“You’ve been here before?” Fontenot asked, glancing back at me over her shoulder.
“Eyes on the road, hon,” the big, bald man next to her said dryly, arms crossed. His name, I’d found out back in Jackson, twenty light-years and a week away, was Jagmeet Singh, and he’d been a bounty hunter up until a few years ago, when he’d taken a job working for the new government. “Unless you want me to drive.”
Fontenot snorted at the idea but still looked back in time to avoid a cargo truck she’d unintentionally been playing chicken with.
“Yeah, I was here during the invasion,” I confirmed. “Unfortunately, with all the stasis and time dilation shit, I couldn’t even tell you how many years ago that was.”
“Yeah, get back to me when you’re so old that you start losing the first thirty or forty years’ worth of your memory.”
I frowned across Singh at her.
“I know it’s not polite…” I began, but her raucous laugh interrupted me.
“Let’s just it this way, Captain Alvarez… think of the oldest person you ever met and add twenty years.”
I thought about Top and decided Fontenot was probably wrong but decided not to argue about it.
“Still, you were here during the war. You should bring that up with the boss. It’ll give you two something to talk about.”
I bit down on the questions I wanted to ask because I figured she probably wouldn’t answer them. She hadn’t been too forthcoming back on Earth, and since we’d taken separate ships to the Delta Pavonis system I hadn’t had the chance to press her on any of the details. I wasn’t sure she trusted us yet, and she hadn’t so much as told me the name of the person I was coming to meet.
If it had been important I would have kept pushing, but we were here and we’d find out everything soon enough. Another scream of jets overhead drew my eyes upward through the sun roof. Another ship coming in. There’d been dozens of them taking off or landing when we’d come in, as busy as any port on a major colony, but one thing had struck me about it. Most of them had been commercial vessels, and I hadn’t seen any military ship larger than a cutter since we’d arrived in the system.
“I forgot you went to Demeter,” Vicky said from the back seat. “I was in OCS for that. I heard it was bad.”
“It was more than bad,” I confirmed, shuddering at the memory. Fontenot had bemoaned the loss of her early memories, but there was one I would have loved to get rid of. “It was a nightmare by the time we got there. I’m glad I didn’t have to sit around and watch how it got that way.”
“Oh, yeah,” Fontenot laughed softly. “You and the boss are gonna get along fine.”
I would have expected the Chairman of the Emergency Council to have a bigger office… but then again, there wasn’t really much in the way of office buildings in Amity. Every square meter of the place seemed to be packed with apartment buildings, townhouses, warehouses, fabricator shops, and factories, like someone had plopped Victorian London into the middle of the 18th century wilderness of North America. Without the smokestacks belching pollution and the child labor, I hoped.
The Emergency Council offices had been crammed into what I thought must have been the original colonial government offices, or at least the ones they’d rebuilt and remodeled after the war. When I’d last seen them, they were half-destroyed by the battle to retake the city from the Tahni. That had been a close-run thing, mostly accomplished by the local militia aided by intelligence assets. Unspecified intelligence assets, as usual, though the rumor was that it had involved special operators from the DSI—the Department of Security and Intelligence, the civilian intelligence agency—as well as Fleet Intelligence. Then again, we always heard rumors about that kind of thing and no one who knew would ever talk about it, not even Top or the Skipper.
However the capital had been retaken, it had been the end product of a year of guerilla warfare. I’d met a few of those guerillas afterward, burying civilians who the Tahni had let starve to death as retribution for the sabotage and the assassinations. They’d been hard people, as patched and threadbare as their clothes, unwilling to let their Gauss rifles get more than an arm’s length away even with every Tahni on the planet confirmed dead or captured. I couldn’t have imagined any of them settling back into the idyllic, pastoral lifestyle they’d lived before the Tahni came, but I wasn’t at all surprised to find out that this world was the heart of the surviving Commonwealth.
The people walking past us in the hallways and up the stairs to the third floor had the same sort of hard look, and I wondered if what had happened here the last two years had been close to what they’d experienced in the war. A few of them ignored us, probably used to seeing new faces in and out of this city every day, but others stared openly, probably having heard where we’d come from or what we were driving. No one said a word to us though until we reached the top floor.
It was less hectic up there than down below, and I thought maybe the design of the outer offices with their gauntlet of aides and secretaries and functionaries was designed for that, to keep the detritus out and reserve access to the inner circle for those who had problems only they could solve. The desk we approached just outside of a door marked Chairman was surely the Cerberus guarding the gates of the otherworld, although the frumpy-looking woman sitting behind it wasn’t a three-headed hellhound.
