Dusk (Dusk 1) (3 page)

Neville nodded pensively. “After that clusterfuck on Regina IV --”

“Don’t remind me.” Pete shuddered.

The general didn’t correct his slip of military manners, whether because he had always expressed a somewhat paternal affection for the junior officer or because he was thinking the same dark thoughts every Marine in the galaxy had anytime the Regina IV massacre came up in conversation.

Among Marines, the debacle could be safely discussed. Any civilian or newsie brought it up in the presence of devil dogs at great personal peril.

Instead he nodded thoughtfully.

“You’re free for the day, right?”

“Yes, sir,” Pete replied dutifully.

“Well, how about you come to my office?”

Although phrased as an invitation, Pete knew the “suggestion” was really an order.

“Yes, sir.”

* * *

“How do you take your whiskey?”

“Neat, please.”

Although it was technically the middle of the duty day, the end of a training cycle was always considered a special time for not only the new Marines, but their chains of command. Moreover, no one in their right mind would tell a lieutenant general that he couldn’t have a drink whenever he damned well pleased, and if he decided to entertain a junior officer in his Table of Organization, that was entirely his right. Because of that, and because Pete could hold his liquor just as well as any other leatherneck, he didn’t think twice about having a friendly snort with his Regimental CO.

Neville poured a generous jigger of top-shelf Canadian whiskey from a delicately shaped spiraling carafe into a tumbler of Plutonian ice crystal. The golden liquid and the smoky gray facets of the glass made a visually pleasing composition, and something about ice crystal enhanced the flavor of just about anything poured into it, drawing out its essential essence and making it somehow more robust. Because of this unique property, Plutonian ice crystal was extraordinarily expensive and well out of the budget of even a lieutenant general.

The set had been a gift from the Chancellor of Sigma Phi VII, as a thank-you for quelling a corporate uprising that had threatened to hurl the planet into civil war. Pete had heard the story more than once, but it always enthralled him. Neville had put down the nascent coup without a single shot fired or a drop of blood spilled, omitting the broken nose he’d given the head of the Takamura Conglomerate as the general helped him on his way to unconsciousness. The story was both damn funny when Neville told it and a powerful reminder that while physical power won battles, intelligence could stop a war before it ever started.

It was a lesson Pete had taken to heart.

Neville finished pouring his own drink and placed both tumblers neatly on a tray of Peruvian silver. He hailed from Rigel II, a small planet where the natives were unusually paranoid about assassination thanks to a series of unfortunate attempts on their leaders’ lives shortly after the first humans made planetfall. As a result, Rigelians tended to allow the guest to choose which glass they would drink from, eliminating doubts about the host’s sincerity. While Pete found the ritual unnecessary for a number of reasons, he still respected the general enough not to give him too much grief about the precaution.

Pete chose the nearer one and lifted his glass. “To our new Marines.”

“
Zum Wohl
!” Neville responded.

“
Salud
.”

The two Marines clinked their tumblers together and sipped. Pete smiled as the mellow bite of the oak-aged whiskey hit his tongue, aided by the ice crystal. He swallowed gingerly, and the whiskey warmed his gullet as it traveled down into his gut.

“God, that’s good,” he sighed with satisfaction. “What is it?”

Neville smiled, one eye fluttering closed and flickering back open again in the barest ghost of a wink. “It’s a trade secret, is what it is. A certain lady of my acquaintance in Vancouver sent me a case of it for my birthday.”

“Happy birthday to you,” Pete joshed.

Neville smiled around a derisive snort and took a good-sized slug of his drink. He closed his eyes appreciatively, apparently enjoying the whiskey as much as Pete did.

For a few minutes the men sat in silence, studying the ever-dwindling contents of their tumblers. Finally, Neville spoke.

“As much as I wish I could say this is a social call, Pete, we do have business to discuss.”

Something in his voice set the hair on Pete’s neck on end. Neville’s tone was reluctant, and Pete knew from long experience when a senior officer started a conversation that way, said officer had something to convey that the junior officer was going to actively hate. Usually it served as a prelude to a world-class ass-reaming the general didn’t want to give, but had been compelled to by Above. That didn’t seem to fit here. If the general had wanted to rack his ass, he would hardly have given Pete a drink of whiskey worth forty credits if it was worth an ancient American penny.

