by Marko Kloos
“Yeah, well, I’d rather be manning my post up there. All I got down here’s a wall rack full of kitchen knives, and a stun gun in my desk back in the office. Kind of hard to go on with life as usual when you know what’s out there and you know that you won’t be able to do a damn thing but kiss your ass good-bye if they show up.”
I want to tell the chief that those are pretty much our options out on the colonies as well, but I understand his point. One of the reasons why I signed the reenlistment form was the dread I felt at the thought of not being able to control my own fate anymore, not even in whatever small measure afforded to me by my armor, weapon, and tactical radio sets. As things stand right now, I have at least some influence on events, and some purpose in life. If I had to sit down here on Earth, knowing how bad things look at the moment, and condemned to spend my days with mundane tasks, I’d probably feel exactly the same way.
“Well,” the chief says. “You two enjoy the rest of your meal. Thanks for the heads-up, Sergeant. I have to get the place ready for the rest of my crew.”
“No problem, Master Chief,” I reply. “And thank you for the food. It beats the living hell out of anything I’ve had since day one in Basic.”
“You’re welcome. Do you think you could pass on a message or two once you get back to the fleet? They won’t let civvies onto MilNet, except direct dependents. I’d like to let my old crew know that the old master chief is still kicking.”
“Sure thing. Give me a few names, and I’ll send it on. I won’t be able to pass on any replies, though.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” the chief says. “I’d just get depressed anyway if I knew what fun they’re having without me.”
“I’ll do it,” Mom offers, and the chief looks at her in surprise.
“What’s that, Mom?”
“I’ll pass on whatever it is you want to send back. Just send it to my mailbox with your weekly mail, and I’ll send it on to the chief.”
“They won’t let you copy anything off the MilNet terminals,” I remind her. “And the automatic censor will strip out all the last names and ship names.”
“So you’ll keep the messages short,” Mom says. “I’ll go straight home, type them into my public net terminal, and send them on to the chief here. No big deal. Least I can do for all this fantastic food he’s been feeding us.”
I exchange glances with the master chief, and we both smile at Mom’s eagerness to skirt regulations.
“Well, I’d sure appreciate that, ma’am,” the chief tells her. He pulls a menu out of his apron, opens it to the last page, and puts it in front of Mom.
“Hope you saved some room for dessert.”
When we leave Chief Kopka’s little restaurant half an hour later, Mom walks out of the place with a slight stagger, like someone who has had just that one drink too many.
“I think I just had more calories for breakfast than I’ve eaten all week,” she says to me, glancing over her shoulder at the restaurant we just left. “I can’t believe he fed us all that food for free.”
“I can’t believe we ran into a fellow podhead,” I say. “Aren’t too many of those around, in the service or out of it.”
While we were eating our opulent breakfast inside, the sky above Liberty Falls had turned from mostly blue to mostly gray, and as we walk down Main Street again, snow starts falling in thick, white flakes that swirl around us silently in the morning breeze. Mom squints up into the sky, a serene smile on her face.
“I wish I could just drop dead on the spot, right here and now,” she says.
Five years ago, I would have been appalled at that sentiment, but now I know exactly what she means.
CHAPTER 7
When I was still a civilian, the moon was a mythical destination. Our first permanent base in space, yet still in view of Earth—with a decent telescope and a clear sky, you can see most of the structures on the Earth-facing side of Luna. When I was a kid, I used to dream up all kinds of imaginative and wildly impractical ways to get up there without the money for a ticket to Luna City.
After five years of service in the fleet, I’ve been on Luna dozens of times. I’ve been back for Fleet School, tech school, and half a dozen specialty courses for the combat controller career track. By now, any mystique the location once held for me has long since evaporated. Part of the reason may be that the military buildings on the moon are generally windowless, so being in a building on Luna feels just like being in a starship that’s under way. We did get to do a lot of vacuum excursions during combat controller training, but I was usually too busy filling my battle armor with sweat to stop and admire the view. Most of the military installations are on the dark side of Luna anyway, so there’s nothing to see overhead but empty space and distant stars.
