TUESDAY, 24 JUNE 2042

Interrogation Room 12
Joliet Federal Prison
1004 hours CDT

“Well, Dr. Alexander,” Carruthers said with a smile. “Are you enjoying your stay at Joliet?”

Escorted by a guard, David shuffled into the bare room with its institution-green cinder-block walls and single table and set of chairs. His hands were chained to a locked belt about his waist, his feet hobbled by a short chain that kept his steps crabbed and short. He was wearing blue prison dungarees and soft shoes.

“That’s Joliet,” David replied, giving the name as close to a French pronunciation as he could manage—a softer and more musical Zhoal-lee-ay quite different from the harsher Anglicization Carruthers had used. “And I’m beginning to get used to it.”

His mispronunciation was, in fact, a small joke. Reputedly, there was a law on the books dating back more than a hundred years which made it a crime to say the name of the town any other way than with a hard “J,” short “e,” and hard ending “t.” Deliberately using the “illegal” form of the name was a tiny, but somehow satisfying bit of rebellion on David’s part.

It was the only rebellion he was capable of at the moment. That, and not giving the bastards what they were asking for.

“It’s been four weeks, now,” Carruthers told him. “It could get a lot longer. And more uncomfortable, too.” He nodded to the guard. “Go ahead and unlock him. He won’t give me any trouble.”

The chains, David had decided, where part of the show, a way to intimidate him, along with chucking him into prison with the threat of no trial. Joliet, he had to admit, was a scary place. Once a state prison in the town of Joliet, sixty kilometers southwest of Chicago, the facility had been converted to a federal prison in 2010 as part of a government prison buyout plan. It was a hot, noisy, and dismal place, a place in which he had no intention of staying.

Even if he didn’t yet know how he was going to get out of this.

“You guys are playing pretty fast and loose with the Constitution,” David said as the guard unlocked the cuffs and chains. He sat down in the chair opposite Carruthers, who was opening up an executive-model large-screen PAD. “Last I heard even spies had a right to a speedy trial.”

“So Ms. Dutton has been telling us. In peacetime, normally, that’s true…though, you know, the dockets are awfully crowded lately. In wartime, well, even the best court system can fall behind on the paperwork quite a bit.”

Julia Dutton was his lawyer. “If you’re here to question me,” he said, “I think I want Ms. Dutton here with me. I have that right, too, even in wartime.”

“Jailhouse lawyer, huh?” Carruthers smiled. “Well, we’ll have her come on down, if that’s what you want. But I’m not here to question you right now. In fact, to tell you the truth I think we have all the evidence we need to put you away for a long, long time. I don’t think you’ll get the death penalty for espionage…though these days, with juries the way they are, and all the bad public feeling against the UN, you just never know….

“And for the hundredth time, at least, I wasn’t spying on anybody!”

“You faxed a model to François Villeret at the Sorbonne. You’ve been communicating with Jean-Etienne Cheseaux for months. You’ve been transferring classified electronic documents to this Pastor Blaine kook in Chicago. Now, maybe you don’t call that spying, but the Federal government does.”

David sighed. They’d been through this before. “I told you. I admit to communicating with Cheseaux and Villeret, and even a few others. But they’re scientists. And friends. My relationship with them has nothing to do with the war.”

“Your problem, Doctor, is that you have this problem with enemy identification. Those people are working for the European Union. Which means they’re working for the United Nations.”

“Maybe. But the information we exchanged had no military value. As for the records sent to the Church of the Divine whatever, that’s total nonsense. I never did any such thing.”

Carruthers pursed his lips. “Actually, I think I believe you on that point.”

“Eh? You do?”

“After we started monitoring your home system, we checked the times of the transmissions to Blaine against your whereabouts. You weren’t at home when the transmissions were made.”

“Then what…ah! Liana.”

“Now, we could assume that your wife was making those transmissions at your orders. I mean, the files in question were passcode protected, weren’t they?”

“Of course.”

“Of course. Still, given your wife’s, um, extreme religious beliefs, and her connections with Blaine and some other cult leaders, we’d probably have trouble proving in court that you had anything to do with it.”

“I’m relieved to here it.” Liana! How the hell had she gotten at his files? The woman couldn’t program a toaster without getting into trouble. He didn’t think she could handle any part of the home system except the entertainment channels. Maybe he’d been underestimating her; in an odd, almost perverse way, he found he was proud of her.

“But we could still nail you just for not keeping confidential material safe on your home system. And we’re for sure going to run your ass up the flagpole for passing confidential information to the UNdies.”

