Luna Marine (15 page)

“I
know
what you
are
, recruit! What I
don't
know is
what you were just doing with that constipated,
sorry
-assed turd you call a brain! While in ranks, you will
not
speak unless I demand a response from you! Do I make myself
clear
, Flash?”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“Hit the deck! Gimme one hundred!
Move
!”

“Aye, aye, sir!” He dropped to a push-up position and began doing push-ups.

“
And
you will sound off with each one!”

“Sir, yes, sir! Three!…four!…”

“I
did
not hear one and two, recruit! I must have
missed
them! Start over!”

“One!…Two!…”

Knox dropped into a crouch next to Jack, speaking softly now, but still with that whipcrack of command in his voice. “And as for what your recruiter may or may not have promised you, maggot, perhaps you would like to take that up with the regimental chaplain. Or maybe you'd like to run home to your momma!
She
might feel sorry for you. But
I
do not!” Straightening suddenly, he walked on down the line of men.

“And while Recruit Flash is demonstrating the proper technique for push-ups, the rest of your sorry-assed wannabes might consider this!
Every
Marine, and I don't care if he's a fighter jock joystickin' a Valkyrie, a space Marine on the Moon, a guard at an embassy or a goddamned
cook
, he is, first and foremost, forever and always, a Marine
rifleman
! You people will learn that lesson, and you will learn it well, because if you don't, some goddamn dink is gonna pop you a new asshole right between your eyes!”

He walked on down the line, and Jack kept pumping, calling off the numbers. “Eighteen!…Nineteen!…”

He had to concentrate, because the other recruits were calling off the numbers of their push-ups and were a bit ahead. By the time Knox had reached the end of the line and started making his way back, half a dozen other recruits were pumping and counting as well. And yet, over the cacophony, Gunny Knox's Voice of Command cracked and badgered, pushed, snapped, and berated. “I
don't think any of you will ever have what it takes to be a United States Marine, but by
God
in heaven I am going to try! I am going to personally break every last one of you miserable lowlife worms, and in the process I guarantee each and every one of you that you will wish that you have never been born! And then we will take what's left and begin molding it into something that
might, perhaps
, begin to resemble a Marine!”

Jack's arms gave out at sixty-four. He kept trying, struggling to raise himself, but by that time the DI had decided that the entire platoon needed to report to their racks inside the barracks to learn something about how to properly stow gear. And after that…perhaps a little run to warm them all up for the afternoon's activities….

“Give it up, Ramsey!” he bellowed. “That is
pathetic
! On your feet! And you have the unspeakable
gall
to think you can become a Marine? Move out! All of you, move out! I want to see nothing on this grinder but amphibious green blurs! On the double, move-it-move-it-move-it!”

The most humiliating part of the whole sorry affair was the sudden realization that his mother might have been right about his chances to get to space by joining the Corps.

Alexander Residence
Arlington Heights, Illinois
0810 hours CDT

Liana Alexander slammed the door behind her as she stalked into the house. Damn the man! Damn,
damn
the man! How he could be so insufferably arrogant, so cold, so…so
heartless
!…

Such a simple request, and he'd refused her, point-blank!

She walked into the E-room and dropped onto the sunken couch facing the wall screen. Picking up the remote, she thumbed through several menu selections, calling up her Earthnet access. David must have some files in
here, things he was working on now, preliminary reports, something that would be useful!

David didn't know that she knew his private file-access code: Sphinx. Not that he'd ever tried very hard to hide it from her. In fact, he seemed to assume that she simply didn't have the brains to work
any
electronic equipment. Well, it was true that she had trouble recording more than one program at a time off the entertainment feeds without getting hopelessly lost in all of the menu selections and information trees. And she had trouble with some of the interactive Net services. So many choices!

But she could handle files and recorded messages just fine, thank you, and she knew how to use access codes. She'd been looking over his shoulder once when he'd keyed in the word “Sphinx” to get a locked file. He'd
known
she was there at the time, but in his usual arrogant way, he'd probably thought that she had no idea what he was doing.

She'd done this a number of times in the past, and it always gave her a small, guilty flush of excitement, the feeling she imagined a spy must have breaking into the enemy's computer database.

Well, she
was
a spy, in a sense. It was the only way she had to get at the truth, the only way she knew of finding the ammunition the Church needed. Reverend Blaine had told her last Sunday that what she was doing…what was it he'd said? It “transcends mere human law, in the eternal service of the Ancient Divine Masters of the Cosmos!”

So
there
, David!

Anyway, whatever it was she was doing, David had it coming!

She'd first started taking sneak peeks at David's files and correspondence several weeks after his return from Mars. He'd been gone one day, she couldn't get him on his PAD because he was busy in a meeting and refused the call, and she'd needed to find his government disbursal number for the tax forms she was filling out. Armed with the password she'd seen him type in once—Sphinx—she
opened his private files and almost by accident discovered a saved vidcast.

It was one of the people at his new office—what was her name? Teri, she thought. Teri something-or-other. “Hiya, good-lookin',” the woman had said, leaning forward and smiling into her E-room's vid pickup. She was naked.

Well, the old taboo against public nudity was one of those aspects of modern society that was changing fast, had
been
changing since the turn of the century. Lots of people went nude these days, at home or when gathered with a few friends. It didn't mean anything, she knew. Even in public, on hot days lots of people wore shoes and UV block and nothing else but a wallet strap; with global warming and all it was just more comfortable that way.

But the way that Teri person had smiled and moved and said “Hiya, good-lookin'” had rankled. Damn it, it was inappropriate, it just wasn't
proper
for her to act and talk that way to a married man, especially when that man was her boss!

“Hey, Teri!” David's voice had answered. “What's up?”