Nobody comes up to Luna for fun. On my shuttle ride over from Gateway on Saturday morning, I’m the only one in the passenger compartment who isn’t obviously on the way to a new duty station. On a normal weekend day, transit shuttles to and from Luna are usually half empty, but this one is full almost to the last seat, evidence of the accelerated training schedule adopted by the fleet. We’re losing more and more ground to the Lankies, but we’re stuffing more and more garrison troops onto the worlds we have left, and the fights with the SRA over the remaining real estate out there are getting more vicious and costly.
Halley is an instructor at the Combat Flight School. CFS takes up a fair chunk of lunar real estate on the fringes of the huge Fleet School complex. I ride the lunar transit tube out to the CFS stop, and by the time the doors of the tube pod open, I am the last passenger on the train.
Halley is already waiting for me when I walk through the double airlock that separates the transit platform from the main hub of the fleet’s Combat Flight School. She’s standing in front of the CQ station, bouncing up and down lightly on the toes of her flight boots. She’s wearing an olive-green flight suit and her usual short and shaggy helmet-friendly haircut.
“Sorry I’m late,” I say as I walk up to the CQ station to sign myself in. “They wouldn’t let me catch a shuttle from Gateway earlier.”
There’s a corporal staffing the CQ post, and I step in front of Halley to render a formal salute to an officer in the presence of junior ranks. Before I can bring my hand up to the headband of my beret, Halley grabs me by the lapel of my Class A smock and pulls me toward her. The corporal behind the CQ desk looks away as she plants a firm kiss on my lips.
“Welcome to Drop Ship Elementary, Sergeant,” Halley says when she releases me again. “Now let’s get up to my berth, so I can peel off this monkey suit and have my way with you.”
I’m not used to Halley’s unabashed display of affection in front of junior personnel, but I don’t object to the proposed course of action, so I follow her as she takes me by the hand and pulls me into the corridor beyond the CQ booth. Behind us, I can hear the corporal on duty chuckling softly.
Halley doesn’t seem to be in the mood for preliminary chitchat. As soon as the hatch of her berth locks behind us, she makes good on her declared intent and undoes the buttons of my uniform with impatient urgency. Her one-piece flight suit is more convenient to unseal, and I tug on the zipper to peel off the baggy green outfit the pilots call a bone bag.
My formerly neat Class A outfit joins the flight suit on the floor of Halley’s berth. Her cabin is cluttered with books, manuals, printouts, and other school-related debris, a disorderly state that is highly unusual for my overachieving by-the-book girlfriend. As long as I have known her, Halley has always been a hundred-percenter on every test, and by every military standard. The Halley I knew in Basic wouldn’t have left so much as a dirty sock on the floor of her berth. This Halley has three different uniforms spread out on her bed and the little foldout table next to it, and a full laundry bag in the corner of the room. She pulls me over to the bed and sweeps all the clothing laid out on it onto the floor. Then she takes me by the shoulders, tosses me onto the bed, and climbs on top of me.
Our coupling is fast, furious, and urgent. Halley is a lot more rough and aggressive than I remember her. By the time we have spent ourselves on each other, I have gouges on my back and blood on my lower lip.
“Whoa,” I say, still out of breath and slightly dazed from the experience. “Don’t use me up all at once. I have a few days left on this leave.”
“If you think that’s all you have left, then get your ass out of my bunk.” Halley grins. “Go find me the young studly private who could go three times in a row back in Boot.”
“He’s right here,” I protest. “He’s just a little tired from heroically trying to save the Commonwealth.”
“Don’t worry so much about the Commonwealth,” she says, and kisses me on the corner of the mouth. Then she gets out of the bunk and walks over to the bathroom, kicking discarded clothes and paper manuals out of the way. “Just worry about staying alive. I’d hate to have to look for a new boyfriend at this point.”
