Kat looked around the crowded barracks, then at Garroway, and seemed to read his mind. “Say, Gare?” She jerked her head toward the door. “As long as we have some downtime, I need to show you something. Outside.”
“’Kay.”
He returned the assembled LR-2120 to its position in a rack with forty-seven other laser rifles, then followed her down the steps, through the building lobby to the front desk where they checked out with a bored sergeant and then out through the front doors into the harsh glare of the sun. It was midafternoon and Garroway felt his exposed skin tingling as the nano imbedded there began reacting to the influx of ultraviolet. The glare lessened to comfortable levels as his eye implants darkened.
The sunlight reminded Garroway once again—and forcefully—of all of the recent barracks chatter about Earth’s worsening climate. Every religion was different, of course, but his own Wiccan beliefs held that the Earth herself was alive, the Goddess in material form, Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis of two centuries earlier given spiritual shape and meaning. To see the Earth in Her current condition genuinely hurt. Could he turn and walk away for another twenty years or more? What would She be like upon his return?
Could She be dying and was it his responsibility to stay with Her and try to help?
But what could one person do to stop the drawn-out ecological death of a planet?
“Where the hell are you taking me?” he asked her as he followed her down the front steps.
“I just wanted to find a place where we could talk,” she replied. “I thought the LVP ready line. …”
Across from the gleaming white building housing the barracks, a number of vehicles had been drawn up in a rigidly straight line along the side of a paved parade ground. The large hangars housing vehicle maintenance and the flight assembly building rose around the perimeter of the field.
The vehicles were LVPs, the acronym standing for landing vehicle, personnel. Specifically, they were M-990 Warhammers, so called for the blunt, crescent-shaped nose assemblies, like the business end of a double-headed hammer, mounting plasma guns housed in turret blisters at each tip.
The vehicles were ugly, their hulls behind the nose section heavily armored and as streamlined as a misshapen brick. Though they could fly, in an ungainly fashion, they were designed to be ferried from orbit to ground slung from the wasp-waist belly of a TAL-S Dragonfly, one of the Corps’ space-capable transatmospheric landing vehicles. They were heavily armed, too; besides the plasma guns, they had laser point-defense weapons, and turreted railgun mounts at the chin and aft-dorsal hardpoints. Each Warhammer was designed to carry two squads—twenty men—plus their weapons and gear, with a two-man/one-AI crew up front.
They walked across the tarmac to the nearest Warhammer. Kat touched an access panel, and the hatch unfolded from the hull, providing them with steps up into the cargo bay.
“This is a lot roomier than the old TAL-S lander modules,” Garroway said, stepping inside and letting his hand slide along the white-painted overhead. “Wish we’d had these on Ishtar.”
“Yeah, the Corps is always coming up with improvements,” Kat told him. “New and better ways to kill things. Anyway, I thought we could talk here without being … disturbed.”
“Did you think I was going to lose it?”
“No. But I didn’t want you clamping down on what you were feeling. C’mon, Gare. Your dad. You don’t really want to kill him, do you?”
He sighed. “Kill him? I guess not. I wouldn’t like going to prison. Or getting a charge of watchdog nano. Another charge, I mean, worse than what we got.”
“Your mother did go back to him, you know, after she’d gotten away. In a way, she has some of the responsibility too.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Life isn’t fair. I wish I had a newdollar for every time I’ve heard of abused women either going back to their abusers, thinking they would change, or just because they didn’t know what else to do … or going on to hook with up someone else just as abusive, or worse. It makes me sick.”
“Sounds like you have a personal stake in it.”
“I do. My sister. Her third husband beat her to death. Her first and second husbands tried to.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “So am I. I hear the bastard’s on nanocontrolled release now, out in Detroit. I hope he screws up and gets fried. I truly, truly do. But I’m not going to hurry him along.”
“They haven’t caught my father,” Garroway said. “Not yet. In fact, he’s probably with the Aztlanista underground. He certainly held Azzy sympathies when I knew him.”
“Yeah, and that’s just it, Gare. You don’t know him. Not now. It’s been twenty-one years, right? He’s a completely different man. I’m not saying he isn’t any better now. I’m not even saying the bastard doesn’t deserve to die. But you’ve been away from Earth too long to get caught up in that.” She grinned at him. “Even if it only feels like a year for you.”
“Damn it, Kat. He killed my mother! …”
“So … somehow you track him down, find him wherever he’s hiding out. What do you do?”
“I alternate between wanting to put a bullet through his brain and wanting to blow out his kneecaps, leave him crippled.”
“With meditech the way it is nowadays, he wouldn’t stay crippled. Look what they did to the asshole you side-kicked. And how would you carry it out, when the watchdog nano in your system is watching you all the time, watching for you to just think a violent thought before putting you out?”
Garroway’s eyes were burning. He was having trouble swallowing.
“You wake up in jail, with a charge of attempted murder hanging on you. No captain’s mast this time. You end up in front of a civilian judge. Dishonorable discharge. Prison or worse. Is the revenge, is the attempted revenge, really worth it?”
Then the tears began to flow freely. A low moan escaped from his throat and then he was crying. He hadn’t cried like this in years, not since he’d been living at home with an out-of-control abuser for a father and a mother terrified of being her own person.
A long time later, Kat held him close. A pull-down storage shelf in the cargo bay had become their bed, a thick roll of foam padding their mattress. Their lovemaking had been hard and needy, almost desperate. At last, though, they clung to one another, sweat turning their bare skin slick and soaking the pad beneath them. With the power off, the interior of the Warhammer had grown stiflingly hot, but that hadn’t mattered, somehow.
Garroway breathed in the delicate scent of Kat’s hair, mingled with the smells of sweat, sex, and machine oil. Reluctantly, he consulted his internal clock. “We’d better get back,” he whispered.
“I know. But this was … good. Thank you.”
“Thank you,” he told her.
“So, what’s it gonna be? Are you going to ditch the Corps
