MONDAY, 8 SEPTEMBER 2042
HQ, Marine
Firebase 125
Near Kirovsky
Russian Far Eastern Maritime
Territory
1540 hours local time
Jack stood at rigid attention in front of Captain Thomas Rollins, his company commander, with Slider to his right. His left arm was still in a sling to immobilize the shoulder wrenched by the hyper-V attack, and he’d been on light duty for the past five days. They’d both been summoned by Gunny Blandings, whose sorrowful mien was all Jack needed to convince him that the two of them were headed for nothing less than a court-martial. “The Old Man is freaking pissed” was all Blandings would tell them.
When they knocked at his door, they were admitted with a brusque “Center yourselves on the hatch!” Inside, Rollins was seated at his desk, his PAD open and an expression on his features that managed to merge astonishment with both sadness and anger.
“Corporal Slidell, Private First Class Ramsey, reporting as ordered, sir!” Slidell rapped out. He could sound every inch the Mr. Clean Marine when he wanted to.
“Would either of you gentlemen care to explain…this?” Rollins said, turning his PAD so that they both could see the screen, with Sam enticingly displaying herself, and Jack knew that the worst had happened.
Or, more accurately, perhaps, the worst was just about to happen.
“Why, ah…sir,” Slidell said. “That’s just a little skin program that Flash here picked up Stateside. No one’s ever said anything about not being able to bring in a skin book or magazines, so what’s wrong with—”
“This,” Rollins said, shaking his head dangerously, “is considerably more than a skin mag, Corporal. I’ve had Gunny and a couple of the tech people from Battalion look at this.”
God! Jack thought, now terrified. This has gone all the way up the line to Battalion?
“They tell me,” Rollins went on, “that you’ve somehow dropped a new agent program on top of the government-issue AIDE, actually recoded the thing so it works better, smarter, and faster. And this new program, they tell me, is probably cobbled together from at least two other programs, though they can’t tell for sure. Very slick stuff, I’m told. Very professional work.”
Jack had to clamp down on himself to keep from blurting out a pleased “Thank you, sir!” He doubted very much that the Old Man had hauled him in to admire his programming prowess. He remained at attention, his eyes focused on a spot on the green-painted wall above and behind Rollins’s left shoulder.
“Slidell, according to your records, you have all of the programming skills and cybernetic savvy of wet spaghetti. But you do have a penchant for con jobs, scams, dealing, and selling just about anything you can lay your hands on. You’re the best scrounger in the company, but you’re just a little bit too greedy. My guess is that you’ve been, um, marketing Ramsey’s little toy here.” He turned his cold gaze on Jack. “As for you, Ramsey, you’re brand-new to this outfit, and I don’t know you that well. You have a good boot-camp record, though, and your quals tell me you have an unusual aptitude for programming and computers. I’m surprised as hell they didn’t put you in for a 4069 MOS and send you to nerd school.” The 4069 Military Occupation Specialty code designated a systems programmer. “I’m guessing that this young lady is your doing. Am I right?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Are you aware that you’re probably in violation of half a dozen different copyright laws with this little gem?”
He started to tell the captain that copyrights and programs were still a gray area in law but immediately thought better of it. “Yes, sir.” He swallowed, then added, “It, ah, didn’t start off as something to sell, sir. But, well, things kind of got out of hand.”
“I’m much more concerned about the alterations you introduced into the mil-issue PAD agent. Tampering with that is about as smart as tampering with the pin on a hand grenade. Suppose your alterations left it unable to perform some vital task, like calling up the right tactical data, or providing you with the correct map?”
“Sir, I made very sure that that didn’t happen.”
“Normally, I would put a statement like that down to damned-fool arrogance. However, I am told by Battalion’s technical team that you are correct. Your revisions not only allow AIDE to do everything it was designed to do, they let it operate faster, more efficiently, and smarter. In effect, you’ve managed to upgrade the damned thing to a level-two AI and done it in a smaller and more efficient package. Battalion is still shaking their collective heads over that one.
“As a result, Ramsey, you are going to luck out. This time. My first instinct was to hit you with mast. Deliberate misappropriation and alteration of government property. Endangerment of yourself and your fellow Marines. Even taking into account the fact that you seem to have fallen in with bad company and been led astray, you would’ve been in deep trouble. Those charges could have ended in a general court-martial. Believe me, son, this is some serious shit you’ve stepped in.
