The air of the Iota Pegasi sector base stank with fear, resentment, and apprehension.
With the dawning of the new standard year had come word of the Emperor's decision to relocate to the Serpens/Bootes region. It meant he was effectively abandoning the rest of the Empire to its own devices. This was as universally recognized as it was scrupulously avoided in all public utterances, so hypocrisy was added to the psychic miasma's unhealthy mixture. Morale hovered in the lower regions of surliness, just above the threshold that portended mutiny.
Admiral Tanzler-Yataghan had maintained a sphinxlike silence on the subject of his own intentions, maintaining the facade of a loyal Imperial officer and reminding everyone that Admiral Brady-Schiavona—whose name was a byword for incorruptibility—was in charge on the Cassiopeia/Perseus frontier. People clung to that solitary floating fragment of good news as the foundation of their lives dissolved under their feet. But they also knew that there were limits to how much good it could do them, in the face of the Tarakan invasion everyone knew was coming. There could be no such thing as a solid "front" in interstellar war. Brady-Schiavona might stand like a rock, but invaders could bypass him—perhaps through the 85 Pegasi Sector, next door.
Whenever possible, Corin Marshak felt the need to get away into the city of Nambucco outside the base, where the atmosphere of despair was less oppressive because the civilians didn't know as much.
The definition of an optimist, he thought as he stepped off the transposer stage. Someone who just doesn't understand the situation. He was in civvies, because a uniform in Nambucco was sure to draw appeals for information and reassurance, and he had neither to give. He came here to escape from reality among these spacious tree-shaded streets with their picturesque old buildings and sidewalk cafes, basking in the sun like a dream that didn't know the sleeper was awakening.
He was looking around as he walked along the edge of a plaza when he thudded sideways into another form—smaller than his but lithely muscular. "Oh, excuse me!" he exclaimed, turning to look at the other pedestrian, who turned toward him with a swirl of auburn hair, unusual on this world. "Major Dornay! Please forgive my clumsiness."
The Marine, also in civilian clothes, blinked with puzzlement before recognition dawned. "Oh—Commander Marshak. Quite all right, sir. My fault entirely."
"It's been a long time," he ventured. In the standard year since they'd both arrived on Santaclara, their respective duties—his as the Sector Admiral's ops officer, hers with the 79th Ground Assault Regiment that was based here—had rarely brought them together. But on those few occasions he'd remembered her, and gotten the impression that she reciprocated. "Can I buy you a drink?"
Her features seemed to come to a rigid position of attention. "Thank you, sir, but I need to return to base."
"Look, I know we didn't exactly get off on the best foot, a year ago. But could we try again?" He gestured at a cafe whose terrace overlooked the plaza. "It's the least I can do, after almost knocking you on your butt."
Her expression wavered, firmed up again, then relaxed with finality into a kind of fatalistic half-smile. "Oh, what the hell. Might just as well be drunk as the way I am."
They seated themselves on the terrace and ordered the full-bodied local red wine. As they waited for it, Janille studied the panorama of the plaza and Corin studied her. She was dressed in a dark-green outfit that complemented her red hair, and Iota Pegasi A had been less unkind to her complexion than he'd once have thought possible. But her eyes flitted to and fro nervously, and her expression wore a strained look that would have puzzled him had he not had a fairly good idea of its origins. He'd heard stories about the admiral's maneuverings to have her in close proximity to him, and his broad hints about the beneficial effect of a sexually cooperative attitude on her career prospects. . . .
The wine arrived. She took hers a little too hastily, and lifted the glass in a toast. "Well, congratulations! You were right, and I was an idiot."
"What do you mean?"
"Oh, come on! You must remember our first conversation, aboard the liner that brought us here." Without waiting for him to respond, she inhaled half her wine. "Well, you were right."
"About the Empire, you mean?"
"What else?" She took a slightly more cautious pull on her wine. "Must be nice to feel vindicated."
"Not particularly. That's the disadvantage of being a pessimist." He sipped rapidly so as not to fall too far behind. "The advantage is that you're never disappointed. Maybe that's why I've cultivated pessimism ever since the Ch'axanthu war. The experience left me tender."
