California, May, 1956
“To Doc Taylor!” Sgt.
Hill said, clinking the glass of bourbon in his long black hand
with those of the four privates around the table. “Best damn
medic in the whole damn Guard, and probably the damn regular
Army!”
“But—” Dani Taylor
started to protest, but Hill wagged his finger at her. “Sergeant,
I didn’t save Baker’s leg! It’s gone!”
“His whole body’d
be gone if you hadn’t found the chemicals to kill that—that blob!” Private
Pulaski thumped his gin and tonic on the nightclub table for
emphasis. “Never seen anything like it, but you kept your cool
and stopped it eating my buddy. From now on, anyone says a girl
can’t be a medic answers to me!”
“Doc Taylor never
loses her cool,” Private Clemente said, gesturing expansively
with his cigar. “Look how she saved Roberts when the giant gila
monster bit him.”
Not for the first
time, Dani wondered what her parents would say if they saw her
now. Sitting in a nightclub, dressed in fatigues, a medic
like Grandfather. Being one of the guys instead of the ‘damn
girl medic’ Col. Ankrum foisted on them. Then she pushed
the thought away and raised her scotch. “Just be thankful the
blob was only a foot across, a man-sized one would have been
a lot harder to kill. And don’t forget, Duggan gave me the idea—where
is he, anyway?”
“He has a dame, can
you believe it?” Clemente said. The Nine Rings—the house band
at the Tower of Mordor nightclub—started singing and he raised
his voice. “I told him to bring her along, but she’s his first
woman, and I think he’s puss—err, I mean, he decided not to.”
“The medic’s still
a lady,” Hill said sternly. “Watch your language.” Dani congratulated
herself on having learned not to show any outward shock at the
platoon’s cussing. “Hell, she’s also a comic-book super-hero—”
“Strange Adventures isn’t
a super-hero comic, sarge,” Pulaski said with infinite patience. “It’s
not even science fiction, really, it’s like that ‘space realism’ Heinlein
writes.”
“Oh, come on!” Hill
said. “Do you honestly think Starship Soldiers is a realistic
look at—”
A waitress tapped
Dani on the shoulder as the guys began debating Heinlein’s vision
of a war in space. “Are you Dr. Taylor, ma’am? I’ve a phone call
for you.”
Dani crossed the dimly
lit room, weaving between tables packed with soldiers, scientists
and TSC agents. The phone was on the far side of the club from
the band, which made it possible to hear over them singing that
new song about heartbreak at a hotel. “This is Dr. Taylor.”
“Doc, you gotta help
me.” It was Duggan’s voice, squeaky as if it had never completely
broken. “I’m with my girl at the Gay Songbird—”
“That—passion pit?
Duggan!” Silence on the other end of the line; Dani berated herself
mentally. “I’m sorry, if you need help you know you have it,
just ask.” Why am I saying that? What if she needs an abortion?
“I—I saw a spaceman
walk into one of the cabins. He looked human at first, but just
for a second, he changed—”
“Into what?”
“A—a guy in a spacesuit—I
wanted to investigate but Lil—my girl, she’s hysterical. If you
and the guys could come over, help me check it out, and if you
could give her something? To calm her down?”
“Which cabin are you
in?”
“Seventeen.”
“We’ll be there, don’t
worry.” Dani hung up, strode back to the table, heedless of who
she shoved past. All she could think about was the alien seed
pods down in that one coastal town that had grown into people,
replaced the entire population…
None of the guys hesitated
when she told them, even though it was the first night off in
a week and a half. Pulaski didn’t even joke about the bespectacled,
oh-so-serious Duggan winding up at a motor court as notorious
as the Gay Songbird. Within two minutes, he and the others, mindful
of Eisenhower’s call for saving gas, had joined Dani in her Buick.
Pulaski gave directions,
though Dani suspected most of the guys knew. Since the National
Guard and the regional TSC branch had set up bases around the
small town of Wind Song, the Gay Songbird had become the haven
of choice for anyone with a roommate who didn’t want to make
love in the back seat of their car. And in the middle of this
desert, what the hell else is there to do?
It took less than
ten minutes before the two cars screeched to a stop outside Cabin
17. Dani scrambled out and took her medical kit from the trunk.
If there was one thing she’d learned from the past few years,
it was to always be prepared.
“Oh, thank gosh!” Duggan
raced out of the cabin in an undershirt and shorts. “It’s over
at 24, I’ll go with you. Doc, Lily’s inside.”
