Duty, Honor, Planet

them. More ominously, she’d caught scattered, static-filled broadcasts from further west reporting rumors that the laser-launch facilities in Baja had fallen, and that there was substantial enemy activity in the area. The laser-launch site also served a dual purpose as the primary ground-based space defense system for the Western Hemisphere, and if the enemy had control of it, they could shoot down anything that came into orbit.

“No use,” she shook her head, finally responding to the Senator. “By now, if any military forces are organizing a resistance, they’ll be staying off the public or civil channels. Once we get to the base, we might find something out.”

“What difference does it make?” Valerie muttered. “We can’t get away from them. They killed Nathan. They’ll kill all of us.”

“Honey,” Senator O’Keefe said, pulling her to him, stroking her hair, “you can’t think like that. Lieutenant Stark will keep us safe. Everything’s going to be all right.”

Shannon stifled the mocking laugh she felt coming up her throat. Everything, she thought to herself, was definitely not going to be all right. If everything was all right, then one of the most noble and courageous men she’d ever met wouldn’t be lying dead on the ground with a chestful of scrap metal. She’d tried not to think about Nathan, knowing that she didn’t have the luxury of dealing with that grief until she’d gotten them all to safety, but she couldn’t help but feel the hollow inside her—and she couldn’t banish from her mind the image of his face, peaceful and untouched, satisfied in death as he was in life that he’d discharged his duty.

“What’s that?” Glen lunged forward in his seat, pointing at a spot below them, at a string of lights that stretched out over a kilometer from east to west.

“That,” Shannon announced, checking the distance they’d travelled on the flitter’s computer readout, “is the base.”

She took the aircraft down to twenty meters, skirting the edge of the woodline, finding herself travelling along an old secondary road, unused since the Crisis and the Reclamation Laws. Bordering the rutted road was an old- fashioned chain-link fence, with three strands of razor-wire along the top, interrupted at evenly-spaced intervals by wooden light poles. She would have thought the fence the relic of some old farm or factory shut down fifty years ago… but the lights were still burning.

She slowed the flitter as they approached the center of the fence—and a gate.

“Couldn’t we just fly over it?” Glen wondered as she brought the craft down.

“Not… not a good idea,” Klesko spoke unexpectedly. Apparently, his last brush with unconsciousness had been precipitated by sleep rather than blood loss. He hauled himself up by the back of Glen’s seat, sticking his head into the cockpit. “Automatic security systems would knock us down with a maser. There’s a keypad on the gate. I know the code.”

The gate swung open with a hum of well-maintained motors that belied the out-of-date look of the place, and Shannon brought the flitter through, staying low and close to the road. The running lights of the ducted-fan hovercraft didn’t penetrate far into the inky blackness, but Shannon caught sight of the ruby flash of eyes just at the edge of her vision. She knew it was just the reflection of their headlamps off of a herd of deer or wild hogs, but she had a sudden, disquieting image of them riding the hovercraft into the netherworld like the Stygian boatman, with a host of red-eyed demons surrounding them in the blackness.

The dirt track, rather than leading to Hades, brought them to a group of squat, wooden structures which Shannon assumed to be military barracks. They seemed to be relics of at least a century ago, their doors and windows boarded up, the decades-old paint nearly stripped from their rotting flanks. She brought the flitter to a hover in the center of the collection of huts, looked back to Klesko.

“You’re the tour guide,” she told him without the humor the words might have contained. “Where to now?”

“The big one.” He gestured at the largest—by a slim margin—of the barracks buildings, only a dozen meters from where they sat.

Shannon cut power to the fans, and let the flitter settle gently on its landing skids, hitting the controls to pop the hatches. A rush of chill air into the cabin reminded them forcefully that Ohio was not sharing the gently warm fall they’d left in New York and set them all shivering fitfully. Glen and Senator O’Keefe helped lift Agent Klesko out of the passenger compartment and the five of them hobbled wearily over to the front door of the hut. Incongruously, set in the face of the rotting wood door was a keypad identical to the one they had seen in the front gate. Klesko leaned heavily against Glen’s shoulder as he tapped in an alphanumeric code and was rewarded with a satisfied beep.