“However, Major General Holcomb has reviewed the case, including the recommendations by the tech team. He has directed me to put through your transfer, effective immediately. You will be put on the first transport back to the States, where you will report to the Space Combat Training Command at Quantico, Virginia. There, you will be given a course in space operations.
“It seems, Ramsey, that the Corps is in desperate need right now for people with talents such as yours. You are headed for 1-SAG. Now get the hell out of here.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
Dazed, ears ringing, Jack all but stumbled from the captain’s office. As he left, though, he heard Rollins turning his full attention to Slider. “You know, Slidell, I’m beginning to think you like being a private! So. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do….”
The thundering, numbing shock of what had just happened didn’t really hit home until fifteen minutes later.
He was going to space after all….
FRIDAY, 12 SEPTEMBER 2042
Vandenberg
Aerospace Force
Base
0740 hours PDT
They both showed their passes to the Aerospace Force guard at the front gate, who looked at them carefully before waving them through and saluting. Security at Vandenberg was unusually tight now…a decided case of locking the barn door after the horse had already galloped off. Rob swung the rented blue-and-silver Samurai onto Oceanview Drive with a thin, electric whine and steered for the old Visitor’s Complex, which for several years now had housed the Marine enclave on the base.
“What a mess,” Kaitlin said, as the hydrogen-fueled vehicle passed a burned-over stretch of scrub brush and the charred-forest remains of an H2 tank farm. The smoldering, skeletal remains of a K-120, its blue UN flag still visible on one upthrust wing, sprouted from the center of the farm like some obscenely alien, flame-scorched tree. “Looks like that one pulled a kamikaze smack into the hydrogen tanks.”
“Might’ve just been a lucky hit,” Rob replied.
“Unlucky for the pilot. That’s not one he’s going to walk away from.”
She shivered. She and Rob had been lucky as well, lucky they’d not been on base when the sneak attack had come. The orders confining 1-SAG to base had been lifted three days before, and the next evening, she and Rob, seeking privacy, had gone to a motel off-base to spend the night together.
Their play had been interrupted by the thunder of explosions. By the time they’d gotten back to the base, the attack was over.
A second sentry, a Marine this time, waved them through at the Visitor’s Complex gate. Smoke still stained the morning sky above the airfield and the assembly hangars in the distance; the pall was especially thick above Pad 4B, where it was expected that the fires, fed by ruptured underground feed lines, would continue burning for days more. A Marine Valkyrie rested tail high in the scrub just outside the complex, where its pilot had brought it in for a none-too-gentle emergency touchdown.
The UN raiders had struck late in the evening two days before, a flight of German stealth K-120s coming in off the Pacific at wave-skimming altitude, minutes behind an initial wave of cruise missiles. The aircraft had been launched by a UN submarine aircraft carrier that had crept to within twelve hundred kilometers of the California coast. The cruise missiles had been launched from a pair of French arsenal subs lurking eight hundred kilometers farther north.
Both UN squadrons had been hit by US retaliatory strikes; one of the arsenal ships, the Pluton, had been sunk by Aerospace Force A-40 Wasps vectored out of Travis by a spotter aboard a US military orbital recon station. The German carrier, believed to be the Seeadler, had been heavily damaged by the Lakota, a US strike sub, and was still being hunted in the dark, cold waters beyond the Jasper Seamount. None of the six attacking K-120s had made it back to their carrier.
Still, the raid had to be chalked up on the big board as a UN success. The stealth attack had left twenty-one Wasp and Defender Aerospace Force fighters destroyed or crippled on the ground. Worse, far worse, a Zeus II being readied on Pad 4B had been destroyed in a titanic fireball that had lit up the western night skies for all of Los Angeles, and six precious SRE-10s being readied in the assembly hangars had been badly damaged. Those Sparrowhawks had been on the prep line, being fitted with missiles to bump those surviving fragments of 2034L that still posed a threat to the Earth; there would be no more counter-asteroid launches now, and the techies still weren’t confident that the oncoming fragment cloud was going to leave the Earth unscathed.
Rob pulled the Samurai into the parking lot outside Building 12. The two of them stopped in the lot and saluted as morning colors sounded, then walked up to the entrance, returned the salutes of the two Marine sentries posted there, and went inside.