“What did you see,
private?” Hill said sharply, towering over the younger man. Dani
paused at the doorway to listen. “Well?”
“Guy in—in a business
suit.” Duggan swallowed nervously. “I was staring out the window,
I saw him go into 24—and just in the doorway, he changed. The
businessman disappeared like it was an illusion, there was someone
in a—a spacesuit. All metal, like.”
“Too bad our carbines
are back at base.” Hill drew his automatic; these days most Guardsmen
went armed, even off-duty. “Remember procedure: Don’t assume
it’s hostile, don’t act belligerent, but don’t forget, it only
took one spaceman in Scotland to take over half the country.
Now move!”
Dani opened the door
to 17 and stepped inside. A good-looking redhead sat in the bed,
sheets pulled up over her body, a cigarette quivering between
long fingers with red-painted nails. “Who the hell are you? Where’s
Peter?”
“He told you he was
getting a doctor? I’m her.” Hearing the barely contained hysteria
in the woman’s voice, Dani opened her kit fast and pulled out
the tranquilizers, standard issue when the mere sight of a mutant
sometimes gave civilians a nervous breakdown. “I’m going to give
you something to calm you—”
“He said it was his
platoon medic! You’re a woman! Peter! Peter!”
“I’m the first female
medic in the National Guard.” Dani crossed to the sink, poured
a glass of water for the pill.
“I don’t care who
the hell you are, I don’t need any calming, I need to get out
of here! My husband—”
“You’re married?” Dani
spun around. “Does Duggan know?”
“Of course, he knows!
Look, if this gets into the papers, if my husband finds out I’m
seeing Peter—” She dropped the sheet, twisting around on the
bed to show Dani a horrendous bruise on her ribs. “That’s what
he did when I was late for dinner last week.”
“Jesus.” Dani handed
the woman the valium and the glass, studying the bruise; it was
lucky the blow hadn’t broken her rib. “Is that why Duggan called
us and not the cops?”
“He said he could
trust his buddies.” The woman’s eyes glanced from Dani to the
pill as if deciding whether to trust her, then a yell of alarm
rang out from across the motor court. Dani bolted out of the
room, grabbing up her kit and drawing her grandfather’s revolver.
She saw lights go
on in the other cabins, curtains drawn aside, a blond woman stepping
outside number 21. Then she was at 24, forcing her way past Duggan—and
stopped, unable to penetrate further into the heat and the smoke
within.
The cinderblock back
wall was gone, transformed into a pool of congealing slag. The
slag had incinerated several pieces of furniture and half-buried
the charred corpse that lay at the back of the cabin in the moonlight.
Pulaski appeared on the far side of the hole and crouched down,
squinting at the body, running a hand over his widow’s peak.
“Is it the alien?” Hill
barked.
“I can’t say, sarge.
Doesn’t seem to have any armor on, though.” He turned and studied
the brush behind him. “Don’t see any sign of a trail, though.”
“We’d better go look,” Hill
said. “Duggan, go back to your cabin, call headquarters, report
what you saw and what we found. Then call the state police, we’ll
probably need to bring them in on it. Doc—”
“Don’t do anything
stupid, sergeant,” she said, glancing again at the corpse. “If
it uses a heat ray in the scrub around here—”
“We’re not going to
engage, just track. Okay soldiers, move it!”
“Doc?” As the men
headed around and into the woods, Duggan nervously tapped Dani’s
shoulder. “My girl—”
“I gave her a valium,
that should be enough.”
“No, if the cops come—doc,
I can’t let anyone find out she was here!” He grabbed her shoulders,
fingers digging in with panicked strength. “Her—she’s married,
and her husband, he’s a drunk and—”
“I saw what he did
to her.” Dani pursed her lips. “I’ll take her home, as soon as
the guys get back. You can have her wait in my car until then.” She
could hear the sounds of cars starting up . “I don’t think anyone
will find it strange she’s leaving.”
“Wow!” Dani turned
back to the doorway; a well-endowed blonde in slacks, black sweater
and cat’s eye glasses stood there staring inside. “What happened
here?”
“Aliens, lady!” Dani
grabbed her and forced her firmly away. “Stay back—for all we
know, the ray weapon that did that was radioactive.”
“Good point.” The
woman wasn’t disturbed by the sight of the corpse, but dead bodies
weren’t as unfamiliar to Americans as they used to be. “I’ll
check the front office, see if the manager knows who was staying
here.”
“And I’ll go call
the cops,” Duggan said. “I guess I have to stay, right?”
