point any further, but she could see in his eyes that he’d understood.
“Lieutenant Stark.” Glen Mulrooney pushed off from the wall, stepping into the midst of them. “You’re going to need some help loading the weapons. I’d like to go with you.”
Shannon blinked at him in surprise: that was the last thing she expected to hear and for a moment she couldn’t think what to say.
“No offense, Mr. Mulrooney,” she finally stuttered, “but you’re not exactly qualified for this kind of work.”
“Maybe,” he said, grinning crookedly, “it’s time I got qualified.” His expression sobered. “Before this is all over, I think we’re
She was about to turn him down again, but suddenly reconsidered. The mission, as they’d planned it, wouldn’t involve undue risk, and their objective was to avoid contact with the enemy. Besides, this was nearly the first time she’d seen Mulrooney doing anything but bitch, and she was of a mind to encourage the change.
“All right,” she agreed, “as long as you agree to follow my orders and those of Lieutenant Kristopolis immediately and without question.”
“No problem,” he assured her, smiling. “Thank you.”
“Glen?” Valerie’s voice came from behind him and he turned to face her. In her eyes, Shannon could see the same disbelief she’d felt. “Why? Why do you want to go?”
“It’s got to be done,” he told her quietly, “and no one else will do it.”
“Well,” Senator O’Keefe sighed, shoulders sagging in resignation, “I guess that’s as good a reason as any.”
Glen Mulrooney huddled under the uniform jacket he’d borrowed, hands sheltered in his armpits. He tried to steady his shotgun between his knees so he wouldn’t have to touch the chilled plastic, but the bed of the truck bucked and he had to grab the weapon to keep it from falling. The RSC troops on either side of him looked nearly as miserable, shivering fitfully, swaying with the movements of the old cargo truck, its bed uncovered and open to the predations of the chilling night.
He still couldn’t believe he was here; he certainly wouldn’t have been able to imagine himself volunteering for something like this only a few days ago. But so much had changed for him—for all of them--in the last few months. He wasn’t sure if things could ever go back to the way they had been before all this, or if he even wanted them to. He felt as if he’d been wearing blinders for the last ten years and they’d just been lifted.
He’d been so concerned with the machinations and intrigue of politics that he’d forgotten the “why” of it all. Every law he’d helped the Senator pass, every appropriations bill they’d hammered out was more than just a petty political victory: it had real, substantial effects on real people. What if they lost this war because he’d denied the Fleet one cruiser or one more refueling center? Would the billions of people living under the thumb of the Protectorate be grateful to him for saving them a few dollars more per month?
There was no way to go back and undo what had been done, but he had to do what he could. Maybe he could become the kind of man that Valerie could respect again, someone who didn’t always think of himself first: someone like Lieutenant Stark or Captain McKay…
“Oh, my God,” he whispered to himself, eyes opening wide. The RSC trooper next to him glanced over curiously, but Glen didn’t notice the man.
Suddenly, everything was abundantly clear to him. The baby Val was carrying was Jason McKay’s. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before, but maybe he’d just been so self-centered that he couldn’t imagine Valerie having sex with another man. It certainly made more sense than anything he’d thought of so far. It explained why she wanted to keep the baby, why she’d insisted on going alone to the obstetrician, and why she’d seemed so distant from him when they’d been reunited.
He knew Valerie had thought he was dead, and—more importantly, he admitted ruefully—McKay had believed Shannon Stark dead. They’d been alone in the middle of nowhere and they’d turned to each other for comfort. The only thing that surprised him was that he wasn’t angry. It seemed distant, somehow, and unimportant. And liberating.
He realized with a crack of emotional thunder that the only thing that had kept him with Valerie the last few months was the belief that either she was carrying his child, or she’d been raped and needed his support. With that thread of commitment severed, there was nothing connecting him to her: not friendship, not respect, not even the vestiges of love. And sitting in the back of an old truck with a shotgun between his knees, freezing his ass off, on his way to sneak a load of guns out from under the noses of ruthless invaders, he suddenly felt better about his life than he had in years.
Jason McKay floated in the midst of the firmament, feeling as if his soul had slipped the surly bonds of his corporeal form and gone sailing through an ocean of stars. Nothing could touch him anymore. No life-and-death decisions could twist his guts nor petty minutiae wear at his patience. He could just let his thoughts drift.
Maybe he wouldn’t come back this time, maybe…
“Captain McKay,” an irritatingly insistent voice resonated in his ear. “Captain McKay, please, it’s important.”
“Off,” McKay sighed with great reluctance.
The starfield surrounding him flickered away and suddenly he was back in the holochamber of the
“What is it?” McKay asked impatiently.
“Sir, we’ve got a reply… from Earth, sir.”
“Well, Goddamnit,” Jason snarled, exploding out of the room past the stunned Fleet officer, “why didn’t you say so?”
McKay flew through the ship’s corridors at breakneck speed, nearly colliding with at least a dozen startled crewmembers on his way to the bridge. He’d delivered his message from the remote commo platform over twenty hours ago, and had almost given up hope of a reply. He’d retreated to the holochamber to relieve some stress after he realized he’d spent nearly two hours staring at the same page of a status report.
“Where is it?” he blurted as he zipped onto the bridge, braking his zero-g momentum against Captain Patel’s chair, earning a raised eyebrow from the ship’s master.
“Bring it up,” Patel ordered the communications officer.
The main viewscreen lit up, somewhat incongruously, with the seal of the Republic HoloNet, which faded into a face.
“Holy shit!” Jason’s breath caught in his throat and he rocked back, floating against the padded restraint bar behind the captain’s chair.
“Hi, Jason.” Shannon smiled at him from the screen. “Surprised to see me? For those of you who came in late”—she put on a serious expression—“I’m Lieutenant Shannon Stark of Fleet Intelligence, acting commander of the surviving Earth forces,” she sniffed derisively, “which consists, at the moment, of a few scattered platoons of RSC troops, a couple precincts worth of local police officers, and one slightly-beat up Presidential Security agent. The acting head of the Republic government is the sole surviving member of the Senate, as far as we know, Senator Daniel O’Keefe.” She glanced down with an almost imperceptible discomfort, then glanced back up. “Valerie’s safe, Jason, and so is Glen. Nathan’s dead.” She shook her head. “Anyway, we’ve got access to heavy weapons, and we’re ready to try to carry out the attack on the orbital weapons control center. We may not be a Marine special- ops team, but we’re all you’ve got. What we need now is a time. We can be ready within two weeks. We have a base of operations, but we’re still gathering our forces, plus we’ll need a few days for recon and training.
“Send us another broadcast, widebeam, with just the time—shift it exactly forty hours and ten minutes ahead, just in case they figure it out, and maybe camouflage it with another one of your commanding-general type speeches.”
Jason barely heard the snickers that remark elicited from a couple of the bridge officers.
On the screen, Shannon’s expression softened.