Room 310, on the third floor down from ground level, was the Marine enclave’s main briefing room in a building devoted to the planning of the missions that were extending the reach of the US Marine Corps from the surface of sea and land into the empty reaches of space. Several dozen men and women were already in the room when Kaitlin and Rob checked through the last security station and walked in, but they were still early. A buffet table to one side provided doughnuts and coffee, and they helped themselves as the crowd quietly milled about, ate, and talked.
Captain Fuentes approached them, coffee cup in hand. “Action briefings the civilized way,” she told them. “Complete with breakfast.”
“Don’t want to get into a firefight on an empty stomach,” Rob said.
“So, what’s the word?” Kaitlin asked, pouring herself a Styrofoam cup of coffee. “Are we going to get clobbered or not?”
“I imagine we’ll hear today,” Fuentes said. “The astronomers’ll have a precise vector for it, and any splinters that got bumped off.” She shook her head. “I still find it hard to believe that we have the power to change the orbit of something like that!”
“Who was it who said, ‘Give me a lever long enough and I’ll move the Earth’?” Rob wanted to know. “Euripides?”
“You rippa-dese, you pay for ’em,” Kaitlin shot back. “Actually, he wrote plays. Archimedes played around with moving the Earth.” She frowned at the thought. What was it about humans, what was it about her that cracked jokes three days before the greatest catastrophe on Earth since the ice ages? Life went inexorably on; maybe people simply weren’t able to face disaster on such a scale squarely.
“I still like the first idea that was floating around the base for a while,” Rob said. He chose a doughnut from a plate, broke off a piece, and ate it—leaning forward carefully to avoid getting powdered sugar on his uniform. “Send in the Marines and blast the thing out of the sky.”
“Not an option now,” Fuentes said. “I heard we won’t have any more Zeus IIs on the ready-pad for a couple of weeks, now. That leaves 1-SAG sitting in the mud, all dressed up with no way to get there.”
“A permanent Marine presence in space,” Rob said. “That’s what we need, and we needed it a year ago.”
“You want to be stationed in space?” Kaitlin asked, smiling. “I hear the liberty is awful. No bars, no cat-houses, no tattoo parlors, no girlie reviews or skin flicks. I mean, what’s a Marine supposed to do with his free time?”
“Well, this special-launch-for-every-mission business stinks,” Rob replied. “If we had SAG teams stationed up there all the time, they’d be in a position to do something right away if some nut-case decides to drop rocks on Earth. The farther away we intercept an incoming rock, the smaller that lever needs to be.”
“No argument there,” Fuentes said.
“I’d like to know why we can’t use the Ranger against those fragments,” Kaitlin wanted to know. “From what I’ve been reading, the hardest part about rendezvousing with an oncoming asteroid is matching vectors with the thing. You’ve got to fly past it, stop, and accelerate back to match course and speed. That takes time, and a hell of a lot of reaction mass. But if Ranger’s specs are anything close to what I’ve seen published, she could match vectors with the rock easy enough.”
Rob grunted. “She could…and then the UN would know all about her. Maybe even rush through the completion of their own antimatter drive. Besides, she’s not ready yet, is she? I know they don’t have her weapons installed yet.”
Fuentes shrugged. “I heard her drives were operational. They could’ve used her to plant Marines on the asteroid, if they’d gone that route instead of trying to nudge it with nukes. But that would’ve given the game away, y’know?”
“National security,” Rob added.
“Yeah. The UN would know we had a working antimatter-drive vessel. Maybe they’re close enough with their AM ship that they could rush it through to completion, confront us with an armed supership. We lose the edge…maybe lose the war.”
“Somehow, that’s a worrisome thought,” Kaitlin said. “Sacrifice five million civilians in the name of national security.”
“We’ll only have one shot with the Ranger,” Fuentes pointed out. “She has to work, and she has to work perfectly, first time. If we lose her, if something goes wrong on her first mission, we don’t have anything on hand when the UN unveils their AM supership. And scuttlebutt says they are armed, with something that makes lasers look like flashlights.”
“What’s Ranger supposed to be packing,” Rob asked. “You know?”
“Lasers. Probably in the hundred-gig range. Probably missiles. I don’t know. Everyone’s being pretty tight-lipped about it.”
