A Desert Called Peace (8 page)

The three stood then, leaving the study and walking across the courtyard to the bedroom side of the house. The rain had stopped; the skies cleared. Hennessey looked skyward at the familiar constellations—the Smilodon, the Leaping Maiden, the Pentagram—and wondered which of the bright points of light overhead were the ships of the UE Peace Fleet.

The budget had been busted with not a damned thing to show for it. Then had come the scandals, the resignations, the heavily publicized trials . . . the obligatory appearances for public flagellation in front of a posturing Congress. Then had come very damned little money, let me tell you, brother. NASA was reduced to minor projects, as flashy as possible, to try to overcome the bad press and re-fire the public's imagination for the potential of space travel.

One such flashy mission—it amounted to little more than another photo op of the rings of Saturn—was underway now.

About the only thing positive to come out of the loss of the
Cristobal Colon
was that any number of astronomers and physicists had turned their attention to the area in which the probe had disappeared. There was a theory on the subject.

Based on the presence near the area of microwave variance that the physicists described as "lumpy," it seemed that the area concerned was very similar to conditions believed to have existed when the universe was virtually brand new. The theory was that the speed of light was not the same in that area as it was more generally.

This theory, by the way, was not exactly correct.

An assistant flight director, bored and contemplating a night with a couple of cold beers, a hot shower and a hotter woman suddenly saw something on his screen that ought not—no way in hell—be there. He fiddled. He even faddled. But there it remained.

When in doubt, delegate. When delegation is impossible, buck it up to higher.

"What the . . . ? Skipper? Skipper, you've got to come see this!"

Impatiently, the 'Skipper'—a retired naval officer entitled mission director for the Saturn mission—made his way to the terminal. His face was old, weather-lined, and leathery, but he walked erect. A careful observer might have noticed a certain swaggering gait that told of a life at sea now confined to the land.

"Yes, what is it?" the skipper asked.

"The
Cristobal Colon
just sent us a distress signal, sir."

"That's not possible. The thing disappeared three and a half years ago and never a peep."

"Look for yourself," the assistant flight director insisted, indicating his monitor screen with a pointed finger.

The skipper fumbled in his shirtfront pocket for glasses—bifocals, dammit!—and, placing them low on his nose, craned his head to look at the screen.

"I'll be dipped in shit," the skipper muttered, then continued, a growing excitement in his voice, "Don't just sit there with your teeth in your mouth. Answer it!"

A little shamefaced, the assistant flight director began typing on his keyboard. A series of protocols appeared on the screen. He scrolled through them at practiced speed.
But which is . . . ah, there.
Selecting one, and hitting return, the assistant flight director sent a signal down the line. The signal reached a largish antenna somewhere in the Rockies and was promptly beamed into space. Then came the roughly one hundred and four thousand second wait— about thirty-one hours—while the signal went out to the
Cristobal Colon,
was received and returned.

From that point until the ship was recovered the
Colon
sent an almost continuous stream of the most absolutely, most amazingly impossible data Mission Control, Earth for that matter, had ever received.

There were those who came to wish that the ship, the data, and the program had or would disappear. They had their reasons, and some of those reasons were very good ones.

Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.

—Mathew 5:4

She glided through his dream like a goddess on a cloud; glowing with her own inner light. The halo of her hair shone with semi-divine vitality. Her perfume was the lightest fresh mist in his nostrils. Perfect rounded breasts danced—thinly veiled—before his eyes, enflamed aureoles outlined in the fabric that covered them. As ever, his eyes were dazzled.

She came to her husband, pressing herself against him and inclining her head to be kissed. Her lips opened slightly, dreamily, in invitation.

As they kissed, Pat ran his hands over her back, skin so smooth that but for the seam of the pajamas he couldn't tell where silk left off and equally silky skin began. No matter that she had borne him three children, no mark showed anywhere on her body. Hennessey buried his face in the junction of her neck and shoulder, reveling in the richness of long flowing hair the color of midnight; savoring her warmth, her wondrous scent.