She looked at him with an interest that drew her out of her bitterness. "Survivor's guilt?"
"Possibly. I lost some friends. But I won't fall into self-pity like some of the survivors I know. Looking back over my life, I can't honestly say I have any grounds for it. You might even say I've beaten the odds. Starting with when I was adopted—"
"Huh?" She leaned forward, her interest intensifying. "That's a coincidence. I was adopted too. On Accadie, 82 Eridani II."
"Really? Was that where your birth parents were from?"
"Couldn't say. I was adopted in early infancy, and my parents—my adoptive parents, that is—never knew anything about them. Neither did the agency they got me from. It was like I came out of nowhere." She finished off her wine and waved at the waiter. "Let's order a carafe."
Corin stared at her. "That really is a coincidence. It was the same with me, only on Prometheus. I never could find out anything about my background either."
"I guess we must have both been war orphans. The civil wars were just ending. I was born the year before Armand Duschane came to the throne of the Empire of Man, you know."
"This is too much! So was I." Then its habitual bleakness closed back over Corin's face. "We were born at a unique moment. Now that moment's ending."
Janille glanced around nervously. This kind of talk could lead to trouble. "You mean . . . you really think we're headed back into the civil wars?"
"Or even further back. We're going to be going through a breakup like what they experienced four centuries ago."
"You really are a pessimist!" She gave a nervous laugh. "Well, maybe it'll at least be exciting. Didn't you once tell me an era like that is good for historical fiction?"
"And hell to live through." Corin nodded, and his brooding eyes swept over the city around them. "Yes, the age of Basil Castellan—who, by the way, is no hero of mine. He pissed away the chance—the last chance—to put the old Empire back together, so it could have stood against the Zyungen. He was more interested in pursuing a personal vendetta against Lavrenti Kang, with whom he needed to make a short-term accommodation against Yoshi Medina's son. It may have been history's most disastrous act of self-indulgence." He shook his head and gave her one of his rare smiles, albeit one of self-mockery. "Sorry. I let my enthusiasm for history run away with me. And I'm probably full of shit, as usual. We'll carry on here, and hope everybody else does the same everywhere. Speaking of which, how's it going with the new Mark 32-A?"
"Well enough." She didn't seem as grateful as he'd hoped for the change of subject. In fact, her grimness settled back over her. He thought he knew why. Maybe talking shop wasn't such a brilliant ploy after all, he chided himself.
But she continued after a heartbeat's pause, as though needing to talk but hesitant to step over a line of whose precise location she was unsure. "I was making some real progress with it. I've had some special advanced training in design theory. And . . . well, I've always been good with powered armor, you know." Corin did know. He'd seen her service record. It went without saying that she had the aptitude for direct neural interfacing—all combat Marines had to. But she was better than most. She had to be, to have attained major's rank and a billet as adjutant to the C.O. of an assault battalion.
" `Was' making real progress?" he queried.
"Before the 79th and everybody else left for Sancerre."
"Of course! I knew there was some reason I ought to be surprised to see you here. Why aren't you out on planet five with the rest of your unit for the exercises?"
Another layer of shadow descended on her face. She spoke in carefully neutral tones. "Admiral Tanzler-Yataghan has asked Brigadier General Toda to assign me to his personal staff as . . . oh, yes, as `special liaison' for something or other."
" `Asked' in terms that amounted to an order, I imagine," Corin replied, striving to match her expressionlessness. He had a very clear idea why the admiral wanted her at his headquarters and outside of the close-knit Marine community. That this was the first he'd heard of it didn't surprise him. He doubted Captain Yuan knew about it either. He'd learned early on that the admiral's "personal staff" was a matter outside the chief of staff's cognizance.
The silence stretched embarrassingly. "Uh, look," he finally attempted, "if . . . that is, just in case . . . well, if you need any kind of help, let me know."
She gave a short, harsh sound that was part laugh and part snort. "What, exactly, could you do?"
A damned good question, he thought miserably.