“Hey there, Korri,” the woman said cheerfully. “You and Jagmeet have a nice flight?”
“Oh, it would have been great if the man didn’t snore like a diesel engine, Claire,” Fontenot laughed, nudging Singh with an elbow.
“Oh yeah, right!” Singh protested, spreading his hands. “That’s the fucking pot calling the kettle black right there! I don’t think you snored that much when you were half metal!”
My face must have reflected my confusion, because Fontenot sighed and explained.
“I used to have some replacement parts left over from the first war with the Tahni, but I had them taken care of a few years back. Thank God, because I probably couldn’t have the work done now.” She turned back to Claire. “The boss is expecting us.”
“Go on in then,” Claire said with a wave. “You know him… if he doesn’t know you’re here, those other two will.”
I was about to ask Fontenot who these other two were, but she didn’t give me the chance, pushing past the desk and giving a perfunctory knock on the door before throwing it open. I shared a look with Vicky, Nance, and Nagarro, wondering what the hell we were getting ourselves into. The office was small, plainly furnished, almost spartan. A desk—real wood, but out here that was just a matter of the materials available rather than conspicuous consumption—and a half a dozen chairs clustered around it. A few physical pictures hung on the walls, family photos I supposed, old-fashioned still frames. The only concession to modern technology in the office was a holographic map of the Commonwealth, decorated with colors and shapes that probably meant something to the people running this place but nothing to me.
Three people occupied the office as promised, one behind the desk, two across from him. The woman drew my eye first, not because of her striking looks, though she did have those—short, dark hair, smoldering eyes, and the sort of perpetual skeptical tilt of her head that reminded me of Vicky. No, what attracted my attention was the impression she gave of barely restrained violence, that beneath her Fleet Intelligence blacks lurked a hunting leopard, ready to pounce without warning.
The man sitting beside her wore the same uniform, but on him I thought it looked out of place. Not just the Intell black fatigues, but any uniform at all. His hair was a wave of slicked-back brown, out of regulation just enough to let anyone military know, some little measure of rebellion against the hand he’d been dealt, and I had the gut-level intuition that he was a man who wouldn’t have minded never wearing a uniform again. He was too handsome for it, for one thing, and I figured he must have come from a well-to-do family who could afford to have his genes tinkered with in utero to be the best him he could be. Either that or he’d just hit the genetic lottery.
There was something else off about him, though it took me a moment to figure it out. He was… outsized, I suppose was the word. Muscular beyond what our Marines were, and we were infamous for spending our off time lifting weights. This guy was jacked, like a professional athlete with cloned muscle implants. Dangerous, like the female, though perhaps in a different way.
But the last man, the one behind the desk… well, if the other two could have been intimidating on their own, when they were in the same room as this guy it was clear who was in charge. He stood as we entered, offering a hand. He wasn’t much taller than me, built powerful and rangy, neither did he share the sculpted features of the Intelligence officer, his face much more normal, but there was something indefinable about him. His handshake was firm without trying to crush my fingers, but I could tell he had the strength for it he wanted to.
“Captain Alvarez,” he said, nodding a greeting, “I’m Randall Munroe.”
“Cam Alvarez,” I said, then motioned at the others. “My wife and XO, Victoria Sandoval, Captain Nance of Space Fleet, and Captain Nagarro of Fleet Intelligence.”
“I’m Colonel Kara McIntire,” the short-haired woman said, unfolding from her chair with the grace of a dancer or a martial artist, “director of Fleet Intelligence.” She cocked an eyebrow toward Nagarro. “Which, I suppose makes me your boss, Captain.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Nagarro said with a curt nod. “If I may… what happened to General Murdock?”
McIntire and the too-handsome guy exchanged a glance and the man sighed.
“I’m afraid he passed on even before… all this,” she said, gesturing expansively. “I understand you’ve been gone quite a while, and I’m afraid a lot has happened in the interim.” She shook herself like she’d just remembered where she was, then offered a hand to the man in black beside her, pulling him forward. “This is Major Deke Conner, my second-in-command.”
“Pleasure to meet you,” Conner said, his voice as smooth as his looks.
“Please, have a seat,” Munroe invited us, motioning to the rough-hewn wood chairs across from his desk. “I think we have a lot to talk about. I’ve only had a sketch of a report from Major Fontenot…”