“What’s on your mind?”

Neville depressed a control stud on his desk. Three things happened simultaneously. The heavy blinds on the airy windows locked down, the lights dimmed, and a holovid cutaway view of the Milky Way flickered into view above the desk’s faux slate surface. He took another sip, the lines of his face suddenly haggard and sinister-looking in the blue nimbus from the holo field, and grimaced as if the whiskey had soured in the glass.

Although
, Pete thought,
if anything soured the whiskey, it’s probably planning how to deliver whatever shit sandwich he’s about to hand me and not the sauce itself
.

Neville touched another control stud and the holo seemed to swoop in on itself, zeroing in on one of the galactic arms. Pete knew astrogators who could name the different galactic arms by a dozen celestial landmarks, but he’d never much cared to learn. Since astrogation wasn’t his headache, it was all the same to him. He just needed to know where to go and what to shoot at when he arrived.

A blue-green point of light flared to life, pulsing gently about halfway down the arm.

“You are here,” Neville remarked with a chuckle. Pete laughed along with him at the old astrogation joke. A tri-dee representation of the galaxy was fine as it went, but “here” today could mean “a hundred thousand fucking klicks elsewhere” next week. To compound the problem, to get anywhere, one also had to account for not simply one’s current position in three-dimensional space, but also the projected location of the destination, which had a nasty habit of changing. Then factor in several hundred or thousand meteors, asteroids, dust clouds, moons, planets, and other navigational hazards lying in wait between “here” and “there,” and the ballistic irregularities of any number of gravitational phenomena, and one began to see the magnitude and shape of the problem. The earliest forms of astrogation had often been described by frustrated or pissed-off explorers as trying to shoot a moving target the size of the head of a pin with a BB gun in a shooting gallery with all the lights off on a dark night while some ass-clown randomly flung variously sized rocks at the shooter.

As the art and science of navigating among the stars improved, such dangers and difficulties were greatly reduced, but even the best and most accurate models could not fully account for every possible navigational hazard. Mastering the theoretical underpinnings of superluminal travel had also reduced the dangers in one direction, allowing ships to “sidestep” most ordinary physical threats, but increased them in another. Many ships had been lost, costing trillions of Terran credits and tens of thousands of human lives, as inexperienced or unwary navigational staff or faulty astrogation programs sent experimental ship designs into newly formed wormholes, black holes, or gravitational anomalies.

There were a million different ways space could kill a person without even trying, and none of them were as cute and cuddly as lions, tigers, or bears.

It was just one of the many reasons Pete despised space travel. Unlike many Marines of his acquaintance, who viewed interstellar and transgalactic travel as about as out of the ordinary as blowing one’s nose, Pete hated being shipboard for long periods of time. He had never managed to shake the “drops” caused by low- and null-gravity conditions, giving him a distinct feeling of kinship with seasick Marines throughout history. The galactic rim, even at ten thousand
c
, was over a week away from Terra’s current position, and that was under full power using the Alcubierre-Fermi drive, the fastest superluminal engine ever conceived by man.

His stomach writhed uneasily at the very thought.

Neville touched another stud, and a deep indigo star near the rim in the “southward” adjacent arm and somewhat “down” from Terra’s represented position began to glow. “You will be
there
.”

“Assuming we don’t get scattered into our component neutrinos by a drunken navigator,” Pete quipped. Neville shot him a faintly reproachful look, but made no further comment. He turned back to the holo.

“This is Dusk.”

Pete nodded. “Okay…”

“We are interested in Dusk for possible military applications beyond the body armor we typically wear.”

Pete raised his eyebrows with a snicker. Anything of military interest that far out in the middle of galactic goddamn Siberia had to be important indeed. “Let me guess. It’s a superweapon that turns all our potential enemies into fuzzy bunny rabbits.”

