“The Periphery then?” Vicky asked her, and I thought she was impressed with Nagarro’s analysis, which was a rarity. Like me, Vicky had bad memories of intelligence screw-ups during the war. “Maybe the Pirate Worlds?”
“You all do what you want,” Joe told me, “but me and mine’ll stay here before we let anyone drag us to the Pirate Worlds. I reckon we’ll do just fine here. If you want to do anything for us before you go chasin’ off after what’s left of the Commonwealth, maybe you could find out if there were any more people around who’re scrapin’ by and could use a better place, like one with a fusion plant and a bunch of livestock, and give them a ride back here.”
“Not a bad idea,” Vicky admitted. “We found this place first because of the power plant, but there are nature reserves out there, biological research stations, maybe just people living in the old cities like Tijuana.”
“Hell, you fellas could stay here, if you wanted,” Joe offered. “I mean, if you change your mind about leavin’. We got enough buildings around here that could be fixed up. We could feed and house at least a few hundred people.”
“Thank you for the invitation, Joe,” I told him, “but we’re all still in the military, which means we took an oath to serve the Commonwealth, and we can’t give up on that until we find out there isn’t any Commonwealth government left to serve.”
“Cam, you reading me?” Wojtera asked, his voice buzzing in my earbud. “We’ve got incoming.”
Shit. I looked to the others. “You getting this?”
They jumped up from their seats, and the Contreras family followed a bit more hesitantly.
“It came out of T-space just outside Lunar orbit,” Woj went on, sounding abashed. “We didn’t pick it up at first because frankly, the sensors on this boat are a lot more complicated than I’m used to and I didn’t even know they could detect anything at this distance through the atmosphere.”
While he spoke, I jogged to the door, opening it to a wind-blown sprinkle of falling snow in my face. The sky had clouded up again while we’d been inside, and fresh powder laid itself down in just another reminder that March in Wyoming wasn’t quite the same as March on the plains of Hausos—or in Tijuana.
“What’s it look like?” I asked, jogging back the way we’d come, clearing the ranch house until I could see the Ellen again.
“Nothing too big,” Woj said. “Maybe a commercial freighter. Small enough to make landfall if they want.”
Commercial freighter… I thought about what Joe had said and slowed to a walk, looking upward as if I could see the thing through the snow clouds.
“Should we try to hail them, sir?” Chase asked.
“It’s a risk,” Vicky warned. I started, only then realizing that she and the others had caught up to me. “If it’s the… Changed, then we can’t know for sure that just the technology on our ship will be enough to deal with them. “
“I don’t think you’re going to have to worry about calling them,” Woj said. “They’re burning for orbit and their current course is going to take them down over the Rockies. Given that you’re standing on top of the only active fusion reactor on the continent, it’s not a bad guess that they’re heading your way.”
“Do you want us to prep for takeoff, sir?” Yanayev asked. “There’s still plenty of time for you guys to get back here.”
That would have been the smart thing to do. If this ship was hostile, we’d be totally safe inside the Ellen, unless they were the Changed. Maybe even then, considering the space-warping abilities of the Predecessor vessel. But if we retreated to the ship and took off, they’d probably see us as an alien threat. We were here to gather intelligence.
“No, stay buttoned up,” I told her. “We came here to talk, and we’re going to talk.”
And I’d just have to hope they were in the mood to listen.
We stood out there in the snow way too long. Maybe that was just a reflection of how spoiled I’d gotten by the Predecessor technology that I expected every ship to make it down from orbit in a few minutes, but this was a conventional commercial freighter, and it took the better part of an hour. My face was numb, and Nagarro and Nance had retreated back indoors with Joe’s sons, though the old cowboy stayed politely out there with the two crazy Marines.
It didn’t come straight down either, of course, not after they caught sight of the Ellen Campbell filling up an entire pasture. The distant whine of the jets came first, well before the black dot against the clouds, shaping a wide, cautious arc around the valley, scanning for threats most likely.
