A Sword Into Darkness (24 page)

“Hey!  Kris!”  He smiled down at her, momentarily glad despite how the day had gone.  “What are you doing here?”

She looked up at him and slowly rose to her feet, her wildly disarrayed phosphorescent red hair offset by the dark expression she wore.  She stepped forward to block his access to the front door.  “Anything you want to tell me about your trip, Nathan?”

He sighed.  “There’s a lot I want to tell you, that I need to tell you, but not right now, okay?  I was up at five AM East Coast time and it’s been a hell of a long day.  All I want to do now is get some sleep.”

Anger flashed in her eyes.  “Yeah?  Well I want some freakin’ answers!  Why is all my access cut off?!  Why are there Army types crawling all over the shipyard and the dock?  What the hell did you do in DC today?!”

“Army types?  Damn, he works fast.”

“What is that supposed to mean?  I called Lydia and she said she couldn’t tell me over the phone.  She told me to go and ask you.  So here I am.  I’m asking!  Why have you two cut me off from my work?  Am I not on the team anymore, now that you’re in the big leagues with Washington?”

Nathan shook his head, confused for a moment, and then he looked at her and grinned slightly.  He laughed, but choked it off when he saw her expression turn fiery.  “Okay, all right.  Let’s go inside so I can put this shit down.  I’ll tell you everything, but it’s not what you think.”

She stood her ground for a few seconds and then stepped to one side.  “It’s not?”

“No,” he said, “it’s much worse.”

Nathan unlocked and fumbled through the door, dropping his gear on the other side with relief.  The place was pristine, ordered, but not because he himself was.  He was virtually a stranger in his own apartment.  All his time, his devotion, his passion was spent at the shipyard.  This place was furnished out of Swedish catalogs, updated with all the latest electronics, cleaned and maintained by a service, and enjoyed by virtually no one.

Kris entered behind him and shut the door.  She looked uncomfortable, the heat of her anger cooling slowly.  Nathan favored her with as welcoming a smile as he could muster, given how tired he was, but he could not help it coming off more melancholy than friendly.

Realizing he could not make her feel any more at ease, he dropped the smile, and meandered through his place.  He felt unaccountably nervous.  It had been a long time since a woman had been in his apartment, but this was Kris.  That was a non-starter.  It could not be that.

He wandered over to the one area of his apartment that he truly thought of as “his”.  A wall entirely devoted to bookshelves was filled to overflowing with paperbacks, hardcovers, UV-ROM movies—science fiction, thrillers, and military all, with a few engineering and speculative science texts thrown in for good measure.  Interspersed among the books-stacked-upon-books were bits and pieces of his former life.  Ball caps, signed pictures of the three ships he had been on, photo albums, cruise books, memorabilia—snapshots of a time when he had served something greater and nobler than his own interests.  Nathan had hoped to add another ship’s icons to those shelves.

But that would not happen, not now.

He shook his head and turned back to Kris.  Her anger had ebbed enough that she could see how deeply he hurt.  He could see the compassion rising in her eyes.  Nathan took a step closer.  His voice dropped to a near whisper.  “We lost it, Kris.  It happened just like Gordon warned it would, and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do to stop it.”

“What—”

“They nationalized us,” he said in a louder, grimmer tone.  “Sykes must have been planning for this from the very moment the government began bankrolling the program.  Now that the ship is done and the mission is no longer political suicide, he made his move.  It’s not just you who’s lost your access.  It’s all of us.  As of this afternoon, the
Sword of Liberty
and the entire Special Projects division of Windward Technologies Inc. are wholly-owned properties of the United States government, managed by the Department of Defense.”

Anger colored her face again, almost making it match the glowing crimson of her hair, but this time her ire was not aimed at him.  “They can’t do that!  You said Gordon had agreements, contracts that clearly laid out the boundaries of who owned what!”

He nodded sadly.  “That’s right, but you’ll find that contracts are hard to enforce when the things they concern are classified at a higher level than any court that’s authorized to work out disputes.  We relied on the magnanimity of the Beltway, which goes completely by the wayside when you start edging up on national security issues.  And when Congress found out we had our own unregulated nuclear arsenal, and that a bunch of non-military eggheads were going to be negotiating with an advanced alien race for the fate of the planet … well, they were only too happy to back up the SECDEF in his power grab.”

Kris looked like she was about to scream, but then her face just fell, her fury shorted out.  He could see all the emotions she had built up through hours of wild speculation and worry over betrayal simply vanish, leaving behind a numb, empty shell, another soul hollowed out by the bureaucracy.  To Nathan, it was a recognizable moment, that realization of defeat.

She turned and sat down on the couch, moving slowly as her mind tried to sort things out.  Nathan was grateful.  His fatigue and his own drained emotions conspired to sap him of whatever energy still kept him standing.  He walked over and flopped down on the plump tan couch next to her.  The cushions were bliss.  He laid his head back.

Kris leaned over, her elbows on her knees, her hands massaging her temples.  “What happens now?  Are we out-out?  Or are we just out for the moment?”

He looked over at her.  He was so tired, but he had worked through all of this hours ago and he did not want her to rack her mind through all the permutations he himself had turned to and discarded, one by dismal one.  “Yes, we’re out-out.  Apparently, we’re national assets, you more than me.  We’re needed down here, to oversee and guide the construction of the fleet, assuming of course that they even decide to build one.”

