Kitabı oku: «Luna Marine»
Luna Marine:
Book Two of
the Heritage Trilogy
Ian Douglas
Contents
Prologue
Sound did not carry well in near vacuum, but Dr.David…
One
“Okay, gorgeous. Let’s get you out of those clothes, first.”
Two
Marine Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway leaned forward and bounced, easing herself…
Three
Sergeant Frank Kaminski stood in line with the other members…
Four
A lobber hop on the Moon was nowhere near as…
Five
The missile struck the LSCP from the right and from…
Six
“So, David,” the other archeologist said, cuddling close in his…
Seven
The Moon filled the black sky, half-full from this vantage…
Eight
“So, anyway,” Kaminksi said, “I was wonderin’ if we could,…
Nine
Jack Ramsey—Private Jack Ramsey, US Marine Corps—stood at a rigid…
Ten
There were no marching crowds today, for a change, no…
Eleven
“It is the finding of this court that Sergeant Frank…
Twelve
“Okay, ladies,” Gunnery Sergeant Knox said, grinning. He was holding…
Thirteen
David was whistling as he entered the broad, skylight-illuminated lobby…
Fourteen
“We have a problem,” the tall man said. “And an…
Fifteen
“Well, Dr. Alexander,” Carruthers said with a smile. “Are you enjoying…
Sixteen
The FBI special agent was different, this time, not Carruthers,…
Seventeen
General Montgomery Warhurst took his seat next to his boss,…
Eighteen
“I just can’t tell you how good it is to…
Nineteen
The met-boys were calling for another day with a high…
Twenty
Jack stood at rigid attention in front of Captain Thomas…
Twenty-One
The main body of 2034L was considerably smaller than it…
Twenty-Two
When the knock sounded on the door, David very nearly…
Twenty-Three
They called them LAVs, but the M340A1 Armored Personnel Carrier…
Twenty-Four
Communicating with Earth was a real problem for the Rim…
Twenty-Five
On the floor of the crater, the LAV could make…
Twenty-Six
Jack pulled his helmet down until the ring lock engaged,…
Twenty-Seven
Jack ducked through the aft airlock hatch and jumped, landing…
Twenty-Eight
“Damn, Sam. I don’t know how we’re going to pull…
Epilogue
“Lance Corporal Jack Ramsey, front and center!”
Other Books by Ian Douglas
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
8 AUGUST 2040
Cave of Wonders, Cydonia, Mars
1445 hours MMT
Sound did not carry well in near vacuum, but Dr. David Alexander felt the slight, ringing vibration of each step through the insulation of his Marsuit boots. There’d been no sound within this chamber in…how long? The team’s best guess was half a million years.
“Halfway across the catwalk,” he said, speaking into the needle mike positioned close by his lips. “Twenty meters.” Over the headset clamped down over his ears, he could hear the unsteady rasp of his own breathing, the hiss-thump of his backpack PLSS. His breath, hot and moist, fogged his helmet visor with each exhalation, a white smear immediately dissolved by the stream of cool air blowing past his face.
“Ah, we copy that, Aladdin,” a voice crackled in his ears. “You’re looking good.”
Aladdin. The radio handle was a last-minute joke concocted by Ed Pohl that morning, back at C-Prime. Naming this place the Cave of Wonders had been his idea, after he’d seen the first transmissions from the penetrator robot three days ago.
It could as easily have been Ali Baba. The cavern, apparently, required a human presence to operate it, a living open, sesame to switch on power and lights and to open doors. Robots massing one hundred kilos and programmed to radiate at thirty-seven degrees—human body temperature—had failed to learn anything about the long-sealed chamber. Alexander, claiming the right as the one who’d found the cavern entrance in the first place, had volunteered to go in. He was, he estimated, a hundred meters into the vast and labyrinthine complex hollowed out beneath the Cydonian Face, and perhaps ten meters beneath the surface of the ground outside.
“Aladdin, we’re seeing an increase in heart rate and respiration. Please check your O2 mix.”
“Copy.” His eyes flicked to the med and PLSS readouts mirrored above and to the right of his visor, checking that all were well in the green. Of course his heart and breathing were faster, the idiots! “O-two at six-point-three. Systems nominal. Fifteen meters.”
“Ah, roger that, Aladdin. Watch the hyperventilation.”
