“Oh, man,” Jack said. “I’m going to have to think about that one.”
“Lemme ask you one thing.”
“Shoot.”
“You think you might wanna go with this idea? I mean, it’s a possibility, right?”
“Well, I guess so….”
“Then do us both a big favor, kid. Stop giving the fucking things away!”
“Huh?”
“You’re gonna kill the market with freebies, man! What’s worse, some other techie-type might get ahold of this and do up a product of his own! Man, you gotta go into business with me on this thing just to protect your interests, y’know?”
Jack shrugged. He’d only given Sam to Slider and a couple of others…and three or four of the guys like Lonnie who’d come over to the Vlad with him. He didn’t suppose it mattered. “Okay, sure. Why not? But I’m still not sure this thing’s such a good idea.”
“Hey, trust me, Flash! I wouldn’t steer ya wrong! You ‘n’ me are gonna clean up big!”
Jack looked at his watch again. “Hey, I gotta get to the honey buckets, Slider. I’ll see you later.”
“Okay, man. Just remember! No more freebies!”
Honey-bucket duty was one of the less glamorous aspects of service with the Marines, Jack was finding. Each morning, and again in the evening, the cut-down two-hundred-liter fuel cans set beneath the latrine benches had to be hauled out into the open, the contents doused with diesel fuel or kerosene, and burned. It was filthy, back-breaking, stinking, stomach-turning work, the sort traditionally reserved for the newbies and the replacements who either hadn’t yet proven themselves, or who hadn’t been aboard long enough for anyone newer to come along and get picked for shit detail instead.
“So, anyone hear any more about that asteroid the UNdies are supposed to’ve launched at the US?” Lonnie wanted to know. There were four of them on the detail—Jack, Lonnie Costantino, Duberand, and PFC Alan Kale, another alumnus from Platoon 4239. They’d dragged out the first three honey pots and set them ablaze. Oily, foul-smelling smoke boiled above the barren hillside.
Kale leaned on his shovel. “I still think it’s all bullshit. The UNdies’d never launch an asteroid at us! I mean, they gotta live on this planet, too!”
“I dunno,” Duberand said. “My sister’s in the Air Force, stationed at V-berg, and she said they already launched missiles to knock the thing off course. She swore it was true.”
“You’re too ugly to have a sister, Dub. How come they didn’t tell the whole country, huh?”
“Maybe because they didn’t want a panic,” Jack said. “Or because they want to wait and make sure it’s going to miss.”
“Man,” Kale said. “You think they’d let something like that go down without warning folks? Without trying to evac ’em or something? That’s cold, man.”
“If they can’t move everybody,” Jack said, “maybe they opted not to move anybody, just because of the panic and stuff.”
“You know,” Duberand said, “there’s a story goin’ around that it wasn’t the UN that moved that asteroid. It was aliens.”
“No way,” Costantino said. “Uh-uh, no way it was aliens.”
“What makes you an authority, Lonnie?” Kale wanted to know. “You talk to ’em?”
“As a matter of fact, yeah.” Lonnie pointed at his forehead, where four months earlier he’d worn the star emblem of the An. “I’m still Alien Astronauts, y’know. The Masters don’t want to harm the Earth. They want to save it.”
“I don’t know what scares me more,” Kale said. “The idea of the UN dropping rocks on us, or you telling me that the aliens won’t.”
“Some churches back home are saying the aliens are the Antichrist’s forces,” Jack pointed out. “Others say they’re angels, here to save us. They both can’t be right!”
“What do you say?” Duberand wanted to know.
He shrugged. “I don’t think they’re gods or devils. I think right now they’re telling us more about humans, from the way people react to them, than they are telling us about themselves.”
“Yeah, so you think the UN has been changing asteroid orbits?”
“Wouldn’t put it past them. A small enough rock might just be enough to cripple us, without hurting the rest of the world. It’d be a hell of a weapon. Of course, that’s why the Marines are going to need more of a presence in space.”
“Uh-oh,” Kale said. “Flash is gonna do his speech again!”