“Look. I’ll say it again, as clearly and monosyllabically as I can. I did not violate any security regulations by talking to Dr. Cheseaux or any of the others. Yes, I faxed a copy of a plaque I found at Picard to Dr. Villeret at the Sorbonne. As far as I was aware, the thing was not even classified. Certainly, there was no information on it that would have compromised security! No plans for super-bombs. No maps to hidden fortifications. Nothing that would have hurt the United States!”

“For your information, everything that came back from the Moon with your expedition was classified! You’d have known that if you’d read your debriefing forms! As for the plaque’s message being harmless, who the hell appointed you as a judge of American security? What makes you think you can say what might be important to the enemy, and what isn’t? Maybe just the fact that we have the thing is important, you ever stop to consider that? You damned scientists are all alike, talking about global scientific communities, but you’re not able to see past your next government grant! Well, I’ve got news for you, Alexander. You are in violation of some very heavy regulations. In fact, you are in one hurtin’ world of trouble. Unless you decide to cooperate with us.”

“By selling out my friends.”

“By helping your country! Look, I’m not a hard guy. And I’m not hard to get along with. All we’re asking is that you do just what you’ve been doing with these, ah, backdoor contacts of yours. Talk to them. Maybe ask them some questions. Maybe pass along some select information that we’ll provide you with, from time to time.”

“No.”

“Don’t be hasty, now.”

“I said no! These people are my friends. They trust me, and I trust them. I won’t have anything to do with this!”

“Ah. Your final word?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, if you say so, then that’s the way it’ll be.” He stood, then stretched. “So, you say you’re getting used to this place? That’s good. That’s real good.” He turned and started to leave, then appeared to think better of it. Turning again, he gave David a twisted smile. “So, you been taking your TBEs lately?”

The question was so unexpected—and such a non sequitur—that David blinked, unsure of the FBI agent’s point. TBEs—Telemere Binding Enzymes—had been available to the general public for a number of years now. The tablets were expensive, and no one could yet say how well they worked, but David had always figured the chance they offered was worth the cost. But how had Carruthers known? “Uh…yeah….”

“Thought so. You look pretty young. Younger than your forties, that’s for sure. Figured you must be on the regime. Those things are supposed to add…what? A hundred years to your life? A hundred fifty?”

David shrugged. “No one knows.” What the hell was Carruthers getting at? TBEs were one step up from the popular fad drugs and herbal remedies available in health stores; supposedly, they bound up the telemeres—the protein caps on the ends of DNA molecules that became unraveled with age—and helped stop or slow the aging process itself. The stuff hadn’t been sanctioned by the FDA, yet, but millions of people took daily TBE tabs in the hope that they held the key to long and youthful life.

“No one knows,” Carruthers repeated. “I’ll tell you, I always figured TBEs were a crock. Like some of the claims the cultists make for their ancient astronauts, y’know? The claims people make sound pretty wild, and there’s no good way to test them. I mean, people haven’t been taking them long enough yet to see if they work as well as advertised. They might not do anything at all.”

“What’s your point, Carruthers?”

“Oh, nothing much. I was just wondering, though, what it must feel like knowing you could be in here for another, oh, century and a half. You’re forty-one, according to your record, right? That’s not too old, but, still, without your TBEs, you might be in here another thirty, maybe forty years before you finally kicked off. That’s a long, long time. Especially for a bright guy like you. But another century or two? Man, that’s a hell of a stretch. A guy could go mad, being locked up in here for a couple of centuries, nothing to do, no way out, no friends except the guards and the other inmates. And, you know what? The food here just isn’t that good….”

David swayed a bit in his chair, a roaring in his ears, a dryness in his throat. He’d tolerated life at Joliet for these past few weeks knowing that he wouldn’t be there much longer; the charges against him were ridiculous…trivial, even. He’d given nothing of political or military value to “the enemy”; at worst he was guilty of bad judgment.

But for the very first time, now, he teetered at the edge of an abyss, knowing that these people had the power to take away his freedom for the rest of his life, however long that might be. The prospect was terrifying.

“Maybe I’ll stop taking them.” Somehow, he kept his voice from shaking. “Just to spite you.”

“Yeah? And maybe I’ll leave orders for the dietary staff to mix ’em in with your food. I’m that kind of guy, you know?” He sounded cheerful about it.

“You can’t keep me here for the rest of my life, damn it! Go ahead! Put me on trial! The worst I could get is a few years, And I didn’t get any money for this supposed espionage of mine. The case’ll be thrown out. Hell, I might sue you for false arrest!”

