Honor Bound

when Colonel Mellanby transferred me out of the Marines back when.”

“Sir,” one of the technicians, a Lieutenant, approached him, looking a bit hesitant. “I hate to rush you, but we do have three more training groups coming through this afternoon…”

“Yeah, I get the hint, son,” he nodded. Son… hell, he’s only about seven or eight years younger than me. “We’ll do our jawing elsewhere.”

The other three followed McKay out the main exit to the simulator bay, past rows of monitors that had displayed their session to the technicians. He was sure it had been recorded… he had already seen one of his and Shannon’s previous training runs on the ‘net. He shook his head slightly… it wasn’t always convenient being a living legend. Beats being a dead one though.

“So, Vinnie,” he went on as they headed for the locker rooms, “how goes the recruit training?”

“Oh, about as well as I could expect,” the younger man shrugged. “This latest class has a couple that show some promise. Tom… err, Master Sergeant Crossman, that is… tells me there’s one guy who’s even better at hand- to-hand than he is, if you can believe it.”

Shannon smiled, having noticed the slip. “Tough being an officer, isn’t it, Vinnie?”

“Sometimes I’d rather go back to being ‘Sergeant Mahoney’ instead of ‘Captain Mahoney,’ ma’am,” he admitted. “But it’s important work, and someone’s gotta do it.”

“See you boys on the other side.” Shannon waved, heading into the women’s locker room.

“You’ve got the job I was supposed to have,” McKay commented a bit wistfully to Vinnie as the three of them stripped out of their battle utilities in the men’s locker room. “And don’t think I don’t wish sometimes I were still Captain McKay, First Special Operations Command instead of Colonel McKay, Fleet Intelligence.”

“Well I am damn glad,” Jock proclaimed, stepping under one of the showers, “that I stayed ‘Sergeant Gregory’ when you blokes tried to talk me into OCS!”

“One of ‘you blokes’ was the President of the Republic,” Vinnie reminded him.

“And he lost the next election, didn’t he?” Jock shot back. “Shows how good his advice was.”

The three men had just finished showering off and were beginning to get dressed when the ‘link clipped to the collar of McKay’s black uniform shirt chimed for attention.

“McKay,” he responded tersely as he tucked the shirt into his trousers.

“Colonel McKay,” a voice he recognized as that of his aide de camp, Lieutenant Franks came over the microphone, “I’m sorry, sir, I know you left instructions not to disturb you, but sir, it’s General Kage again… he keeps calling back and insists on speaking with you today.”

“Oh great,” Jock sighed, listening in on the conversation. “What does that…” he stopped in mid-sentence at a quelling look from Vinnie, “…fine Colonial Guard officer want now?” he finished, rolling his eyes.

“Put him through, Franks,” McKay said with resignation in his voice, stepping out of the locker room and out into the corridor.

“That’s just it sir, he’s…”

“He is here,” said a harsh voice behind him, a voice as sharp and unyielding as the edge of an axe. McKay turned to see a trim, compact man in an impeccable grey uniform approaching. His craggy, scarred face was chiseled out of amber, his dark eyes clouded with a roiling anger. His hair was dark and wavy and the only thing that gave a clue to the man’s age were deep lines on either side of his downturned mouth.

“General Kage,” McKay nodded. They were indoors and he wasn’t formally reporting to the man, so a salute wasn’t warranted. Not that he would have given one anyway…

“I thought I would find you here, playing your child’s games, McKay,” Kage shook his head. “Perhaps if you put as much effort into your job, your recommendations to the President on the Inferno situation would have been more rational and less impossibly optimistic.”

“I had trusted people on the ground in Inferno, General,” McKay shrugged, unconcerned. “I listened to their recommendations and passed them on up the chain. Well, up the last link of the chain,” he grinned maliciously, “since I do only report to the President.”

“I am well aware of the unwarranted trust President O’Keefe has in you and your department, McKay,” Kage ground out. When he was upset—which, in McKay’s experience, was most of the time—you could hear a hint of his odd accent: Japanese by way of Peru. “While you can make light of it, it is my troops that will have to deal with the results of your miscalculations when the criminal scum you’ve arrogated into a political party rise up and try to take the Inferno colony from us.”