“’fraid so, kid.” Dani
lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply, staring into the smoke. Pulaski’s
right, it doesn’t look like the body’s wearing armor…But if that’s
not the spaceman, why would an alien sneak into a motel court
in disguise just to murder one man?
“You’re a woman.” The
redhead sat in Dani’s passenger seat, staring out the window,
smoking, her voice slurred by the tranquilizer. “What are you
doing in the Guard?”
“All the nuclear tests
have given the Southwest the highest mutation rate in the world.
Well, except for Japan and a couple of spots behind the Iron
Curtain. With all the deaths from the Invasion, the ant swarms,
the other mutants and spacemen, they’re desperate for manpower,
especially since the Guard wants full-time soldiers now.” Even
so, most states refused to have female doctors even in the MASH
units, but the exaggerated stories of her exploits against the
Devilfish had caught Gen. Mayfair’s attention in California—and
she’d wound up leaving Boston for the west coast and her “test
case” job. “It’s really no different from World War II when they
sent the women into the factories.”
“I did factory work,” the
woman said. “For a while. Bad for my nails.”
“Oh. Well.” Dani fell
silent; it wasn’t too much further to the apartment the woman—Lil,
that was what Duggan called her on the phone—had told her husband
she was staying at. Husband. Even if he’s a brute…I can see
why that would make a sweet kid like Duggan appeal to her, but…husband.
Married.
Cheating.
The rest of the drive
passed in silence.
Wind Song was a poor
substitute for Boston.
Dani gathered the
hole-in-the-wall town had been dying before the government bases
opened, and the Guard had taken over the abandoned, nearby town
of Skink for combat training. Given the lack of decent restaurants,
libraries, bars and stores, Wind Song still felt at least half-dead
to her.
In addition, she’d
yet to find a newspaper, including the LA Times, that
she considered as good as the Boston Globe. Nevertheless,
the morning after returning from the Gay Songbird, Dani sat at
the window of her tiny one-bedroom on-base apartment and became
totally absorbed in the morning’s papers.
The Times’ banner
headline announced that the Russians had just launched something
called “Sputnik” into orbit by combining their rocket research
with technology from the Growing Men’s spaceship that the Russians
had shot down over Leningrad last year. As proof they were serious
about allying with the West against the spacemen and putting
the days of Stalin and New America behind them, Khruschev had
offered to share the technology and work with America on putting “cosmonauts” into
orbit.
Eisenhower’s announcement
that instead of running for a second term, he would step down
and devote himself to organizing and leading his proposed World
Defense Alliance came lower on the page.
The Arizonia Republic’s leading
headline informed Dani that PHOENIX BUSINESSMAN SLAIN BY ALIEN
AT SEEDY MOTEL. The TSC lab had helped the coroner identify the
body as human; the motor court manager had identified him as
Duncan Gregory of Star Science, one of the government contractors
working to adapt alien technology for commercial use. The story
quoted Duggan, demanded to know what the company had been working
on that might have been seen as a threat, and hinted that since
the alien had used a male disguise to meet Gregory at the motel,
it was possible Gregory had been a “moral weakling.”
Well, I guess it’s
no business of mine any more, unless the alien and his pals
start an invasion. Dani flipped over to the movie listings;
James Dean’s new film The Lonely Crowd was opening that weekend
and Jason Barclay, a British military officer studying “how
you Americans do things” had offered to take her out. Pulaski’s
right, if I don’t learn to relax once the mission is over,
I’ll never have any fun.
The next couple of
weeks passed swiftly. Dinner—and afterwards—with Jason; dinner,
no afterwards, with Rob Trueblood, a TSC Science Investigator;
and, of course, the usual Guard jobs. A prehistoric sea serpent
that ravaged the shores of the Salton Sea after rousing from
suspended animation, a nest of 20-foot rattlesnakes, and an Anaheim
scientist who’d turned himself into a 15 foot tall ape man with
a taste for human flesh.
Then came a weeklong
furlough she’d intended to spend flying back to Boston for a
wedding, but a flying saucer was attacking planes in the Midwest
so everything was grounded, and if she went by train, she’d have
arrived too late, so she wound up spending the first day sitting
in Tommy’s Tavern in Wind Song, fending off the occasional wolf
and wishing there was a bookstore in town where she could find
a copy of The Last Hurrah.