She backed up, pulling and leading him towards the bed. At the bedside, goddess-fingers deftly removed his shirt, undid his belt. As she began to kneel, most un-goddess-like, she whispered, "I love you, Patricio. Only you. Ever . . . forever." Her husband groaned, fingers flexing involuntarily in her hair, as sweet soft lips and roving tongue found and teased.

Sensing the right moment, one of Linda's feet replaced a knee. She arose gracefully, kissing her way upward.

How they moved onto the bed he did not know. Where their clothes went he did not know. One moment they were standing, she in pajamas and he half in working clothes. The next, he lay atop her, the two naked together, her back arched, face flushed with desire. A greedy, grasping hand guided him into her. A small gasp escaped her lips as he began to fill her body as he filled her heart.

For his part it was as if he had entered heated honey. He reveled in the wet heat. His hands roved and stroked, caressed, squeezed, fondled with more than fondness.

Together, they began the age old dance; long slow strokes together. Her moans were more than music to his ears. They inflamed him, drove him on and on, faster and faster. With her moans turning to cries of ecstasy, he groaned, shuddered, spent himself inside her.

Patrick Hennessey smiled in his sleep.

One of the distinguishing features of Terra Nova, with only its three small moons rather than Old Earth's single large one, and its lesser axial tilt, was that the weather tended less to extremes than had the world of Man's birth. This had made certain technologies that had proven suboptimal and unreliable—even dangerous—on Old Earth rather more competitive on the new. One of these differences was that lighter than air aircraft, blimps and dirigibles, were somewhat more practical and safe.

LTA aircraft still had a number of limitations. They were slow, and so—since the development of large, fast and efficient propeller and jet powered passenger aircraft—not generally used anymore for intercontinental passenger service. Materials for building them both light and strong were either expensive or lacking and so they were not generally used for heavy freight. (Though several companies, notably in the Kingdom of Haarlem, the Republic of Northern Uhuru, and Anglia, were working on this.) For war purposes, though the LTAs had been used extensively early on in the Great Global war, they had been found to be simply too big, too slow, too easily spotted and, because of this, altogether too vulnerable. As helium was relatively expensive, and since the weather was so much less of a threat, Terra Novan airships had stuck with using hydrogen for lift. This, too, made them less suitable for military use.

Instead, LTAs kept a niche in local light freight drayage, regional and infracontinental passenger service, and—naturally—sightseeing. There was nothing quite so good as a mid-size LTA for touring the ice fields of southern Secordia, the Great Ravine that roughly bisected the Federated States of Columbia, the Balboa Transitway, or the First Landing skyline.

The five men sat up in First Class, Yusef playing on his guitar and singing in Arabic . . . much to the annoyance of the other passengers and the flight crew. He played his new song, happily unconcerned that the song referenced airplanes and they were actually on an air
ship.
That was the sort of trivial detail only the infidels worried about.

 
"I've been dreamin' fait'f'ly
Dreamin' about the jihad to come
I know deep inside me
The holy war has begun"

The other four men of the team unbuckled themselves and stood in the aisle, clapping their hands, dancing, and singing along:

 
"War plane getting nearer;
RIDE on the war plane!"

One of the other, business class, passengers rang for a stewardess. "Miss, can't you get those bearded heathens to please shut up and sit down?"

"I'll try, sir," she answered, smiling. She walked up to one of the dancers and asked, politely, "Sir, could you please—"

And then the ceramic knives came out.

Hennessey sliced off a bite of ham as he, Parilla and Jimenez took their breakfast in the courtyard, not far from the statue of Linda.

