“If you don’t mind, sir, ma’am,” Fontenot said, “me and Jagmeet have some paperwork to file and well…” she motioned at the rest of us seated. “You don’t have enough chairs in this rathole of an office.”
Munroe struck me as the serious type and I braced myself, expecting him to chew the woman out, but instead he chuckled as if this was a recurring joke between them and motioned assent.
“I’ll read you into it at dinner, Korri,” McIntire promised as the door closed behind the two of them. It all seemed very casual, not quite what I’d expected, but I got the impression the familiarity was from the fact that they’d all known each other and worked together for years.
When Munroe turned to me, his eyes took on a cold, calculating glint that I was certain had been the very last thing many men had seen.
“Talk to me, Captain Alvarez,” he invited.
“This is gonna take a while,” I sighed, then motioned between Vicky and myself. “The two of us used our separation bonuses after the war to homestead on Hausos, a former Tahni possession…”
“I know you,” Munroe interrupted like I hadn’t been speaking. I blinked and stared back, uncomprehending. He aimed a very Marine-NCO-style knife-hand at me. “We’ve met.”
“Have we?” I asked, shaking my head. I tried to run everyone I’d ever come across through my memory using the headcomp, but Jim basically told me that there was insufficient data and I couldn’t count on pulling up memories I’d had before he’d implanted the computer.
“The shuttle down to Inferno off the transport from Earth,” he told me. “When we were both reporting for Boot Camp.”
Then it hit me like a sledgehammer between the eyes, a memory as vivid as if it had happened yesterday…
“I’ve been out in space for two weeks,” the guy next to me in the shuttle complained, “and I haven’t seen anything but the inside of a ship.”
He was about my age, I thought, maybe a year or two younger, but with one of those lean faces you thought might be older at first. He had his hair buzzed short like he’d already been getting ready for Boot Camp before he even boarded the ship to Inferno. His accent was familiar to me. I’d heard it sometimes in the Zocalo, from the rich kids who came down there to slum. I didn’t know what the hell a rich kid would be doing in the Marines, but that wasn’t my business.
“You’d rather have been riding outside in a suit?” the girl on the other side of him wondered, chuckling so softly I almost couldn’t hear it over the distant bang of the maneuvering thrusters taking us out of the docking bay of the transport.
As the shuttle emerged from the metallic womb of the ship, the light of the system’s primary star whited out the image in the passenger cabin’s overhead viewscreens for a second until it adjusted the contrast. The ruddy brown and algae green of Inferno came into focus as the merciless glare of 82 Eridani faded in the background, and I sighed in anticipation of the misery. They’d warned me it would be hot. The Underground was never hot.
“There’s your view, buddy,” I said, nudging the guy who’d complained. “Get used to it. We’ll be spending a lot of time there.”
“Eden’s just an orbit over,” he mused, eyes fixed on the scorched desert and steaming jungles below us. “Temperate, comfortable, a paradise.”
“You been there?” I wondered.
“Me?” He shook his head. “Naw, I’ve never been off Earth. Just audited it a lot, virtual reality and stuff. That’s why I joined. To get away… from Earth, I mean.”
“Yeah,” I murmured. “I guess most of us joined to get away from something.”
“Secure for boost in thirty seconds,” the shuttle’s crew chief warned us over the intercom. “Things are gonna be uncomfortable for a few minutes.”
I made a face, remembering the shuttle I’d taken from the Trans-Angeles spaceport to McAuliffe Station.
“I’m Randall Munroe,” the lean-faced kid told me, sticking out a hand.
I stared at it, cocking an eyebrow. Shaking hands was a rich people thing. He seemed to remember that suddenly and reddened, offering me a forearm. I bumped it with mine.
“Cam Alvarez,” I returned.
“Maybe I’ll see you around down there,” he said, grinning.
Rich people sure were talkative. He sounded lonely though, and he also sounded like a guy who wasn’t used to being lonely.
“Yeah.” It wasn’t likely, but no use bringing him down any more. “Good luck.”
“Holy shit,” I murmured, rocking back in my chair at the impact of the memory. “How the hell did you remember that?”
“Let’s just say,” he told me with a shrug, “that my mother had enough money and enough pull to make sure I had a near-perfect everything before I peeked my little head out of the womb.”
“She didn’t care about your looks then?” Vicky asked him bluntly, then rolled her eyes when I stared at her, horrified. “Not that you’re ugly, but look at him.” She pointed at Deke Conner. “He definitely had prenatal gene therapy to get those looks, but you look kind of… normal.”
This time, all three of them laughed, and I decided without any other evidence that I liked this guy.
“I kind of ruined their work,” Munroe admitted, “when I decided to ditch the whole Corporate Council Executive lifestyle and join the Marines.”
“Why?” I blurted. “I mean, I know why I joined—I didn’t have any choice. It was go to war or go to jail. But why would you choose to give up life in the towers for a chance to get yourself killed?”
“I was a patriot.” He shrugged. “Blame my grandfather—he was a United States Marine. Whispered in my ear since birth that it was an honorable calling. My mother made it easy by being such a manipulative, controlling bitch.”
“And who was that?” Vicky wondered.
“Patrice Damiani.”
I shaped a silent whistle.
“Your mom,” I said slowly, “is Patrice Damiani? The number two in the entire Corporate Council?”
“Was.” His voice went wistful. “She died during the last battle of the Psi War.”
Nance had been looking back and forth between us like he was watching a tennis match but now he spoke up.
