Of Fire and Night - Kevin J. Anderson [104]
He scrubbed his hands on a rag. The friction of his actions released a solvent woven into the fabric, and the stains quickly vanished from his fingers and knuckles. "What are you talking about?"
Maureen looked away as if she had failed him somehow. "I couldn't convince them to make any exceptions. I used every favor I had left, but the Chairman's instructions are utterly rigid."
Exasperated, Fitzpatrick slammed the hood of the Mustang. "Are you aware that you aren't making any sense?"
She stared at him as if she couldn't believe he was so out of touch. "In the aftermath of the Soldier compy revolt, you've been called back to duty. Everyone has. Even I'll be doing a lot of special projects behind the scenes."
"What are you talking about?"
"All resignations and retirements have been rescinded, effective immediately. Every trained member of the Earth Defense Forces has to be deployed to protect our planet. Every single one. Killer robots are coming, and probably the hydrogues too. It's only a matter of time."
Patrick's hands went numb, and the cleaning rag fell to the sealed floor of the service bay. Maureen stepped forward as if tempted to hug him, but then thought better of it. "You're going back into battle. To the front lines."
60
ZHETT KELLUM
Golgen's hydrogen-rich clouds turned a lemony tan in the spreading rays of sunrise. Floating free above the sky-ocean was a lot better than being cramped with the humorless Kowalski clan members at Forrey's Folly. Zhett's father was right--skymining was what Roamers were born to do.
Early Golgen cloud harvesters had discovered a thin temperate zone where the oxygen and nitrogen balance created pockets of habitability. When a skymine cruised in this layer, containment fields, oxygen condensers, and heaters allowed for an open deck. Zhett could stand here all by herself and listen to the winds whistling across the storm bands.
The empty skies seemed an unsettling and lonely place punctuated by rising chemical plumes. She watched, attuned for any sort of stirring below. Would she see an ominous ripple in the cloudbanks if a warglobe were to cut through the mists? This was the first place the drogues had ever struck, destroying the Blue Sky Mine in misguided retaliation for the Big Goose's Klikiss Torch test.
Yes, the Big Goose certainly had a talent for pissing people off. She gripped the red-painted rail. The metal was cold, but she squeezed hard, imagining it might be someone's scrawny neck. Someone like Patrick Fitzpatrick III . . .
Zhett shook her head to clear her thoughts. Supposedly, the Kellum skyminers had nothing to worry about from hydrogues. If Jess Tamblyn had pronounced Golgen free of the enemy, then she believed him. She had flirted with the handsome man when he'd delivered water from Plumas, but she could tell that Jess's heart belonged to someone else--someone whose love caused him more pain than joy. But though he was smitten with another woman and didn't know a good thing when Zhett offered it to him, she was sure Jess had never lied to her. Unlike certain other people . . .
"Out to watch the early morning operations, my sweet?"
Her father wore a warm vest and kept gloves clipped to his belt. Even filtered and tamed by the containment field, the brisk wind made her cheeks rosy. "What difference does the hour make, Dad? You keep operations going around the clock."
Kellum laughed. "It's good to see that my baby daughter understands business. You'll be a fine facility manager someday."
Sinuous probes dropped into the upwelling atmosphere as the skymine drifted along. Intake and feed tanks gulped gaseous mixtures into separating chambers and ekti reactors, which converted hydrogen into stardrive fuel. Waste gases spilling from the exhaust funnel propelled the facility along. Maintenance ships flitted around the perimeter. Suited workers in jetpacks circled the junctions of the modules, inspecting