That sounded like Doc Penkov. He could imagine all of the Team members back at Cydonia Prime, crowded into the radio shack as they followed his progress. Only Devora Druzhinova and Louis Vandemeer were on the surface today, now waiting just outside the tunnel entrance in case he needed help.
The catwalk of black metal trembled harder with his next few steps, and he stopped, gripping the pencil-thin guardrails to either side until the motion dampened itself out. His heart was pounding hard now, beneath the breastplate of his suit. At last, he was inside the Face….
The Face…first observed on photographs transmitted to Earth late in the previous century by the Viking orbiters and subsequently confirmed by other robot spacecraft. The Face…enigma and lure, drawing scientists like David Alexander to probe its secrets, held in silence now for half a million years. Even now, with all the evidence of the ancient ruins uncovered on the Cydonian plain, with the uncanny discovery of flash-frozen and desiccated corpses of long-dead archaic Homo sapiens on Mars, there were some who yet thought the two-kilometer-long mesa’s vague and sandblasted resemblance to a human face to be the product of chance and human psychology.
The discovery of the Cave of Wonders had all but put to rest that notion. Sometime between four and five hundred thousand years ago, someone had reshaped a natural landform, giving it the vaguely apelike, vaguely human features that had attracted so much comment when they were first noticed sixty years before. At the same time, they’d hollowed out the Cave in the bedrock beneath the towering mesa, connecting it by a long, descending, and carefully sealed tunnel to the well-hidden entrance on the Face’s eastern corner, just below the left end of the harsh-carved canyon slash that formed the Face’s mouth.
Once, the Cave had been airtight, accessed through a series of airlocks that still worked at the touch of a gloved, human hand. But even solid rock is porous over geological time. The air within this enormous chamber—radar probings had established that it was a spherical cavern half a kilometer across—had leaked out long ago. The air pressure inside now stood at a little below ten millibars, the temperature constant at minus fifteen degrees Celsius.
Alexander tried not to look down. The catwalk seemed impossibly frail, a spider’s web of black, interlacing threads woven into a deck that felt solid and metallic enough but was hard to see against the deeper black of the two-hundred-meter depths below. Ahead, a pale light—a white-yellow glow a meter across without visible source—illuminated the end of the catwalk; the only other light in the place came from the worklights mounted on the shoulders of his suit and from the telltales inside his helmet.
“Ten meters,” he said.
“Hold it, Aladdin. Can you pan for us?”
“Roger. Panning to the right.” Carefully, he turned himself in place, allowing the camera mounted on the outside of his helmet to relay the view across a full three-sixty. He could see nothing but black; the cavern swallowed his worklights in impenetrable darkness, but the camera would be picking up frequencies invisible to his eye. Perhaps they were enjoying a better view of things than he, back at the Team HQ.
Alexander thought of Howard Carter. On November 26, 1922, after a long dig and repeated disappointments, the British archeologist had chiseled a narrow hole through a stone door separating him from another world, in a long-sealed tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. Air thirty centuries old, hot and stale, had gusted from the opening; a candle thrust through the hole flickered but remained lit, proving the air breathable.
Carter’s heart must have been pounding as hard as Alexander’s was now, his breathing as fast and as uneven, as he carefully enlarged the hole and peered through. The candle’s flame had been captured and flung back at him by myriad polished surfaces of pure gold.
“Can you see anything?” Lord Carnarvon, his partner and the expedition’s backer, has asked, close at his shoulder.
“Yes,” Carter had replied, his voice cracking with emotion. “Yes, wonderful things!”
Alexander knew now exactly what Carter must have felt as he first addressed that sealed, stone door leading to the tomb of Tutankhamen.
“Still not a lot to see,” the voice said over his headset, “even at IR freaks. Maybe this thing is a bust after all.”
Alexander refused to even consider the possibility. “I’m moving again. Eight meters.”
It could not be a bust. It couldn’t. So far, except for the automated controls on the airlock doors on the way in, there’d been no positive indication that there was anything inside this sealed, empty sphere worth exploring. Even so, Alexander had suggested the name Cave of Wonders in what was for him an atypically romantic whim; no one knew what they would find in the chamber, though speculation had ranged from living quarters for the transplanted humans who’d worked here, to some kind of operational center for the yet-unknown intelligences who’d brought early hominids to this place, to a starship, intact and filled with secrets buried these past five hundred millennia.