“Like you’d have a hard time finding a replacement,” I say. “Fleet’s lousy with studs in tight flight suits who would love to, uh, fly close formation with you.”
“And that’s the problem,” she says from the bathroom. “Pilots are all overconfident, self-centered adrenaline junkies. I want one of those, I can just date myself. Less hassle that way.”
I look around in Halley’s messy little officer berth while I listen to the sounds of water splashing in the shower. In the last five years, she has lost her by-the-book valedictorian uptightness when it comes to rules and regulations. What she hasn’t lost is her hypercompetence. She doesn’t keep her medals and commendations on the walls of her berth, but I know the abilities of the average junior officer, and Halley is one of the best drop-ship jocks in the fleet. I know there’s a Distinguished Flying Cross tucked away in her locker somewhere, and she made the jump to first lieutenant after the absolute minimum required time in service. I have no doubt she’ll be a twenty-star general someday, if she decides to become a lifer and the Lankies let us all live that long.
In the bathroom, the two-minute timer shuts off the shower. A few moments later, Halley comes out drying herself with one of the scratchy standard-issue fleet towels. Her dog tags jingle softly on their chain as she starts drying her short dark hair.
“You hungry?” she asks.
“Somewhat,” I say.
“Drop Ship U has a pretty good rec facility. Class One galley. Come on, get dressed and let’s get some chow. I want to talk to you about something.”
The dining room of the Fleet School’s rec facility has a real viewport, a huge slab of triple-layer polyplast that takes up a ten-meter section of one of the walls. When Halley and I sit down at an empty table with our meal trays, we can see Earth—one of its hemispheres, anyway—rising above the built-up lunar horizon in the distance. The fleet complex on Luna was built before they deemed the inclusion of complex exterior viewports an unnecessary expense and just went to camera-fed screens instead. It seems slightly obscene to be eating what must be a two-thousand-calorie meal in view of the North American continent, where two-thirds of the population have to make that many calories stretch all day.
Halley pulls two bottles of soy beer from the leg pockets of her flight suit. She pops the caps off both, then pushes one toward me.
“Officer privilege,” she says. “You’re on leave, and I am off duty until tomorrow morning. Drink up.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I sketch a salute and take the bottle from her. I don’t particularly like soy beer—it tastes like fermented tofu with a bit of a fizz—but it’s one of the few alcoholic drinks we can get through the official supply chain.
“So what do you want to talk about?” I ask.
“Us,” she says. “I mean, where we are and where all this is going. This is, what, the sixth time we’ve actually gotten together since Basic?”
“Seven,” I say. “Eight if you count the Versailles.” I have a slightly sinking feeling that I’m about to hear a Dear John speech. “Considering our occupational specialties, that’s actually not bad for five years.”
“No, it isn’t. But it’s not great, either. I don’t want to keep having to wait nine months between leaves to get enough of you to last me for the next nine. It’s not ideal, you know?”
“No,” I say. “It’s not. But unless we manage to get assigned to the same ship again, it’s what it is.”
“We already used up that particular golden ticket,” Halley says. “So we need to figure out some alternative. Because this super long-distance boyfriend thing isn’t enough for me anymore.”
I take a bite of my food. Today’s galley special is beef over egg noodles. The sauce has a vague soy tang to it, but the beef is real, not some soy imitate like the civilians in the PRCs get.
“We’re in the military,” I say. “In the middle of a shooting war. Two of them, really. I don’t think the fleet is going to make it a priority to accommodate some random couple in the ranks so they can spend a little more bunk time together.”
“No,” Halley says. “Of course not.” She stabs the beef with her fork and shovels a healthy amount into her mouth. Halley is smart and pretty and the most capable junior officer I know, but ever since I met her in boot camp, she has eaten with all the speed and grace of a calorie-starved space dockworker.
“But we can use the system to make them give us more of what we want,” she continues.
