STARGATE ATLANTIS: The Furies (Book 4 in the Legacy series) (21 page)

Of course it snowed buckets the entire week. She was coming from Florida, from Tyndall Air Fo
rce Base, and all her clothes from when they’d been posted in colder places were long since outgrown. So Sam pretty much froze to death the entire week.

“It’ll be a great experience for you,” her dad had said. “A little taste of the best and brightest from
all across the country, just like the Academy will be next year.”

If that was so, she hoped the Academy would have more science people. Presidential Classroom was full of social studies people, debate team captains and kids who read the Atlantic Monthly.
Debate had never been her strong suit, and she felt distinctly outclassed. There were lots of structured discussions where you signed up to present one side or another of a topical issue and argued it to your peers, or where a group was assigned to come u
p with a position paper or a solution on something thorny. Thankfully, you could kind of steer what task forces you wound up on. Sam was a lot happier with strategic missile arms control than she was with migrant farmworkers.

Fortunately, her roommate, Si
b, was one of those social science people, though she was way into space too. She also owned sweaters in a size that fit Sam, a definite plus since she was freezing her buns off. She was a good four inches shorter than Sam, with long brown hair all the way
to her waist, and she talked incessantly. Not that it was bad. It made it easier to make friends.

“Sib is short for?” Sibling was all Sam could think of, and that was kind of a weird nickname.

“Sibyl,” her roommate said, throwing herself down on the bed
in her blue and purple painted jeans. “That’s not my real name either, but one of my friends started calling me that in ninth grade and now everybody does.”

“Because you see the future?” Sam asked.

“Or the past.” Sib curled her legs up under her. “So we’
re on the same team to present the pro position for the Strategic Defense Initiative at the session tomorrow night. Got anything nice you want to say about Star Wars?”

“Well, obviously a missile shield will be very expensive,” Sam said, carefully mustering
her thoughts. “The number of payloads required to launch it is going to be extraordinary, even if many of them aren’t space shuttle missions. Even if they’re good old Titans launched from Vandenberg.”

“So they’re going to say it’s too expensive,” Sib said
.

“How much is too expensive?” Sam asked. “Bigger than the entire budget of Strategic Air Command? Because that’s how expensive it would have to be not to be worth it. If we can spend the money on parallel weapons systems to create parity, we can spend the
money on anti-missile systems to reduce threat.”

“How big is SAC’s budget anyhow? And how much are the Vandenberg launches?” Sib deferred to her on things military in a very gratifying way, having discovered she was an Air Force brat.

“Big,” Sam said. “A
nd the Vandenberg launches are pretty affordable. I can call my dad and ask him first thing in the morning. He’ll know and then we can provide an exact budgetary comparison.”

“Cool,” Sib said. “We’ve got the White House tour in the morning, and then in the
afternoon it’s small breakout sessions. Which one are you going to?”

“I don’t know yet,” Sam said. “I haven’t decided. How about you?”

“The one on Solidarity,” Sib said promptly. “The speaker is a Polish dissident who defected in Norway. It sounds pretty
interesting.”

Sam flipped open her schedule. “I was thinking about the one with the Russian Air Force officer from the Russian embassy.”

“That would be smart for you,” Sib said. “It’s always a good idea to know your enemy.”

Sam had never been in the White
House before. It was big and had lots of gilded things. They’d only gotten as far as the East Room when Secret Service agents came pouring out of the woodwork, herding all the kids together and talking quietly with their group leader, hands on the headset
s in their ears.

“We’ve got to leave,” the group leader said. “We don’t know why.” She looked worried. She wasn’t a teacher. She was with the Department of the Interior, doing this as a special assignment for a few months. And so they hurried back out int
o weak sunshine, to their bus waiting a block away on 16
^th
street.

“What do you suppose that was about?” one of the guys in the group asked Sam, possibly by way of making conversation.

“No idea,” she said, concentrating on not slipping in her summer dres
s shoes on the icy sidewalks.

She didn’t have winter dress shoes. Her old ones had been outgrown a long time ago, and it wasn’t the kind of thing her dad noticed. If she said anything to him about it, he’d just boggle at her. “Holy Hannah, Samantha! Buy s
ome shoes! You’ve got the Master Card.”

And she did. She was seventeen. She could drive. She could go to the mall anytime and buy herself some shoes, or whatever else she wanted. Her dad would never notice or complain, not unless she spent a thousand doll
ars or something. She could buy really expensive Outback Red, or any kind of makeup or accessories she wanted. He wouldn’t tell the difference and it would be ridiculously easy to hide anything from him. He had no idea what girls’ clothes cost and he’d nev
er notice if she left the house with her belly button showing.