“So what do you think
of this latest attack?” A bespectacled blond in a dark blouse
and slacks—no hat, no gloves—sat down next to Dani at the bar,
fitting a cigarette into a gold holder. After a second, Dani
pegged her as the woman from the motel. “Wild, isn’t it? Like
the aliens have their own Murder, Incorporated.”
“Attack?” Dani stared
at her blankly. “By whom? On what?”
“It was yesterday’s
paper, you haven’t heard?”
“The platoon was hunting
ape men in Anaheim. And you would be—?”
“Claire White, TSC
labs.” That surprised Dani; the women scientists she’d met didn’t
dress this casually outside the laboratory. Claire ordered a
martini, ignoring the wolf whistle from one of the men at the
bar. Given the woman’s hourglass figure, Dani guessed she was
used to the attention. “Have you heard how everyone went crazy
after the alien killed Gregory?”
“Same as after we
found out about the pod people—folks calling the cops saying
their husband’s having an affair, their kids are smoking reefer—”
“So they have to be
a carbon copy of the real person, right. Trust the squares to
go around the bend when the heat is on.” Claire took a sip of
her drink, nodded approvingly. “That’s actually my job with the
TSC: I work on ways to figure out who’s real and who’s a copy
in case more pods show up.”
“I heard that was
impossible.”
“The ones we captured
have the same features, scars, internal organs, memories as the
originals,” Claire said, nodding, which set the smoke she exhaled
wiggling through the air. “But they can’t fake it under psychoanalysis;
it may take a few hours but the nonhuman thought patterns start
to surface. Lysergic acid has a disorienting effect that makes
it hard to keep up the pose. And it seems their DNA—the stuff
those English scientists found inside our genes—differs in a
few crucial ways—”
“So are you studying
the genes or the psychology?”
“Both. I have doctorates
in biology and psychology.” Dani stared; Claire barely looked
24. “I know, I’m young, but being a genius makes up for it.”
“Was that why you
were at the motor court? To investigate—
“No, I was there for
the same reason as everyone else. You know, sex?” She said it
with so little embarrassment, Dani’s jaw dropped; reaching into
her shoulder bag to pull out a paper, Claire didn’t notice. “Here
you are. Front page in the Republic.”
Dani read. Anton Morodin,
one of Arizona’s wealthiest men—she remembered the name in the
context of a future gubernatorial bid—had burned to death in
his home. Police said the brick walls had melted like the ones
at the Gay Songbird, the work of some still unidentified ray
weapon. Morodin’s right-hand man had called the police, describing
the same disguised alien as Duggan, then his call had cut off;
he’d been found in a phone booth that had melted around him.
“Jesus.” There were
interviews with Morodin’s wife and business partners, but Dani
only skimmed them, thinking of the burn victims she’d treated
at Taylor General in Boston. “That’s a hell of a way to die.”
“Excuse me?” A plump
woman caught Dani by the elbow and thrust a comic in her face. “Would
you mind autographing this, please? For my daughter?”
“Uh, sure.” She found
it slightly silly being asked to autograph the issue of Strange
Adventures that dramatized her experiences with the Devilfish
in Boston, but she’d gotten used to it. She turned to the page
with her story on it, then realized it wasn’t Strange Adventures at
all, it was an issue of Young Love with a picture of a
woman in a Guard medic’s uniform on the cover:
“‘Introducing Dr.
Laura Lyons,’” Dani read the cover blurb blankly. “‘Heartbreak
and heroism in a story of today’s woman.’ I don’t see—”
“Oh, who else could
have given them the idea?” the woman said. “My daughter Ellen
pointed out it’s just like your life—”
“It is?”
“—and now she says
she might want to be a doctor!”
“Well, that’s—wonderful.” Dani
signed and handed the issue back, watched the woman scurry off. “Claire,
why are you grinning?”
“You’d smile too if
you saw the look on your face. The story’s actually pretty well
drawn, you know.”
“Geniuses read romance
comics?”
“No, but I flipped
through it while I was picking up Tales From The—” She
broke off, staring over Dani’s shoulder. “Isn’t that one of the
guys from your platoon?”
“Doc!” Pulaski was
at her side a second later. “It’s Duggan! The aliens got him
too!”
“Doc Taylor.” It might
have been a smile; it was hard to tell from what remained of
his face. “How’s—tricks?”
