stylus for my tablet computer, and put them all into a cup.
“Look,” I said, “let’s make plans for later. I’ll finish up what I’m working on and we’ll go to the beach, okay?”
Sandra didn’t answer. She cruised by my desk and looked over my shoulder at my tablet. I reached up and retrieved my stylus from the cup she had deposited it into and tapped at the screen.
Her face suddenly slid close to mine, making my neck tingle. I could feel her warmth there. She whispered into my ear. “Not okay.”
I swiveled my chair around to face her, half-smiling. “What’s plan B?”
“Plan B? You come with me to the beach, right the hell
“The turrets will keep you company.”
Sandra huffed out. My eyes followed her, admiring her shapely rear end. She paused in the doorway. She slipped off her pants and top. Underneath, she wore a bikini. It wasn’t much of a bikini. Technically, I’d classify it as a network of pink straps. She left the rest of her clothes in a heap in the doorway and walked away.
I got up out of my chair. A man has to recognize when he’s been beaten. I trotted after her and together we headed out to the beach. We walked until we were as far from the nearest beam turret as we could get, which was nearly a mile. We could see two of them at that point, one to the north and one to the south. I gazed at them, and they were indeed creepy. While I watched, they targeted and scanned everything. Once every few minutes, one or the other of them seemed to notice us on the beach and tracked us for several seconds before moving on to a new target.
“What if we have kids, Kyle?” Sandra asked suddenly.
“Uh…” I said.
Sandra reached up and pushed my chin upward, closing my mouth with a snap. My teeth clacked together and I must have looked confused. She frowned up at me.
“Don’t pass out or puke or anything,” she said, suddenly angry.
Inside I wondered how I’d stepped into this. Was it even possible I could have avoided it? I decided to keep up the dumb act. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Noooo,” she said, “I’m not pregnant.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Right?”
“I’m talking about these machines, Kyle. What if we had kids, and they went out to play on this beach, and those things were tracking them all the time. Staring at them. Would you be cool with that?”
I blinked and tried to follow her logic. I had trouble. “You don’t like them because-because they might threaten kids we don’t have yet?”
She walked off a dozen steps, shielding her eyes from the blazing sun. She pointed up at the one that was closer. I took the opportunity to admire her figure. I almost missed what she said next.
“There it goes. See? It just noticed my movement. It’s looking over here. I’m about a mile away, and it’s still tracking me and thinking about burning me.”
“They don’t shoot harmless people, Sandra.”
“Well, you had better make damned sure they know what they’re doing. What if I ran up and kissed you, would they freak out?”
“Let’s experiment,” I said, stepping back a few paces. I braced myself for impact. “Okay, get up some speed and make it look real.”
She twisted her lips, not falling for it. “How about if a kid ran around aiming a stick at them?”
I appeared to consider the idea. Mostly, I wondered how I could get out of this conversation unscathed. I had been hoping to get a little reward for letting her lure me out onto the beach hours earlier than I had intended. Instead, I was being interrogated on hypotheticals.
“They are more interested in real weapons,” I told her. “Anything that emits dangerous radiation or projectiles. They won’t trigger on something simple, like throwing a rock on them.”
“You could blow them up then,” she said, looking down the beach. “I think I should try it. What if I just walked up to the base and left a bag of plastique there and walked away. I could blast it apart. You could have commandos walk up to each one, unarmed, seemingly innocent. I wonder if the other side will ever figure that one out.”
I frowned. “I hate to say it, but you might be right. I’m going to have to work on that angle.”
Sandra bounced over to me excitedly. “Are you going to actually blow one up? I want to do it.”
I snorted. “You really hate them, don’t you?”
She finally started kissing on me. I think she liked the fact that she had managed to come up with a worry I hadn’t thought of. I responded to her touch as I was genetically predisposed to do. Sometimes, when we made out like this, I wondered if this relationship really would explode in my face at the end of two years. I mentally counted the months I supposedly had left. They didn’t seem adequate. Maybe the relationship-calculus didn’t apply to college professors who had moved on to bigger things. It was a hope, anyway.
“Hold your arm up,” she commanded.
I smiled indulgently and did so. I held my arm out stiffly at shoulder-level, parallel to the beach. She climbed up there and perched on my arm like some kind of happy, sexy bird. I walked along the beach while we both smiled. Holding her up was easy for me as she didn’t weigh much over a hundred pounds, but I had to lean in the other direction to keep from tipping over.
“I need another girl on the other side to balance me out,” I said, my mouth being faster than my brain at times.
She tweaked my ear viciously.
“That hurts my feelings,” I said.
Sandra hopped down from my arm, ran into the waves and splashed me as I chased her. We ended up making love out there in the ocean. I kept checking the beach for prying eyes, but didn’t see anyone.
Only the beam turrets watched us with silent, alien interest.
— 22-
We sent General Kerr back to the mainland six months after his failed invasion. Truthfully, he had become kind of a pain by then. I really didn’t want him snooping around, looking at everything we were doing. Publicly, he was our prisoner. Privately, he operated as a liaison. But I suspected he was more of a spy than anything else. Crow came up with the release idea. Kerr had to go undercover to go back home, of course. The public believed he was the architect of a coup. He was a spook now, and I don’t think he liked it.
“You know what’s worse than dying for your country, Riggs?” he asked me the night before he shipped out.
“What?”
“Living on as a ruined man, having sacrificed everything, and then witnessing firsthand how little everyone cares.”
I eyed him. He seemed sincere. I fell silent and looked around the base.
We’d named it by now, and I pressed for a new tradition: we would name places after our fallen. So, the base was now Fort Pierre. Sure, to deserve the name we should have filled it with red velvet settees. We were fresh out of them, however. We had to make do with corrugated steel, concrete and conical beam-turrets.
Fort Pierre had doubled in size over recent months. We had more troops, supplies and buildings than ever. I’d set up weighing stations recently as well. I’d learned that a fully-equipped and operational fireteam of four marines weighed in at just over a single metric ton. Of course, most of the material we’d be loading onto the Macro ship in six more months wouldn’t be the troops themselves. Each troop needed to eat, for example.
In the sky overhead, a black chopper slid over the treetops. It had come in from the sea. Some kind of ship out there past our borders had sent it in. There were no landing lights on the chopper. It was dark and quieter than a normal bird. I supposed that no one back home wanted to advertise who they were picking up tonight.
“Well,” I said to Kerr, “if you ever need a new home, we are still recruiting.”
