The Desert of Stars (The Human Reach) (12 page)

Compared to Tecolote, all that was true, Neil knew,
particularly in the prosperous decade during which Tippy was on Earth. But he
wondered whether to describe all the problems, failures and shortcomings that
went along with those things, or to let Tippy keep his vision of the United
States as it was in his head.

“You thinking about moving back?” Neil asked.

Tippy snorted. “Like I could afford it. The government
subsidizes moves out to the colonies, not back to Earth. I might be able to sell
everything to get my family and me back there, but we’d be penniless as soon as
we landed.”

No reason to disabuse of him of his notions, I guess
,
Neil decided.
Might make him happier here, but he doesn’t need to know.

“But why not move somewhere else on Entente? There are
better places than this,” he said.

“My wife’s family is here; my business is here; my friends
are here,” Tippy said after a pause. “Sure, the government’s a disaster, full
of parasites with guns who demand their protection money from time to time. But
you can survive all the same, as long as you don’t talk politics in public
places. I keep a bunch of people employed and fed. I have to believe that’s
making things better, or, at least, keeping them from getting worse.”

His cork hopped on the water.

“‘Bout time!” he said. He started reeling in slowly.

“Don’t you want to set the hook?” Neil asked.

“Gently, amigo. This ain’t no river trout. Need to bring in
the slack first.”

“What is it, then?”

“Beats me. That’s the beauty of fishing out here; there’s
all kinds of stuff you can bring up.”

Neil’s line jerked as well, and he grabbed the rod and
imitated Tippy’s motions. The fish had hit so hard the hook had set itself.
Neil kept one eye on the reel, unfamiliar with some of its workings.

“Aw, hell, it’s just a school of bonito,” Tippy said,
motioning with his head to the water behind the boat, where several silvery ten-pounders
broke the surface. “Predator must have spooked them. Bonito’s not a great
eating fish, but the churches in the city will take them to feed the homeless.
So here’s our good deed for the day.”

Feeding the homeless.
Tippy’s words sparked a line of
thought in Neil.

“Hey, Tippy, got a question for you,” he said, his voice
strained with effort fighting the fish.

“Fire away!”

“Got any openings for servers?”

“What, you get fired from the consulate?”

“Naw, it’s for a friend. Good guy, just needs a better job.”

Tippy’s fish burst from the water, its tail fluttering.

“Sure,” Tippy said, his eyes looking out to sea. “I’ll tell
you where to send him.”

Neil went out to a club that night, with everyone from
the consulate except Irene Gomez. They went to dinner and then to Dietrich’s,
the same club he had met Kitsune, now geared up for its weekend audience of
young and wealthy patrons, children of the nation’s elite, mostly, and
foreigners from the embassies and business district.

Neil took first watch over everyone’s things, sitting alone
at the round table they had commandeered in one corner and nursing a glass of
cheap scotch. He had a brief urge to rifle through the purses to see if they
betrayed any evidence of spying for the Chinese.

Above the thumping dance floor swirled three ghosts.

They were in the horizontal, looking down on the dancers. They
were beautiful people; they glowed, the color shifting between a pallid green
to a warm yellow. Two were female, and one male, at least from the waist up.
Their trailing lower extremities were a tangle that morphed from loose bandages
to cephalopodic tentacles.

From time to time, one would descend onto the dance floor,
growing legs as it landed. The ghost would dance by itself for a bit, but if no
one moved toward it, it would move toward a knot of dancers and engage one or
more of them.

The holo projectors, software and sensors were as good as
any on Earth; they didn’t skip or repeat in obvious ways, and Neil found his
brain accepting the ghosts as something real. So did the dancers; Neil watched
as one began assisting a female ghost in a wild, gyrating striptease; the
holo’s clothes fell away where his hands touched her. But the software did not
automatically reward such behavior: Move too aggressively, or too slowly, and
the ghost’s flesh rotted away, its face turning into a wormy skull or maniacal
clown with teeth honed to points. It would scream, then, a horrific electric
laughter, and launch back to the ceiling. The striptease moved forward only as
a reward for the right mix of skill and reserve on the part of the human.