“Never mind me, what
happened?” She climbed into the ambulance before it rocketed
off toward the base hospital—but one look had told her it couldn’t
arrive fast enough to save him. “Pulaski said the spaceman—”
“I was meeting my
girl for eats ...” He broke off and gave a small groan, despite
the heavy dose of morphine. “She’d told me she was gonna leave
him…it came for my car…like Sarge says, always be on the alert,
you know? I saw it lu-lurking—”
“It killed the witness
who reported it attacking Morodin.” Dani would have taken his
hand, but there was nothing left to take. “It must have been
afraid you saw something we could use against it.”
“Like that movie…” Duggan
broke into something that might have been a laugh. Dani told
herself she couldn’t want to cry; not when she’d seen so many
deaths already. Just because it was a green kid she knew and
liked, didn’t change that. “Guy gets poisoned to cover up something…he
never saw…Doc, it’s not fair…tell Lily I…love…”
Dani managed not to
cry until after she’d left the morgue. It wasn’t until she was
back in her apartments that the tears turned to realization and
rage.
“Murder.” Phoenix
homicide detective Jimmy Jameson shook his head as he set his
checkered coat on the back of his chair. “Claire, just because
we had dinner a couple of times—”
“Duggan’s lover was
called Lily,” Dani said impatiently. “When I got home, I remembered
the newspaper interview with Mrs. Morodin after her husband’s
death—I called Claire, and she confirmed it. Lily Morodin.”
“Lily’s not that rare
a name.”
“We found a photo
of her attending the funeral,” Claire said. “It’s her.”
Jimmy shook his head.
The police station was a bustle of cops, prisoners, secretaries,
occasional yells and stale tobacco smell, but as Dani waited
for his response, it all faded into the background. “Coincidence.
That’s what Captain Winthrop would say, anyway.”
“Duggan told me
he didn’t see anything,” Dani said. “His dying words, along with
telling Lily he loved her.” And if it’s true what I think,
God that makes me sick! “What if she was the one who saw
the spaceman, or told him she did? And begged him to be the witness
so her husband wouldn’t find out she was at the Songbird? He
was in love, she was beautiful, he’d have done it.”
“And that’s it?” Jameson
stuffed his pipe mechanically. “That would be enough if I was
Sam Spade or Mike Hammer, but—”
“Dani called me up
to try and talk her out of it,” Claire said. “She told me it
had to be some weird coincidence, but then we cast an eyeball
over the facts and saw it differently.” She raised her fingers,
ticking off points. “First, Star Science has been working with
the Air Force on rocketry, adapting engines from downed spaceships,
the same way the Russians did. Second, the company’s going to
be worth millions if the joint space program goes through. Third,
Morodin owned a third of the stock, and his widow inherits all
of it.
“Fourth, the guy who
assumed management of the company after Gregory died was Paul
Hotchkiss. He joined the company last year to adapt the fuel
from the Mt. Shasta spaceship crash into something we could use.”
“And you know this
how?”
“I read the papers,
I read the science journals, and I hear the gossip—science is
a small community in this part of the country. And the gossip
tells me Hotchkiss was about to get the axe because he couldn’t
make a workable fuel out of the stuff from Mt. Shasta. It’s so
volatile that when exposed to air, it melts through stone, brick,
metal.” Jameson sat holding his pipe, forgetting to light it. “There
was talk Gregory was going to cut his losses, close down the
project and give Hotchkiss the boat.”
“If Hotchkiss is such
a flop, why would they appoint him to be the new boss?”
“A recommendation
from Morodin that arrived the morning after his death,” Claire
said. “And the grieving widow who owns a third of the stock has
said that of course she can’t question her poor dead hubby’s
decision—”
Jameson lit his pipe,
looking very, very thoughtful. Dani smiled.
“He said he’d take
care of it!” Sitting in Claire’s rented corner room in Wind Song,
Dani slammed her fist into the wall, heedless of how much it
hurt. “Claire, how can he let that—that bitch—walk! That lousy,
goddamn, murderous bitch!”
“She gave him enough
to swear a warrant out on Hotchkiss,” Claire said. “That’s something,
right? And don’t keep hitting the wall, you’ll break your hand.”
“She used Duggan,
Claire, you know it. And probably Hotchkiss too. And if Star
Science gets a share of the rocket research—”
“Lilian Morodin will
be rich beyond the dreams of avarice, I dig what you’re saying.
And I agree it’s a lousy deal for Private Duggan, but even if
Hotchkiss accused her now, his word wouldn’t count for much.
She’s rich, she’s respectable, someone gave the papers the story
about Morodin beating her—”
“I should have examined
the bruise. She could have used makeup.”