In the old Solarian Empire's military, absolute gender equality had prevailed. But that hadn't lasted. The Sword Clans' centuries-long twilight struggle with the Zyungen in their home system had made them relearn a basic truth their ancestors hadn't needed to know since clawing their way upward from Old Earth's precivilized ooze: with species survival in the balance, men are expendable and women aren't. The resultant attitudes and social patterns had—as always—long outlived the circumstances that had called them into being; they had carried over into the Empire of Man. Nowadays, all legal restrictions were removed and many women were in the combat branches—but their numbers grew less and less as the rank structure grew more rarefied. Corin recalled hearing the expression "armorplast ceiling."
Of course, the Fleet's lingering Sword Clan ethos had another side: a sternly chivalric ideal that generally prevented the potential for abuse from becoming actuality. But when a really high-ranking officer failed to live up to that ideal . . .
"I understand your bitterness—" Corin began.
"Do you?" For an instant her eyes held his with icy flame. Then she seemed to remember herself, and the armor of formality clashed into place. "Excuse me, sir. I've spoken out of turn. And now my duties require that I return to base." And, with awkward haste, she was gone.
Corin was gazing at the spot where she'd vanished into the crowd when the waiter brought the carafe.
Be a sin to let it go to waste, he told himself.
The communicator beside his bed brought Corin out of a deep sleep. He took two tries to mumble clearly enough for the room to understand and accept the call. Another moment passed before the face on the screen registered.
"Janille—er, Major Dornay! What . . . ?"
"Sir, I apologize for calling you at this hour." She was in uniform. He could only see her from the shoulders up, but she seemed to be standing at attention, her face expressionless. "I have no right to . . . well, sir, you said to let you know if . . . I mean . . ." All at once her face's tightly drawn rigidity cracked. "I don't know what I mean, Commander. Please forget I called." She reached for her communicator's controls.
"Wait! Don't disconnect!" Corin cudgeled his wits into functionality and looked more carefully at the screen. He couldn't recognize the background. "Where are you?"
"The 79th's maintenance shed, at—"
"I know where it is. I'm on my way. Wait right there. If it takes an order to make you stay where you are, consider that an order." He broke the connection before she could argue, and began fumbling for his clothes.
The sentries at the Marine compound gave no trouble to the admiral's ops officer. And the maintenance shed—it was too large a structure for the word to really fit—was unguarded save by automated security systems set to pass people on his level without even recording their entry. He entered and activated the lighting, at "dim" level. A row of powered combat armor suits stood like steel idols of war gods, in a silence that belied the intrinsic menace they held for anyone who knew what they could do. Corin knew, and he had to lick his lips before speaking in a low voice. "Janille?"
"Here." She stepped from the shadows between two of the Mark 32-A's. "Come with me."
She led the way into a windowless storeroom-cum-workshop, where she sank down into a swivel chair at a computer station in a way that suggested familiarity. Corin seated himself on a bench and waited for her to make the first conversational move.
"Thank you for coming, Commander. I didn't know who else to call. But I shouldn't have called you. I have no right to involve you in my personal problems—"
"Cut the crap, Janille." His tone was gentler than the words. "I know precisely who and what you're talking about. And call me Corin."
She blinked, but made a quick recovery. "All right . . . Corin. Earlier tonight, he made me work late, in private. I'd always thought I'd be able to deflect anything he did in an acceptable way. But . . . he'd been drinking, and he . . . well, he tried to force me. I'm afraid I lost my temper."
Corin wondered why he was so appalled—after all, he'd never had any particular illusions about Tanzler-Yataghan. But it wasn't moral outrage that had floored him. It was the admiral's sheer stupidity. My God! Is it possible that a man who'd try to get physical with a trained Ground Assault Marine has been entrusted with the defense of an entire sector? No wonder the Empire is swirling around history's toilet bowl. Aloud: "Uh, you didn't . . . ?"
"No!" She shook her auburn head vigorously. "I said I lost my temper—not that I went insane! He's alive. But I left him unconscious, after I'd . . . Well, I sort of kicked him in the balls."
Corin managed to smother his guffaw before more than a couple of splutters had escaped. "Sorry. Not funny. All right, so afterwards just going back to your quarters and turning in for the night didn't seem like a viable option. You came here instead."
"After taking care of a few things first. I didn't completely lose my head. But yes, I went to earth here. When he comes to, he's going to be bellowing for my head."
