Rick Partlow - Duty, Honor, Planet

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. “ She didn’t want to have them around for the press to see—thought it would make her look paranoid.”

“Hell, I wish I was on the lander,” Jock Gregory grumbled from the seat behind him. “These pus…” he hesitated, glancing around self-consciously, “ wussy Fleet shuttles make me want to puke.”

“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 senoritas?”

“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 cow comes too close to the building, I want you to restrain it and hold it for questioning. You got that, Mister?”

“Aye, aye, sir.” Tom’s mouth twisted into his crooked grin. “Arrest all suspicious farm animals—got it, sir.”

“ MacArthur shuttle SL-103,” the pilot’s voice came over the PA system, “preparing for launch. All passengers fasten your safety restraints, and have a pleasant flight.”

“Goddamned commercial pleasure cruise,” Vincent Mahoney whispered to Gregory, who grunted agreement. McKay had to laugh: those two would always be Marines.

The metallic clunks of releasing locking rings vibrated through the aerospace vehicle as it began to float through the open docking bay doors. Muffled bangs signalled the momentary ignition of the maneuvering thrusters that carried them out of the bay and into the shadow of the massive nickel-iron obelisk that was the RFS MacArthur. For a few seconds, the black metal of the hull was all they could see, punctuated by the regular bumps of sensor pods and antimissile defense turrets; but then they emerged into the harsh brightness of Aphrodite, a brown, green and blue hemisphere that stretched before them in the compartment’s holographic viewscreen.

“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 sign on their door that said, “Please shoot me?”

At least the ride was blissfully short—the port was only about sixty klicks from Kennedy, the capital. Why they’d built the planet’s capital so close to the nearly uninhabitable northern desert, McKay wasn’t sure. Maybe it had something to do with proving a political point that the planetary government represented the immigrant farmers of the north just as much as the wealthier colonists of the south. Or maybe it gave the wealthy colonists of the south a convenient center to find failed farmers they could hire for next to nothing as servants and workers.

Either way, Kennedy did have the distinction of being the second largest city in the star colonies, with a population of nearly 500,000. They could see the outskirts of the city a couple dozen klicks before they came anywhere near the governor’s mansion: not much, just scattered housing and a few small shops. Not that the city itself was that impressive. It was barely four or five kilometers on a side, with uneven rows of low, sprawling buildings constructed of native wood and rock interspersed with the taller, more modern structures built by the multicorps; but it was more than McKay had seen on any of the other colonies he’d visited during his hitch with the Marines.

A few minutes after they’d passed by the city limits, the ducted-fan flitter banked east and ran along the edge of the town until they came to one of the few paved roads that led out of the city proper. It ran for nearly a kilometer along a tree-lined path, through painfully-green, mechanically-irrigated fields of genetically-engineered grass to a huge, stark-white palace of a building that could only be described as something out of Scarlett O’Hara’s worst nightmare. It was meant to be an authentic imitation of an antebellum southern plantation house, but something had obviously gone wrong along the way; it had wound up as a kind of hodgepodge of protruding wings and terraces that more resembled a Dali painting than an official residence.