“A monkey could do that now,” she snarled, some anger still alive within her.  “The ship is designed!  Anyone could take our specs and build another.  I’m not needed for that.  I’m needed where the damn first contact team might run into something we never planned on!”

Nathan shook his head.  “Be that as it may, your new place is here.  A combined Navy-Air Force crew will take up
Liberty
, and they’ll make first contact.  They’re dependable.  They’re expendable.  They’re not us.”

“So I build their damn starship, and I don’t even get a ride?  That’s complete BS!”

He shrugged.  “I know, but Lydia and I were able to get a couple of concessions, at least.  We will get to go up.  We’ll launch the ship, carry out the test trials with the military crew, and then we’ll return to Earth.  One ticket, one joyride, but no mission.”

She slumped back on the couch, to slouch as he was.  She looked over at him.  “And what about the mission?  What about the whole reason we built the ship in the first place?”

Nathan smiled tightly.  “The ship will stay in orbit while they re-evaluate the mission plan, and train on the operational systems.  When the DOD decides they’re ready, they’ll go.  I’m sure we’ll get a nice mission patch or something, but as of this afternoon, the fate of the world no longer rests on our shoulders.”

Kris turned her head and stared at the ceiling.  “Good god, this sucks.”

“Yeah.”  He looked at her in profile, smiling softly to himself despite how horribly the day had turned out.  Kristene was here, and for some reason that seemed to make everything all right.  He watched her stare ahead, working furiously and hopelessly through all the angles of their new reality for as long as he could.  But after a few moments, his eyelids drooped, the world fell away, and he slept, admitting defeat at last.

After some unknown time, as quick as an eye blink, or as long as hours, the world came back.  He awoke refreshed, renewed, and unreasonably content.  The worries of his long day did not seem to matter as much.  Something was different, with either himself or the world, but the difference was a welcome one.

As he rose further from the comforting depths of sleep, he realized that something indeed was changed about the world, a world defined at the moment by just his senses of touch and smell.  Now, before he dared to open his eyes, the limits of his existence were bounded by the pleasant warmth and the reassuring pressure of someone by his side, by the fresh, indescribable scent of a woman’s hair.

Nathan opened his eyes and looked over to see Kris’ head lying against his shoulder.  She looked back at him with red-rimmed eyes, unspent tears gathered at their corners.

She said nothing, gave him no explanation for why she was there, for why she might have been crying.  There was nothing that needed to be said, however.  For her, things between them had never really changed, only delayed.  For him, the only thing that had changed was the realization that his stoicism and his denials had been for nothing.  His rejections had not saved the project.  They had only put off what they both wanted, what they both knew was the right and necessary thing.

His reasons for doing what he had done had been valid and objectively wise, but they also no longer applied.  They did not need to hold him back anymore.

Nathan circled his arms around Kris and leaned toward her.  She reached up and drew him into a kiss, gentle and slow, the fulfillment of an unspoken promise that had been made in his office one night nearly two years before.  Over time, time that passed unnoticed and unheeded, their kiss grew more heated, more insistent.

The pleasant warmth that lay between them became an unbearable heat.  Lying on the couch together, they each quickly shed their encumbering clothing and yielded to the pull of unrealized needs, to the weight of years spent orbiting about one another, waiting for this moment.

Later still, so late that it was early, Nathan lay back in his bed, holding her close to him, reveling in the sensation of her skin in contact with his own.  His hands roamed aimlessly across her back, tracing the colorful tattoos that extended up from her left arm and across half her back, massaging or idly stroking with no rhythm or regularity.  It was just something to do, something he had always wanted to do, but which he had never admitted to himself before.  He enjoyed the slight shivers that went through her when his touch was lightest.

They looked at each other and, seemingly on cue, they both started giggling, laughing over nothing but new-found joy.  It was as if they were two children who had discovered the hidden wonder and magic in the everyday world, like suddenly finding the rainbow spun off a crystal in sunlight.

Kris rolled over and lay next to him on her back, in contact, but not so close now that he could feel every heartbeat.  She pulled the sheet down, carrying nothing for modesty and happy for a chance to cool off.  She looked at him.  “You know, I’ve been thinking … .”

“You can still think?” he asked, smiling.  “Wow.  That’s one up on me.”

Kris smiled back.  “Stop it.  I’ve been thinking, is the SECDEF a bad guy, someone who just wants the tech for himself, under his control?  Or is he right, that we shouldn’t be trusted with something this big, that just because we thought it up and we built it, we aren’t necessarily the right choice to actually go?”

Nathan frowned and reached for her hand, entwining her fingers with his own and kissing them gently.  He brought their arms down between their prone forms, still holding her hand lightly.  “I don’t know.  I don’t know him well enough to say.  Just because someone didn’t get along with Gordon or Lydia, doesn’t automatically mean they’re evil or wrong.”

“But it’s not exactly a vote in his favor, either.”

“No, definitely not.  Still, Gordon had his quirks, and not everybody appreciated them.  I guess I’d have to hope that Carl Sykes did what he did out of a genuine sense of duty and concern for the nation.  But I was there.  I saw him and the way he operates.  He may have nothing but altruistic motives, but how he gets his way is nothing short of criminal.”