While Neil watched, fascinated, Lindsay Trujillo came by
more than once, but the music was too loud to allow for conversation, so they
shouted brief updates to one another, and communicated no more than that.

Much later, Lindsay drove him to the consulate and
followed him to his apartment.

“You said you’d been to that club before? You get around for
a guy who’s new in town,” she teased.

His brain was still soaked from a day and night of drinking,
but the internal guard against telling secrets was still in place. “Daytime
meeting. Place is much different after hours,” he said.

She looked him over. “Rumor is you are heading out with the
army.”

“Yes. Leaving Monday. Tomorrow is a day of rest.” He sat on
his sofa, suddenly tired, and Lindsay wandered around. Neil had put up few
personal effects, and she zeroed in on a photo of Jessica.

“Girlfriend?”

“Yes.”

“You guys poly?”

“I don’t … I don’t think so. We never talked about it.”
Actually,
we don’t talk often at all.

Lindsay said, “It’s important to communicate with each other
in a relationship, Neil.”

A tone in Neil’s ear, a personal transmission from
Apache.
Jessica.

Neil answered it immediately. “Hey! How’s it going?”

Lindsay recognized the tone in his voice and surmised who
was calling. When Neil activated the video, she made sure she was out of view
of the camera. She silently waved good-night and left.

They talked about their pasts.

Neil and Jessica had done surprisingly little of that. Their
relationship on
Apache
had largely started off in the physical realm and
remained oriented in the here-and-now, but their separation with Neil’s
deployment to Entente’s surface was forcing them to explore more of a verbal
sort of intimacy. Because Neil’s orders required him to remain on Tecolote, he
was trying to persuade Jessica to let him purchase her passage down to the
island for some shore leave. But Jessica insisted on paying her own way, which
complicated things, as she sent most of her salary home to her parents and
younger sister on Mars.

Jessica had grown up there, in one of the decaying domes
that was nominally American territory, although its management had been farmed
out to a subsidized company with little incentive to improve things. The domes
and covered canyons on Mars were becoming a sad little historical footnote,
representative of a human space future that was born after the Rock but died
quickly, once Hirasaki Masuyo isolated the first wormhole and the deep space
telescopes discovered an abundance of potentially human-habitable worlds
orbiting nearby stars. But here and there in the Sol system were signs of that
alternate future: the abandoned surface bases on Callisto and Ceres, the
half-hollowed-out asteroids, and the derelict terraforming stations on Mars.

The colonies on the red planet had been built as homes for
the scientists and engineers to design and gestate the various plants that
would help process a breathable Martian atmosphere, but after those projects
ended, the domes came to serve as retirement communities for the first
generations of commercial spacers. These were people whose bodies had atrophied
after spending years in zero-gee, before some of the more enlightened
governments began requiring freighters and liners to provide facilities for
crew to exercise under simulated gravity. But the damage was done for people
like Jessica’s parents, who simply couldn’t survive on Earth or any of the
other new planets without wearing powered exoskeletons all the time. Permanent
quarters on space stations were ridiculously expensive, so many had elected to
spend their retirement in the 0.38 g on Mars.

The conditions inside the domes were not good; the residents
had nothing to sell the rest of humanity, and Jessica’s no-nonsense scavenger
mentality had been forged helping her family locate and trade for various
not-quite-necessities from other dome-dwellers. On Mars, estate auctions were
well-attended events.

“So I didn’t have many options to get off-planet,” Jessica
told Neil. “I needed to get someone to pay my way, and I’ll never work for one
of those commercial haulers. At least the military
tries
to care for its
veterans.”

Combat Supply Cache Falcon, Sequoia Continent, Kuan Yin

Rand and Aguirre sat under the night sky, their butts on
two flimsy folding chairs they had found in the supply cave and brought up to
the surface. Rand was hunched over, peering into the telescope’s display, while
Aguirre took notes on his handheld. He had to use an actual
wire
to link
into the base network; transmissions from even a local wireless network might
be detected by the Chinese.

