years, and Glen was still embarrassed that the Senator knew they were sleeping together. How delightfully old- fashioned.
So it had fallen to him to finish the bottle, stored away for just such an occasion. It had been so long ago. Margaret had been with him when he’d picked out that bottle, and another one just like it.
Damn. It had been almost a week since he’d thought of Margaret. Her memory still stung like a whip across his soul. Reluctantly, he turned and paced back into the den, back to the mantle where the holocube rested. It was their wedding picture, taken nearly thirty years ago.
He looked somewhat ridiculous with the loud suit and long hair that had been in fashion at the time. But Maggie… Maggie was so beautiful, so beautiful it hurt to look at her.
He remembered it just like it was last year and not three decades ago. He’d been an idealistic and ambitious young aide to a powerful senator, much like Glen, and she’d been the daughter of the Czech ambassador to Canada. She’d had the most incredible eyes—eyes you could just fall into. Val had those eyes—he could see so much of Maggie in Val. They’d been so much in love and so young.
The call beeper on the room’s comlink shook him from his reminiscence, petulantly demanding his attention. Shaking his head clear, O’Keefe set down his glass, stepped over to his desk and hit the answer control. A young, clean-cut male in a dark suit shimmered into existence in front of the desk, a remote dialing unit in his hand.
“Senator O’Keefe?” he asked.
“You’re speaking to him, son,” the older man confirmed.
“Please hold for the President, sir.” The man disappeared and was replaced by the Presidential Seal.
O’Keefe’s eyebrows rose. Greg Jameson calling him at home? This was going to be good. A few seconds later, the hologram shimmered once more and congealed into the form of a tall, broad-chested black man in a plain, grey suit.
O’Keefe knew that Jameson was in his late sixties, but the man looked just as fit now as when he’d quarterbacked the University of Florida to their ’71 championship season—not a grey hair on that lofty head.
And then there was that face carved from granite by a fusion blast, that face that could cow the most recalcitrant politician, those eyes that held dark, steaming hurricanes in check beneath their calm exterior. Yes, Greg Jameson looked his part.
“Evening, Daniel.” Jameson’s modulated earthquake of a voice came through the transmission.
“Evening, Mr. President.” O’Keefe nodded. “I trust you enjoyed my daughter’s speech.”
“Saw a recording of it about an hour ago. Sorry I couldn’t make it live, but some unexpected business came up.”
Unexpected, O’Keefe thought, laughing inwardly. Right. To Greg Jameson, the end of the world wouldn’t come unexpectedly.
“Quite all right,” O’Keefe assured him.
“It was very impressive,” Jameson allowed. “She’ll make quite the politician.” O’Keefe didn’t thank him— coming from Jameson, it wasn’t a compliment.
“I hope it didn’t upset you unduly.”
“Why should it?” Jameson smiled genially. “I agreed with at least ninety percent of what she said.”
“Aren’t you worried that it might adversely affect your upcoming appropriations bill?”
“I don’t have the time to worry about things that won’t happen,” Jameson replied with too much confidence for O’Keefe’s comfort.
“Then to what do I owe the honor of this call?” The Senator tried to mask his uneasiness with sarcasm.
“Talk her out of it, Daniel,” Jameson said simply.
“I’ve already been through this with Space
“I don’t give a damn about embarrassment, political or otherwise, O’Keefe,” Jameson snapped in an uncharacteristic display of irritation. “We’re talking about your daughter’s life, man.”
“Oh?” O’Keefe cocked an eyebrow. “Can’t your vaunted Marines keep her safe from a few disgruntled emigrants?”
“It’s not the terrorists I’m concerned with. You’re on the Security Committee—you’ve read the reports.”
“What?” Daniel snorted in derision. “That drivel again? I told Secretary Long and I’ll tell you, too, Mr. President, I don’t believe in fairy tales. All that nonsense was structured to push through the funding for your precious Fleet.”
“That ‘nonsense,’ Senator, has claimed five supply ships in the last three years. There’s something out there. And don’t give me your spiel about natural phenomena. Natural phenomena don’t cut open hulls and suck out cargoes, and they don’t steal fusion reactors.”
Daniel shook his head. “Don’t hand me your paranoid delusions, Mr. President. In almost forty years of regular interstellar travel, we’ve discovered no signs of active extraterrestrial intelligence.”
“And precious little of terrestrial intelligence,” Jameson muttered. His shoulders sagged with a heavy sigh. “I had to try,” he said quietly, maybe to himself or maybe to someone off-camera. “I could just have Space pull her travel permit. Maybe I should.”
“You wouldn’t,” O’Keefe said tightly, “and we both know it. It would look like you were covering up something.”
“You think you have all the angles covered.” Jameson’s tone was soft, almost pitying. “Daniel, did you ever take any history in college?”
“Just what was required for a Polisci major,” the Senator replied.
“Back around the beginning of the last century, men quite like you, with much political ambition and many ideals, and very little knowledge of history, watched the rise of Antonov and his Protectorate and called those concerned about it alarmists and saber-rattlers. They very nearly let him and Xiang destroy this planet and cause the extinction of the whole human race.” Jameson’s voice turned hard as a naked atomic pile. “I won’t let that happen again, Daniel, not on my watch. I want you to remember that.”
The President’s image shimmered, and then was gone. O’Keefe frowned uncomfortably, got up from behind his desk and retrieved his glass. Jameson, he told himself, couldn’t have been serious. He was bluffing—he had to be. There was just no other possibility.
O’Keefe looked down at his glass. It was empty. With a sigh, he walked over to the bar and found another bottle of Scotch. It was going to be a long night.
Chapter Three
“To hunger for use and to go unused is the worst hunger of all.”
MacAuliffe Station hung like a child’s toy in high Earth orbit, a great, spinning wheel that was the gateway to space for all civilian traffic. It was brightly lit and brightly colored, a collage of solar collectors and waste heat radiators that reminded McKay of the old pictures he had seen of a 1950’s concept of a space colony.
The slablike bulk of the RFS
