“We need to talk,” said Tad.
“Okay.” Galen walked alongside Tad as he took a few steps away from the TOC extension.
Tad stopped and faced Galen and looked down, his voice lowered. “Do you like black women?”
Galen said, “Not all of them. Some are all right. Why?”
Tad looked up, his eyes meeting Galen’s. “Karen. What do you know about her?”
“Enough. She likes me. And make no mistake, her olive skin is no barrier to me appreciating the love of a good woman.”
“Her father died six years ago, at the hands of the Mosh. He was a Major in the Ninth Legion of Langston.” Tad folded his arms.
“And her mommy was probably Mandarin, or some other sort of Asian. So what?” Galen placed his hands on his hips.
“Her grandfather is…” Tad looked to his right. “Her maternal grandfather is the chairman of the board of directors.”
Galen took a deep breath and exhaled heavily. “Okay. Okay, here’s the deal. She’s a sleeper. But this was her first jump so we didn’t know it. She went through the eternal darkness and I was there when she came out of it, and she admitted she loved me.”
Tad blinked and stepped back.
Galen continued, “You can’t understand, but I do. I know what it’s like. And because of that, I know she loves me. That’s the whole reason she’s here, she wanted to be on this contract to be close to me, and that was before she found out she was a sleeper, before she had an eternity to think about it. She’s all right in my book, everything is fine.”
Tad smiled. “Have you told your mother?”
“It’s none of her business, not yet.”
“And have you told Karen your life-long plans? To save enough money so you don’t have to do anything for the rest of your life? You want to get a farm house on forty hectares of land and grow your own food as a hobby. Really, have you told her that? She’s in love with an up-and-coming military professional who fast-tracked right into a Brigade commander slot with a real good chance of becoming a filthy rich member of the board in less than ten years.”
Galen looked to his left and spit. “I’ll have to think about that later. Let’s go inside and get this meeting over with.”
Tad patted Galen on the shoulder. Galen strode toward the TOC extension and Tad followed him.
Inside, the tent walls were white. White glow strips that seemed a bit yellow in comparison to the white walls spanned the ceiling of the dome. A dozen fold-up chairs faced the flat screen at the end of the dome opposite the lowered assault ramp of the TOC tracked vehicle. Galen took the first seat at the front right corner of chairs and removed his helmet and placed it under the chair. Karen, Spike and Tad sat to his left. A burly sunburned man with light brown hair stood before them wearing combat coveralls, the top pulled down and tied around his waist, revealing a non-standard dark green muscle shirt. His short hair showed a tan line that indicated his hair had recently been much longer.
“Aloha, lady and gentlemen. My name is Chief Koa and for this contract I will serve as the Brigade intelligence officer.”
Spike said, “We all know who you are. How was the beach?”
“It was wonderful. Best year of my life. You ever get the chance to visit Terra, go to Hawaii. And stay ten years, one year is not enough.”
Galen leaned back in his seat and said, “Relax, gentlemen. This is an informal briefing. Continue, Chief.”
“Okay.” Chief Koa sat at the far left end of the front row of chairs and pushed a button on his remote. “This is the weather report for the next ten days. Clear and dry, not too hot, not too cold. Highs in the 20s and lows in the 15s. That’s Celsius, in case you were wondering. The weather here is controlled by the sky factories, and since this area of the planet is nearly uninhabited, they never bothered to send a lot of rain this way. But rain does come by accident, about twice a year for a couple of weeks. But not much.”
Koa brought up the next picture. It was a mountain capped by a collection of pipes and stacks and concrete buildings, with a row of a dozen stacks leaned at a 400 mil angle to the left, along the spine of the largest concrete building. A road wound around the mountain to its base, a town at the bottom, spreading outward onto the flat ground “Here we see a typical sky machine and the complex built around it, with a town of about two hundred thousand people. A highway system connects the twenty two sky factories that are located all around the surface, either side of the equator, none of them more than a thousand kilometers from the equator.”
“Impressive,” said Karen.
“Indeed.” Koa advanced to the next slide. It showed a cutaway graphic of a sky factory. “They are built on top of volcanoes, to provide the power and the basic gas materials needed to make air. There were originally twenty five factories, but over time, three of the volcanoes erupted and destroyed the factory and the town around it. The most recent disaster was three hundred and twenty six years ago.”
The next slide showed an overhead photo of a volcanic crater with lava and steam. The time stamp showed it was from three hundred and twenty six years ago. Koa continued, “The crater we are in is an ancient impact crater. The mountain in the center is the impact object itself. It hit, penetrated the crust, and then was pushed back up. The outer wall of the crater is sheer cliffs, and the floor of this crater is flat because over time, dust settled. The compacted dust is nearly thirty kilometers deep, to the original crater floor. The lake around the mountain formed when the dust was blown around and away from its base by high winds that didn’t stop until the sky factories had changed the atmosphere sufficiently to stabilize the atmosphere. And the rain that came has soaked into the dust and made it hard, and has filled in the lake.”
Koa flipped to the next picture. It showed the crater’s central mountain by itself. “This is almost entirely solid iron. There are traces of other metals of course, but mostly iron. Most of the material we remove from road building and tunnel boring will be used to construct the rest of the facilities on the mountain. We’ll cut the top off flat to have seventy hectares of useable land to emplace the EugeneX facilities, the permanent TOC, the command center and the space shield.”
Galen said, “Sounds like fun.”
“Well I’ve gotten a little off topic. Let’s get back to intelligence matters.” Koa flipped past a couple of pictures and showed a video taken from the sidewalk along an urban street. Houses lined each side, and motorized two and three wheeled vehicles drove along the street. A large four-wheeled cargo truck came to a stop and blocked the camera’s view. The next picture was of a city skyline in the distance. The tallest building was perhaps forty meters tall. Discernable in the background was a sky factory atop a mountain.
“For the most part these people present no organized threat to us. The biggest threat is the little one percent of criminal-minded people that all societies have, and curious explorers who want to know what we’re up to and then decide they don’t like what we’re doing. Really, nothing we can’t handle, and dealing with that sort of thing will let some of our less experienced troops cut their teeth with some low-risk live combat.”
Tad leaned forward in his chair. “That’s more my lane. Operations. I’ll decide who will deal with it and how.”
Koa said. “I’d assumed security would fall under intelligence.”
That’s one of the things Galen liked about military organization, the rank. Petty arguments were settled before they began. “Don’t take it personal, Koa. You’re doing a fine job. Continue.”
“Right, Sergeant Major.” Koa showed a picture of another city. “There is one community that presents a unique threat. Not military so much as moral. It could cost us our charter and we could forfeit our bond if we’re not careful. The people living around Air Factory seven.”