“She denies seeing
the spaceman and paints Hotchkiss as an old boyfriend who never
got over his jealousy about her husband. With the chemical traces
on the walls matching the fuel, he looks guilty as sin.”
“But dammit!” Dani
almost hit the wall again, kicked a stack of technical journals
instead and stalked over to the window as they toppled behind
her. “We’re in a war—us against all of outer space! A fight so
big, they’re bringing down the Iron Curtain to win it! How can
we be crazy enough to still be killing each other?”
“You think anything’s
really changing? The Soviet Union’s still a dictatorship, even
if Khruschev has denounced Stalin.” Claire grimaced. “Or look
at the South: Some doctor in Mississippi claims he has X-rays
that prove the Till boy they lynched last year was really a spaceman,
and that the desegregation protests are the work of ‘alien agitators.’”
“And people believe
it. Or say they do.” Dani stared out at the passers-by, wondering
what dark secrets they might be hiding: The woman with the toddler
heading for the bus stop, the old couple bickering and gesturing,
the man emerging from an Oldsmobile in front of the house, clad
in something like an asbestos firefighting suit—
“Claire! Run!”
“What?” Before she
could glance out the window, Dani had her by the elbow, yanking
her from her chair to the door, and swinging it open. “Dani,
who is that—”
The front window and
wall burst into a mix of wood and stone as Dani flung herself
and Claire down the steps. She’d hoped to get away without Hotchkiss
spotting them, but drops of melted glass caught the back of her
arm, and she screamed.
“I hear you, bitch!” The
voice within the flames was loud and angry. “You ruined everything
you filthy tramp, and now you’re going to pay.”
Ignoring the pain,
or trying to, Dani scrambled to her feet, crouched behind the
garden wall and drew her revolver. “Dani,” Claire said, “shouldn’t
we be running or calling—”
“The bastard’s killed
his last goddamn victim.” If I’m lucky, I can get off a shot
before he sees me. “You run. I’m ending this.”
The side of the burning
house erupted out and the man stepped down the stairs. He saw
Dani and aimed the nozzle of the weapon he carried, strapped
to a tank on his back.
Dani fired fast, praying
to God that the suit wasn’t bullet proof.
It wasn’t.
Unfortunately, neither
was the fuel tank.
“Half the town wants
to have you arrested for something, Private Taylor, they don’t
care what.” Col. Ankrum, the commander of Dani’s Guard company,
shook his head. Dani had never met anyone who could look as grave
as the colonel. “We’re just lucky that the fire trucks were already
on their way when he exploded or we’d be dealing with deaths
instead of injuries and destroyed houses.”
“With all due respect,
sir—”
“On the other hand,
everyone in the company thinks you should have a medal for catching
Duggan’s killer. And Morodin and Gregory had many influential
friends who feel the same. On yet another hand, the people who
opposed me recruiting a woman medic in the first place are painting
your actions as hysterical and panicked, including some of our
MASH doctors.”
“All of whom are men.” Until
she’d left Boston, Dani hadn’t realized how much being the great
Paul Taylor’s daughter had affected the way her colleagues treated
her. “I’m quite sure some of them would have been happier if
he’d burned me to death.”
“In that case they’d
be lionizing your heroism in facing him down.” Ankrum leaned
back in his chair and sighed. “You’re no hysteric, doctor. And
you’re alive, Hotchkiss is dead, as far as I’m concerned the
matter is closed, except for reparations for the houses. Just
try not to do anything quite so ah, incendiary, for a while.”
“What about Lily Morodin,
sir? She’s getting away scott-free for the murders.”
“There’s nothing you
or I can do about that, doctor. At this point, nobody this side
of God can touch her.” Ankrum sighed. “Take it from an old soldier,
if you don’t learn to live with loss, it’ll eat you alive.”
“I can live with it
when it’s a kaijin or a spaceman doing the killing. But one of
our own kind?” Ankrum’s eyes fixed on hers; she nodded reluctantly. “The
JAG already warned me about taking any actions or making statements
that might be ‘misconstrued.’ You don’t need to worry about me
on that score, sir.”
Leaving Ankrum’s office,
she walked down to the edge of the base and stared out at the
desert. I know what Duggan said. I know the bitch set it up.
And I killed the last person who could tie her to it.
I’m sorry, Duggan.
You deserved better.
Dani tried to think
of a moral she could derive from everything that happened. Something
that would give Duggan’s death at least a little meaning.
She couldn’t think
of anything.
She walked back to
her apartment and spent the evening getting quietly drunk, alone.
