His mother would have to decide to help herself. He would be gone.
But not just yet. “No,” he told Lynnley. “You go ahead. I’d better hang around and see how this plays out.”
“Suit yourself,” she told him. “Just remember, you won’t be able to protect her when you’re with the Corps off on Mars or someplace.”
“I know.” Am I doing the right thing?
He wished there was an answer to that.
3
5 JUNE 2138
IP Packet Osiris
En route, Mars to Earth
1337 hours Zulu
Colonel Ramsey lay snug within the embrace of a linking couch, only marginally aware of the steady, far-off vibration that was the packet’s antimatter drive. It converted a steady stream of water into plasma and hard radiation, blasting it astern to accelerate the blunt, bullet-shaped vessel with its outsized heat radiators at a steady one gravity. Twenty hours after boosting clear from Mars orbit, the Osiris was already traveling at over 700 kilometers per second and had covered well over 25 million kilometers.
Within his thoughts, stroked by the virtual reality AI of the Osiris communications suite, he was in a huge auditorium, the Pentagon Briefing Center, located some kilometers beneath the Potomac River. The faint, steady thrum of the packet’s main drive, starcore furies rattling just above the level of detectability in deck and titanium-ceramic bulkheads, was all but submerged by the incoming sensations of the padded auditorium seat, the murmured conversations and rustling movements of people around him, the glare off the big screen behind the podium, magnifying the features of the speaker.
“Gentlemen, ladies, AIs,” General Lawrence Haslett said, addressing both those gathered physically in the briefing center and the much larger audience present electronically as well, “as of zero-nine-thirty this morning, Operation Spirit of Humankind is go. President LaSalle signed the executive order authorizing the Llalande Relief Expedition, and both House and Senate approval are expected by tomorrow. Admiral Ballantry has cleared the use of our newest IST, the Derna, for the op, and given the orders to begin rigging her for the voyage.”
Haslett, Army Chief of Staff for the UFR/U.S. Central Military Command, gripped the sides of the podium as he spoke, his words as clear as if he were physically standing in the cramped comm suite on board the Osiris. It was hard for Ramsey to remember that the images he was seeing were already ten minutes and some seconds old. That was how long it took the comm lasers bearing the sensory data to reach Osiris from Earth.
“I needn’t tell all of you,” Haslett went on, “that this is a singularly important deployment, demanding diplomacy, tact, and a clear set of mission objectives and priorities.” He paused. “I also needn’t remind you that time is very much against us. While the FTL communicator on Ishtar provides an instantaneous link with the comm array on Mars, it will take ten years, objective, for the Derna to reach the Llalande system. By that time, of course, anything can have happened. New Sumer may have fallen, almost certainly will have fallen, if the situation continues as it has for the past few weeks. We need to proceed on the assumption that our colony will have been overrun by the rebels by that time, and craft the expeditionary force’s orders with that in mind.”
A chirp sounded over Ramsey’s implant, a question signaled from someone in the audience.
“Yes,” Haslett said.
“Yes, sir,” one of the men seated in the auditorium, an Aerospace Force colonel, said, his image thrown up on the big screen at Haslett’s back. Biographical data scrolled down the right corner of Ramsey’s vision, identifying him as Colonel Joshua Miller. “If the Llalande contact mission is already doomed, what’s the point of sending another ship out there? Is this a punitive expedition?”
“Not punitive, Colonel Miller. Not solely punitive, at any rate. You must know what the polls are saying about the situation on Ishtar.”
“I didn’t realize we were running our wars according to the poll numbers,” another officer put in, and a number of people in the auditorium chuckled.
Haslett scowled and cleared his throat. “The mission commander will have full discretionary powers to deal with the situation as he sees fit, once he arrives at Ishtar. We will be sending along firepower enough that a full range of possible military options will be available.”
“They’d damned well better,” the woman on the recliner to Ramsey’s left muttered, sotto voce, as if the people within the virtual reality transmission playing itself out within their heads might hear. “It’s a hell of a long way to call for reinforcements if the Marines get into trouble!”