Chapter Four
“People are not born bastards. They have to work at it.”
Jason McKay woke with a shiver that rattled his bones, his eyes flying wide open as he jerked upright. It took him a moment to remember where he was, but the sight of row upon row of coffin-like sleep chambers lying open all around him brought him back to reality. He still had the bitter aftertaste of oxygenated biotic fluid in his mouth and the slimy feel of it on his skin. On a conscious level, he knew he’d been breathing the stuff; that it had filled his lungs and surrounded his body for the last two months, cushioning him and the others from the crushing acceleration and deceleration necessary to reach supralight speeds in a reasonable time. But he was still grateful that he’d been unconscious during the process, in a state of chemically-induced hibernation: the thought of breathing liquid scared the hell out of him.
He looked around, still trying to get his bearings, and saw Shannon rising from her chamber, clad only in the halter top and shorts that was twice what he was wearing. Her short hair was matted with dried biotic fluid and her eyes were squinty and half-closed, but he found himself staring at her in a most unmilitary way. Her halter top was plastered over her small, pert breasts, and suddenly Jason wasn’t feeling quite so cold anymore. Her eyes came up to meet his, and he knew he should have tried to look away, but he didn’t. To his surprise, she just smiled.
“Sleep well?” she asked, stretching her legs over the side of the cabinet.
“I really hate this shit,” he admitted, swinging himself out of the chamber, feeling the kinks in his back. He was grateful that the g-sleep machinery had electrically stimulated his muscles while he was in the tank, or he’d have been a quivering mass of jelly after a couple months of floating. Trying to locate the other members of his team, he saw Jock and Vinnie still sitting in their cabinets, doing crunch situps. Shannon followed his look, shaking her head. “Ah, youth,” McKay muttered.
Crossman, he noticed as his gaze swept the room, was already hitting on one of the ship’s crew, and getting nearly as frosty a reception as he had from Shannon. Maybe, he thought, there had been a mixup of the personnel files, and they were really supposed to get some other Tom Crossman.
Flexing his knees, Jason realized that they were still decelerating at around one gravity, which probably put them somewhere around the system’s outlying asteroid belt and well below lightspeed. If they were following standard Fleet procedures, that would give them nearly twenty-four hours at one gravity before they coasted into orbit: time enough for everyone to recover from their long g-sleep. Then they would drop the O’Keefe party off and go refuel at the solar antimatter factory, where kilometers-wide collectors powered a huge particle accelerator, producing the antiprotons that were the only fuel that would take humans to the stars.
Thinking of O’Keefe, he hunted her down with his eyes and saw that she and Glen Mulrooney were just getting out of their booths, huddling close with the RHN cameraman that had accompanied them to record their mission for posterity. Posterity, my ass, Jason thought to himself. More like to further her political career, the Goddamned hypocritical bitch. Hitching a ride on a military ship so she could try to get their funding cut. How did he ever get himself into this? And just what the hell was the Snake thinking of?
“Good God,” the slim, twentyish RHN cameraman was moaning to Glen Mulrooney on the other side of the room. The young reporter’s long, black hair, usually tied into a ponytail, was hanging in greasy strings across his face and his temples pounded with every pulsebeat. “Is it always this bad?”
“I hope not.” Glen shook his head, wiping slime off of his face. “We’ve got nearly a year of this to look forward to.”
“It’s not so bad after the first time,” Valerie assured him, smoothing her hair back from her brows. “I just wish we didn’t have to wear these skimpy outfits.” She could already sense some of the male crewmembers staring at her. It was nothing she couldn’t handle, of course, but it still made her uncomfortable. “Come on, Glen,” she said, standing, her arms crossed over her breasts. “Let’s go get cleaned up. We have a lot of work to do.”
“So,” Shannon asked as they strapped into their seats, “where are the Marines?” She glanced around the shuttle’s passenger compartment, seeing only Valerie O’Keefe’s party and the guard team. It was odd to see them dressed in civilian clothes, but McKay had thought it best to maintain a low profile: if the bad guys couldn’t tell them from O’Keefe’s people, they wouldn’t know who to concentrate on. Jason, Vinnie and Jock were clothed in baggy, tan utility pants, with light-colored shirts worn open over T-shirts, while she wore a white safari shirt and tan shorts—sensible wear for the climate in Aphrodite’s dry season. Tom Crossman, of course, was clad in some garishly-colored jumpsuit more appropriate for an inner-city dance club than a desert.
“They’re coming down separately,” Jason explained, mouth screwing up in distaste, “on the lander.” He jerked his head toward Valerie O’Keefe, engaged in conversation with the RHN reporter. “
“Hell, I wish
“So, sir,” Vinnie asked, surreptitiously elbowing his friend in the ribs, “what’s the agenda? Did she move the meeting back?”
McKay nodded, obviously unimpressed by her half-hearted cooperation. “By a whole hour. So, after we meet with Governor Sigurdsen, we’ll have to bust ass over to the hall ahead of her and give it a good looking-over. You two’ve done security scans before, so you’ll be in charge.”
“My favorite job,” Gregory muttered.
“What about me, Lieutenant?” Crossman asked, somehow managing to look more at ease than everyone else, even in zero gravity. “Do I get to do strip searches on the local
“You…” Jason bit back his initial response, doubting it would seem very professional. “You’ll draw a weapon and patrol the perimeter. If as much as a
“Aye, aye, sir.” Tom’s mouth twisted into his crooked grin. “Arrest all suspicious farm animals—got it, sir.”
“
“Goddamned commercial pleasure cruise,” Vincent Mahoney whispered to Gregory, who grunted agreement. McKay had to laugh: those two would
The metallic
“It looks a lot like Earth,” Shannon observed.
“Looks can be deceiving,” Jason told her. “About a third of the surface is as barren as the Mojave desert.”
“Have you been here before?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah.” He laughed humorlessly, settling back in his seat and closing his eyes. “I have been here before.”
Jason tried to keep from sweating as he watched the rocky ground pass by beneath them, but all he could imagine was a heat-seeking missile rising from some sheltered outcropping below to wipe them out in a methane explosion. God knew, it wouldn’t take much more than a rifle bullet to bring down the bulbous, ungainly, ducted-fan hovercraft that was the only transport available from the spaceport. The damned thing was a genuine antique, surely older than him, and ran on methane, for God’s sake. Why the hell didn’t they just strap on a bomb and hang a