“That’s not funny, Captain.” Neville’s authoritative tone stopped Pete’s cackle dead in its tracks. “I cannot tell you what the mission parameters are at this time. What I can tell you is that we want someone on-scene who can help negotiate for the materials we require and analyze them for their military usefulness. I personally picked you for this mission, Pete.”

His stomach lurched as if the floor had suddenly given way beneath his chair. “Why me?”

Neville took another long swallow of his drink, a mannerism Pete recognized as the general getting ready to issue a commandment from on high that was not at all to his taste. He’d give the order, but he would stall as long as he could beforehand.

“Because you have a cool head and understand that an itchy trigger finger creates more problems than it solves. You and I have talked before about this, Pete. You understand diplomacy better than most devil dogs, and you’re willing to explore other options before you start anything.”

Neville touched the first stud again, and the holo faded away. Warm Terran sunlight flooded the room. Pete blinked against the sudden brilliance and sipped at his drink.

“You’ll be attached to Ambassador Al-Aziz’s party as a military adjutant. This posting comes with a brevet increase in rank and pay. If the negotiations are successful, you’ll be confirmed at the higher rank as a permanent instatement.”

Pete’s eyebrows shot up.

“Just how high are we talking, here?”

Neville’s voice was smooth enough to make silk feel bad about itself.

“Colonel.”

Pete choked on his drink.

Olivia groaned theatrically as she ambled out of the DDC chamber.

“God, I thought they’d
never
shut up.”

Up ahead, at a food vendor just down the corridor, her friend Kase Reed reclined against the countertop, flirting with the adolescent selling the Dusk version of Russian cuisine. Unlike Olivia, she had opted for a far more conservative outfit of a bright teal cropped top that showed off her cleavage to its best possible advantage and a pair of shorts that rode high enough on her thighs to give the hems altitude sickness.

Kase flicked her blonde hair in a coquettish gesture. The move apparently brought Olivia into her line of sight, because the other woman straightened and waved urgently.

Thank God
, she thought.
I’m famished
.

Kase’s narrow face broke into a broad smile as Olivia drew closer.

“Olivia!”

She vaulted off the stool and hurled herself into a bone-crushing embrace. Olivia grunted, patting the shorter woman’s back gently at first, then urgently.

“Can’t… breathe…” she panted.

“Oh!” Kase backed off a step, her signature smile firmly in place. “How was the meeting?”

Olivia rolled her eyes. “Oh,
please
, get me started on
that
,” she said sarcastically, making a “blah blah blah” gesture with one hand. “It’s just like going to the beach, except without sand, water, or fun.”

Kase mimicked her gesture with the opposite hand. “Yeah, and you love having power and knowing all the state secrets. I wish I could be in there. Stupid no-telepaths rule,” she spat, thrusting out her lip in a theatrical pout.

“You’d be bored to tears in ten minutes, and you know it.”

“Not if I got to sit next to Merrick.”

Olivia laughed. “Merrick’s hotter than noon, there’s no denying that, but he’s still not enough of a consolation prize to make a DDC meeting entertaining.”

Now it was Kase’s turn to roll her eyes, and she did it with such fervor Olivia entertained a brief spark of alarm that she might injure something.

“
Suuuuuuure
,” she retorted, drawing the word out until it had about fifteen syllables. “Because you don’t
ever
pass the time thinking about what’s under Merrick’s breechclout and when he’s going to use it on you next.”

Olivia reached out and swatted Kase’s shoulder.

“You’re terrible.”

“You hungry?” Kase jerked a thumb at the volcanic-complected teenager behind the counter.

“You buying?”

Kase laughed. “I got you this time. I owe you for the Rigelian sapphire brandy you gave me for my birthday.”

Olivia snorted. “As if a couple of salmon blini would make us square on that score. Do you have any idea what that bottle
cost
?”

Her friend giggled, a distinct twinkle of devilry blinking to life in her eye. “No, and you’re not going to tell me, because I’m not rude enough to ask the price of a gift and you’re not gauche enough to tell me.” She stuck her tongue out and wrinkled her nose in one of the pugnaciously cute expressions she was famous throughout Galacia for.