Bellowing in soprano. Corin firmly thrust the thought down. "Well, what can he do? I mean, given the circumstances, he can't exactly court-martial you."
"Of course he can. On any charges he wants to dream up—charges completely unconnected with these `circumstances.'"
"But . . . Look here, there's such a thing as an appeal process, you know."
She stared at him. "And I thought you were such a case-hardened cynic! Do you seriously believe any appeal process beyond the sector admiral's level exists any more, in any real sense? Besides . . . what makes you think he'll even bother with a trial at all? Why should he?"
Corin started to open his mouth, then closed it and thought hard. His thoughts weren't welcome ones.
His comfortable affectation of pessimism had been a prophylactic, shielding him from the full enormity of what was happening now that the Emperor had abandoned two-thirds of his Empire. Whatever organization remained above the sector level must have more urgent things on its bureaucratic mind than an aggrieved Marine major. As a practical matter, Tanzler-Yataghan was no more answerable for his actions than some baron of Old Earth's Middle Ages.
So, Corin thought, to his own dawning astonishment, I guess it's time for a knight-errant. And never mind that the damsel in distress wouldn't even need her powered combat armor to wax his ass.
"All right. I concur. Your life is in danger here. We've got to get you off-planet. Do you have any money?"
"Why . . . yes." His sudden briskness, and his voice's deeper timbre, had taken her by surprise. "As I said, I took care of a few things before coming here. One of which was to clean out my account via computer. I'd saved a little, and now I've got it all in the form of a general bearer draft."
"Good. Nobody will be able to touch that—or trace it. You'll also need civilian clothes—oh, you have them? Go ahead and change into them. Forget any personal effects you don't have with you. We've got to get you off this base right now."
"But I can't take the transposer without it being recorded."
"We'll take my slider. The sentries would ID a civilian woman I was bringing onto the base—but not one leaving it. Then straight to the Nambucco spaceport. We'll get you onto commercial transport out of this system tonight."
"But—but—tonight?" Her shock was understandable. This was moving pretty fast. And Corin noted her eyes straying in the direction of the door, beyond which stood the row of Mark 32-A's. The powered armor with which she mind-linked wasn't really sentient. But neither was a beloved cat or dog. And it was more than that—the armor represented all she was losing. Has she even let the word deserter form in her conscious mind yet? he wondered.
"We've got to do it right now, Janille," he said softly. "When he comes to, he'll seal the base and it'll be too late. This is your only chance. Better get moving."
"Yes . . . yes, of course." Moving like a sleepwalker, she picked up a duffel bag from beside the computer table and walked toward the nearest head to change out of her uniform . . . for the last time.
As they drove through the night into Nambucco, she sat in the silence of shock. It gave Corin a chance to examine his hastily conceived plan for flaws. It seemed to hold up. Losing oneself in the general population was far easier today than it had been before humankind had left Old Earth. In those days there had been but one world, made ever smaller by technology and divided among states whose appetite for control had been as totalitarian as their rhetoric had been democratic. But now, with swarms of planetary societies under a laissez-faire Empire only recently emerged from a centuries-long interregnum, the last resort that Janille was about to take—vanishing into anonymity—was once again possible.
"I shouldn't have let you do this." Her low voice interrupted his thoughts as they approached the light-blazing spaceport. "You're bound to get into trouble. It'll be the end of your career."
"I doubt it. The sentries saw me leaving the base with a civilian woman and coming back alone. That's all. I won't enter the spaceport with you, so nobody there will see me."
"But there's always a chance—"
"Undeniably. That's another reason for me to not accompany you past the gate. Just in case I should get probed at some point, I won't know where you went."
He saw her turn and look at him, but couldn't make out her expression in the dark. "The question is," he went on, "wherever you go, what will you do when you get there?"
"I'll think of something."
He essayed an attempt at lightness. "If all else fails, there are lots of mercenary outfits that would be glad to have you."
The noise she made with her mouth was at least an improvement over moroseness. "I hope you're joking! There are worse things than starvation. If I wanted to be a whore, I could have stayed right here."
