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"Are you being . . . well, you can be kind of over-critical . . . occasionally."
"I can be a class-A son of a bitch is what you mean. Honey, one of the guys asked whether we could just perform an amphibious invasion of Diess, I shit you not. He did not quite seem to grasp, among other things, that space is a vacuum, that lasers travel in a more or less straight line and that Earth is curved. Either David Hume, who is the project manager, is a great actor, or he is one of the most remarkably stupid persons on Earth."
* * *
Lieutenant Commander David Hume twisted his A
After lunch at a local delicatessen, Commander Hume walked to the Washington Mall and turned towards the Capitol along Independence Avenue. A bitter north wind was blowing down the mall, whipping the skeletal branches of the cherry trees back and forth in a way that was frankly ominous. He watched them for a moment wondering why they bothered him so. Finally, he realized that they reminded him of a line from Dante's Inferno. The shiver that swept over him then had little to do with the bitter Christmas cold.
When he was opposite the reflecting pool he turned into the mall and walked over. A moment later he was joined by Doctor Jervic, and the two ambled along the path to the Vietnam Memorial, just two more lunchtime strollers walking off their pastrami.
Commander Hume pulled a bulky package from his briefcase and punched a crudely affixed button on the roughly formed plastic case. A passing jogger cursed all things Japanese as the powerful electromagnetic pulse shut down his Walkman for all time.
"What about laser?" asked Jervic when the deed was done.
"Difficult at best under these circumstances, same with shotgun mikes, and the background noise is the same frequency as human voice."
"Lip reading."
"Keep moving your head around," Hume said, turning to look across the pool as he sat. "Well?"
Although eighty percent of the perso
"Shouldn't you have asked that before you crossed the Rubicon, so to speak?" Mark asked, gesturing languidly at the EMP generator. "They are watching us, you know." The Mystic river accent flowed like its namesake.
"Of course I know; with my information we were across the Rubicon anyway. What do you have to add?" Hume asked sharply. He was willing to act the fool for the mission, but sometimes Dr. Jervic seemed to forget it was an act. After the two of them had battled it out in Boston for six long years, Mark should know by now who the brains of the outfit was.
"Well, the AID's translation programs have some interesting subprotocols in them. Very interesting." Jervic, the former Harvard professor, paused and cracked his knuckles.
"Skip the damn dramatics," Hume snarled, "there is precisely no time."
"Very well," Jervic sighed, "the protocols are deliberately deceptive, primarily in areas related to genetics, biotechnics, programming and, strangely, socio-political analysis. The deception is more than mere switching of words, it has a thematic base. The programming side of it is out of my depth, but there is no question that the Darhel are deliberately causing us to move towards dead ends in those fields. I find the thematic approach in sociology to be both the strangest and the strongest. There are constant deliberate translation errors and modifications of data related to human sociology, prehistory and archetypes."
"Archetypes," mused Commander Hume. He glanced at Washington's monument and wondered what George would have made of all of this. Probably not much; he would have foisted such underhanded shenanigans off on Benjamin Franklin.
"Any of several apparently i
"I know what a damn archetype is, Mark," David interrupted, angrily, drawn from his reverie. "That was `Archetypes,' with an unspoken `Damn' attached in the subjunctive case. Not `Archetypes? What the hell are archetypes?' It happened to fit in with my data. Okay, it's time to see if we really do have presidential access," he continued, standing up. "You would not believe what I found in a Sanskrit translation . . ."
"Hey, man, you got a light?" One of the ubiquitous street people of the Washington Mall stumbled blearily towards them, fumbling a dog-end.
"Sorry, soldier," said Commander Hume, noting the field jacket and scars, respectful to even this fallen soldier at the last. "Don't smoke."
"It don' matter, man," the unshaven bum muttered, "Don' matter." Four rapid huffs from a silenced .45 caliber Colt followed and the pair of scientists slumped into the reflecting pool staining the pure waters red. "Don' matter," the bum muttered again, as the screams began.
15
Camp McCall, NC Sol III
1123 May 6th, 2002 AD
"Move it! Move it! Get out! Off the bus! Move it!"
The young men in gray piled off the Greyhound bus, some in their haste tumbling to the ground. These unfortunates were unceremoniously yanked to their feet and hurled towards the group now milling into a half-assed formation. The three brawny young men and one brawny young woman doing the shouting had, four months before, gotten off the same kind of bus. Despite the corporal's chevrons on their sleeves they were recently graduated privates chosen for their size, strength or fierceness as much as their motivated attitude. They broke the formation into four ragged groups and moved them, overloaded with duffel bags, to their respective assembly areas. The new recruits were chivvied into rough lines comprising three sides of a quad and then they got their first experience of a real drill sergeant. In second platoon's unfortunate case it was Gu
He and the group recalled with him had been told that, thank you, we have all the senior NCOs we need for the Line and Strike formations. They were instead parceled out to Guard and training units as a leavening of experienced perso
But he was a Marine (or whatever they wanted to call him this week) and when given an order said "aye, aye, sir," or "yes, sir," or whatever, and performed it to the best of his ability. So when told he was going to be a DI, he naturally requested Pendleton, since that was right by his home of record. Ground Force Perso
Being in McCall might have been for the best. The Galactics had started to come through on one of their promises and he was one of the first group offered rejuvenation. The rejuv program was being run on a matrix of age, rank and seniority. Since the military ran on a framework of both an officer Corp and an equivalent NCO Corp, senior NCOs were prioritized with "equivalent" officers. As one of the oldest NCOs in the second layer of enlisted rank, he had received rejuvenation ahead of many sergeant majors that were younger. Thus, after a month of truly unpleasant reaction and growth, he found himself a physical twenty-year-old with a sixty-year-old's mind. He had forgotten what it was really like, the physical feeling of invincibility and energy, a coursing drive to do something, anything, all the time. Regular heavy-duty workouts were returning the musculature of his prime. They also served to occupy his other energies.