The last few steps toward the end of the catwalk, suspended high above an invisible floor and surrounded by darkness absolute, were the hardest steps David Alexander had ever taken. He was drawn on, however, by wonder and by Howard Carter’s ghost. Like Carter, he was standing at a doorway opening to another world.
But he still needed to find the key….
“Five meters,” he said. “I’m…I’m entering the lighted area now.” The sourceless glow seemed to hover above a widening in the walkway, a structure that reminded him, disconcertingly, of the harpoon gunner’s bowsprit platform on an old-time whaling vessel.
Light surrounded him. He raised his gloved hands, staring at the white material. St. Elmo’s fire danced from the fingertips, cold and otherworldly. His fingertips traced blue arcs in the air…
…and the cavern was no longer shrouded in blackness. From his vantage point, suspended near the center of that kilometer-wide chamber, it seemed as though he was in the middle of a perfectly spherical swarm of stars, each star rigidly locked with the geometric perfection of the other stationary stars around it. There were thousands of them, in orderly, regimented splendor. Fainter glows floated among the ranked stars, forming oddly regular sweeps and streaks and dots that might have been words, an alien script felt more than seen.
“Ah, Control,” he called, his breathing coming faster still. “Are you picking this up?”
“Roger that, Aladdin. We see…something, but we’re not sure what we’re seeing. What do you make of it?”
“I’m…not…sure….”
As he focused on one section of that far-off wall of stars, one marked by one of the alien-script words, it seemed as though one section of the spherical surface—twenty degrees, perhaps—broke off and rushed toward him, each star becoming a tiny, polished facet, like a jewel.
Or…like a display screen or monitor.
How was the illusion accomplished? Was he seeing something real? Or was it in his mind?
Alexander blinked, hard. Sweat was trickling down his face, tickling his nose and stinging his eyes, and he yearned to be able to reach up and wipe it away. His mouth felt as dry as the thin, dry vacuum of the Martian atmosphere. He was looking now at an array of tiny, rectangular TV screens, an array at least fifty rectangles wide and fifty high…or were they, in fact, tiny? He had no way of judging scale. They might have been the size of a thumbnail, suspended a few centimeters in front of his eyes, or the size of a theater’s holoscreen, each three stories tall. Without a frame of reference, there was no way to tell.
“Aladdin! We’re not seeing anything here. Can you describe what you’re seeing?”
The clear majority of those screens, he saw—perhaps two thousand of them or more—were blank. But on the others…
He picked out one that was alive with a reddish hue, straining to make out the scene he could just distinguish glowing in its depths. Abruptly, and silently, the screen expanded until it filled his field of vision.
“Aladdin!” the voice called, tinny in his ears. “Aladdin! Can you see anything?”
It took Alexander a long time to answer. “Yes,” he replied at last. “Wonderful things!…”
ONE
SATURDAY, 5 APRIL 2042
Ramsey Residence
Greensburg, Pennsylvania
1635 hours EST
“Okay, gorgeous. Let’s get you out of those clothes, first.”
“But, Jack…all of them? How far do you want me to go? I mean, I’m outside, and the neighbors might—”
“I want you naked, babe.” Not that the bikini top and tight, red slacks she was wearing now left all that much to the imagination. “Make yourself starkers. For me.”
John Charles Ramsey—he preferred the name Jack—leaned a bit closer as he watched the young woman on the flatscreen that dominated one wall of his room. She gave him a sultry pout, one filled with lust-churning promise, then started slowly unzipping her pants. She was lounging on a folding chaise next to an outdoor pool, where the sunlight turned her long hair to spun gold, and she had to wiggle a bit to get the slacks down off her hips. Jack licked his lips once, then reached down to unzip his own pants.
Before long, the woman was naked, seated in that tailor’s seat, show-all pose that Jack loved best. She leaned back with catlike grace, closing her eyes and smiling dreamily as she started gently fingering her blond-tufted cleft. “Oooh, Jack,” she breathed.
“Yeah, Sam. Oh, yeah. Do it. Do it….” His hand was inside his shorts, now, squeezing with slow, deep movements. God, she was beautiful….
“I want you, Sam,” he told her, leaning even closer to the screen. The way those big, hard-nippled breasts bobbed and circled with her quickening motions was pure heaven, especially when she reached up with her free hand and rubbed them. “Oh, God, I want you, Sam.”
“Oooh, and I want you, Jack. I want you right here, inside me….”
“Jack?”