Her reaction was as per expectations. Free companies had proliferated during the wars of the last four centuries, and Armand Duschane hadn't attempted to eradicate them. Instead, he'd hired them for his campaigns and gradually brought them under certain restrictions, allowing them no major space-combat capabilities or planetary-bombardment weapons of mass destruction. So they'd tended to specialize in ground action. To say the Marines regarded this as a form of patent infringement was to give their feelings an altogether too dry and legalistic coloration. Armand hadn't been displeased—a degree of rivalry has its uses.
The slider rounded a final curve, and the great terminal building was ahead of them. Beyond it, a cargo shuttle drifted soundlessly up into the night on gravs and vectored impellers, occluding the stars with its rising constellation of running lights. Corin pulled up to a curbside and halted, then turned to face Janille.
"Well, this is as far as I go," he said lamely.
At first she made no move to get out of the slider. She looked at him with an expression he couldn't define and spoke hesitantly. "Look, I know thanks are inadequate . . . I mean, all kidding aside, we both know this could come back to haunt you, and . . . Well, I mean . . ." She took a sudden deep breath and blurted it out. "Why don't you come with me? The way things are unraveling now, what kind of future have you got working for a fat fool like Tanzler-Yataghan?"
Corin took a while to regain the power of speech, because it was the last thing he'd expected to hear from her. "No," he finally said. "I can't. As long as the Empire still exists, my oath to it still exists too. At least it exists inside me." Suddenly aware of what he must sound like, he forced his features into a cynical grin. "The real reason, of course, is that unlike you I haven't converted my savings into bearer form. I'd be broke."
Her features quivered into a smile. "You really are a fraud, aren't you?" With the speed of combat reflexes, she grabbed him in a quick, hard embrace and kissed him with savage intensity. Then she broke off, and he had just enough awareness left to wonder if the glitter he saw against her cheeks was the spaceport light reflected from tears. He blinked, and she was gone.
The yellow light of 85 Pegasi, so different from the actinic glare of Iota Pegasi A, was even yellower than usual as the late-afternoon rays slanted through the bar's windows. Janille didn't notice as she waved for the bartender's attention and ordered another Promethean whiskey.
This piss-hole planet, capital world of the sector next door to Iota Pegasi, had been the only destination she'd been able to afford if she was to have enough left over for luxuries like food as well as necessities like getting drunk. So here she was, stuck on this largely desert world of Ostwelt, 85 Pegasi II, habitable only by grace of Luonli terraforming, watching a duo of already drunken enlisted Marines navigate their way through the bar's entrance. This would be a sector capital, complete with Fleet base, she thought, to drown out her whimpering inner cry.
There was a lot of movement of military personnel in this sector, close to Admiral Brady-Schiavona's frontier region, as the bewildered Imperial command structure sought to redeploy its resources to counter the inevitable Tarakan invasion. Only, except where Brady-Schiavona commanded, there was no real command structure at all. It was every sector for itself, or at best cooperating on an ad hoc basis with neighboring sectors, for no one had any confidence in the Empire's ability to provide defense against that which everyone knew was coming. How long, she asked herself, before the sector admirals begin to go into outright rebellion? We thought that kind of thing was safely in the past, for us to read about—unlike Basil Castellan and Sonja Rady, who had to live through it.
Sonja Rady, whose body was never found . . .
A burly form shoved up against her from the next bar stool. It was one of the two Marines who'd just entered. "Hey, bartender!" he bellowed. "Yeah, I'm talkin' to you, shithead! I heard the lady order another. Move your fuckin' ass—an' put it on my tab." He slipped an arm around Janille's shoulders and brought his face close to hers, favoring her with a smile and a high-octane breath. "You just gotta speak up, Red. Hey, after this round why don't you and me get a bottle and take it someplace?"
Janille emerged from shock. She stepped backwards off the stool and thrust his arm away. "Get your hands off me, Private! And put yourself on report for touching an—" But I'm not an officer anymore, came the realization, twisting in her guts like a knife blade and stopping her in mid-breath.
The Marine rose unsteadily to his feet, eyes red with the kind of abrupt mood swing characteristic of his condition. "Don't get high an' mighty with me, bitch!" He reeled forward, groping for her. She shifted aside to avoid his grasp, and with the same movement pivoted on one foot and brought her left fist into the pit of his stomach. He doubled over, gasping for breath and fighting not to vomit.
