“I don’t want it to be that way, sir. I want them to be volunteers. I want them to be from every elite service in the world.”
“A Foreign Legion of freaks, huh?”
“Not the terms I would use.”
“No, I suppose not. But okay. The higher-ups saw the whole thing. I briefed them, ran the vid files for them raw. They are convinced to give it another go. With you leading the charge, if you will do it.”
Sandra caught my attention, flapping her hands at me. I looked up at her. She mouthed a single word: No.
“Yes sir,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
I eyed Sandra. She had her hands on her hips. Her lips were curled in disgust and worry.
“I know a fellow crazy bastard when I see one, Riggs,” laughed the General, sounding like he’d just won a bet. “Welcome to the special forces club. Start building super-sized reactor packs and brewing up some of those injections, pronto.”
“Will do, sir,” I said.
“Oh, and Riggs? The Congress is planning to give you a medal of some kind. You aren’t officially in any of the armed services, so they had to make it something any citizen can get. You are still a U. S. citizen, right Riggs?”
I had to think about that one. I supposed that I was, as Star Force wasn’t exactly a nation. “Yes I am. Are we talking about a Congressional Medal of Honor?”
“That’s what they call it. I guess they really need a war hero about now.”
After I hung up, Sandra was upset with me. “You don’t have to go.”
“Yeah, I do,” I told her.
She crossed her arms under her breasts. Her eyes were half-closed. I felt a sudden urge to grab her and kiss her. But I knew that if I did, I would be rebuffed. She was clearly annoyed.
I threw up my arms. The newly regrown one gave me a stab of pain as I did so. “How can I build a new set of weapons, then recruit another thousand guys to die fighting with these experimental guns against giant robots, and stay home shivering in this ship?”
She sighed and relented, sitting on the couch next to me. “I don’t know. But I wish you would stay out of it this time. Somehow.”
Sandra stared at me for awhile, and I stared back. Suddenly, she threw one of her long brown legs over mine and sat in my lap, straddling me. We made out fiercely for several minutes. It was good.
As suddenly as she’d climbed aboard, she jumped off again. I had to fight to control myself. I almost lunged for her, but I stopped. I’d just gotten my own arms back, and it wouldn’t do to accidentally yank off one of hers. She gave a little laugh and had no idea how I was feeling. Or maybe she did.
I could tell she wasn’t going to give me any more sugar at the moment. So, I decided not to beg for it. Women never respected that. I headed into the shower. Lord, how I needed a shower. The water was hot and I stayed in it for longer than usual.
Sandra surprised me in our makeshift shower stall about one minute before I was going to get out. She wrapped her arms around me from behind. We kissed and touched. It was even better than it had been out on the couch.
“Incoming private channel request from Admiral Crow,” said the ship, interrupting.
“Not now, Alamo.”
The ship was silent for about thirty seconds. I made the best use I could of each second. Sandra was really beginning to respond, and we’d moved several steps past kissing.
“Incoming urgent channel request from Admiral Crow.”
“Admiral Crow?” asked Sandra. “When the hell did he make himself into an Admiral?”
“Do you accept the incoming channel request?” droned the Alamo. Sometimes, the ship really did sound like a computer.
“Just answer,” sighed Sandra, putting her wet head against my chest, “or they’ll never let us alone.”
“Open channel, Alamo,” I growled.
“You there, Riggs?”
“Yes sir.”
“You on the john or something?”
“Something like that, sir.”
“Well, I’m calling because you’ve gone bananas, and—well, I have to tell you Riggs, right now I’m thinking of demoting you.”
I snorted. Sandra tensed against me. I patted her back, trying to relax her again. This man was a master at ruining a good mood.
“What’s the problem, Crow?”
“You’ve gone and overstepped yourself. Grossly. I’m in charge of this fleet. You know that, right?”
“That was the deal.”
“Well, then why are you negotiating a new force of star marines, or whatever you want to call them, without my approval? Why are you offering to give away one of our most amazing technologies without even telling me?”
I pursed my lips. “I have to admit, you have a point. I was too focused on solving the problem to worry about approvals.”
“Well, tell me why I’m not going to cancel all your arrangements and rip some stripes off of you.”
This was more than Sandra could take. Throughout the conversation, I could feel her body getting more tense against mine. She had a temper. And she seemed particularly defensive when it came to me. I supposed that was a good thing.
“What do you want his stripes for, Crow? You sew new ones on yourself every other damned day. Did you run out?”
There was a moment of silence. I looked down at Sandra. She was lovely, wet and naked. There was a wild look in her eye. I should never have agreed to talk to Crow, I decided.
“Is that Sandra? Ah—now I get it!” he burst into laughter. “That is a shower I hear running, isn’t it? I need to figure out how to get video feed out of this communication setup.”
-27-
After an irritatingly long talk, Crow came to see things my way. I agreed at length to consult with him before proposing things like new armies or technology giveaways. By the time Crow and I had finished talking, Sandra and I were dry, dressed and out of the mood. At least, she seemed to be. I hoped I hadn’t gotten myself kicked out of her shower stall for good.
I played it cool, however. Exhaustion helped with that strategy. I was simply too tired and hungry to care much. I ate a big meal of chicken, cottage cheese, canned peaches and cold broccoli. It was filling, but lackluster. I resolved to have the camp people build a better eatery. Maybe I could put a real kitchen aboard the Alamo as well.
After I ate, I slept for a good dozen hours. Sandra startled me by curling herself up against my chest, about half-way through my sleep. I figured this had to be a good sign. I felt so tired however, it was like being drugged. Maybe the Nanos had drugged me, for all I knew, as part of their ministrations. Or maybe it was just a natural reaction to exhaustion and gross injury. In any case, I fell back asleep again without so much as molesting her. Hours later, when I woke up, she was gone.
I awakened with a fuzziness in my mind. I’d had strange dreams and even stranger ideas in my head. I’d dreamt of the home planet of the Nanos. They’d been created—in my dreams—by blue men with huge eyes and even huger skulls shaped like inverted pears. It left me with the thought when I awoke that I needed to know who had sent these machines to Earth. Who, and why.
I’d tried to get this information from Alamo before. It had come up many times over the last month or so. But the ship had been programmed to avoid answering such questions. It was part of the Nanos’ internal, unchangeable programming to keep their origins a secret. Either that, I thought, or the ship truly didn’t know.
“Alamo? Are you listening to my thoughts?”
“When your mind forms word-thoughts, they are transmitted to my receptors.”