Puberty had changed that. Mimi had suffered few of the extreme mood swings of that period in life, but she had changed, nonetheless. She had “put away childish things” and in keeping with that, perhaps, Tuffy had morphed to be more of what a young teenager, recently a child but now exploring the world of adulthood, needed, somebody cool and Tuff looking.
Or he might just be aging. Nobody really knew. Except Tuffy and, maybe, Mimi, and they weren’t talking.
“Okay, okay,” Mimi said with an exasperated sigh.
She got up and walked into the living room where Mrs. Wilson was vacuuming with the TV on in the background.
“Aunt Vera,” Mimi said over the sound of the vacuum.
“Mimi,” Vera said, shutting off the machine. Vera Wilson was a heavyset woman in her forties, currently wearing a muumuu since the Wilsons kept the thermostat high to save energy. “You’re dressed nice for school.”
“I’m not going,” Mimi said. “Tuffy has told me I have to go visit someone. Today.”
“You’re… what?” Vera Wilson asked, confused. Since taking Mimi in she had found her to be a very biddable and charming young lady, the daughter she’d never had. Mimi had never asked to skip school and had certainly never back talked or said anything this… strange. “What do you mean you’re not going to school?”
“Tuffy has something that I need to do,” Mimi said, calmly but definitely. “I need to go visit someone and then… well, I’ll probably be gone for a while. But there will be adults who will talk to you about it. But I have to leave now, this morning; we have a transfer from the gateport at ten. And there’s a taxi on the way.”
“Young lady, you can’t just walk out of this house…” Vera Wilson started to respond angrily.
“I don’t want to make you mad, Aunt Vera,” Mimi continued calmly. “But I really need to go. I’m not running away. Some adults will come explain, I’m sure, but I’m not sure what I can say to you about it. You remember when Dr. Weaver came to visit that one time and he said it was ‘confidential.’ It’s secret like that.”
“Well, if the government wants you to go, why didn’t they tell me?” Mrs. Wilson asked, confused.
“They don’t know I have to go,” Mimi said. “But Tuffy says that if I don’t, it’s not going to work.”
“What’s not going to work?” Mrs. Wilson said, totally out of her depth.
“The thing I can’t talk about,” Mimi said as the taxi honked its horn. “That’s my ride. I’ve gotta go. I’ll write and I’ll probably be back, maybe soon for a week or so, if you’ll let me come back. But it’s time for me to do the things I’m supposed to do. I think, it’s sort of like being called by God, Auntie Vera. I have a calling. And the first place it will take me is San Diego.”
Aunt Vera looked at the cool looking spider thing on Mimi’s shoulder and sighed. She’d had a very confusing, but interesting, conversation with Dr. Weaver at one point when he visited Mimi to thank her for her help. After that she’d had to wonder: Do angels always appear in a cloud of light? Or, as Dr. Weaver had pointed out, “Well, we got the big light. And the city was certainly smited or smitten or whatever… I don’t know exactly what Tuffy is, but from what I went through, an angel in heavy disguise is a pretty good description.”
But God sure worked in mysterious ways. You just had to have the patience of Job and trust that it would all come out right.
“You write, you hear?” Aunt Vera said, tearing up. She and Herman had never been able to have children and Mimi had been, in a way, a gift from God. Now, it seemed, the time was come to lose the gift. She’d thought they’d have more years. She hugged the girl to her and sniffled. “I got the hang of that e-mail thing. You be sending me e-mails, you hear, girl? And come home when you got a chance. This is always home.”
“I will,” Mimi said, sniffling herself. “But where I’m going, well, I don’t think there’s e-mail.”
2
Private First Class Eric Bergstresser parked his Jeep outside headquarters and got out, stretching his back.
Berg’s first intimation he was being transferred had been the previous day when his team NCOIC, a staff sergeant, had dragged him out of morning PT and told him to “get his ass up to battalion.” Upon reaching the battalion headquarters he had been put through “the one fastest post-clearance in history” according to the gunnery sergeant from S-3 who had walked the private through, then handed him orders to proceed, via personal automobile, to Bravo Company, Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance, which was based, oddly enough, at Newport News Naval Base.
Berg hadn’t even known there were any Marines at Newport News which, as far as he knew, was still in the process of closure. He was more than surprised to find out there was a Force Recon company there.
Berg was a “Nugget,” a NUG, the “new guy” in the battalion. He had volunteered immediately upon reaching the 1st Marine Division, his initial duty station after Basic. After taking the initial entry tests, mental and physical, he’d gone through the short hell of Recon In Process and the much longer hell of Force Recon Operator Training. After the Dreen War, Force Recon qualification had been revamped to concentrate more and more on off-planet operations. It also had gotten harder to qualify; of the sixty volunteers in the class with Berg, he had been one of only four to pass the full course. While not quite as hard as Delta qualification and training, it was equivalent to or surpassed SEAL BUD/S. At least in sheer brutality.
Berg wasn’t sure what was happening to the Corps he had wanted to join for so long, but he was seeing changes that were interesting. Unlike most troops, he paid a lot of attention to things like the budget fights in Congress and current events. And in the former, especially, there were some odd things happening. After the Dreen War, and the closing of the various gates that had permitted the Dreen to invade Earth, most of the forces had suffered serious cutbacks. The still unexplained breakouts of Dreen infestations in several Islamic countries had taken most of the starch out of the Great Jihad and while U.S. troops were still deployed around the world, mostly they were back to peace enforcement or peace keeping missions; the War on Terror had died along with several hundred thousand jihadists in the Bekaa Valley, Mecca and Iran.
But while the Army and the Air Force were getting their budgets slashed, most of the money wasn’t being “reinvested.” It was going to the Navy and the Marines. And most of it was going into black holes. The “black” portions of the budget were getting large enough to cause some serious questions in the news media. The only information slipping out was that the expenditures involved “extraterrestrial military research projects.”
He’d been directed to the windowless, block building by the gate guard on reaching Newport News, one long ass drive from Lejeune. Now it was time to find out just what this company of Force Recon was doing and why it was hidden away in a secure building in Newport News.
Entering the door marked “Visitor’s Entrance” he found himself in a small room composed of mostly concrete walls. Directly opposite the door was a plane of what he recognized to be aliglass with a security station behind its protection. He knew that it was technically transparent aluminum, but it looked more like transparent sapphire, ten times as strong as plexiglass and still expensive as hell. A sheet of it meant somebody seriously wanted to stop an attack. The inch and a half thick window would shrug off an armor penetrator round.
“Bergstresser, Eric, PFC,” he said, holding up his ID to the guard behind the glass. The guard was a civilian, not a Marine, but he was relatively young and armed for war with an MP-7 on a three-point combat strap hooked into his chest, boron carbide helmet and heavy body armor. “I’m reporting for duty.”