“Mom!” He started violently, bumping hard against his desk top and nearly falling out of the chair. At the code word “Mom,” the image of Sam and her breast-heaving passion dissolved in a cloud of rippling pixels, replaced in a startled heartbeat by an elderly man with a bushy mustache, bright eyes, and a white linen suit, standing in a library or book-filled study.
The door to Jack’s room, just to the left of the screen, opened, and his mother walked in. She glanced at the screen, then at Jack, who was pulling himself and his chair awkwardly up close against his desk. “Are you okay, dear? I thought I heard you…talking to someone.”
“Um, sure, Mom. I was just talking to Sam, here. You know, Sam Clemens? My agent?”
“Howdy, Ms. Ramsey,” Sam said in a pleasant, homespun Missouri drawl.
“Oh, of course, dear,” she said, ignoring the AI agent. “I just wanted to tell you that your Aunt Liana just arrived. I think it would be nice if you came down and said hello.”
“Aw, now?”
“That’s the general idea.”
“Uh, I’ll be down in just a few, Mom. Sam here is helping me download some stuff.”
“That’s fine.”
She paused to glance at the recruiting posters decorating much of the wall space not taken up by the monitor. Above Jack’s bed, a grinning, life-size Marine in crisp Class As snapped a salute, held it, dropped it, then saluted again in an endlessly animated cycle. “The Marines Want YOU” was emblazoned across the bottom of the sheet, the letters cycling through the entire spectrum, as Valkyries streaked through the sky in the background. Nearby by was a large, full-color poster of the flag-raising at Cydonia, five US Marines in vacuum armor, hoisting a small American flag on a length of pipe against the pink sky and rusty stone backdrop of Mars. The photo was signed by David Alexander, the civilian archeologist who’d taken the photograph.
The man who also happened to be Jack’s uncle.
“Come on down when you’re ready. Just don’t take too long.”
She pulled the door shut behind her, and Jack loosed a long, heartfelt sigh of relief. That had been entirely too close; usually, he could hear her coming up the stairs, but that time he’d nearly been caught. He thought again about a pressure-sensitive switch with a PC-radio link he’d seen in World Electronics for fifty bucks. It might be worth it, to be able to flash an alarm whenever Mom started up the steps. If she ever caught on to “Sam’s” alter ego…
“It’s okay, Samantha,” he whispered. “She’s gone. But, uh, keep your voice down, okay?”
At the name Samantha, Samuel Longhorn Clemens pixel-flickered back into the guise of a blond, naked, twenty-year-old woman, standing this time in the Clemens library. Jack himself was seventeen, an age particularly susceptible to the charms of commercial AI net agents who looked and spoke and undressed like her. Software packages like Samantha—the thought of the word “software” made him vent a quiet, frustratedly longing groan—were supposedly restricted to people twenty-one and older, but it was easy enough to get around those rules, especially if you had a buddy with a valid Net ID. The net vendors, mostly, just wanted your recorded assurance that you were twenty-one so that they didn’t get into trouble if you got caught. Damn it, the United States still had such uptight and puritanical laws about sex. It wasn’t like you couldn’t go to any public beach or download any movie these days without seeing plenty of nudity, all ages, all sexes, all orientations.
“Maybe I should go ahead and get those downloads,” he told her.
Reaching up, she cupped her full breasts, rubbing her nipples between her fingers. “Whatever you say…Jack. But, oooh, I would just love it if you could download me.” Watching her, it was impossible to think of her as anything other than a flesh-and-blood woman. Net agents, however, artificially intelligent programs designed to search the Net for information and to serve as secretaries, librarians, search specialists, data valets, and even personal stand-ins, were the most visible aspects of the ongoing computer revolution, and they could look like anyone, or anything, their owners desired.
“Whatcha got for me?”
She leaned forward in the screen, drawing a deep, slow breath. “Lots….”
A window opened to the left of the screen, the image adjusting itself so that none of Sam’s lush anatomy was obscured. A succession of images—military aircraft, tanks, troops, and ships flashed across the screen window. “I have two hundred twenty-seven news downloads,” Sam told him, “dealing with the war. Eighty-five of those are cross-linked with stories about the US Marine Corps.”
“Just gimme a summary.”