“All things considered, that’s good,” Kaitlin said. “If we don’t know, maybe the UN doesn’t either!”
The door at the far end of the room opened and Major Avery stride in, accompanied by Captain White and a base photographer. “Attention on deck!” someone yelled, and the Marines already seated in the briefing room came to their feet.
“As you were, as you were,” Avery said, waving them down. He made his way to the podium at the head of the room, taking his place there with his hands braced on the sides as though he were conning the thing through a storm. His photographer crouched nearby, taking shots as the rest of the Marines in the room filed through the aisles to take their seats.
“Good morning, Marines,” he said as the room went quiet. “First item on the agenda. The Deep Space Tracking Net at Colorado Springs has just issued an all-clear for Earth, which they now say is safe from Asteroid 2034L. Apparently, the vector change introduced by the Aerospace Force strike a month ago was sufficient to deflect the body. They report that, while we may be in for some shooting-star fireworks on Monday evening, the main body has definitely changed vector sufficiently to easily clear the Earth as it passes us.” Several of the Marines in the room broke out into cheers and applause at the news. Avery waited, frowning, until the noise had died down before continuing. “Of course, this means that the One-SAG alert is canceled. It now appears that our services will not be necessary in dealing with this threat.”
He almost seems disappointed, Kaitlin thought, be-mused. She wondered how much career capital Avery had had riding on the possibility of a Marine-SAG mission to disintegrate 2034L. It was possible. Of course, after the UN strike against Vandenberg, it would have been impossible to launch any kind of space intercept mission at all, which was probably why the UN had launched it in the first place. The sub-carrier air strike must have been planned months ago, before 2034L’s course had been changed in the first place.
“We can, therefore, turn to the second item on the agenda, which we are now calling Operation Dark Star. Gentlemen, ladies, we are now assured that the USS Ranger will be fully operational within two weeks. We have authorization from President Markham himself to use her in a combined-arms sky-and-ground assault against the enemy forces dug in at Tsiolkovsky, what the Army tried to do last May, and failed. We now anticipate being able to mount a major op against the enemy within the next two months.”
That caused a stir in the audience. Avery tapped out something on his podium’s touch pad, darkening the room lights and opening the wall at his back to reveal a large display screen. Another few taps, and the screen lit with an image, a high-orbit view of a portion of the Moon’s surface.
It was a particularly rugged and forbidding stretch of terrain, heavily cratered and broken. The only flat area at all was a flattened oval that stood out as much darker than the surrounding highlands, a large, deep bowl of a crater with an off-center central peak and steep walls.
“This is the crater Tsiolkovsky,” Avery told them. “As you can see, it’s one of the very few flat places on the entire Lunar farside. The near side is characterized by the flat-plain maria, with some highlands. On the farside, there are no true maria at all, except for the Mare Moscoviense, farther north, and the Mare Ingenii to the southeast, and those, properly speaking, are just large craters with lava-plain floors, a little larger, a little less steep than Tsiolkovsky, here. On the whole farside, there are no seas at all even as large as the Mare Crisium. Very rugged territory. Very hard to traverse on the ground.
“The crater Tsiolkovsky was originally chosen as the primary site for the joint US—Russian SETI radio telescope project back in the ’20s. The Mars landings and the discovery of alien artifacts at Cydonia resulted in the funding for the project being cut. After all, if we had an actual alien civilization to study, even a dead one, we wouldn’t need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on an antenna to listen in on their equivalent of Monday Night Football.”
Polite chuckles rose from the audience. Avery smiled and continued. “In any case, the facility was mothballed and came under UN control in 2036. Since the beginning of the war, we’ve known they were up to something back there, but intelligence has been damned hard to come by. This series of intel photos, unfortunately, is almost two years old. We have nothing more recent, and attempts to send recon spacecraft around the Lunar farside have all met with disaster.”
He touched a key, and the photo on the screen expanded sharply, zooming in until the oblong, dark gray plain of Tsiolkovsky filled the screen. The shot was oblique, taken from the north at an altitude of under one hundred kilometers; the three-dimensional nature of the terrain was plainly visible, with the crater clearly a deep, steep-sided bowl, with the central peak a prominent cluster of smoothly rounded mountains closer to the north rim than to the south. A cluster of lights was just visible in the shadows at the base of the central peak.
