Rick Partlow - Duty, Honor, Planet

He took in a deep breath and slowly let it escape, trying to slow down his triphammer heart rate as he settled back onto his pillow. He should, he knew now, have taken advantage of the fact that Valerie had cancelled all her planned activities for tomorrow and made use of his free night to get roaring drunk. At least then he would have been able to sleep through the night. He had tried to work some of the tension out with Shannon, but he hadn’t been able to get the day’s events off his mind and concentrate on her. She’d understood, and told him she’d be there for him if he needed her, which was good to know. Then he’d gone back to his own room to try to rest.

But rest wouldn’t come; his sleep had already been interrupted twice by the nightmares. This last one had been mild compared to the first: in that one, Gomez had been replaced by the animated corpses of casualties from his platoon on Inferno, intent on blowing up Jason and Shannon to avenge their own death.

Had he handled this situation the right way, he wondered? Or had he just gotten lucky? The fact that all of them weren’t dead right now, he was certain, was more attributable to the quick thinking of his team and of Nathan Tanaka than to any decision he had made. When he cut through all the psychological defense mechanisms, he knew in his heart that he was simply scared shitless and had been ever since Inferno. He feared not his own fate so much as he feared that once more he would lead those that trusted him to their deaths, and have to live with it after.

Sighing heavily, he gave up on sleep and looked around for his clothes. The air was too Goddamned conditioned and recycled in this place anyway. He’d be spending too much of the next few months breathing shipboard air—he needed to get outside. He hesitated as he reached for his shoulder holster, slung over a chair back. Would he need it for a walk in the garden?

Shrugging, he slipped into it anyway. The thing about a gun, he remembered Grandpa McKay saying more than once, is that you’ll be a lot better off having it and not needing it than needing it and not having it. Grandpa was a real throwback, but McKay hadn’t known him to be wrong about much.

He pulled his khaki shirt over the holster, then found a jacket in the closet. Though the mansion was in a much more temperate clime than the Wastes, it was still high desert; and, if it was anything like the deserts he’d visited on Earth, it would get pretty damned cold at night.

The halls of the mansion’s guest wing were dark and deserted as he padded silently down them, letting the shadows swallow him up. Did he need to think this through, he wondered, or stop thinking? Sometimes, he felt like he thought too much, although he doubted he would have been able to get his advisors in college to agree with that proposition.

Jason wandered out of the guest wing, through the wheel-like hub between the wings of the building, and finally out a set of open double-doors into the large gardens behind the mansion. Roland Sigurdsen had plenty of connections with the corporations that helped fund the colonies under the umbrella of the Republic Resources Development Council, and it was clear from the lavish way he’d poured money into the mansion that he exploited them to their fullest. The garden covered nearly an acre, its perimeter marked by a hand-cut stone wall, decorated by classical-period statues, but the extravagance wasn’t in the size or the decoration, but in the flora itself: all were Earth plants and flowers, which meant that all were produced from genetically engineered seeds grown specifically to adapt to the conditions on Aphrodite. As much as the engineered food crops cost, engineered decorative plants, being far rarer, were a level of magnitude greater in price.

Just from what Jason could see by the soft gleam of the nightlights that lined the path, the garden must have represented about a hundred thousand dollars in seed money alone. Of course, Sigurdsen hadn’t paid it, and it likely hadn’t come out of colonial funding, either. No, it was much more probable that it had come in the way of “donations” from the local multicorps representatives, in exchange for letting them walk all over the environmental and labor regulations in the mines and on the corporate farms. Or maybe, McKay reflected, he was just getting cynical in his old age.

Yeah, right.

He paused next to a round, polished stone bench and took a deep breath of the chill night air, slowly letting it out. He was finally beginning to relax.

“I just love the night air,” the voice came from behind him. He didn’t remember moving, but suddenly he was crouching behind the bench with his gun in his hand, pointing it at Valerie O’Keefe.

“Shit.” He started breathing again, stuffing his pistol away as he rose to his feet.

“Didn’t mean to startle you,” Val apologized, seemingly unaffected by his reaction. “I just couldn’t sleep—and, like I said, I love the night air out in the desert.” She shrugged, sitting down on the bench. “It’s so… clean. And clear.” She looked up at the night sky. “You can see so many stars.”

“Yeah,” he murmured, surprised at how civil she was being, but a bit annoyed at having his solitude disturbed. “Well, I guess I’d better get back inside.” He started to turn back toward the mansion, and was surprised again to be stopped by her hand on his arm.

“Don’t go yet,” she asked him, her voice earnest and almost pleading. As he moved back, the glow from the ring of chemical lights at the base of the bench lit up her face and he noticed the tracks of dried tears staining her cheeks.

“Ms. O’Keefe…” he began.

“Valerie,” she told him, letting her hand slip off his arm and fall back into her lap. “Please call me Valerie.”

“Uh…” he stammered, “okay, Valerie.” The name seemed to stumble awkwardly off his lips. “Anyway, it’s kind of cold out here, and you’re not exactly dressed for it,” he pointed out, actually noticing the light blouse and mid-thigh denim skirt she was wearing only after he made the comment.

“I’ll be fine,” she insisted. “Sit down for a minute.”

Against every ounce of better judgement in his body, Jason eased down next to her, feeling the chill of the stone bench even through his fatigue pants.

“The real reason I came out here,” Valerie confessed, not looking at him, “is that I saw you from my room, and I wanted to talk to you.” She met his gaze hesitantly, and the words she spoke seemed to have to claw their way free of her throat. “I wanted to thank you for saving our lives today. And apologize for the trouble we’ve given you since this whole thing started.”

Jason shrugged. “Hell, it was probably just as much my fault as it was yours.” Actually, he thought to himself, it was probably mostly your boyfriend’s fault. But that, he decided, was best left unsaid.

“I just wanted you to know,” she went on, “that just because I don’t approve of the way that the government is using the military doesn’t mean I don’t respect it… and you. If you and your people hadn’t acted so quickly, we would have all been killed.”

“We only did what we had to do,” he told her honestly. “I’ve got to admit to you, Ms. O’Kee… Valerie, that when I saw that big lump of plastique, I was thinking more about my ass than my duty.”

She shook her head, seeming not to hear his reply, her eyes focussed on an unseen memory.

“I can’t understand men like him,” she murmured softly. Men like who? Jason wondered. “How could he do it?” she asked. “Didn’t he know that I—that we were trying to help his people? To help all the emigrants?”

Okay, he got it now. It was Gomez she was talking about. But did she really want an answer to those questions? And if she did, how much of an answer did he have? He wasn’t a sociologist, just a soldier.