Major by Rick Shelley

Author:Rick Shelley [Shelley, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781936535354
Publisher: Jabberwocky Literary Agency
Published: 1999-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

Waiting. At times, Lon thought that was worse than combat. Until memory reasserted itself. The most vivid memories came in sleep—the chaos, the horror, the smell of death, and the cries of dying men. The terror. The questions: Why would a sane man ever do this voluntarily? How can anyone choose this for a career? Lon had first asked himself those questions a lifetime before, during his first exposure to combat, on a colony world called Norbank. He still had no satisfactory answers, no explanation. He was not a native Dirigenter, raised from earliest childhood to accept that war was the world’s business, that being part of the Corps—one way or another—was as much patriotic duty as practical necessity. And his old mantra, “All I ever wanted to be was a soldier,” no longer seemed sufficient—especially since his son had started to echo it. For Lon, that desire had been born years before he had any experience of battle, before he knew what being a soldier really meant. And the rationalization that combat, deadly peril, filled only a small fraction of his days seemed an evasion.

Lon spent the rest of Saturday morning alone in his office, his complink hooked through CIC aboard Tyre to the shuttles running their search patterns. For the present, only one shuttle was flying at a time. They spelled each other, taking three-hour shifts. If—when—one of them found something interesting, the other shuttle might be brought in to permit better three-dimensional probing, with each craft standing off to the side, flying circular routes to give them the best penetration available.

It was lunchtime when Tebba Girana knocked and entered Lon’s office without waiting for an invitation. He shut the door behind him and went over to Lon’s desk.

“You should know that Harley thinks you saddled him with the stay-behind job because you don’t think he’s good enough for the operation,” Tebba said softly. “He’s still young and insecure enough that he needs reassurance.”

Lon leaned back and sighed. “I should have thought of that myself, Tebba. Thanks for reminding me.”

“You get to be fifty years old, you pick up on some things a little easier,” Tebba said.

“Don’t give me that crap,” Lon said. He looked at Tebba and grinned. Girana was indeed fifty, and his hair was beginning to show just a little gray. But that was the only visible sign of age, and it was almost by choice, Tebba refusing to maintain the cosmetic appearance of youth. The molecular health implant systems—the crowning achievement of nanotechnology, according to some—that everyone on all but the most primitive of colony worlds received at birth held the aging process at bay. Old age did not truly begin until after a person reached the century mark. Tebba Girana was as fit, mentally and physically, as he had been at twenty. And experience made him better.

“I’ll talk to Harley after lunch,” Lon said. “We all go eat, then you find something to do while we talk.”

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