“Oh,
lots
of things, I'm sure. What I'm calling for, though, is to find out about the trip to LA.”

Liana had watched the whole sordid recording, wondering all the while if David was sleeping with that woman. The rest of the message was innocuous enough—her asking about details on the speech he was scheduled to give in LA, and his voice replying matter-of-factly, without any leering or flirting or innuendo. But the way, at the end, she'd stood up and slinked closer to the pickup, closing out with the words, “Okay, honey. See you…
later
…” had shocked her. At that moment, she was certain that David had had sex with Teri, was having sex with her on a regular basis. The fact that David had saved that damned message instead of deleting it was proof enough.

She wondered how often he played it back, with HER up there two times larger than life on that damned big wall screen. Yuck.

Liana sighed. Nudity taboos weren't the only aspects of
society that had been changing lately. Marriage, for instance. Nowadays, the institution was pretty much whatever people said that it was. There were so many new kinds of marriage and social groupings now that simply hadn't been around when she was younger…or at least, no one had talked about them, things like line marriages with several men and women all married to one another.

That sort of thing had never been for
her
, not the way she'd been raised!

And…and divorce was so easy, now! All you needed was for both parties to agree that it was over, and that was it, unless the initial contract specified something more enduring.

The thought made her uncomfortable. She knew that David wanted a divorce; they'd talked about it several times, but she'd simply not been brought up that way. Stacy might be able to shake off the way they'd been raised…but not her. “What God has brought together, let no man put asunder” her mother had always said, and while Liana had lost much of her once fiery Baptist faith during the past few years, especially since she'd started going to Reverend Blaine's church, she hadn't lost the upbringing that had come with it. If marriage vows meant anything, they were holy vows to be kept, and kept forever!

Even if she now believed that Jesus had been the genetically manipulated child of a woman artificially inseminated by extraterrestrial visitors. Her mother, dead now for six years, would have thrown a fit if she'd known.

Every time David had brought the subject of divorce up, she'd managed to change the subject…or else throw a crying fit emotional enough to make him back off. The law, at least, was on her side. If he walked out on her, she would get the house and half of their joint bank account, and that seemed to be holding him back.

As for her divorcing him, well, she wasn't about to let him off the hook easily. She was certain that he was cheating on her—probably had been for a long time—and that was grounds for a divorce if she wanted one. The point was that she didn't.

She sighed. The very word “cheating,” she knew, was a holdover from an earlier age of more formal and binding marriage contracts, but she simply couldn't help that. For her, as for her mother, marriage was
forever
.

Besides, if she and David separated, she wouldn't find things like…
this
!

A folder marked “Picard/Sumeria” opened to a scrolling page of notes, including some PAD-scanned images of what looked like gold or silver statues. She squinted at the pictures, trying to make sense of them, but there was little sense to be made. The figures were so stiff and cartoonish, somehow…and did not resemble her notion of the ancient astronaut-gods very closely.

Nonetheless, she made a copy of everything, transferring the duplicates to her own private files. Later she would uplink them to Pastor Blaine's Net address, and the Church elders could make of them what they could.

Guilt nagged at her, but she angrily pushed the feeling aside. She'd given David his chance, just a short while ago when she'd driven him to the maglev station. Every morning she drove him to the Arlington Heights station so he could take the commuter maglev into town; every evening she picked him up again…at least on those days when he wasn't gallivanting off around the country somewhere, giving talks, giving lectures. Did he have time for her and her church and her friends? No!

He could sleep with his goddamned secretary or assistant or whatever she was, but he couldn't tell his own wife about what he'd discovered on the Moon, even if he knew how important the subject was to her.

This morning had been the worst. She'd asked him, yet again, if he could tell her about what he'd found on the Moon that obviously had him so concerned, asked him if there was anything there that she could share with the people at her church. “What, that bunch of idiots?” was what he'd said.

And, by implication, that was what he thought of her. There'd been more. A lot more, none of it pleasant. The part about “a bunch of losers who think God was a space-man, and that he's going to come down and rescue them
all from the evils of the world,” that had hurt, a lot.

Maybe because there was some truth in it. The First Church of the Divine Masters of the Cosmos did hold that there would be a final reckoning, when the Divine Masters returned—any day now!—and demanded an accounting for Man's stewardship of the planet. And on that day, the faithful would board the great mother ships, to be carried in rapture into heaven, abandoning a world corrupted by greed and sin and Adam's fallen nature, a wicked world already under judgment by global warming, a world about to face the nuclear destruction levied by the Masters on Sodom and Gomorrah….

And David simply couldn't
see
….

She'd been skimming the material on the screen, looking for key words or phrases that might pop out at her, and finding nothing. Some of the sub files were cryptically named: Gab-Kur-Ra, Shu-Ha-Da-Ku, Shar-Tar-Bak. What in the Name of the Divine Masters were
those
?

She copied them faithfully, nonetheless.

Then, however, her eyes landed on a pair of concluding paragraphs, and she read them carefully.

“
It seems obvious that the aliens, tentatively identified as ‘An' or ‘Anu,' and which from admittedly preliminary and scanty evidence quite possibly can be identified with Species Eighty-four, from the Cydonian visual data, did indeed have considerable direct contact with humans living at the head of the Persian Gulf, the peoples we know today as Sumerians. That contact, however, does not appear to have been a friendly one from the human perspective. The accounts translated so far speak of enslaving the
‘lu,'
a term used in ancient Sumerian to mean “human,” but which includes the connotation of ‘something herded,' ‘something taken care of.' Humans appear to have been useful to the An primarily in working mines, raising crops, forming military units for further conquests, and for attending the masters as personal servants
.