Well,” Mandila said, raising a finger didactically, “as of about fifty years ago, we’ve had the ability to clone individual human tissues in a lab—we can grow muscle, nerve, even brain tissues in a vat and transplant them back to the donor. But this,” he waved back at the preserved corpse, “is a level of sophistication above that—at least fifty to a hundred years beyond what we can do now.”

“So they’re clones,” Jason deduced.

“Not like the ones you might have seen in science fiction movies.” The pathologist shook his head, a look of