The Fall: Crimson Worlds IX by Jay Allan

Author:Jay Allan [Allan, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw
Publisher: System 7 Publishing
Published: 2014-12-18T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

WAS Boyer

High Orbit

Columbia, Eta Cassiopeiae II

Sarah Linden was staring at her workstation trying to focus. She was close to solving the problem, and she knew it. There was something missing, some last piece of the puzzle that had eluded her. She was determined to figure it out, but she was having trouble concentrating. Her thoughts kept drifting down to the surface, to the overloaded field hospitals she knew she should be commanding. It felt wrong to be sitting in her nice, sterile lab while Marines were fighting and dying in the mud and filth of the battlefield. For 20 years she had been there, just behind the lines, waiting to do whatever was necessary to save those men and women. Her field hospitals had been in abandoned buildings, tents, even caves, but everywhere she had gone, Marines who would have died survived their wounds. She understood all the logic and the rationale for why she’d stayed behind, but that didn’t make it any easier to accept.

It was one more distraction, adding to the anguish and pain already tearing at her insides as she tried to unravel the mysteries of Anderson-45’s conditioning. She knew success might render battles like the one going on now obsolete. The Shadow Legions followed their orders because they were conditioned to do so, not out of any real loyalty to Gavin Stark. If she could break that hold, give the thousands of clones access to the free will she knew existed somewhere within each of them, she could end the war and destroy Stark’s bid for power in one stroke.

Her hand slipped into her pocket, her fingers closing gently around something small and cold. Erik Cain had left his Marine ring behind on her table when he left Armstrong in search of Gavin Stark. Some might suggest he hadn’t taken it with him for the same reason he’d left his general’s stars behind, but Sarah knew him better than anyone, and she understood perfectly. For the first time in all his wars and his desperate battles, Erik didn’t expect to come back. He’d left the ring so she would have something of him if he died on his quest.

A military life filled with almost ceaseless combat had left Cain with few personal possessions, and he’d left her the thing he’d had that was most precious to him. She’d known as soon as she came in and saw it laying there. She’d burst into tears then, but now she’d resolved to keep the thing with her at all times, not as a remembrance of a lover she would never see again, but as a sign of her belief he would return to her, as he always had before. She refused to give up, even to consider the possibility that Erik would lose his battle with Stark, that he would die far away from her, on some distant planet or ship. No, she’d sworn to herself. Not after all they’d been through together. It just couldn’t end that way.

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