“Of course, Jack. In summation of the most important stories, extensive fighting is continuing near Chapayevsk and Saratov, where Moslem troops continue their advance into southern Russia, and at Vladivostok, where PRC troops are threatening to break through the Russian-American lines. US forces entered the towns of Navajoa and Ciudad Camargo yesterday, completing operations in Sonora and Chihuahua. According to Secretary of Defense Archibald Severin, ‘The threat of Mexico forcing the creation of their so-called Aztlan Republic, carved out of the American Southwest, has been effectively and permanently neutralized.’”
As she spoke, she let one hand slide down between her legs, gently caressing. Jack’s attention was torn between her and the rapid-fire succession of download imagery. On the screen, greasy black smoke boiled into the sky behind a war-damaged Capitol dome. Other scenes showed fire-fighters and disaster crews picking their way through tumbledown rubble and smoking craters.
“Four American cities,” Sam continued, “Washington, Atlanta, Boston, and Miami, were hit by EU ship-or sub-launched cruise missiles last night. Damage and casualties are reportedly light. The president said today that—”
“Never mind that. Let’s hear the stories about the Corps.”
“Of course, Jack. In Cuba, the launch sites at Matanzas and Sagua la Grande are now firmly under US control. Elements of the 1st Marines are advancing on Habana, and reports of mass surrenders of starving Cuban soldiers have been reported by most major news networks.
“In the Russian Far East today, the 1st and 3rd Battalions of the 5th Marines, fighting alongside battle-hardened elements of the 43rd and 115th Russian Armies, repulsed what was described as a major human-wave assault south of Laka Khanka near the city of Ussuriysk—”
“Skip it, Sam. Space news.”
“Whatever you say, Jack. There are fifteen new stories dealing with space, including one cross-indexed to the US Marines and to the war.”
“Shibui! Now you’re talking! Let me hear that one, Sam.”
The window showed a stock photo of the moon, shot from space. “Reports of a military expedition to the moon by a special assault force of US Marines trained in space-combat techniques have been circulating in Washington today, but all attempts to confirm or deny these reports have so far failed. It has been confirmed that a Zeus II heavy-lift booster took off from Vandenberg early this morning with an estimated ninety to one hundred Marines aboard. Official agencies have responded only with ‘no comment’ to speculations that the Marines are bound for the UN-held base in the lunar crater Fra Mauro. There are no images associated with this story.”
“Okay. Save it, and I’ll look at that one a bit later. Anything on aliens?”
“There are twelve stories dealing with extraterrestrials or aliens, including three new additions to the Cave of Wonders database.”
“Sugoi shibui! Lemme see those now.”
“Of course, Jack. One of those stories mentions your Uncle David.”
“Hey, yatta! Play that one first.”
“Whatever you say, Jack.”
Jack didn’t mind admitting that he was space-crazy. A lot of his friends were, especially since the intriguing discovery of ancient humans on Mars had been publicized two years ago. The fact that his archeologist uncle, Dr. David Alexander, had been the sonic-imager technician on that expedition—and the man who’d smuggled out news of the discovery at the very beginning of the war—just made it that much better. And some of what they’d been coming up with, lately, from the incredible mass of data gathered within the Cave of Wonders…
His uncle’s face came up in the window, as secondary windows opened to show the red Martian landscape, the now-famous Cydonian Face, and a montage of images taken from the immense chamber beneath the Face. Jack leaned a bit closer, his heart pounding, as he looked at those images.
Images from other worlds.
His uncle was talking. “Full screen, Sam.”
“Of course, Jack.”
The view of David Alexander filled the screen, replacing Samantha’s tanned and naked body. There were a few things that Jack found more fascinating than pretty women.
“…and so we’ve been able to identify another alien race from the data we’ve brought back,” the man was saying. He was wearing a safari jacket with the Mars-Face emblem of the Cydonian Research Foundation over the left breast pocket. “Of course we don’t know what they called themselves, but we call them Race Eighty-four, because they’re the eighty-fourth distinct species we’ve been able to isolate for study.”
Another window expanded in the picture, showing a…face. It was recognizable as such, at least, which was more than could be said with many of the eighty-three other beings glimpsed on the display screens found within the Cave of Wonders. The eyes were startling, large and golden and horizontally slit by a jagged black line that must have been a pupil; the head was more like that of a fish or reptile, a mottled apple green and green-yellow, with a low skull crest and glistening scales like fine chain mail. There were no external ears that Jack could see, but there was a recognizable nose and a lipless, black-rimmed mouth in a more or less human arrangement on the head.