“Oh? How so?”
She studies me for a moment as if she’s trying to decide whether to go through with letting me in on her plan. Then she puts more food into her mouth and chews before answering.
“What do you know about my family, Andrew?”
“Not a lot,” I shrug. “You don’t talk about your folks a lot. I know you’re from the ’burbs, and that your parents weren’t happy when you joined up.”
“Not quite true,” Halley says. “They all but disowned me. Ever wonder why I never ask you to come home with me on leave?”
“I figured it was because we decided that we didn’t want to burn up most of our leave time in transit.”
“There’s that,” she says. “But mostly it’s because I didn’t want to kick off World War IV at home by showing up in uniform and with what they’d consider a sexual lunch bag.”
I chuckle around a mouthful of beef and noodles.
“But,” she says, and waves a beef-tipped fork at me, “if I brought home a respectable prospect for future grandkids, I’m pretty sure it would take the sting out of the whole military enlistment thing. For my mom anyway. And she’s the one we really have to worry about.”
“Wait,” I say. “You mean getting hitched? Are you proposing right now, First Lieutenant Halley?”
Halley is a pragmatist, not the romantic type at all. Hearing her talk about marriage, however oblique, is about as surprising as hearing a Lanky recite Shakespeare in flawless English. I look at her with an incredulous grin.
“Well, here’s the thing,” she says. “I looked up the regs. Married couples get extra family leave. We could see each other twice as often. And if one of us buys the farm, the other inherits eighty percent of the end-of-term bonus.”
In the five years we’ve been together, I never considered marriage, and if I had, I wouldn’t have suggested it to Halley. I always had the feeling that she was happier with our loose commitment, but part of me is immensely pleased by her implied proposal, even if it’s wrapped in Halley-esque pragmatism.
“My parents aren’t just middle-class,” she says. “Mom’s the chief surgeon at a private hospital, and Dad designs ballistic-delivery systems for the Colonial Administration. I’m their only kid. I come home with a presentable husband and dangle that grandchild carrot in front of them, we could have a pretty good life back home. A place to take our retirement bonus.”
“Too bad we just re-upped,” I say. I remember Liberty Falls, that pristine upper-middle-class enclave in the mountains of Vermont, and the thought of getting to live in such a place seems alm
ost surreal. Fresh air, clean streets, dairy farms. No weekly BNA rations. No need to check your back every time you walk down the street.
“Look, you know I’m not the sappy type,” Halley says. “And I don’t give a shit about engagement rings or anything like that. But I don’t want you to think I’m just making a business proposal here.”
She takes a slow breath and looks over to the viewport, where Earth hangs low in the sky, blue and gray against the all-absorbing black of space.
“We match,” she continues. “We laugh about the same stuff, I don’t have to explain much to you, we have a good time when we’re on leave, and we’ve seen some pretty hair-raising shit together. You’re a good boyfriend, and you’d make a good husband. I’ve met enough guys in the fleet to know that I’d have to look long and hard for someone that fits me as well as you. We’ve been the closest thing to family for each other since we met. Let’s make that status official.”
She shrugs and gives me a lopsided little smile. If I didn’t know better, I would say she’s nervous.
“Might as well get the monetary benefits, too, you know?” she says.
I laugh, the tension in me releasing like a decompressing airlock.
“Holy shit,” I say. “That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me.”
I reach across the table and take her left hand in mine, touching my thumb to the area on her finger where an engagement ring would go.
“I do,” I say, and she laughs.
“Come on. Let’s see what it takes to get hitched in the fleet.”
We’re in the Armed Forces of the North American Commonwealth, and the NAC military doesn’t ever let you do anything in one step when they can make you do it in ten. We head over to the base’s personnel clerk to check on the procedure for a marriage between service members, and it’s like a cold shower after the rush of excitement from earlier.
“You file your intent today, and you get your marriage license in six months,” the clerk tells us.
