Luna Marine(95)
She blinked, then relaxed a bit and laughed. “You are absolutely correct, Sergeant Kaminski. It would not!”
“Yes, ma’am! It was the name, you see. I thought—”
“It’s Jeff Warhurst, the commandant’s grandson!”
Somehow, that seemed worse. The commandant of the US Marine Corps had a grandson? That was about like learning that God Almighty had a maiden aunt.
“I met the Warhursts a couple of years ago,” Kaitlin explained. “Just before I joined the Corps, in fact. I was in Japan when the war broke out, and it happened that I received some…information. Some important information from my father that had to be passed on to Military Intelligence.” Something passed behind the lieutenant’s gaze. She became distant for a moment, as though she was remembering something, something sad. Then she seemed to shake the thought off. “Anyway, I managed to get out of the country before everything was shut down and contact a friend of my dad’s by vid while I was airborne. I was met at the LA airport by some Marines with orders to take me straight to the commandant. He let me stay at his place, with his family, while I was being debriefed.” She smiled. “Jeff is fourteen now, and brilliant. He also plays a hell of a mean game of chess.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder, indicating the wall screen. “We’ve been playing v-mail chess for a year now. Not real-time, of course. Just sending animés of the moves back and forth. The damned little son of a gunny beats me two times out of five, too. So, what can I do for you?”
“Ma’am, I’ve got a problem. I don’t know who to talk to, so you seemed like the logical place to start.”
“If it involves getting off base, the answer is negative.”
“I know, ma’am.” Kaminski nodded. One-SAG had gone on full alert four days ago, with no sign yet of the order being lifted. Scuttlebutt held that the UN had diverted an asteroid out of orbit and sent it toward the Earth, and that 1-SAG was going to have to go capture the thing and destroy it. It was, Kaminski thought, one of the craziest wild rumors he’d heard in his entire Marine career, and whoever first started it as a joke must be laughing his head off right now. Whatever the real story was, though, it had the entire Vandenberg complex sealed off tighter than a vacuum chamber. “I don’t need to go ashore. It’s, well…it’s this e-mail I got.”
“Something from home?”
“No, ma’am. Uh, do you remember the Prof, uh, Dr. Alexander? Back at Picard?”
“Of course.”
“You know he was with your dad, on Mars. And that he was, I mean, he is a kind of honorary Marine. Unofficial, but, well, he was one of us on Garroway’s March.”
“I can certainly understand that. Everyone on the March went through hell, to hear my dad tell it.”
“Yes, ma’am. It wasn’t that bad, really, but air and food were damned tight, and we couldn’t get out of our space suits for three weeks. That meant we were getting pretty ripe by the time we closed on Mars Prime, and the suits and armor were really chafing us, raising blisters and sores and, well, it wasn’t real pleasant. But the Prof hung right there with us. He was the one who patched through that information about Cydonia, putting it out over the Net to screw the UNdies. He might have been a civilian, but if he was able to tough it out the way the rest of us did, he was okay. One of us, you know?”
Kaitlin nodded. “Understood. What’s the problem?”
“This, ma’am.” He reached into his BDU left breast pocket and extracted an MD. “I just got this e-mail last week, and I haven’t been able to figure what to do about it. I downloaded it to disk so you could see.”
She slipped the disk into her desk PAD; the chess game on the display behind her vanished, replaced by the e-mail text, writ large.
Silently, Kaitlin read the message on her PAD’s smaller screen. “Who is this Teri Sullivan?” She asked, looking up.
“Don’t know her, ma’am, but I gather she’s another archeologist. And a friend of the Prof’s. She explains that further down the letter, ma’am.”
“Got it. Says she worked with him at the Exoarcheological Institute in Chicago.” She looked up. “He’s been arrested? For spying?”
“Ma’am, I talked to Dr. Alexander a lot. Starting back on Mars, when he let me come into the Cave of Wonders to see the aliens and stuff he was finding on those TV screens. He never had much use for government or bureaucracy or that kind of thing, but he’s no enemy spy!”
“She says much the same. She also says his lawyer isn’t being allowed to see him, that they’re holding him incommunicado at Joliet. God, what’s this country coming to!”