“Inferno isn’t yours to keep or not, General,” McKay reminded him. “It belongs to the colonists, not the Colonial Guard and not the Multicorps. You’d have less trouble if you and your troops remembered that. As for the political situation, Governor Cho seems to be handling it well… he has the parties talking instead of shooting, which is an improvement over the first time I visited.”

Kage’s mouth snapped shut on his automatic retort. He shoots, he scores! McKay thought, fighting down a laugh. He had last visited Inferno as a Second Lieutenant, the platoon leader of a Marine Reaction Force, sent in to rescue a Colonial Guard unit that had been captured, along with their armory and weapons, by the local rebels. He had defeated over 400 rebels at the cost of eight of his Marines’ lives and when the local CG Captain had tried to interfere with his medics treating a civilian casualty first before a CG trooper, McKay had beat the shit out of him.

He’d expected to be court-martialed, but instead the original head of his department—Colonel Kenneth Mellanby, the legendary “Snake”—had transferred him into Intelligence and tasked him with setting up a new special operations team. He’d been assigned Shannon Stark, Vincent Mahoney, Jock Gregory and Tom Crossman as the kernel of the new team and they’d been given a shakedown mission to guard Valerie O’Keefe, daughter of then—Senator Daniel O’Keefe, on a goodwill tour of the colonies on behalf of the Economic Justice Association. That had put them on Aphrodite when it had been invaded by the forces of the former head of the Russian Protectorate, Sergei Antonov, long thought dead in the Sino-Russian War.

McKay and his team had been instrumental in defeating Antonov’s attempt to conquer Earth, which had made McKay and the rest legendary figures and made his position as the new head of Fleet Intelligence nearly unassailable. By bringing up Inferno, he had not only reminded Kage of the fact that he had pulled the CG’s fat out of the fire before, but tangentially that there was no way Kage could get around his authority.

“McKay,” Kage finally spoke again after a visible attempt to control himself, “you may think that there is nothing that can threaten you, but I will tell you this: if those rabble on Inferno cost the lives of even one of my men, I will make it my mission in life to see you pay for it. You should try to remember that you, too, are capable of making a mistake.”

“I’ve made plenty of mistakes, General Kage,” McKay shrugged. “I do try to learn from them, however. Given the history of the Colonial Guard’s dealings with the colonists on Inferno, I’d think you’d want to try that, too. If you are actually concerned about your troops, my advice would be to stop trying to put down the New Dawn Party and start trying to give them a stake in the future of the colony beyond digging up iridium for the mining firms. People don’t want to burn down cities when they own part of them. That’s Republic policy.”

“For now,” Kage snorted. “Presidents change, McKay. You’re this President’s golden boy, but I wouldn’t get too comfortable in the position.”

Before McKay could respond to that, Kage turned on his heel and strode purposefully down the corridor and through the exit.

“Whaddya suppose he meant by that?” Jock wondered. “Next election ain’t for another seven years.”

“He’s just talking out his ass,” Vinnie shrugged. “As usual.”

“Either way,” McKay said, “we’ve got more important things to worry about.” As he spoke, Shannon Stark emerged from the woman’s locker room in her Intell blacks, her dirty utilities in a bag slung over her shoulder. “Shannon, tell them about the reports from the Scouts.”

“We had an observation post in a system near the inner frontier,” Shannon told them quietly. “They were checking out a habitable there, fourth out from the primary. They’d been checking in every two months with a regular military patrol, then, about four months ago, the patrol cruiser found this.” She pulled a tablet out of a thigh pocket and touched the screen, bringing up a video feed, then turned it around so Vinnie and Jock could see it.

The picture was a recut and remixed video that started in orbit around the green and blue planet, then descended with the lander through a thick, stormy atmosphere to circle above a tall, old-growth forest. The trees were subtly different from terrestrial flora, yet similar in a way that convergent evolution had, they found, made almost inevitable. Here and there, as the shuttle passed lower above the treetops, the two former Marines could