Lizard-man, Jack thought, heart pounding. Fish-man. It looked so human it almost looked hokey, like one of those man-in-latex monsters that still occasionally waddled through the cheaper varieties of sci-fi late movies, the ones made decades ago, before the advent of digital characters and programmable AI agents. He wondered what its hands looked like, and whether or not it had a tail.
“The other end of this particular communications link,” Alexander said, “is still working, apparently has been working for thousands of years. We think, from what we’ve learned so far, that the Eighty-fours must have been an advanced, technic species perhaps ten to twelve thousand years ago. Now, they seem to be barely above the stone age, if that. We have no idea what happened.
“We also don’t know how the communications complex at Cydonia managed to connect with the Eighty-fours’ home world, especially since Cydonia is something like half a million years old. Each of the active screens within the Cave of Wonders, however, has large amounts of encoded information, information which, we believe, includes data on that species’s language, culture, history, and biology. In time, we might be able to learn more about the Eighty-fours, as well as the other races we’ve glimpsed so far, and discover what connection they may have with the Builders of so long ago.
“What makes this one especially interesting,” Alexander continued, “is that we’ve been able to identify the home star of these people…and they’re close. Real close!”
The alien face was replaced by a landscape and a darkening, alien sky. It looked as though the scene had been shot from the open-air top of some kind of high, flat-topped building; in the distance, fading into the shadows, something like an ancient Mayan step pyramid rose from a black jungle, with stairways sloping up each face and ornate carvings worked into the stone. Two moons, crescents bowed away from the red-orange twilight glow at the horizon, hung in a purple sky. The stars were just coming out….
“It appears that their end of the communication link with Cydonia is now an object of veneration, of sorts. They have it set up atop one of their distinctive pyramids—we think it’s a temple of some kind—and so we’ve been able to watch a number of the local sunsets…and we’ve been able to match the constellations we can glimpse in their sky with constellations in our sky, changed a little, of course…but recognizably the same as constellations in our own sky.”
Lines drew themselves from star to star in the landscape, picking out a familiar hourglass shape with three bright stars across the middle. The hourglass lay on its side instead of standing upright and was slightly distorted by parallax, but it was obviously Orion; it could be none other.
“What is truly spectacular about this find,” Alexander went on, “is the fact that these, these people, the Eighty-fours, are living right now on a world circling the star we call Lalande 21185. A star that is only about eight and a quarter light-years away….”
“Wow!” Jack said, the word long, drawn-out, and breathless. Why, eight light-years was right next door as far as interstellar distances went, just less than twice the distance to Alpha Centauri. It meant that intelligent life must be dirt-common throughout the Galaxy…though the number of races represented on those display screens in the Cave of Wonders had pretty well established that.
The face of the Eighty-four reappeared as Alexander kept discussing the find. Jack found himself wondering what they called themselves…and whether they’d had anything to do with the structures on Mars.
Or with the ancient humans found there. It didn’t sound like their civilization was that old. But…what were they doing at the other end of that magical, faster-than-light communications device buried beneath the Face on Mars?
“Jack!” Another window opened on the screen, and his mother looked out at him. “Jack, are you coming?”
Jack started. Damn! He’d let the time get away from him. “Sorry, Mom! I’ll be right down! Uh, halt program,” he said. Windows closed, leaving only the bright-eyed electronic ghost of Mark Twain on the screen. The word “Mom” had reactivated his incarnation. “Uh, save all this stuff, Sam,” he said. “I’ll have to go over it later!”
“Whatever you say, Jack,” Sam drawled. “’Minds me that I still have t’run down that data on spacecraft converted to military operations you asked fer this morning. I got some, but I’m still followin’ up some leads, like the good newsman that I am.” He winked. “Catch you later.”
He sighed. He was really proud of the Samantha—Sam Clemens crossover, which he’d hacked out himself from two separate sets of vendored software. Sometimes, he felt guilty about deceiving his mom…but, then, Mom wouldn’t understand about Samantha. She didn’t understand a lot of things….
The display flicked to the screen saver his mother had bought him last year as an “educational” gift—a tedious succession of abstract animated light paintings by various modern artists. He had others that he preferred, but he let them run only when he was sure his mother wasn’t going to come barging into his room. He checked his fly, steeled himself, then strolled out of his room and onto the open landing above the house’s main den.