Two muscular arms grasped Janille from behind, immobilizing her. "I keep telling you it don't pay to be nice to whores, Jax," said the voice that went with the arms. She'd forgotten about the second Marine.
The bartender waddled importantly forward. "Hey, this is a respectable establishment!"
Jax surged upright, his expression ugly. He grabbed a glass, smashed it against the edge of the bar, and brandished the jagged stump at the bartender. "Back off, fat stuff!" The bartender retreated, and Jax swung the broken glass toward Janille. "And now, cunt, you an' me an' my buddy Tomo are gonna go have us a private party."
Janille abruptly went limp in her captor's arms. Jax smiled and stepped closer, misinterpreting the classic breakaway tactic. As Tomo's grasp loosened in response to the deflation of her stiffness, she suddenly crossed her forearms, then snapped them outward, breaking free. Simultaneously, she brought her right foot around in a sweeping side-kick that connected with Jax's hand and sent the glass flying. The move unbalanced her, but she quickly righted herself, skipped sideways, and turned to face her attackers in fighting stance.
Ordinarily the two Marines could, of course, have taken her. But they'd had a good deal more to drink than she had, and her resistance had stunned them. They rushed her clumsily, Tomo first. He'd grabbed a stool and brought it sweeping down toward her head. She made a blade of her left hand, chopping outward against his left wrist and deflecting the stool, and with her right gave him a short, jabbing punch to the solar plexus, followed by a left behind the ear. As he folded, Jax arrived, roaring. He'd evidently sobered up a bit, for he launched a textbook combination of kicks and hand chops at her. She let trained reflexes think for her, rotating away from his first kick and coming around just as he was recovering from the second. She brought the edge of her right hand down on the base of his neck, hard. All at once, she was the only one standing in the deathly quiet bar.
"Not bad."
Janille whirled to face the door, from whence had come the quiet voice. A Marine lieutenant colonel stood there in fatigues. Behind him, impact-armored figures were crowding in. He turned to one of them and indicated Jax and Tomo. "Sergeant, get them to the brig. I'll deal with them when they've come to and sobered up."
"Yes, sir!" the sergeant replied with feeling. "You men, get these two scumbags out of here."
Janille slumped into a chair and studied the officer. He had well-chiseled features in a face of the young/old sort, aged beyond its years by care. "About time the Patrol got here," she groused.
"We're not the Patrol, ma'am. We're scouring all the bars and whorehouses for our people who're on liberty."
" `We'?"
"The 34th Ground Assault Battalion. I'm Lieutenant Colonel Nicholas Vogel-Sabre, commanding. And you are . . . ?"
Groping for an alias, her mind flashed back to the thoughts Jax had interrupted. "Sonja," she blurted, then hastily changed the subject. "But you say you're rounding up your personnel?"
"Yes. You see, we've just been placed on alert."
The last dregs of intoxication drained out of her. "You mean . . . ?"
"Yes. The Tarakans. The early-warning sensors of one of this sector's outlying systems have picked them up. A task force at least. We just got the word via tachyon beam, so we have some warning—though their lighter advance elements could show up any time."
"So," she thought out loud, "they've decided to bypass Brady-Schiavona, who they know is going to be the hardest nut to crack. Damned unsettling, how good their intelligence on us is." Belatedly realizing that this kind of talk might be incautious, she shut up and stole a glance at Vogel-Sabre. He was studying her with sharp gray eyes, and as they met hers he gave a slight smile.
"I already knew you used to be a Marine, after watching you take out two of my men—for whose behavior I apologize, by the way. But now, I'd be willing to bet you were an officer as well."
"You can't prove—I mean, I was never a Marine!"
"Well, then," he drawled, elaborately casual, "I suppose you must have been a mercenary instead."
She jumped to her feet, eyes blazing. "Why, you—" As she caught herself, his smile widened.
"That definitely settles it."
She drew herself stiffly up. "I fail to see, Colonel, how my background is any business of yours."