The sun was up, a pleasant breeze blowing. The head of the waterfall was just visible from the spot where they sat. The air was fresh and clean, washed by the previous night's rain. The mosquitoes were vanquished by day. Nor was anything allowed to gather anywhere near the house that might draw or breed flies. There was only the smell of the flowers, Linda's carefully nurtured garden in the courtyard, and of the repast: bacon, ham, eggs, corn tortillas, some cheese Lucinda made herself from the few score cows the Hennesseys owned, mostly for the sake of Linda's family tradition. Above all was the smell of strong Balboan coffee, grown by one of Hennessey's in-laws in a high, cool mountain valley halfway to the southern coast.

The courtyard was doubly screened in, overhead. The finer mesh was intended to keep out mosquitoes and flies. The coarser, steel wire mesh was prevention against entry of the unsavory
antaniae
, nocturnal flying lizards with batlike wings and highly septic mouths. Like tranzitrees, bolshiberry bushes, and progressivines,
antaniae
were neither terrestrial in origin nor Terra Novan, but showed evidence at the cellular level of being artificial creations.

A portion of the screen, a panel of perhaps four feet by six, had receded when light sensors told it the sun had risen enough to drive off the bugs and the winged lizards. Just as Hennessey took the bite of ham an emerald, blue, red and gold reptilian bird—or flying reptile; it was somewhere between the two, though most called them birds— appeared at the opening, circled almost incredibly slowly twice, then descended to land in front of Linda's statue. There it squawked several times before twisting its head to cast an accusing glare at Hennessy.

"She's still not back,
Jinfeng
," Hennessey called to the bird. "Come over for your breakfast."

Hennessey picked up a still warm corn tortilla and held it down between the level of the table and the level of the courtyard's ground. The bird looked at the tortilla, then looked with vast suspicion at Parilla and Jimenez in turn. Hennessey wriggled the flat fried corn cake to distract the bird.

"My friends won't harm you,
Jinfeng
. Come get your chow."

The bird opened its beak wide, wide enough to show that it was lined with teeth. A warning? Possibly.
Jinfeng
and her kind had not survived—so far—on Terra Nova by failing in the paranoia department. Then she waddled over, her long boney tail scrapping along the stone walkway that ran the length, also the breadth, of the courtyard while the claws on her partially reversed big toes went
click-click- click.

She stopped beside Hennessey's chair and reached out with a three-fingered claw sprouting from her wing for the tortilla. Before eating it she gave another screech, this one sounding almost polite. Then she raised the tortilla to her beak and began ripping off pieces with her teeth.

"You don't see many of those around anymore," Parilla commented. "There were a lot more when I was a boy."

"They're smart, you know," Hennessey said. "At least as bright as a grey parrot."

"If they're so smart," Jimenez asked, "why are they nearly extinct?"

"It's the feathers," Parilla answered. "I daresay if you were that good looking, my ebony friend, people would be hunting you, too. Besides, coming near extinction, in the presence of man, is no shame . . . except to man."

"And they still do hang on," Hennessey added, flipping the bird a slice of fried ham that it caught and likewise bolted down. "Linda's been looking for a mate for this one."

"Speaking of hanging on, why did so many of you stay and hang on in the
Estado Mayor
?" Hennessey asked again, as breakfast neared its end. "Don't get me wrong. I think you did the right thing. I admire you dumb bastards, I did even then. But it
was
hopeless."

Jimenez sighed and shrugged. "We knew that. But what's a principle worth? What's honor worth, Patricio?

"Not everybody did stay in the
Comandancia
, you know. Truthfully, I do not know how many took off as the screen between the Transitway Zone and the
Estado Mayor
collapsed. For a certainty, very few of the real thugs Piña brought in stayed."

"We found well over a hundred bodies inside," Hennessey reminded. "And only the five of you that were too badly wounded to fight were taken prisoner."

Jimenez winced. "Oh, I know, Patricio."

"Damn shame. You had some good kids with you that day."

Jimenez smiled. "Yes. They were the best, the ones who wouldn't give up."

Parilla interjected while spreading butter on a piece of toast, "You will note, young Patricio, that those were men Herrera and
I
trained, for the most part—the old guard. I wish to hell we had their like again in the uniform of the country."