Ozzie sighed, shoulders setting as he organized his thoughts. “You have to understand something about Dominguez. Xavier Rosario Dominguez… 58 years old, Modern History PhD from Harvard. Impressive early career and a fairly staid private life. One marriage that ended after five years, no children. A succession of short-term relationships since then that is part of my point. Dominguez is a dilettante. Not regarding his career, but socially and personally, he flits around from one woman to another, from one set of friends to another, from one hobby to another. He’s a black belt in several martial arts, a concert pianist when he bothers to play, a scratch golfer, a poet… you get the idea. Since his marriage fell apart when he was 33, he hadn’t had a relationship that lasted more than three months. Hobbies last a maximum of two or three years.
“Until five years ago. Five years ago, when he was still a Senator, Dominguez volunteered for a relief mission to Aphrodite, to help the colony recover from the Protectorate invasion. When he came back… something changed.”
“What?” Glen asked.
“Nothing,” Ozzie replied perversely. “Nothing at all. Before he left for the trip, he’d taken up rock climbing. He’s been an avid rock climber ever since… he goes at least twice a month, schedule permitting. Before he left on the trip, he’d become involved with the aforementioned clerk from Argentina… and they’re still bumping uglies three years later, but they haven’t gone public, haven’t done anything but each other, despite the fact she’s been complaining to her friends about his intransigence. Before he left for the trip, he’d become a regular at the weekly poker game at the Situation Room lounge in Capital City. He still is. Do you see where I’m going here?”
“That’s kind of weak, Oz,” Glen shook his head. “Maybe he’s just come to appreciate stability now that he has some real responsibility.”
“So stable he won’t commit to his girlfriend? Responsible? Hell, Mulrooney, he took time off from a summit with the South American Workers’ Unity Party and the Southern States’ Government Conference to go rock climbing! He’s not stable or responsible… he’s fucking
“So, what are you saying, Oz? That it’s not really Dominguez? That someone has taken his place? Do you know how impossible that would be? I can’t even tell you how much identity verification there is for the Vice President of the Republic, but we’re talking DNA, alpha wave, full biometrics… it’s just impossible.”
“I don’t know what I’m saying, Mulrooney,” Ozzie shrugged. “But you told me to run him through the program, and I ran him. This is what I got. You do with it what you will. But I will tell you something, my friend, this sort of search is not something that can go completely unnoticed. You have to know what to look for, and you have to be actively looking for it, but if they do… they’re going to find out who ran it.” Ozzie stood up, shrugging his shoulders. “You might think this is nothing, that I’m being paranoid, but I’m going on vacation for a while. Don’t try to find me.”
With that, the older man turned and walked briskly out of the locker room. Glen watched him go with a bemused smile on his face.
And yet…
He took his ‘link out of his swim bag and pulled up the address Shannon Stark had given to him back in the cabin. Maybe it was nuts, but she’d want to know anyway. “Major Stark,” he spoke into the ‘link, “looked into that matter. There is some evidence that…”
Glen never saw the arm that snaked around his neck, never saw the ceramic blade that speared through his left eye and into his brain. Blackness claimed him before he could form a final thought.
Chapter Nine
Walking through forests darkened by the shadows of thirty meter tall trees, Jason McKay decided that the videos he’d watched didn’t do Peboan justice. The place was so much larger and more intimidating in person. There was a chill bite to the air, an ozone tang to its smell, that the recordings hadn’t captured; and a paranoid foreboding to the trackless forests that no video could convey. Added to the slight difference in gravity from Earth and the odd color cast the blue-tinted primary star gave to everything just to remind you that you were on an alien world light years from home, it was enough to raise hackles on the back of his neck.
“I don’t think I like this place,” D’mitry Podbyrin commented quietly, eyes darting around from shadow to shadow, hands clenching like they longed for a weapon. Behind them nearly a kilometer back were the ruins of the scout base, being pored over by the technicians for any as-yet-undiscovered evidence, but McKay had wanted to get an idea of how the infiltrators had approached the place, so he had headed into the surrounding forest with Jock, Vinnie, and the Russian expatriate looking for their landing site.
“It is a bit creepy,” Jock said with a shrug, “but all in all, I like it better than laying around up there in the ship.”
“At least there is gravity here,” Podbyrin grunted agreement. McKay had been surprised when the man had volunteered to go down with the landing party; apparently, zero gravity didn’t agree with his stomach after so many years living planetside. “Are we sure they came from this direction?” Podbyrin wondered, looking around them at the looming trees, each thick as a sequoia, their bark an inky black. He looked out of place in borrowed Marine body armor and fatigues.
“Well, on the west, the front of the outpost is pretty open,” McKay explained. “I doubt they would have advertised they were coming by setting down at the landing zone the scouts cleared. East has a sheer cliff about a hundred meters out overlooking a pretty steep canyon. South there are lava-rock hills… it’s a possibility, but an accurate landing on those hillsides would have been iffy. So I’m betting they came from the north. There has to be a clearing somewhere out this way they could use to land, then walk in.”
“Fuckin’ chilly out here,” Vinnie muttered, flexing his gloved fingers for a moment before they returned to gripping his carbine. “And this is what? Summer?”
“Close enough,” McKay nodded. “Late Spring, almost Summer. It doesn’t get much warmer than this in these parts from what I’ve heard.”
“Feels like home,” Podbyrin said with a shrug. McKay idly wondered if he meant his home on Loki or his home back in Twenty-First Century Russia.
“I don’t think they would have risked dropping too far from the outpost,” McKay mused, coming back to the subject. “The biomechs don’t have that much in the way of autonomy, and they’d have to guide them through the woods probably in the dark…”
“Yes,” Podbyrin nodded agreement. “Three, four kilometers, no more. But your people who found the base destroyed… would not they have found any landing site already?”
“They didn’t have time,” McKay informed him. “It was late Fall when they arrived. They had just found the rifle casings when the first big storms of the winter rolled in and dumped about a meter of snow on this place. The ship’s captain made the call to get the news back to Earth instead of waiting out the weather.”
Stepping across the bare floor, desolate and shielded from the star’s warmth by the tyranny of the trees, they fell silent under the oppressive hush of the forest, eyes hunting for signs of intrusion but seeing only a still-frame sameness. Long, wordless minutes passed, the only sound the faint crunching of dead leaves beneath their boots, and McKay began to lose track of time and distance. A quick check of his ‘link revealed that they had walked nearly three klicks from the outpost and he had begun to debate whether he was going to go any farther on foot.
“Hold up,” Vinnie said softly, raising fist in the air to halt them. Slowly he brought up his carbine, gesturing with the barrel to a point on their right. “Three o’clock, fifty meters, on the ground.”
McKay scanned to their front right and almost passed over the dark shape as a root or rock before he came back to it, noticing the not-quite-right color, the too-regular shape.
“Vinnie, Jock, stay here and keep overwatch,” McKay ordered. “Podbyrin, you’re with me.”
“Joy,” the Russian muttered, following behind him.
As the two men approached the object, its lines grew clearer and its color more distinct… it was globular, colored a dull grey mixed with rust. McKay nudged it with the barrel of his carbine, turning it over and revealing it for the broken remnants of a battle helmet.