“Those lights,” Avery went on, “are at the site of the old SETI base. We believe the UN has simply added to the facilities there. The amount of space transport traffic we’ve tracked going around the back side of the Moon suggests they’ve expanded the port facilities there. They’ve probably built containment tanks of some sort for water hauled in from the Lunar south pole. They probably also have a large nuclear reactor. The creation of antimatter, I needn’t remind you all, requires a very large expenditure of energy, so we expect a small fusion plant on-site, at the very least.”
The scene expanded again, this time zooming in on the central peak. The lights at the base were more numerous now and seemed to sketch out short lines and geometric figures. The base, obviously, was a big one. At the rounded top of the highest mountain, a slender silver tower extended high into space. It would have been almost impossible to see if not for the telltale shadow it cast, a long, black scratch across the sunlit mountaintop.
“That tower was part of the original SETI project. The idea was to raise the tower as the focus for incoming signals. A thin mesh of very fine wires would have extended from the mast clear to the crater rim, kind of like the old RT built in a round valley at Arecibo, in Puerto Rico. That would have resulted in a radio telescope dish 185 kilometers across, big enough to eavesdrop on a private, short-range radio conversation clear across the galaxy.
“What we believe the UN has done is fit that central mast, which was already in place, as a transmitter instead of as a receiver. Easy enough to do, technically. In 1974, scientists used the radio telescope at Arecibo to send a symbolic radio message into space. The UN techies have probably done the same sort of thing, setting it up as a powerful radar station.
“Somewhere in this crater, the UN has also erected a powerful weapon designed to fire bursts of antimatter…specifically, positrons. Antielectrons. Such a burst destroyed a recon Sparrowhawk last April, at a range of some tens of thousands of kilometers. We think, but don’t know, that they would have constructed their weapon somewhere at the top of the central peak, to give it a good field of fire, without raising the horizon by firing out of the bottom of this bowl. It’s also possible, of course, that the weapon is sited somewhere along the crater rim.
“Somewhere inside the crater, we don’t know where, the UN has assembled some sort of shipfitting or ship-building complex and is busily working on their version of our Ranger, an antimatter-powered spacecraft of tremendous range, power, and maneuverability. We believe, but don’t know, that this spacecraft is a heavily modified Dauphin-class transport.” A diagram and accompanying photograph appeared in windows inset over the view of Tsiolkovsky, showing a black, diamond-shaped craft, streamlined for atmospheric flight. “We believe her to be the Millénium, launched early this year from Kourou, the ship some of you reported seeing at Picard. Also, fragmentary reports from the Army expedition at the Lunar south pole suggests that she was there as well, though this has not been confirmed. Intelligence believes that the Millénium is being refitted with both an antimatter drive and an antielectron cannon. It is possible—though we cannot count on this—that they have only one antimatter cannon, which was set up on the ground at Tsiolkovsky in April but is now being mounted, or else has been mounted already, aboard the ship.”
“If we knew any less about the objective,” Carmen whispered at Kaitlin’s side, “we’d be going in completely blind.”
The sentiment echoed Kaitlin’s own thoughts. How did you plan an attack on an objective that you hadn’t reconned, that you hadn’t even seen for two years?
“We have been working on a plan of battle,” Avery went on, “one that will allow us to approach Tsiolkovsky with a fair chance of success. The operation, as we see it so far, will require a two-pronged attack, beginning with an assault on these perimeter defenses…incapacitating the enemy’s long-range radar.
“Three gets you five he had nothing to do with the planning,” Rob whispered at her side. “This had to come from the very top.”
Kaitlin shushed him, then leaned forward, trying to capture every word. He was now describing a new vehicle, which he called the new and improved LAV, and how it would be used for the initial phase of the Tsiolkovsky attack.
The plan, she thought, was nothing short of brilliant. Risky…even dangerous, but brilliant nonetheless….
Discharge
Office
Joliet Federal Prison
1543 hours CDT
“Sign here, sir…and here.”
David Alexander signed the release forms on the indicated lines. He’d already had his personal effects returned to him…the suit he’d been wearing the day he’d been arrested, his digital Rolex, his Sony PAD, his wallet with eighty-five dollars, pocket change of three dollar coins and a quarter, and a small globe-and-anchor pin one of the Marines had given him as a keepsake after the return from Mars; he liked to carry it as a good-luck piece.