But she didn’t. Sam was responsible. She was really, really responsible. And her mom wouldn’t have liked it if she’d done that, taken advantage of Jacob’s ignorance and inattention. After all,
it wasn’t easy for him, trying to raise two kids by himself. Mark had only been nine when it happened. He was fourteen now and an athlete. Sam made sure he had lunch money and always took his cleats to school on the right days, that his gym clothes were c
lean and that his laundry was done. She wasn’t sure what was going to happen next year when she was gone. But Mark would be fifteen. He could maybe do his own laundry.

Also it hadn’t occurred to her she’d need winter dress shoes. And her dad would frown at
that. “Samantha, it’s DC in January! What were you thinking?”

Well, she wasn’t. But she’d better start, because nobody was going to do her thinking for her.

They went to McDonalds at the corner of New York Avenue. Their group leader couldn’t think what e
lse to do with them for about two hours, but they could hang around McDonalds while she called people and tried to find out if she was supposed to take them back to the Shoreham or what. Sam sat in the window munching on a sausage biscuit, looking out at t
he late morning business people rushing by in the dress for success uniforms of professional DC. She might be here for real someday, assigned to the Pentagon, working on a top secret project. That would be pretty cool.

Sib was scribbling in a notebook she
carried everywhere in her purse, her head bent over her sparkly purple pen.

“What are you doing?”

“Notes about SDI,” Sib said. “For the debate tonight. I’m trying to get the main ideas down to three points. What’s the biggest reason you support SDI?”

Sam
folded her hands around her coke. “Because it’s inevitable.”

Sib looked up. “Well, it is. But we’ve got to do better than that. Elaborate.”

“I guess…” Sam considered. “It’
s not like nuclear weapons are going to go away. I mean, unless we do nuke ourselves back to the Dark Ages, it’s not like the entire field of nuclear physics is going to be forgotten. There are always going to be nuclear weapons, and there are always going
to be situations where somebody thinks it’s a good idea to use one. The only way, in the entire history of warfare, that we’ve ever gotten rid of a weapon is to render it obsolete.”

“Ok,” Sib said. “That’s point one. The only way to get rid of nukes is to
render them obsolete.”

“A missile defense would do that,” Sam said. “I mean, eventually. What’s the point in building dangerous things that are really expensive if you know that whether you launch them on missiles or use strategic bombers they can be shot
down from space before they can deliver their payloads? They become like fortifications — big, expensive, clumsy things that don’t give you a tactical advantage. We don’t build castles anymore because they don’t do any good. They’re a waste of money and t
ime. If nukes were just a big waste of time, there would be no reason to maintain an arsenal.”

“That works for me,” Sib said, scribbling away. “So why SDI? They’re
going to say that a space based missile defense system is impossible. It’s sci fi. And that
this is just a big bonus for the defense contractors, since it doesn’t work.”

“It doesn’t work yet,” Sam said. “No technology works the minute you think of it. It may take fifty years to work completely. Dramatic changes in the balance of offensive and def
ensive weaponry tend to take a while.”

Sib looked up. “I totally see why you’re going to the Air Force Academy.”

Sam shrugged. “I think this stuff is fun.”

“So do I.”

“You guys!” A guy at another table stood up, a geeky guy with longish hair who looked to
tally out of place in his dress code blue blazer. He had a walkman on his head, holding the earphones against his ear in the loud restaurant. “You guys, the space shuttle just blew up!”

“Yeah, right Darryl!” One of the guys at his table laughed. “Way to pu
t us on.”

“No, for real.” Sam twisted around in her seat, a sudden cold in the pit of her stomach. No. It wasn’t a joke, not with that expression on his face, not with that look in his eyes. “It really blew up.”

“Was there a launch today?” Sib said quietly
as four or five people started asking questions.

“Yes,” Sam said. “The one with the teacher in space. It was supposed to be about forty five minutes ago.” She always watched the launches if she could. She’d known she was going to miss this one, with Presi
dential Classroom and the White House tour. “Oh my God.”

“What?’

“That’s what happened at the White House.”

Sib looked at her, and Sam thought her face must have the same stricken look.

“It’s on the radio,” the guy said, as all around him the restaurant we
nt still, construction workers with their thermoses frozen at the counter, business people stopping in their tracks. The woman on the register drew a deep, shaky breath. “About two minutes into the launch,” he said, repeating what he was hearing. “The boos
ter tanks separated. They don’t know what happened.”