“If it’s any consolation, you really didn’t miss anything. There was nothing on Mars but rocks and hard work.”
“I know. I’d still have given my eye-teeth just to hold one of those rocks, though. I had to make due with a crappy telescope, and by God, I kept my face glued to it from sunset to sunrise, just dreaming about all the places I’d go if I got my chance. If you look close, I’ve still got a dent on my cheek from the eye-piece.”
She looked at his face and started to giggle. “Oh God, I thought you were just saying that.”
“I cheated,” he said. “Neglected to mention the part where my brother smacked the back of my head so hard that I needed ten stitches. What are brothers for, right?”
“That’s terrible.”
“Nah. It gave me character. That’s what mom said, at least.”
Sal smiled, but it faded quickly. “So, you always knew you were going to outer space?” She sounded wistful.
“S’pose so. I went to university on a scholarship, got my degree in astronomy, and then it was straight into the Foundation. I got so wrapped up in the work that I kinda forgot about aliens and weird worlds, and just stared out into the unknown, hoping to discover some strange phenomenon to slap my name onto.”
“Until you saw an alien ship.”
“That was… clearly a turning point for me. I bet I wasn’t the first to see her. It just took someone half-crazy to recognize what she was.”
“Is that when you became Mr. Fix-It?”
“Yep. Doctor Donovan, patch kit and space gypsy. Most despised man in the Foundation, I reckon.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Say you’re working on a project, and the suits inform you that Marcus Donovan is being transferred to your station. How would you take it?”
“Like a slap in the face.”
“Right. I got used to steely gazes and professional sabotage after a while. But it didn’t matter because I had my eyes on the prize.”
A look of utter disbelief suddenly overtook her. “Wait a minute, Donovan. You’re full of crap. You’re telling me your life turned out precisely the way you imagined it.”
“Not precisely. Like you said, the future never turns out quite how you expect. In my case, I just got more than I wished for.”
“More of what?”
“Everything. I wanted to see new places and peoples. Instead, I’ve got an alien warship plugged into my skull, and now this war… The Earth’s lying in shambles, Legacy keeps telling me the fate of the galaxy is hanging in the balance, and I’m the only person in a position to do a damn thing about it. Can you imagine that? No one likes having responsibility dropped on their shoulders, and I’ll be frank with you… I’m the worst possible candidate for the job. I’m not a general, or even much of a leader really. I’m just an astronomer who likes to solve problems.”
They were both silent in the wake of that revelation. Marcus hadn’t paid much attention to how he felt about it all. He’d just been along for the ride, doing whatever came naturally, and this was the first time he stopped to think about it. He wasn’t entirely pleased at what he found.
They both looked out over the sleeping factory for a long while, until Marcus finally spoke again. “I know this isn’t the future any of us expected, Amira, but whether we like it or not, it’s the one we were dealt. The fate of our race is hanging in the balance, and we need all the hands we can get. Even the little ones.”
She was still quiet. He decided it was time to leave, and let her make the right choice on her own. Before he left, he said one last thing. “We’ll all collapse if we don’t carry this weight together, and there won’t be anyone left to pick us up.”
It was true: Marcus Donovan didn’t have a subtle bone in his body, but sometimes subtlety wouldn’t do.
Chapter 27:
Cellular
With their training complete, the Bravos became a full-fledged combat cell with Jack in command. They kept their ERC jumpsuits, whose colors had faded to dull brown during their long months in the dirt, and they added desert-camo ponchos as further protection against the late summer sun.
Charlie told them their first mission would be a warmup, requiring nothing more than basic competence. These types of missions were assigned to separate the wheat from the chaff. Successful cells moved on to greater challenges, while failures would either be drummed out of the organization, or simply swallowed up by the sands.
Their assignment turned out to be just as simple as Charlie suggested. The Bravos were to head into the Gaza Strip to search for spare fuel cells, and conduct routine reconnaissance along the way. It was known territory with plenty of cover, and screwing it up would require real effort.
The resistance always moved at night. During daylight, alien forces were everywhere, their cuttlefish flitting through the air and long-legged walkers stalking the land. But at night, the alien forces dwindled to scattered foot patrols, and mankind made their moves. The darkness became their last refuge and final domain.
No one knew why the alien activity dropped off after sunset, but there rumors and theories flew around in abundance. Most claimed the alien vehicles were a combination of solar powered and cold blooded. Jack meanwhile found a good chuckle in thinking the invaders were afraid of the dark.
Nikitin had his own theory, based on the pet bird he had as a kid. The bird was a parakeet named Mister Whistles, and whenever the sun was up, Mister Whistles would tweet and twitter non-stop. But if someone so much as dropped a blanket over his cage, he’d go silent as a whisper. Lights out birdy. Nikitin called it the “alien parakeet theory,” and Albright was an unexpected supporter, preferring the more sophisticated sounding “diurnal theory.”
Whatever the reason, daytime was off-limits. The Bravos trundled out over rocky terrain in a military four-wheeler with Corpsman Andrew Chase at the wheel, and arrived before sun up. They hid their vehicle beneath a dirt-brown tarp on the outskirts of the farms, in the palm of a rock outcropping shaped like a hand thrusting out of the soil. The aliens weren’t known to be curious, but caution was rarely a mistake.
Then the sun came up. The air turned hot and dry, but unlike Al Saif where the ground was a single shade of beige, the land near Gaza was fertile. Bountiful even. There was ample farmland full of fresh but abandoned crops, separated by pockets of damaged-but-standing buildings, while a scorch mark that used to be a city loomed off toward the coast.
The Bravos found one of the sturdier bombed-out and partially fallen buildings, and made camp for the day. Chunks had been taken out of it, but all three levels remained, and it made a good observation post, offering shady hiding spots and a bit of altitude in one crumbling package.
Then the cuttlefish started to pass overhead. The air wasn’t filled with them, but they went by often enough to remove any thoughts of stepping outside. There were a few patches of cover out there, but only separated by long stretches of open terrain. Without anti-vehicle weapons, getting caught would equal a swift death. It was simple math.
Jack busied himself studying maps of the area, trying to make some connection between the drawings and the wreckage all around, but he wasn’t having much luck. The maps were the old folding paper style, which had hardly been used in more than fifty years. They were relics from a time before global wireless and teraflop pocket computers, and these particular specimens were woefully out of date.
Despite being awkward to fold and more wrong than right, Jack still kind of liked them. There was something tactile that was missing in the digital versions, and since he didn’t have anything else to do, trying to understand the maps made for an acceptable pass-time.