seated beside Valerie and Senator O’Keefe near the back of the auditorium. The Senator usually stayed near the head of the pack for speeches such as this, but Valerie was a bit sensitive about her pregnancy—it had taken an hour’s worth of cajoling for her father to get her to agree to attend with him, and the conditions had been that they would sit near the back and leave immediately afterward.
Valerie, hearing Glen’s comment, fixed him with a hard stare.
“Maybe someday,” she said, “you’ll stop thinking like an ideologue, Glen, and start thinking like a statesman.”
He bit back his initial response and shut up. Things had been tense since they’d returned and she’d told him about the pregnancy—as if she blamed him for what happened. He still didn’t buy her story about the g-sleep cancelling out his sterilization treatments; he had his own idea of what happened. She’d been raped by Huerta or one of his goons, and made McKay promise not to tell anyone about it—that’s what he thought.
He was willing to cut her a little slack if it would help her deal with it, but if she got any worse, he was going to have to insist she go to counselling. The one thing he couldn’t figure out was why she was so determined to keep the baby. She’d told him that by the time she’d found out, it was too late to abort it legally—fine, but why not have it transferred to a surrogate and put up for adoption? Especially if he was right, and she had been raped?
He shook his head and tried to listen to the rest of Jameson’s speech.
“I don’t intend,” the President was saying, “to use this turn of events as a political tool. In times such as these, we must work together and put our past differences behind us. We have defenses in place around all of our colony worlds, but we have no way of knowing if these will prove adequate to the task. The Department of Defense is already in the process of mobilizing every possible asset for shipment out to the colonies to augment the ships and troops already in place. What we will need, however, and sooner rather than later, is more starships. I am putting in a request, which I will forward to the Senate immediately after the recess, that all Corporate cargo ships be refitted with weapons and defensive systems, restaffed with military crews, and used to patrol the colonies. I’ve already talked to the heads of the transportation multicorps, and I’ve been assured they will cooperate completely. What I ask of you, upon your return, is to move up the construction of the three cruisers already authorized by the Defense Spending Act—we’ll need them, both to replace the
His eyes scanned back and forth across the auditorium, wondering how these men and women would react to the news. Would they do the right thing, unite against a common foe, or continue their petty squabbling until the wolf was knocking at the door?
“I realize,” he continued, “that we have many unsolved problems: the issue of the forced emigrants, the political unrest in Eastern Europe and South America, the independence movements on Mars and the Jovian colonies, and the continuing debate over the ethics of our plan to terraform Venus. But these must take a back seat, for the moment, to the immediate threat. I implore all of you, no matter what your political orientation, to join together with me and the whole of the human race in this time of danger. I continue to hope that there may be some way we can contact whoever was responsible for the attack and perhaps bring all this to some kind of peaceful conclusion, but the brutal and unprovoked nature of their actions makes this less than likely.
“We don’t have a clue as to where they may strike next, but I promise you that we will be prepared for them, and no more of our citizens abroad will fall victim to their predations.”
A jackhammer echo from the auditorium’s front hallway made Jameson glance around in mid-sentence. At the foot of the podium, Charlie Klesko’s head snapped up, one hand going to his earpiece transmitter and the other slipping under his jacket to the machine pistol holstered beneath his left arm.
Jameson tried to compose himself and continue with his speech, but another, closer burst of the sharp, hammer-blow noises interrupted him again.
“Sir!” Klesko started up the stairs to the platform, eyes filled with uncharacteristic fear. “You’ve got to get out of here!”
Klesko was only halfway up the stairs when two of the security agents standing closest to the main entrance vanished in a fireball that stretched from floor to ceiling. Jameson watched in horror as time seemed to slip into a slower, nightmarish pace. He could see the tide of flame wash out of the blast centimeter by centimeter, slowly passing over the seats closest to the entrance as half a dozen people ignited from its heat, dying before they could scream as the superheated gas burned through their lungs. The edge of the blast crept forward, tossing Klesko off the step, limbs flailing, even as Jameson felt it slam into him like a giant fist, knocking him off his feet.
As his back touched the platform, time rushed back into fast motion with a thunderclap of sound and a wave of heat that stole the breath from his chest. The reverberation of the blast faded, the void it left filled by the panicked screams of the audience as they rushed for the exits—and straight into the flashing muzzles of Invader autorifles.
Invader biomechs, faceless behind their helmet visors, poured in through the side exits, laying down a withering swathe of rifle-fire. Senators and their families fell like dominoes, those in the front ranks dying under the impact of the high-caliber slugs, those further back trampling each other underfoot as they retreated from the deadly hail.
Gasping helplessly, lolling on his side on the platform, Jameson could only watch the carnage unfold before him. He let his head sag, trying to look away from the slaughter, and saw a long shadow stretching down the main hallway. It was humanoid in shape, but moved with an unnatural, halting gait entirely unlike the fluid movements of the armored troopers. His stunned, barely-coherent mind envisioned some kind of monstrous ogre tramping through the hallways, a horrific, computer-generated beast from the fantasy movies of his youth.
What actually emerged from the corridor was more plausible, if no less threatening. Lurching into view came the dull-grey bulk of a massive suit of powered armor, over three meters tall, one of its arms terminating in the gaping maw of an autoloading cannon, a dish-shaped transmission antenna mounted on one shoulder. Behind it, like remoras clinging to a great white, swarmed a handful of dark-uniformed figures, faces covered by visored helmets, hands filled with the same autorifles the biomechs carried.
They spread out along the platform, surrounding Jameson as the bulky armored battlesuit lumbered into a defensive position facing the main entrance. In the background, Jameson could hear the Invader troops firing into the crowd, methodically executing them, but his attention was frozen on the black-clad humanoids that surrounded him. The one closest to him was talking into a helmet comlink, voice muffled by the mirrored visor, but there was something eerily familiar about the cadence of his words—something not at all alien.
The figure abruptly turned toward him, the muzzle of the autorifle swinging around to point directly at Jameson’s forehead. The President gritted his teeth in anticipation of the shot he expected would end his life, but instead the muzzle of the rifle swung upward and the black-uniformed figure casually slapped back his visor, sliding it up over the crown of his helmet.
“Jesus Christ,” Jameson gasped.
The face beneath that visor wasn’t the blue-skinned visage of a manufactured biomech—it was unmistakably human.
“Get up,” the man told him in English.
Jameson stared at him in disbelief. The face was young, with dark eyes and a crooked nose, and Jameson thought he’d heard a hint of Eastern European in his accent.
“I said, get up!” The man impatiently grabbed him by the collar and yanked him to his feet. Jameson was too stunned to resist as the man pushed him down the platform stairs and toward the main entrance, past the imposing bulk of the battlesuit.
“Who are you?” Jameson finally found his voice as the man guided him down the corridor, over the smoldering remains of the entrance doors.
“Shut up,” his captor growled. “Move.”
Jameson briefly considered trying to jump the man, making a break for it—but he knew that would be suicide, and the old soldier in him wouldn’t let him give up that easy. Still, as he heard the screams of the dying slowly ebb behind him, he couldn’t help but wonder if they hadn’t been the lucky ones.
Chapter Sixteen
