Final impact

He pulled the brim of his cap down lower as he stepped out of the Quonset hut onto the gravel path, turning away from the regiment’s administrative buildings toward Camp Hannon’s parade ground. Conditions at Hannon were primitive, especially when compared with the increasingly settled and luxurious campus informally known as “Area 51” or just “51,” the control center of the Special Administrative Zone, which had attracted dozens of aeronautical and “high-technology” firms-a term he found more than a little ironic.

More often than not these companies had established West Coast offices in downtown LA or elsewhere in the Valley. However, with the Zone operating as an autonomous region where twenty-first-century U.S. law and custom prevailed, a lot of outfits like Douglas, IBM, Boeing, and McDonnell had spun off stand-alone companies with their offices here.

Despite wartime restrictions on building materials, they had still managed to run up some very impressive-looking buildings dotting the grounds of 51. Even so, they were dwarfed-both physically and conceptually-by a publicly owned entity, the Intellectual Property Trust, or IPT. By an act of Congress, IPT now held “deemed” patents over all those remaining processes and creations where ownership was contested or even nonexistent. Prime examples were Microsoft’s operating systems and applications, which had yet to be invented, yet had come with them through the Transition. From what he had heard, the plan was for the trust to be broken up and floated on the open market sometime after the war.

Frankly, it was all beyond Jones-he had no idea how these guys worked out who owned what. One of his former captains, Maria O’Brien, had been a legal affairs officer attached to the War Crimes Unit on the Clinton, and she had tried to explain it to him once, without much luck. She’d been just a few weeks from finishing her hitch in the corps when the Transition had ripped her out of whatever life she’d been supposed to lead. Now she made more money than God as a civilian lawyer, smoothing out the intersection between the economy of 1940s America and twenty-first-century intellectual property law. Her personal “Death Star”-as she jokingly called it-was a weird, contorted mass of polished concrete and black glass out on the fashionable western edge of 51, amid a streetscape of expensive restaurants and lush parkland. Jones always thought her building, which had been designed by some very important architect whose name completely escaped him, resembled a bagel turned inside out, if that made any sense. It looked to be about six floors high, although he doubted it ran to anything as mundane as actual “floors” on the inside.

As far as he was concerned, she could have it all to herself. The less Jones had to do with the ’temps, the better.

A born conservative, even as a kid in the projects he’d never had time for politically correct bullshit. In his America men and women, black or white, got the chance to make a success out of life. And if they didn’t succeed, it was probably their own fucking fault. He’d gotten no special treatment from the corps, but he’d suffered no discrimination, either. Every decoration he had pinned to his dress uniform had been honestly earned, mostly by killing people who badly needed it. The Bible at his bedside table had lain beside his daddy’s pillow, and like his daddy he allowed himself one reading every night that it was possible, starting at Genesis and slowly working his way through to Revelation, before going back and starting all over again.

He had supported the same baseball team-the Cubs-for thirty-five years. The same basketball team-the Bulls-for thirty-six. He loved his country, his corps, his friends, and his family, most especially his wife who was, as he never tired of telling people, as white as the Grand Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan. By way of contrast General J. Lonesome Jones disliked whining left-wingers, network news broadcasts, and steamed brussels sprouts all about equally.

He wasn’t the sort who saw himself as the victim of anything.

Yet nearly every time he had to deal with the ’temps, it seemed like he was instantly cast in bronze as the object of their fear and loathing. At the very best they treated him with a stiff reserve. That was the standard response whenever task force business took him down to Camp Pendleton to meet with the “old” Marine Corps brass. He was treated with courtesy, and every formality due his rank. But never once were the informalities observed. Even after Hawaii, he’d never been invited to take a drink or share a meal with anyone at Pendleton.

Jones pressed his lips together as his boots crunched along the gravel path. The insults to his own dignity he could suffer in silence. He didn’t give a shit about the opinions of ignorant assholes. But the endless shitcanning of his marines was intolerable.