The Lotus Eaters Read Online Free PDF Page B

his head.
    Which is precisely why we're going to see the son of a bitch. We need him, now as never before, and he's got to snap out of it.
    * * *
    To snap Carrera out of it was something easier said than done. He'd always been a pretty tough sort, so everyone agreed, but the combination of ten years of the continuous strain of command in war, first in Sumer and then in Pashtia, to say nothing of the various peripheral campaigns on land and sea he'd sponsored, coupled with having the blood of over a million innocents on his hands (though very few people knew about that), had effectively broken him the year before.
    For five local months, a full half of a Terra Novan year, the man had not said a word, but simply stared off into space. He'd eat if someone fed him, otherwise not. Even if he wouldn't speak, he'd still screamed regularly at night. The old nightmares he'd suffered were gone, but now he had a brand new set of them.
    His wife—his second wife; the first was dead along with the three children she'd borne Carrera—made it nearly her entire life to nurse her husband back to health. In this she'd been notably successful, at least in comparison to the state he'd been in when he'd returned to her, catatonic from, among other things, his nuclear demolition of the Yithrabi city of Hajar.
    On Terra Nova no one outside of Carrera's immediate circle knew about that nuclear attack. At least one person off world, the current commander pro tem of the United Earth Peace Fleet, knew. Or thought she did, which amounted to the same thing.
    Truth be told, few on the planet even suspected. It was much easier to believe that the Salafi Ikhwan, the terrorist scourge of the planet, had somehow gotten hold of a large nuke, which nuke they had inadvertently set off in the compound where it had been stored, which compound just happened to be the family holding of their late leader.
    * * *
    "Think it'll work this time, Boss?" Rico asked. This was not the first time they'd driven to the Casa Linda, always at least in part to try to swing Patricio around.
    "It has to, Pedro," Jimenez answered. "If I have to have you put a gun to his wife's head while I beat some sense through his own thick skull, it has to."
    There's no more time for him to convalesce. I wish there were; he needs it. But there isn't and so he can't have it.
    "Yeah," Rico half agreed. "But what if the bitch meets us at the front door with a submachine gun again?"

Spaceport Rome, Province of Italy, United Earth
    Two armed guard rode in seats behind Wallenstein as her shuttle descended to the Eternal City.
    Rome, much restored, spread out beneath them as that shuttlecraft broke through the clouds. Marguerite resisted the urge to press her face to the porthole of the little craft. After all, the guards were lowers, Class Fours, she thought, and they would be watching. Even so, her head twisted, her chin dropped, and her eyes searched out the landmarks she had not seen in more than a decade, even since her last trip home to convey the late— I hope the bastard is "late " . . . though Carrera never expressly promised me to kill him —High Admiral Martin Robinson to his new command around the alien star.
    Just as Geneva was the bureaucratic locus of United Earth, so was Rome its emotional heart. Indeed, nearly half of Old Earth's half million Class Ones made the city their home. Why this should be so Wallenstein was not quite sure. Perhaps it was the more pleasant weather, especially as more northerly Europe, like Canada, was in the grip of a little ice age. Little, they call it . . . but it seems to go on and on and has since the early twenty-first century. Perhaps it was a harkening back to the glories of the Roman Empire.
    Wallenstein slowly shook her head. But I think it has more to do with the emotional satisfaction of having triumphed over a stifling Christianity and taken the Vatican for ourselves. Certainly, when the last pope was burned by the Ara Pacis, we at least