“That is all. Comp’ny, dismissed!”
The ranks began to dissolve into individual Marines once more. Garroway turned then, looking west. He could see An-Kur, a slumped, black mound beneath a pillar of angry, gray-black ash dominating the horizon. The cloud nearly obscured the swollen globe of Marduk hanging above what was left of the mountain.
Gunny Valdez, dead? Goddess! He’d talked to her an hour ago…had wanted to join her. Shit, he’d known then that whatever she was doing, it was likely a one-way deployment. She’d turned him away, and somehow the rejection was a sour bitterness, burning throat and eyes.
Of their whole squad, only he, Womicki, Dunne, Garvey, and Vinita were left. Five out of twelve. Shit, shit, shit. He felt as if he’d just lost his family.
And, he thought, he had. His mother was far away now and ten years older than when he’d last seen her. Goddess alone knew where Lynnley was. The only family he knew now was the Corps, and seven of his eleven closest relatives had just been whisked away in the space of a scant few hours.
By what quirk of the universe, by what right, was he still alive and breathing and, worst of all, thinking, while they were all dead? It wasn’t fair.
He felt as though the waves of loneliness just outside his circle of personal space were threatening to crash through and engulf him.
He became aware of a presence…no, of two presences, at his side—Garvey and Vinita, both still in armor save for helmets and gloves, their faces smudged with smoke and grime acquired at some unhelmeted moment in the past hour.
“It doesn’t seem fair,” Vinita said. Her grief was tangible.
“No one promised us fair,” Garroway said.
“Yeah,” Garvey said, “but you know? Sometimes the universe just outright sucks big, slimy rocks.”
“Maybe so,” Garroway said. “And maybe we just have to pretend it all makes some kind of sense.”
Trade Factor’s Quarters
Legation Compound
New Sumer, Ishtar
1015 hours ALT (Arbitrary Local Time)
Gavin Norris surveyed the mess that had been the PanTerran office with growing anger, then slammed his fist down on the already cracked case of a computer monitor. The large windows overlooking the compound had been smashed in, and the stringy-fuzzy purplish stuff that passed for vegetation here had invaded the open room. There was water pooled on the floor…and cabinets that once had held data storage crystals had been overturned and scattered everywhere. Mold grew on the walls and ceiling, and parts of the wall showed black streaks indicating an old, old fire. A desk safe gaped open and empty.
If Carleton had left any corporate records here, they’d been utterly destroyed by Ahannu mobs and ten years of the wet local weather. Damn it, it wasn’t fair.…
Not that he’d been counting on Carleton’s efficiency. His briefings back in New Chicago had begun with the assumption that he would have to basically start over. But if the man had just thought to leave a note scrawled on a wall, perhaps with a clue or two as to the location of a fireproof lockbox with a stash of backup storage crystals…
He would have to begin again here, from scratch.
“Did you find what you’re looking for?”
He turned at the voice. Dr. Hanson stood in the doorway that had been smashed open a decade ago by rampaging alien mobs.
“No,” he replied. “My…predecessor didn’t keep a very tidy office, it seems.”
“Don’t blame him. Blame the company he kept. Looks like the Ahannu pretty well trashed the place when they broke in. I’m surprised they didn’t burn it to the ground.”
“They burned a number of buildings, I gather.” He looked around the office in disgust. “Damn it, what brought all this on? We had a solid rapport with the local nabobs. Things were going so well!”
“It’s beginning to look like a classic case of Alexander’s First Law.”
“Alexander’s…First Law? What’s that?”
“An important xenosociological concept,” Hanson replied. “Advanced by the guy who came to be known as the Father of Xenoarcheology, back in the twenty-first century. It states that the members of any given culture will understand the customs, attitudes, and worldview of another culture solely within the context of their own.”
“I don’t get it.”
“There were Native Americans who encountered Europeans for the first time who thought the foreigners were traveling inside gigantic black water birds with huge white wings. Sailing ships with sails, you see? And the ancient Sumerians thought the Anunnaki—‘Those who came from the heavens to Earth,’ as they called them—were gods.”