“Well, we’ll worry about that when the time comes. It’ll only happen, though, if your case actually comes to trial. You see, what lots of folks don’t know is that the government has certain powers it can exercise in wartime. Suspension of habeas corpus is one of ’em. Your right to a speedy trial, well, things slow down in wartime. And people get lost in the cracks.” He folded his arms, leaning back in his chair. “Not many people know this, but ever since 1933 the United States has essentially been operating under an ongoing declared presidential state of emergency. All it takes is the stroke of a pen to revoke a lot of ‘rights’ Americans take for granted. They can be arrested for saying the wrong things. They can be relocated to special camps. Held without trial. ‘National security’ is a very large blanket that can cover a hell of a lot of pretty nasty stuff. Why, you’d be amazed—”

“You can’t keep me locked up in here forever, goddammit!”

“Just try me, Dr. Alexander. Just try me! You could simply disappear in here, and no one would ever know! You could lose any right you have to access the Net, so you wouldn’t even know what others were doing with your research. You’d be cut off from your career, from everyone you know and love, from everything you’ve done and hoped for, as completely as if you were dead!” He smiled. “But, as I was saying earlier, I’m a reasonable kind of guy. If you make me happy, why, I just can’t do enough for you. But, man, if you piss me off, I’ll just go out of my way to make life as miserable for you as I possibly can. And if that means seeing to it that you don’t see daylight for two hundred years, that’s exactly what I’ll do.”

Something thumped against the door to the interrogation room, and David heard muffled shouts outside. A moment later, the door banged open, and Julia Dutton walked in, a tall, slender black woman with steel in her jaw and fire in her eye. A guard hurried after her.

“Damn it, I said we weren’t to be disturbed!” Carruthers shouted at the guard.

“Tough!” Dutton said. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing, Carruthers, questioning my client in my absence?”

“Just offering him the best deal he’s going to hear. I’d advise him to take it, if I were you.” He gave them both a satisfied smile, then left them alone in the room.

She dropped her briefcase on the table. She wore a conservative suit; the only jewelry David noticed was a quiet subdermal pattern of yellow stars and moons flashing on and off around the outer corner of her left eye.

“Haven’t you learned yet, David?” she said. “Don’t you talk to any of these sons of bitches, don’t you even give them the time unless I’m here with you!”

David found his heart was pounding hard and fast after the encounter. He was sweating, and it had nothing to do with the temperature of the room. “I didn’t agree to anything.”

“What did he want?”

“I think they want to use me to plant disinformation in the enemy camp. Maybe spy on some friends of mine.” He shook his head. “I won’t do it, counselor.”

She didn’t look at him for a long moment. “You may not have much choice. Not if you want out of here before the war ends.”

He looked up at her sharply. “He told me he could make me…disappear. He said they could keep me from going to trial and just keep me locked away for the rest for my life! Julia, they can’t just keep me locked up in here, can they?”

She took too long to answer. “David, I’m afraid you’ve made some people mad. Powerful people. This ancient-alien gods garbage is getting out of hand, with its end-times melodrama and its message that our real allegiance is to angelic beings or whatever on some other planet. Some people, high up, think it could undermine the war effort. And they see you at the center of this thing.”

“I don’t have anything to do with those lunatic cults!”

“Guess again. You found those human skeletons on Mars and uploaded the news to the whole world. You found the Cave of Wonders in the Cydonian Face, with all those weird aliens on TV, including some that look like they might be the folks who were visiting this part of the galactic neighborhood just a few thousand years ago. And you found those tablets on the Moon, with information that got passed on to the churches almost before it was deciphered.”

“I didn’t—”

She raised a slim hand. “I know. You didn’t. But you did broadcast that stuff from Mars all over the Net for everyone to see and download.”

“They—the UN—were trying to suppress it!”

“And you kept them from doing that, yes. Kept them from suppressing your discovery. Your little news flash from Mars probably caused the UN a lot of domestic problems, just when they didn’t need them. But it also caused Washington some similar problems. And that wasn’t appreciated.”

“So…what? I betray these people, and that makes it better?”

“It makes you some friends in high places. And, believe me, David. You need some right now.”

“Just whose side are you on, anyway?”

“Yours,” she snapped. “And don’t you forget that! Now…I’ve got some things to go over with you, here….”