“They’re hailing us, sir,” Chase informed me.
“Connect me through my ‘link,” I told him.
“You’re up, sir,” he said almost immediately. “Go ahead when you’re ready.”
“Unidentified vessel,” a woman’s voice repeated, harsh, stern, like a drill instructor, “this is the Commonwealth Provisional Government transport Diana. This settlement is under the protection of the Commonwealth government and military, and any aggression against it will be met with force.”
“Well Goddamn,” Vicky murmured, raising an eyebrow. “She sounds like a Marine.”
“Attention Provisional Commonwealth vessel Diana,” I replied, “this is Captain Cameron Alvarez of the Commonwealth Fleet Marine Corps, acting commander of the Fleet Intelligence ship Ellen Campbell. We’ve been out of the Cluster for several years. We mean no harm to this settlement or anyone here. If you could land, I’d really like to talk to you face to face.”
No response came, and I thought maybe she wasn’t buying it, that the freighter would turn around and make a run for T-space to call for reinforcements or just give up on the place altogether if there were no reinforcements to be had. But the Diana didn’t turn and run; she pulled tighter into her arc, descending not into the pasture but into the courtyard behind the ranch house, coming down right on top of us.
Vicky cursed and shielded her eyes from the debris kicked up by the landing jets as the two-hundred-meter cargo hauler roared its defiance of gravity, a dozen landing struts extending from the belly as she touched down. Joe’s ranch hands had taken the livestock back to the barn, but in the distance, a klick away in the field beyond the Ellen, sheep surged away from the sound and light and heat, huddling against the far fence as they bleated their fear.
I very purposefully didn’t blink or flinch or cover my eyes. Whoever had been on the other end of that comm line had sounded tough, unyielding, and I sensed it would be a bad idea to show weakness this early. Besides, the heat from the belly jets felt damned good after spending an hour in sub-freezing temperatures. Steam poured off the ship and the ground beneath it. The snow pack melted and vaporized, the curtain of superheated water vapor thick enough that I didn’t even notice when the belly ramp lowered.
Not until the tall, broad-shouldered woman sauntered down it. She didn’t look old, could have been anywhere from thirty to two hundred and thirty, but there was something about the set of her eyes, the supreme confidence of her step that made me guess she was somewhere on the spectrum closer to the latter age. She only wore a uniform in the sense that her combat boots, olive drab fatigue pants, brown tank top, and leather flight jacket were nearly uniform for independent spacers. So was the heavy pistol tied down in a gunfighter rig on her thigh. For some it might have been an affectation, an attempt to look tough. Not with her.
Her long, powerful stride brought her nearly nose to nose with me in seconds, her piercing gaze weighing me like God at the last judgement. Behind her, a man emerged from the steam, dressed in a similar fashion. A head taller than her, bald, with cheekbones that could have sliced through steel, he would normally have been intimidating in his own right, yet I barely noticed him past the woman.
“I’m Korri Fontenot,” she declared, “Fleet Intelligence. You wanted to talk to me?”
[ 7 ]
“Is that a fucking mastodon?” Rafael Nance asked, pressing his nose against the window of the groundcar like a child on a tour of a zoo.
“Yes, Captain Nance,” Korri Fontenot said with a droll indulgence. “Demeter was originally established as a biological research station for the reintroduction of extinct animals—the ones we had enough DNA to recreate. They call them Revenants.”
Looking out the front windshield of the car, I could believe it. The northern continent of the world was part subtropical rain forest and part boreal where it climbed back up the major rivers into the mountains. Amity had been built in the center of the two, nearly in the center of the continent at the confluence of two of those rivers, or so it had appeared from the air on the way in. We’d landed around noon local time, which I preferred. Getting my first view of a world at night was unsatisfying. Or at least my first view in a long time.
“The city’s about twice as large as it used to be,” I said softly. Where we’d landed the Ellen Campbell at the edge of the spaceport would have been nothing but forest during the war, and from the port facility buildings to the first structures of the town proper was where the landing field had been.