"Oh, don't worry. You're absolutely right: the circumstances under which you left His Imperial Majesty's service are no concern of mine, and I won't inquire about them. It's just that . . . well . . ." Vogel-Sabre's smile died, and his fine face's premature aging showed in stark relief. "Look, Sonja, or whatever your real name is, I'm desperate. My battalion is badly understrength. I can use anybody with training and experience—no questions asked."
She goggled at him. "Colonel, even if I was an ex-Marine—which I'm not!—you can't just go recruiting on your own, putting anybody you want into powered combat armor!"
"That's absolutely true, in normal times. But, in case it's escaped your notice, the times have ceased to be normal. We're on our own here. Unless Admiral Strauss-Gladius surrenders this system, which he won't, we're almost certainly going to be facing a surface assault in overwhelming strength. I can't worry about legalities. I can't worry about anything except this planet's civilian population—which is going to die, Sonja, if we don't hold out."
She swallowed hard. "Colonel, I'd like to help you. But I repeat: you're mistaken. I've never had Marine training."
He sighed, and managed another flicker of a smile. "Well, if you haven't, you haven't. There are still a few civilian ships leaving this system. If you hurry, you might be able to catch one. But just in case you change your mind . . ." He reached into a pocket and handed her a commcard. "This will get you directly through to me." He turned to go, then paused and gave her a small salute. "Good luck, Sonja." And then he was gone.
Don't be stupid, she told herself as she strode out onto the street and headed for the sleazy room she'd rented, to collect her meager belongings. How do you know you can trust his promise not to investigate you? Besides, these poor schmucks are going to die here. You can't make a difference.
A whine of protesting impellers brought her out of her self-lecturing. A Fleet air carrier dropped down to street level, loudspeaker blaring the news that martial law had been declared. "All children of ages twelve and below are to be evacuated to within the sector Fleet base's deflector screen," the announcement concluded. "To repeat—"
Janille looked through the carrier's windows. They'd already collected some civilian children on their rounds. They sat, all ages jumbled together, adult attendants trying to comfort the youngest.
It's not your fight. Not anymore.
A little girl—Janille had never been any good at estimating ages—looked out through a window with huge, bewildered eyes, clutching a stuffed animal.
You can't save the universe!
The little girl met Janille's eyes and smiled tremulously.
You can't even save this damned planet!
The little girl was hustled toward the back of the carrier to make room for more children, who were being herded aboard in a tide of uncomprehending terror that must have communicated itself to her, for her smile dissolved into a mask of panic and tears.
Oh, shit. Janille turned toward a public comm terminal, fumbling for Vogel-Sabre's card.
"You do understand, don't you, that I can't just turn you loose without checking you out on the Mark 32-A?"
"Naturally," Janille affirmed as they strode along the corridor. "And you do remember, don't you, that I'm only signing on under the condition that no questions be asked?"
"That's the deal," Vogel-Sabre sighed. "Although a last name would be helpful . . . Ah, here we are."
He placed his palm in front of a security sensor, and heavy doors slid aside to reveal a large, warehouselike chamber. In the center stood a Mark 32-A, clamshelled open for boarding. The walls, ceiling and floor held devices that Janille recognized as the business ends of tractor and pressor beams. It was like every training room she'd ever seen.
She studied the Mark 32-A from every angle. It was seemingly unexceptional, with no outward sign that it was a training model. She grasped the edge of its upright lower half and, with practiced ease, swung her legs up and slid them into those of the powered armor. She touched a key, and the torso components swung shut around her with a faint hum of servos. Her body, clad only in the regulation nanoplastic body stocking, was now encased in a three-quarter-ton anthropomorphic construct of molecularly aligned crystalline steel which, given a trained operator, could by itself have won any of Old Earth's pre-spaceflight battles.
It also had a curiously low-tech look for its own era. Modern technology was quite up to producing strength-amplifying suits that were skin-tight, their very fabric composed of molecule-sized nanomachinery. But such suits could never provide the kind of armor protection that an older-style powered exoskeleton like this one could carry, to say nothing of its integral weapons. So the Marines continued to use armor of a pattern essentially unchanged since the General War that had ravaged Old Earth two millennia before.
Of course, the current suits added some new wrinkles to that basic pattern. . . .