She opened her briefcase and began laying out papers for his inspection. He couldn’t really focus on them, though. Though he hated to admit it, even to himself, Carruthers had found a deadly, weak chink in his armor. David was an archeologist, but that didn’t mean he was suited to the academic, indoor life. He was, above all, a digger, a man who lived for getting out in the field and conducting his own excavations, who still felt that spine-tingling thrill each time he picked up a coin or a pottery shard or a graven bone tool and knew that he was the first, in some thousands of years, to see and touch that bit of human ingenuity, industry, and artistic skill. He needed the sun on his face…the dirt under his fingernails.

His love of fieldwork had taken him as far as Mars and the Moon. How could he possibly cut himself off from that?

But how could he buy his freedom by betraying his friends? An impossible dilemma. Worse was the growing fear that he was on the wrong side, that somehow, when he’d not been looking, the so-called land of the free, home of the brave had acquired some of the blood-encrusted patina of a police state.

War could bring out the worst in people and in governments. Just as, occasionally, it brought out the best.

He found himself thinking of the Marine, Kaminski. The man had little education, but a good mind, a kind heart…and absolutely unimpeachable loyalty to his buddies and to the Corps.

What David admired most about the Marines, he thought, was the way they looked out for one another. He’d been with Garroway on the March from Heinlein Station to Mars Prime; the esprit, the camaraderie, the sense of belonging during that cramped, uncomfortable, and desperate three-week trek through a portion of the Valles Marineris had been downright magical. Powerful. Throughout that time, there’d been a sense of us-against-the-world, a do-or-die flame that could not be quenched.

Marines never left their own behind. Never. They didn’t turn on their own. They belonged to one another in a way civilians could never quite comprehend.

The scientific community was hardly the same as the United States Marine Corps. Still, David wondered if he’d somehow assimilated Marine values after being locked up with them for three weeks on that grueling march.

Semper fi!

Recruit Platoon 4239
Parris Island Recruit Training
Center
1510 hours EDT

“Move it, move it, move it, recruits!” Gunnery Sergeant Knox yelled. “Hit that wall! Up and over! We don’t have all freakin’ day!”

Jack ran down the path, taking the muddy stretch in two steps, then leaping, high and hard, slamming against the wooden barrier, his outstretched arms snagging the log at the top three meters above the ground. He chinned himself, dragging his body up and over. Couldn’t have done that ten weeks ago, he thought, a little wildly. As he straddled the barrier, the next recruit behind him leaped and slammed; Lonnie Costantino’s hands were muddy from an earlier fall, and he nearly lost his precarious handhold. Without thinking, Jack reached down with a hard, forearm grip, helping the other recruit over the top.

“Thanks, man!” Lonnie gasped.

“Semper fi, man,” Jack repeated, dropping down the farside of the wall. Technically, each recruit was being timed on this run, with the results entered in his final record. In fact, the average time of the entire platoon was what counted toward the awards and honors ceremonies at graduation next week. It was one small part of the not-so-subtle process of indoctrination here. You could run the obstacle course as fast as you could and get the best personal time possible. Or you could help your platoon win.

By this time, the recruits scarcely needed to think about that. They were a unit, a team. The good of the platoon came before the good of any individual.

Knox was still shouting as more recruits came over the wall. “What’re you ladies waiting for? I don’t wanna see nothing here but amphibious green blurs!…”

Amphibious green Marines. It was an old concept, dating back at least to Vietnam. There were no black Marines, the saying went. No white or yellow or red Marines. Only amphibious green Marines. Recruit Platoon 4239 was down to fifty-one men now, and they made up a fair cross section of American society. Twelve were African-American, seven were Asian, fifteen were Latino. One, John Horse, was Lakota, while Gary Lim was Polynesian. Such distinctions, though, had been lost on the recruits a long time ago, lost in their step-by-step metamorphosis from civilians to Marines.

Another hard, quick run, a leap, a grab. Jack snatched hold of the Cable, a massive rope, stretched at an angle across the mud pit, which bounced and swung dizzyingly as he gripped it with hands and legs and began working his way along it, head down. If he slipped and fell, tradition demanded that he emerge from the mud singing the “Marine Corps Hymn” at the top of his voice; he’d done that a time or two in weeks past and knew it would knock precious seconds from his score.

He didn’t slip, not this time. He hit the ground running, as Knox made a notation on a PAD and kept on shouting. “Go-go-go-go!”

Jack attacked the final line of obstacles with a second wind that was more of the spirit than in his lungs. Flat on his back in the mud, he slithered forward beneath tangles of barbed wire, as an old-fashioned machine gun yammered somewhere close by, live bullets snapping and hissing a meter or two above his body.