“Thank you, sir,” the prison clerk said, checking the form over inside his cage. “That’ll do it.”
“It certainly will,” David replied.
“Is it, ah, true what they’ve been saying? That you’re gonna sue the government for false arrest?”
He considered a sharp answer and discarded it. The clerk was a part of the system, but he wasn’t the system and certainly had had no part in David’s arrest and illegal imprisonment. He smiled. “My lawyer recommended that I reply to that question with a firm and definite ‘no comment,’” he replied. “But damn it, you people stole almost four months of my life, maybe even derailed my whole career. You can bet that pretty blue uniform of yours I’m at least thinking about the idea!”
“Well, that’s your business, of course.” The clerk looked uncomfortable as he countersigned the papers, then typed something into the computer on his counter. “I’ll bet you’re looking forward to getting to sleep in your own bed tonight! Here ya go.”
The clerk slid the prison-release form through the slot in the cage front, and David pocketed it. Julia Dutton had told him that morning to be damned sure he kept all of the paperwork they gave him; it would all be evidence at the trial when they sued for wrongful arrest and imprisonment.
He still wasn’t sure what had happened, exactly. His lawyer had seen him in the prison’s visitor center that morning, ecstatic with the news that he was to be released. Apparently, he’d had some pretty big guns on his side and not even realized it. If Dutton had her facts straight—and she always seemed to—then General Warhurst himself, with a small army of JAG lawyers in tow, had dismantled at least part of the Justice Department in Washington, DC, threatening all-out war if David Alexander’s case was not investigated, reviewed, and brought out into the open. The investigation had taken weeks; according to Dutton, there’d been some deeply entrenched political powers behind the scenes trying to delay or derail the process, but Warhurst and his legal legions had triumphed in the end.
David had met Montgomery Warhurst several times, both before and after the MMEF expedition to Mars, and been impressed with the man’s sharp intelligence, determination, and sheer guts. What David didn’t know yet was why the commandant of the US Marine Corps had gone on the warpath for him. Sure, sure, he was an honorary Marine, and all of that, but the way Dutton told the story, Warhurst had been that close to declaring war on Justice and the FBI both.
And hell, he had shared information with foreign nationals. Had Justice decided to try his case, instead of trying to pressure him into spying on his friends, he had little doubt that he would have ended up as a guest at Joliet for ten to fifteen big ones.
“This way, if you please, Dr. Alexander,” the guard who’d accompanied him through the bureaucratic circles toward release said. “There’s someone here to meet you.”
Funny, David wasn’t going to be able to think of the man or his comrades as anything other than screws from now on. Prison life had a culture and a language all its own. “Lead on,” he said. “Who is it, my lawyer?”
“I really don’t know, Dr. Alexander.” He tapped the radio on his belt. “They just told me from the visitors’ check-in desk.”
David wondered who was meeting him, then decided it had to be either his lawyer or, just possibly, Teri. He’d asked Dutton not to tell his wife that he was being released. He still had some thinking to do about that. If he could just convince Liana that it would be better for them both to end this mismatched marriage once and for all….
The clerk was right. It would be good to sleep in his own bed tonight. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure he wanted to see Liana just yet. He’d been doing a lot of thinking about things during the past couple of months. It was time, he thought, to have it out with Liana once and for all…to sit down with her, make her see that it just wasn’t working out, make her realize that there was no good reason for the two of them to keep on destroying each other’s lives. There had to be a way to make her listen to reason.
He knew he had to do it, and soon, but the thought of going home tonight, before he’d had a chance to work out exactly what he wanted to say, was more daunting than Joliet’s walls. Funny. All those months alone, here, and he hadn’t figured out yet how to say what he needed to say….
Maybe he would take a hotel room in Chicago for a day or two, while he thought things out. Somehow, he had to find a way to resolve things with Liana before he could let himself even think about a new life with Teri.
The guard led him into a lounge area near the main building’s front door. There were a number of people there, and he scanned the crowd, looking for a familiar face.
Then a group of people in uniform stood and walked toward him, and David’s eyes widened. “Good heavens!” he said. “I certainly didn’t expect to see you here, sir!…”
“Dr. Alexander?” General Montgomery Warhurst said. “You and I have to talk.”