The door powered open with a pneumatic hiss, revealing ten centimeters of duralloy backing the rotted facade, and a staircase leading downward.

“Well,” Glen murmured, remembering the Governor’s shelter back on Aphrodite, “talk about deja vu.”

“I’ll go first,” Shannon said, drawing her pistol. Glen had kept the empty rifle—he still carried it slung over his shoulder like a totem.

Shannon led them down the stairway. Each step was lit by a chemical striplight, but the end of the passage was swallowed in darkness. She descended slowly, dragging one hand against a wall for balance, feeling Mulrooney’s breath on her neck as he nearly crawled up her back. She spared him an annoyed glance and he backed off a step with a sheepish look.

At the foot of the stairs was another door, this one without the camouflage or the keypad—a simple lever was mounted instead, and Shannon whispered a prayer that it wasn’t locked from the inside as she reached for it. The lever moved hesitantly, with a creak of rust, but it did move and the heavy door swung open. Behind it was the gaping maw of a shotgun and the wide, frightened eyes of a young man.

“Shit!” Glen exclaimed, nearly letting Klesko drop as he fumbled with the rifle slung over his shoulder.

“Don’t shoot,” Shannon said firmly, hands raised to the ceiling. “We’re friends!”

“Who are you people?” the boy stammered—he couldn’t have been older than nineteen and looked even younger, despite his uniform. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m Lieutenant Stark, Fleet Intelligence.” Shannon spoke quickly, trying to relax the boy’s trigger finger. She fished her I.D. from her hip pocket and held it in the light from the other side of the door. “We’ve just come from the Capital—have you heard what’s going on?”

“Have I heard?” the young soldier snorted, lowering his weapon, running a hand through his close-cut black hair. “Jesus Christ, ma’am, what else have I heard?” He looked past her at the bedraggled band, at Klesko’s burned face and Valerie leaning wearily against the wall, wincing at the pain in her back. “Come on inside.”

They followed him into a well-lit chamber taken up mostly by communications equipment. A plain, plastic- upholstered couch had been dragged into the room and set in front of the room’s main viewscreen, and Glen and Senator O’Keefe lowered Klesko onto it carefully. Val sat on the edge of the couch and worked at the agent’s bandage—she seemed to have absorbed herself in caring for the man since Tanaka’s death.

“I’m Corporal Lee, ma’am,” the teenager told Shannon, setting his flechette gun on one of the control boards. His plain, brown uniform, she noticed with something of a start, was that of the Republic Service Corps—the Janitor Corps, Marine troops called them. Those who were unsuited for space travel for one reason or another served their mandatory two years in the Service Corps, providing unskilled labor for one or another construction or reclamation project, security for government facilities and cleanup crews for natural disasters. Their reputation in military circles was somewhere on a par with the Colonial Guard—only not as ruthless nor as well-trained.

“How did you end up here, Corporal?” Shannon asked casually, trying to keep her preconceived opinion of the Corps out of her tone.

“We were assigned to keep the place up,” the Corporal told her, leaning back against the console. “Me’n Raj… PFC Vingh, I mean. We’re part of a maintenance platoon quartered over by Cleveland ’plex. We were over here doing preventative maintenance on the machinery when we caught the news—just a flash before everything went dead. We didn’t know what to do. We couldn’t get the Lieutenant over the radio because of all the traffic and the static.” There was real fear in the boy’s dark eyes as he related the story to Shannon—she tried to imagine a pair of lower-income draftees stuck out in the middle of nowhere, cut off from any leadership while the world fell apart around them.

“We were going to take our truck back to the ’plex,” Lee went on, “but then, about an hour ago, we got the first play of the message.” He shrugged. “After that, we decided it would be better if Raj went back and I stayed