“Oh, shit,” I sighed. “That was the one hope I had coming here once we found what had happened to Earth. That some of you still might have the power.”
“Hope for what?” McIntire asked me.
“I think it’s time,” I said, “that I told you about the Unity.”
“This is good, right?” Vicky asked, one hand on my arm as we stepped back out into the summer sunlight.
I hadn’t noticed how warm it was here back when we were in the groundcar. Something else I’d grown to hate about the constant travel was never settling into one season or another. Funny, since Tijuana only had two seasons, dry and wet, while the Trans-Angeles Underground had lacked even a sky, much less weather. But our time on Hausos had spoiled me, given me a taste of seeing the same patch of ground, living through winter and spring and summer and fall. The last several years consisted of stepping off the lander into a different terrain and different climate every few days, and the only place we’d stayed for more than a brief visit was Yfingam.
I had a feeling I’d be calling Demeter home for the foreseeable future though.
“Which part?” I asked, standing on the street corner, waiting for the groundcar to take us back to the Ellen. I assumed the promised cargo trucks would meet us there to unload both our personnel and gear and bring all of it into Amity. “The part where they’re going to let us stay here while they decide what to do with us, the part where they obviously don’t trust any of us, or the part where none of them bought the idea that the Unity is an existential threat, much less that it’s on its way here?”
I didn’t have to keep my voice down, because the two of us were alone at the curb. Nagarro had been asked to stay for a private debrief with her new commander, and Captain Nance… well, he’d decided that since he had no personal belongings on the Ellen and wasn’t going to be allowed to fly her for the moment, there was no reason to ride back out.
“You’re the commander,” he’d reminded me, waving as he headed into the commercial part of Amity. “You can break the news to the others. I’m going to go get a beer.”
Bastard. I wanted a beer too.
“No,” Vicky said, kicking me in the ankle just hard enough to make me look up from staring at the pavement. “The part where you don’t have to worry about the ghosts anymore. Everything’s back to normal and there’s no danger you’ll turn into a violent psychopath. Plus, now there’s no way for the Unity to track you down.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” I told her. “The Unity weren’t affected by the ghosts, and I doubt they’ll be affected by whatever this Mitchell guy did that cut off the network from humans.”
I’d exaggerated a little, I decided, when I’d thought of Amity as Victorian London. It was more like an early twentieth century New England manufacturing town, though again minus the smog. London even up until the time we’d left the Cluster had an air of age to it, the weight of history pressing down on every cobblestone… unless the ViR travelogues I’d accessed on the public net in the Underground hadn’t been accurate.
Amity had no such feel to it. It had been around less than fifty years before it had been nearly destroyed in the war, and now most of it was even younger than that. No buildfoam or plasticrete here though, no temporary dome housing that had wound up being used for decades because no one wanted to bother to build anything more permanent. No, these buildings were constructed from local brick and wood or old-fashioned concrete and cement. The green fields and distant forests only contributed to the image, and not even the freighter making an overflight of the city at three thousand meters could change that.
“Maybe we should just consider ourselves lucky,” Vicky said, and there was a bleak note to her voice, a sagging frown on her face that reminded me of what we’d found on Earth and what it had meant to her. “A lot of people would fall down on their knees and thank God to be where we are now.”
I slipped an arm around her, pulled her toward me.
“I’m sorry. We’ve been gone so long… I guess it’s easy for me to forget you still had family back in Trans-Angeles.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said, accepting the hug, though from the tightness in her shoulders not entirely comforted by it. “I haven’t even sent Mom a message in years, even before we left the Cluster. Not since Hausos.”
“We were pretty involved in the operation,” I reminded her, but she was already shaking her head before I could finish the sentence.
“It doesn’t matter. She…” Vicky’s shoulders shook, a minute vibration, but enough to tell me she was fighting back tears. “She stopped answering. By the time we left, she’d stopped answering my messages. I think she gave up on me.”
“Things happen,” I assured her. “Your brothers might have kept her busy.” I grinned. “They were always getting into trouble. Or maybe she decided to get married again. She would never have forgotten you.”
She sucked in a deep breath and visibly composed herself, shoving her feelings into a box to deal with later when we were alone. Sometimes I wondered if she was going to overload that segment of herself and explode with uncontrollable rage, and I hoped for everyone’s sake that I would be the only one there when it happened, because at least she might not kill me.
The car pulled up, a civilian driving it. Or least a young woman in civilian work clothes. From what I’d gathered, most of the people here worked for the provisional government in one way or another.
“You guys going out to the spaceport?” she asked through the open window.
“That’s us,” I confirmed, pulling open the back door and letting Vicky get in ahead of me. “Just take us to the big alien ship out there.”
“Copy that, sir,” she said, and I suddenly revised my estimate of her age. She’d served somewhere.
“Marine?” I asked her as we pulled away from the curb. By way of answer, she pulled the brown hair away from her temple and cocked her head to the side to show me the ‘face jack implanted in her temple.
“Drop Trooper,” she told me, pride in her voice. “3rd of the 198th. I got out after the war and settled here because it had looked like a nice place when we landed here to retake it from the Tahni.”
“Everybody landed here but me,” Vicky lamented.
“You missed an easy one,” I said, grinning, hoping to take her mind off her family. “No KIA, only one casualty in my platoon, and that was from a building falling on her. The local militia did all the heavy lifting.”
“Yeah, we have Mr. Munroe to thank for that,” the driver said.
“What do you mean?” I asked her. She laughed, glancing back at me.
“You mean, you don’t know who he is?” She laughed, then took a careful look around to gauge traffic and pulled a wild U-turn with the screech of tires. A handful of pedestrians jumped out of the way, some wide-eyed and horrified, the rest cursing and making obscene gestures. “This, you should see for yourself.”
We’d been heading out of town, but her maneuver took us to what looked like it had been the center of the city back before it had been extended to deal with the influx of refugees. Traffic got heavier through the industrial districts, a steady stream of cargo trucks coming in from the spaceport, loaded down with raw materials brought in from the system’s asteroid belt or the lunar mines. Demeter had larger industrial facilities in orbit, taking shipments from the belt and the mines in the atmosphere of the system’s gas giants, probably manufacturing fuel for the planet’s fusion plants or maybe for the ships in their makeshift fleet.
I thought she was taking us to one of the fabrication centers, though God knew for what, but instead we pressed on to a public park at the center of the old city. Given that the world was a wilderness populated by mastodons and saber-tooth cats, the park seemed incongruously tame by comparison, well-manicured lawns and stately oaks lining the place.
Our driver pulled up just in front of a huge plaque and a statue half-hidden behind it, mounted at the center of a ringed sidewalk, the focal point of what a sign told us was Liberation Park.
“Go take a look,” she urged, waving at it.
Vicky rolled her eyes, apparently considering this all a waste of time, but now I was curious to venture back into the afternoon summer heat and the sun beating off the pavement to investigate. The plaque and the statue were both of bronze, polished and maintained with loving reverence in the years since the war, the statue showing two men and a woman in civilian clothes, carrying Gauss rifles, expressions of anger and resolve on their faces. The plaque…
The plaque was adorned with the face of one man, and even at short acquaintance, I knew it was Randall Munroe.
