Berg wasn’t sure what was happening to the Corps he had wanted to join for so long, but he was seeing changes that were interesting. Unlike most troops, he paid a lot of attention to things like the budget fights in Congress and current events. And in the former, especially, there were some odd things happening. After the Dreen War, and the closing of the various gates that had permitted the Dreen to invade Earth, most of the forces had suffered serious cutbacks. The still unexplained breakouts of Dreen infestations in several Islamic countries had taken most of the starch out of the Great Jihad and while U.S. troops were still deployed around the world, mostly they were back to peace enforcement or peace keeping missions; the War on Terror had died along with several hundred thousand jihadists in the Bekaa Valley, Mecca and Iran.

But while the Army and the Air Force were getting their budgets slashed, most of the money wasn’t being “reinvested.” It was going to the Navy and the Marines. And most of it was going into black holes. The “black” portions of the budget were getting large enough to cause some serious questions in the news media. The only information slipping out was that the expenditures involved “extraterrestrial military research projects.”

He’d been directed to the windowless, block building by the gate guard on reaching Newport News, one long ass drive from Lejeune. Now it was time to find out just what this company of Force Recon was doing and why it was hidden away in a secure building in Newport News.

Entering the door marked “Visitor’s Entrance” he found himself in a small room composed of mostly concrete walls.