One more week, and he would be a Marine. A Marine, not a recruit. Even now it was hard to credit; boot camp had been his whole life for so long he scarcely gave a thought anymore to what was going on outside the narrow, isolated, sandbagged and leveed world of Parris Island.

It was hard to imagine being free of the mud and the aching muscles, of the night firewatches and the sand fleas, of the drills and Gunny Knox.

Damned if I’m not going to miss this. The thought made him laugh. Somewhere along the line, he’d gone over that infamous hump that every recruit faced.

Gung ho! All together…

EU Science Research Vessel
Pierre-Simon Laplace
In Trans-Lunar Space
2150 hours GMT

Laplace was eight thousand kilometers from 2034L, falling toward the distant twin-star pair of Earth and Moon, when Jean-Etienne Cheseaux saw the flash. It was small, an unremarkable pulse of light partially blocked by the body of the asteroid itself, but his instruments registered hard radiation—gamma and a flux of high-speed neutrons—together with the electromagnetic pulse that was the characteristic fingerprint of a nuclear detonation.

“Damn them!” Cheseaux exclaimed, pulling back from the eyepiece on his broad-spectrum analyzer. He checked the readouts again, to be sure there was no mistake. “Damn them! What do they think they’re doing?”

The second EU ship, the Sagittaire, had rendezvoused with Laplace and 2034L over a month before. Two weeks ago, Laplace had been ordered to return to Earth.

Cheseaux had liked no part of the arrangement. Sagittaire was unmistakably a military ship, with a dorsally mounted ball turret that he suspected housed a high-energy laser. What possible interest could a military vessel and crew have in an asteroid orbiting the sun in deep space?

He could think of only one possible reason, and the mere possibility chilled him to the core. They couldn’t be thinking of…that!

Colonel Armand and the rest of Laplace’s small crew were eager to leave the desolate boulder in space and return to the Moon, but Cheseaux had found a pretext to stay—a broken spectrometer and the urgent need for some additional data on 2034L’s chemical composition.

A message had arrived from Earth a few days later. Laplace had until the twenty-third and then she must burn for the return trajectory. Food and water would soon be a problem, and the crew of the Laplace were obviously angered at Cheseaux’s apparent scientific fussiness.

Let them fuss! As Laplace had completed her burn, falling into a vector that would carry her to the Moon and then to home, he’d stayed at the science vessel’s instrument suite, watching the asteroid and the tiny Sagittaire hanging in its shadow.

He wasn’t surprised when the nuclear explosion briefly flared against the night, but the horror nearly overwhelmed him. Maybe, maybe they were changing the asteroid’s orbit for some other purpose than the one he feared, but he couldn’t imagine what that purpose might be. A base of some sort? Raw materials for the highly secret construction rumored to be proceeding on the Lunar farside?

As hour followed hour and he continued to watch the change in 2034L’s course, the surer he became. Running simulations on his computer suggested that the nuclear blast—which he estimated to be in the fifty-to one-hundred-kiloton range—had nudged the tiny, flying mountain just enough to swing it inward, ever so slightly toward the Earth.

His software wasn’t good enough, and his measurements over the course of twenty-some hours weren’t precise enough and they didn’t cover a long enough span of time, but Cheseaux was now convinced that the European Union government was planning to smash 2034L into the Earth. He wasn’t sure of the target; it might be Russia, which would be on the outer, nightside of Earth at impact. But it might also be aimed at the United States, which would be on the trailing, sunset side of the planet when the asteroid came plunging in from space.

The sheer irresponsibility of the act was staggering; not for the first time, Cheseaux wondered if he was on the right side of this war. He rarely followed politics; politicians were buffoons at best, criminals at worst, and any claims they laid to concern for ordinary people was purely for show. Still, he’d read the Geneva Report and thought that its conclusion—that civilization could collapse across the planet if Earth was not united under one rule within another eight years—was accurate, if unduly pessimistic in the timetable it presented.

But, mon Dieu! How serious could they be about their concern for the plight of Earth’s billions when they were willing to drop an asteroid on the planet? It was insane!

For the next hour, Cheseaux thought carefully about what he must do. He could talk to Colonel Armand, of course…but that didn’t seem to be a productive option. What could the man do, save, possibly, join his protest to Cheseaux’s? And he certainly wouldn’t condone the single other option Cheseaux could think of, the only option possible, under the circumstances.

No, Cheseaux would have to shoulder this particular responsibility alone.

After copying the visual and spectographic records of the explosion and the observations that showed the asteroid’s new and deadly orbit to PAD microdisk, he made his way hand over hand through the zero-G complexity of the ship to this quarters.

He had an important call to make….