“Quite the throwback, eh, Hal?” Rand said. “This is stuff I
learned in my first year and didn’t need since.”

Aguirre nodded; the sergeant had been one of Rand’s gun
commanders during Rand’s brief stint as an artillery platoon leader before the
Chinese invaded Sequoia, and he had learned the same things during training. Their
telescope was indeed a nice one, scavenged from an estate outside of Sycamore
in the chaos following the invasion. It certainly wasn’t as smart as an
artillery telescope, which could actively seek and follow orbiting ships and
stations, but it could still resolve things in orbit with significant detail.

“All right, that wraps up the forties; I’m moving to
inclination fifty-four degrees,” Rand said. That would catch ships passing over
Sequoia’s latitude – ones capable of making bombardment passes on them.

At Rand’s command, the telescope angled slightly upward and began
a slow back-and-forth track. It quickly found something and began to follow it.
The image appeared on the display.

“Communications satellite, looks like one of ours. Hans
probably holed it with a laser during the invasion.”

“Good of them, keeps the debris down.”

“Yeah.”

Rand told the telescope to ignore the object in future
passes and set it to resume scanning.

“Aha. Gotcha.” With his right hand, Rand made a firing-the-pistol
motion into the night sky.

On his screen was a slightly fuzzy image of a Chinese
Luhai
-class
destroyer. Its forward sphere was pointed roughly toward them; it was on
bombardment patrol some two hundred kilometers above Kuan Yin’s surface.
Extending from behind the sphere were two large, corrugated rectangles – the
destroyer’s radiators. Rand hurt inside seeing them.
So vulnerable. At this
range, a couple of hits from my guns would slice them clean off.
He took
some stills of the ship for future study. And he saw three little lumps along the
main hull … spacewalkers out for a stroll, probably to inspect or fix some
busted part.

“Hey, L.T., can I talk to you about something?” Aguirre
said.

Rand looked up. “Sure, Hal.”

“Sorry. I guess I should stop calling you L.T.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m not really used to the new rank,
either. It’s just a brevet, so I may not keep it once this is all done.”

“Yeah, and when will that be?” Aguirre grinned sardonically.
He had been an oak after they became guerrillas, anticipating Rand’s needs,
gently guiding him when he was making a bad decision or forgetting something
important – in short, doing everything a sergeant should, except, perhaps, for
sleeping with a private, but Rand had not ordered them to stop. With all of
them separated from higher command, and, really, the rest of humanity, one had
to make allowances.

Aguirre said, “So Violet talked to me and Lopez.”

Uh-oh.
“What did she say?”

“She wanted us to leave with her.”

“Wait – what? What do you mean, leave?”

“She thinks this base is due to get whacked. Can’t say I
disagree. Too many people, not enough defenses. She wants to head back out to
the wilderness and keep doing what we’ve been doing.”

“Hal, we hadn’t hit the Hans in four months hanging out
around Cottonwood.”

“I know. She hinted she wants to get some new supplies and
maybe recruit a few more fighters to leave with her, and then start operating
near Sycamore.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Lopez and I both said you’re our CO, and we go where you
go.”

Rand felt a surge of emotion.
That’s loyalty, right
there.
“Thanks, Hal. She hasn’t come to me with this.”

“I know. She thinks you’re getting rolled into command
responsibilities here and that you won’t leave.”

“She’s right, I guess. We’re back to being real Army again,
aren’t we?”

“Yes, sir. Not that we ever really stopped, not in the ways
that matter.”

“Yeah,” Rand said. He didn’t say anything for a few seconds.
“Did she say what she was planning to do?”

“She said she’s not planning to go solo unless she thinks a
Chinese attack is imminent. Not sure I trust her to stick to that. She’s not
popular around here, and she feels like a fifth wheel.”

“I should talk to her, Hal.”

“Yes, sir. I think that would be a good idea,” Aguirre said.
He leaned back in his chair and looked at the sky. Earth’s constellations were
wildly distorted, but familiar markers like the Pleiades, Capella and Aldebaran
were above.