Janille lowered the suit's helmet down over her head. It had no faceplate or even eyeholes. She was in Stygian darkness for less than a second. Then the neural interfacing engaged and she was seeing with the suit's sensors, just as she would move with its myoelectric "muscles." She took a minute to feel out the individual idiosyncrasies of the molecutronic brain with which she was now linked. The linkage presented no special problems; this was a normal Mark 32-A, within standard parameters. And now it was effectively her own body.
She ran through a mental checklist, testing the suit's defenses and countermeasures. All appeared to be in order. Then she hefted the eighty-pound-plus plasma gun that was the Mark 32-A's standard carried weapon. She inserted its butt into the firing socket that enabled the suit's own microfusion unit to power it. A readout told her the connection was functioning.
At that instant, with no warning, the interior of the training chamber vanished from her "sight," replaced by a desolate battlefield. Vogel-Sabre was giving her no breaks.
She got moving. Of course she wasn't really going anywhere, any more than her weapons would really be firing. The tractors and pressors, slaved to the suit, would apply just the right resistance to keep it in place as it duplicated her movements. She ran through the virtual battlefield at a speed a galloping horse could achieve but not sustain, sensors out, defenses tight.
Munitions landed nearby, and she grinned. Psi-ordnance, intended to panic her by invoking the cultural phobias of centuries. It might work on nervous newbies, but Janille remembered that her neurohelmet provided psionic shielding. This was the easy part.
Her heads-up display awoke with the icons of incoming aircraft, screaming in on impellers. Their weapons crashed around her, but missed a target whose camouflage circuitry made its liquid-crystal skin blend into its background, and whose infrared shielding masked its heat emissions. Flying debris caromed off her deflector screen, not even connecting with the physical armor it couldn't have dented. She concentrated on targeting the plasma gun. The sensors automatically damped the glare and thunder of the blinding energy bolts she fired. Blossoms of flame flowered in the sky where her targets had been.
She continued to advance into the increasingly deadly virtual combat environment, blasting one threat after another out of existence. A glancing hit from a hostile powered-armor suit smashed the plasma gun out of her hands, as the pressors staggered her backwards as though from concussion. She righted herself and went to integral weapons. She pointed her right hand, fist clenched, and the gauss weapon in that forearm fired a stream of superconducting monomolecular wire segments, electromagnetically accelerated to hypersonic velocities. A deflector screen wasn't at its best against projectiles one molecule wide; they sleeted through the enemy armor, shorting out its systems and leaving it paralyzed.
Janille had a premonition of what was coming, and she thought a command to the suit. The integral laser weapon in her left forearm began to shape-shift; its nanoplastic casing flowed and writhed, allowing components to rearrange themselves into new forms.
It was none too soon, for the crescendo soon came. An enemy powered-armor suit popped into existence in front of her, a few yards away. It hadn't gotten there via transposer; the device had little utility in a combat environment so permeated with countermeasures as to preclude the sensor lock it required. No, this was old-fashioned psionic teleportation. Human jumpers were few—a tiny minority among the tiny minority that had any sort of psi talent at all. But a powered-armor suit with which such a teleporter was mind-linked could, at great expense, be webbed with psi-reactive circuitry that rendered it an extension of his own body for purposes of teleportation's mass constraints. It was a new development, and one for which many Marines were unprepared. Janille had studied it because the Tarakans were known to make extensive use of psi power. (It was even rumored that they used questionable means to increase their supply of teleporters.) So she'd expected an opponent to materialize inside the effective radius of her ranged weapons. But the test was realistic—the teleporter spent the inevitable moment of disorientation on his arrival. It was all Janille needed. She lunged forward, jabbing with the contact plasma weapon into which her left forearm had reconfigured. There was a flash that momentarily overloaded the sensors' damping capacity, and the hostile armor collapsed in a fuming heap.
At that instant, the vista of devastation vanished, and Janille was back in the training chamber. Vogel-Sabre stepped forward and offered his hand—a thing you only did with a wearer of powered combat armor when you were absolutely certain of that wearer's ability to control the pressure of the grip to a nicety.
"Welcome to the 34th, Sonja."