Ric Locke - Temporary Duty

Steward didn’t like to be called “Doc.” “Thanks, Doctor,” Peters told him. He took the weapon and held it below the blanket, and the doctor started to straighten up and turn. “What the—”

Blue-anorak had spun around and produced a revolver. He got off one shot, but his mistake was to take the time to stretch his arm at full extension before firing. Peters was thumbing the button, and kept it up until somebody else took a hand. The bür weapons were too much in this situation, but M27 sliver guns were specifically designed for close-quarters urban combat. The man’s chest exploded in gore before he’d begun to fall from Peters’s shots. A Marine and a bür smiled and nodded at one another.

“Medic!” somebody shouted, but this wasn’t the sort of crowd to run screaming in terror. Marines clustered around the downed man, and a couple of other people—Grallt, in this case—were clutching wounds in testimony that even sliver rifles were a bit much some ways.

“What the Hell was that all about?” Steward wanted to know.

Peters let the handweapon fall to clatter on the concrete. “Look for his ID,” he suggested. “Betcha it says ‘Styles.’”

“Are you all right?”

Peters stretched his lips in a strained mockery of a grin. “No. It don’t hurt, though. Must be the sleepygas.” Then he passed out again.

The suite at the Willard had been repaired, but if you looked closely at the window frames you could still see traces of the events of a year ago. Peters leaned back in his chair, careful not to stretch the clips and stitches under his left arm, and looked at the scene with pride approaching hubris and satisfaction well past the ‘smug’ point.

Alper was on the floor, helping little Emmett with the brightly colored toys scattered around; the boy had already tried most of them and rejected them as inedible. Ander was asleep in one of the wingback chairs, with Eve a blanket-swaddled lump in her arms. Lisi was suckling baby Thu in the other wingback, and Dzheenis was looming over her and his son with the same sort of expression Peters knew was on his own face. Khurs was half-prone on the couch, too swollen to more than waddle; her mate, a zerkre called Denis, was in the kitchen making her a peanut butter and zishis sandwich. Peters had just met him. He seemed a decent sort. He’d better be.

“We ain’t found you a girl friend yet,” he said to Steward, who was sitting in the fourth wingback around the coffee table sipping something with ice in it.

“It’s being worked on,” the doctor replied. “She works across the road there.” He jerked his thumb at the building behind, which was the White House. “First I need to find out whether it’s me or outer space she wants, then I’ll introduce her to this lot and see if she runs screaming. I don’t think she will.” He swirled his drink and sipped.

Peters chuckled. “Good enough. Like I told Dzheenis a bit ago, a pa’ol can grow by recruitin’ as well as by natural increase.”

“Seems to me you’ve got a nice balance of both here.”

There was a knock on the door, and Dzheenis, the only one mobile and unencumbered, went to answer it. He held a low-voiced colloquy with whoever had come, then pushed the panel wide, turned, and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States of America.”

“Don’t get up, and if anybody starts that damn music I’ll sing,” Hansen threatened as he came in. “George, it’s a small room and ought to be pretty safe. Why don’t you and Brenda stay, and the rest wait outside?”

“We can do that, Mr. President,” the Secret Service agent said.

“Good, thank you. I told you not to get up,” Hansen said to Steward, who had risen despite admonitions.

“I can move and my de’pa’olze can’t, not easily anyway. Won’t you sit down, Mr. President?”

“Thank you.”

The little boy focused on the new visitor, got to his feet, and took two steps before falling on his face. Alper snatched him up, muffled the screams, smiled “sorry” at the President, and took him to the bedroom.

“My son,” Peters said. “Named for my daddy. Alper wanted to make it John Junior, but I didn’t think that was a good idea.”

“Seems like a fine boy,” Hansen said. “Were those his first steps?”

“I reckon so.” Peters was grinning.

“Mr. President, you’re reputed to sip a Tom Collins now and again,” Steward commented, and offered a glass. “Here’s something you might like from a star too far away to see.”

Hansen took the glass and sipped. “Now that’s first class,” he said, echoing Prethuvenigis. “What’s it called?”

“Thivid,” Peters told him. “The n’saith make it from berries, and a tea that’s real good from the leaves of the same plant. Dzheenis, I’d take it kindly if you’d see to it Gene, here, gets a quarter-square of bottles of thivid to remember us by.”

“At your command, de’pa’olze .”

The Secret Service agents’ faces had gone stiff. Hansen looked up at them, then at a grinning Steward. He smiled slightly, sipped his drink, and said, “I take it you’ve decided to go with the Head of State option.”

Peters frowned. “I can’t see as I’ve got much choice.”

“No, I don’t think you do,” Hansen agreed.

“No,” Dzheenis put in. “My de’pa’olze has been the catalyst for changes that are still propagating across the Web like waves from a dropped stone. Mr. President, I’m sure you get tired of hearing about stars you can’t see, but even we don’t know how far the influence reaches. One small thing: Trader 1049 came when asked, and the ferassi have been cooperating with free Grallt, bür, and humans. Nothing like that has ever happened before, and John Peters set in motion the train of events that led to it.”

“Interesting times,” the President observed. “Not the best time for humans to get mixed up in it.”

“But you are,” Dzheenis said. “If ever there were Makers of radios and associated technology they have failed or been lost, and as for computers—well, Mr. President, the human species will be rich soon if you do it right, and that will mean you’ll be mixed up with it, as you say, as thoroughly as anybody.”

“The United States hasn’t seen much good out of it,” Hansen objected.

“That ain’t our fault,” Peters observed.

“No, it isn’t,” Dzheenis confirmed. “Warnocki’s shipyard is in Brazil because he couldn’t get permits; he already has customers. Captain Collins’s anti-pirate fleet operates under Grallt law and funding because the United States wouldn’t license it; we just heard of their first kill. We never released the funds SPADET 1 earned, because we found out right away that they’d just get taken away from the sailors. Many of them are back with us, now, with modest wealth and great demand for their services, because you couldn’t wait for them to spend the money, you had to grab it at gunpoint.”

“I’ve heard all that,” Hansen growled. “I believe it. Hell, I’ve said it often enough, that’s how I got elected in the first place. But dammit, there has to be some organization, otherwise it all falls apart.”

Peters snorted. “Somebody’s got to drive. It don’t mean the driver gets the side meat an’ ever’body else gets hoof and horns.”

Hansen stared into space. “That’s not a principle very many people in this town will be anxious to apply.”

“No, and that’s why I gotta do this.” Peters looked Hansen in the eye. “I done took the Pledge of Allegiance more times than I can count, with and without God in it. I’m still proud to have been an American, but now I gotta withdraw that pledge.”