“Good,” I say, just to be agreeable. I haven’t heard of Division Four or Division One, or any division, for that matter. “What are they?”
Kumar ignores me and looks forward.
The rotors tilt back for vertical landing and that damned shudder returns. My mind is going like I’ve just been dosed with post-drop enthusiasm. I think on Joe and DJ and Kazak and Tak and Vee-Def and all the others—on Captain Coyle and her team—all of us who were in the Drifter…. I had been worried about the green powder. Hadn’t thought much about the black, shiny stuff. I am remarkably dense.
“Touchdown in two,” the pilot announces. “Ground crew wants a quick transfer. They’re armed and anxious, so make it clean.”
Borden tightens her belt and says, “For what it’s worth, you’d be glass by now if you were contaminated… right?”
“Sure,” I say. But I’m ignorant. Ignorant, unshaven, wearing rumpled civvies… I could be a paranoid homeless guy wandering the streets of Anytown, USA.
The Valor bounces and sidles before settling. We’re surrounded by anonymous figures in severe orange MOPP gear. Three big green Oshkosh fire tenders stand by, foam guns ready—whatever the hell good that will do. We run under the shadow of the rotating blades to another Skell—me, Borden, and Kumar. Borden advises me not to make any sudden moves. “They’ll blow us off the runway if you so much as cross your eyes.”
“Got it.”
Our transfer is swift and clean. We pile in. Borden drives. I watch the nervous crews part to let us out of their cordon. Even through their thick visors, their eyes flash fear and even hatred.
An odd look crosses Kumar’s smoothly calm features. “Getting interesting, Master Sergeant?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s what the Gurus like. They like it interesting.”
Our next ride is a low-slung private jet shaped like a manta ray with a fin coming out of its head. On the fuselage below the fin I read Blue Origin Texas. We enter through the tail hatch and find comfortable red leather seating near the front, behind wide windows facing forward, not apparent from the outside. The comfy seats wrap around our legs and middles and cushion our necks. A sweet female voice tells us we’ll be in Texas in less than forty minutes. Sounds too pretty to be real.
The rear door seals, the jet spins about, and in a few seconds we’re in a steep climb. The jet is a drone. It feels smooth and expensive.
“We’ll be hitching on a Blue Origin lifter,” Kumar says.
“Why not ISD ships?” I ask.
“If you haven’t noticed, we’re off the grid,” Borden says.
“At the end of all our careers, I’m afraid,” Kumar says. He arranges his hands neatly in his lap. “But if promises get fulfilled, we’ll get a lift to LEO, transorbital to a Lagrange station, and from there—if we’re really lucky—a high-speed shuttle.”
“To where?”
“First stop, Mars,” Borden says.
I’ve guessed it all along—felt it in my bones. Back to the Red. Unfinished business.
“Courtesy of some very brave CEOs,” Kumar adds, “a couple of senators, and more than a few generals and colonels.”
“Sounds like a full-throated conspiracy,” I say.
Kumar demurs. “Let’s just say a number of us have become dangerously curious.”
A little vanilla-colored cart tracks up the aisle and offers us coffee or juice. I take coffee. Borden orders orange juice. The cart dispenses our drinks in blessed silence.
“Mr. Kumar provided the Chief of Naval Operations with your evaluation, as originally submitted to the Wait Staff,” Borden says while we sip. “Your psych chart has some interesting bumps. The Office of Naval Research put me in charge of evaluating those bumps.”
“Arlington?”
“Right.”
“Someone’s skeptical about what the Gurus have been telling us?”
“Draw your own conclusions.”
I raise my cup in toast. “They need you to find out why I dream about being a bug.”
Borden shakes her head. “That is beyond my mandate,” she says. “I was given another assignment. Not to beat around the bush, we hear you have visits from the dead.”
I’m silent for a few seconds. “Walker Harris told you?”
“I don’t know a Walker Harris,” Kumar says.
That’s about to drag me through another line of questions, but Borden interrupts, “Was your experience informative? Real-seeming?”
I look out at the pretty cloudscape. “No. Yes.”
“Can you tell me who it was you thought was visiting?”
My throat tightens. “Captain Daniella Coyle.”
“Were you and Coyle close professionally or otherwise?”
“We were in a bar fight at Hawthorne years back, some sister Skyrines and Coyle and my training buddies. She went Special Ops and we didn’t see her again until she arrived at the Drifter with her team. They carried bags full of spent matter charges.”
“Enough to collapse the Drifter.”
“Easily.”
“She turned glass? Describe that again for me.”
Reluctantly, hands clenching, I recount the last moments of Coyle’s transformation in the heart of the Drifter—the Church—in the looming presence of that crystalline pillar. The blooming spikes, the weird little lights chasing inside her like fireflies in a black night. “After that, the rest of us were in a hurry to get out.”
“Understandable. Are you sure she was dead?”
“I’m not sure about anything.”
Borden’s expression stays cool and firm, but there’s something in the way she moves her eyes, looking away, then back—her first tell. Psych evaluations are standard for Skyrines. Trips to Mars and back are expensive and the brass does not want damaged goods fucking up an otherwise orderly drop.
“I was in a transfer once where a Skyrine lost it after we entered orbit, in cleanup,” I say. “He came out of the Cosmoline screaming, then started crying like a baby. We weren’t told what the corpsmen did with him.”
“I don’t think that’s at issue here,” Borden says.
I shift in my seat. “Yeah, but what did they do with him? I’ve never bothered to ask, maybe I don’t want to know—”
“Tell me what happened after you returned and were taken to Madigan. No diversions. Straight out.”
This is it, then. It could all end right here. “And if I don’t pass your exam—Kumar sends me back to the shithouse?”
“You’ve never experienced visions before? Contact with spirits, ghosts?”
“Not out-and-out. Dreams, sure, but nothing real.”
She doesn’t want to hear about dreams. “Tell me what happened when Captain Coyle visited you.”
“It’s pretty fucked-up. Pardon me. Crazy.”
“Let me be the judge.”
Maybe Gurus are watching everybody on Earth, writing down our stats in dense little Guru charts, and holding back is silly. And so I lay it all out. “I think Coyle was trying to tell me something… pass along some sort of crucial information.”
“You could see her?”
“I could feel her.”
“How?”
“Well, a little protective voice woke me up in the middle of the night and said, ‘Captain Coyle is here.’ It seemed surprised.”
“A protective voice… War sense? Battlefield angel?”
“Whatever. Me and it are not used to having dead people show up in our head. My head.”
“And then?”
“I could feel her, sense it was her—or a dream of her, though she seemed pretty real. But when she tried to speak, there was just this word balloon filled with scribbles. Like those wind doodles all over Mars…” This makes my neck hair bristle. I look hard at Borden. “A few days later, I could actually understand what she was saying. A real pain in the ass. But what’s it to you? Why track something so crazy?”