by Marko Kloos
“I don’t know,” Halley replies. She looks up into the sky, which is showing patches of blue peeking through the cloud cover, and squints at the sun. “I don’t mind it so much. On Luna, I spent months between classroom, hangar, and quarters. I didn’t get to see anyone who wasn’t wearing a uniform.”
She looks around at the civvies heading into the station with us. “This is not so bad. It kind of helps remind me why we’re risking our necks. And I get to feel the sun on my face every now and then.”
You fly a drop ship, I want to reply. You don’t go into dark tunnels after monsters. But I immediately feel bad about the thought popping into my head, because I know it’s not fair. Halley isn’t a grunt, but she has taken more risks than most grunts I know, and her life in the service is every bit as dangerous as mine. She saved my platoon from getting wiped out a month ago on Arcadia when she broke stealth and shot down the renegade Shrike that was about to blow us out of the sky. We lost three of our four priceless Blackfly drop ships, and Halley got mauled badly while ejecting from her ship. Half the Blackfly crews on the Arcadia mission died in that place. Their casualty rate was much higher than that of our SI grunts, and I have no right to quantify her occupational risks. We all face death every day in different ways. Even the civvies rushing off to their homes all around us do. In a lot of ways, they have it worse. All they can do is to rely on us to stop the monsters. I realized a while ago that I still wear the uniform because I want to have a little bit of control over my fate. Sitting down here on Earth and looking to the sky in fearful anticipation whenever something strange happens, with no way to fight back—that’s a trade I wasn’t willing to make.
We walk into the station, scan our military IDs, and wait on the platform for the maglev that will take us back to Liberty Falls. We’re not the only military personnel on the platform, but the others—three HD troopers and a fleet sailor—are junior enlisted, and they keep a respectful distance from us, if only to not get close enough to have to salute us. The civilians standing nearby give us glances and nod respectfully when we catch their gazes.
The maglev train glides into the station almost silently. The maglev cars are clean and in good repair, unlike the shitty trains of the public-transit systems in the PRCs. There’s even some generic synth-pop playing softly from the overhead speakers, and the announcements to stand clear of the doors sound like a polite request rather than a near command. Halley and I find an empty row, stash our alert bags, and sink into the comfortably upholstered seats. I want to take a nap, but the ride out to Liberty Falls only takes fifteen minutes, and there’s no time to get situated and fall asleep. Instead, I lean my head against the window and look out at the scenery.
“What’s on your mind?” Halley asks. I glance at her reflection in the polyplast window and see that she is watching me.
“Why do you ask?”
“You look like you’re chewing on something,” she says.
I shake my head. “When that Lanky tunnel collapsed, I thought I was done breathing fresh air. All dark, helmet sensors knocked out, no weapon except the dumb little pistol. And knowing there are Lankies nearby. I’ve never been so fucking scared in my life. It’s like the train is coming for you, and you are standing in a tunnel and can’t get off the tracks.”
“I have no trouble believing that,” Halley says.
“But that wasn’t the worst of it.”
I tell her about Private Cameron, the poor bastard who dug himself out of the rubble just after I did and who drew the attention of the Lanky by turning on his comms again and calling for help. It was a dumb mistake, but he was a green trooper, barely out of boot, and combat against Lankies is the most unforgiving proving ground there is.
Halley listens to my account with a serious expression on her face. “You think you should have done more.”
“There wasn’t a damn thing else I could have done. You know those pistols don’t punch through Lanky skin. But yeah. I climbed up the rubble pile and got away while that green kid tried to hold the line.”
“He did what he was trained to do. You should send his DI a gift basket or something. Because that green kid did his job.”
“I know. Still won’t help me not to see the replay in my dreams.”
I look out the window again, where the sky is starting to get dark. The stretch of maglev track from Burlington to Liberty Falls runs through forested mountains, more trees in a kilometer or two than a PRC resident sees in a lifetime.
“I have a bad feeling about Mars,” I continue. “A really bad feeling. I think we are about to bite off way more than we can chew. Nobody’s going to come back from there.”
Halley shrugs. “We almost died on Versailles together when all of this started. Then we went off to war for six years. How often did we almost get killed in those six years? You, on the ground with your podheads, and me, in my cockpit? You know how many drops I did where we lost a bird or a whole flight?”
“Probably as many as I did where we lost podheads,” I say.
“Precisely. And then Earth, a few months back. And Leonidas. And a dozen other scrapes we’ve each had where we figured we’d just not worry the other too much with the nasty details. And don’t even deny that you’ve kept some shit from me over the years. Because I sure as hell kept some from you.”
“One day, our luck’s going to run out,” I say.
“Maybe it will. But so what? You want to turn in your tags and resign your commission? Stay down here in ’Burberville until the nerve-gas pods come raining down?”
I snort and shake my head. “Not likely.”
“You’ve got a bad feeling about Mars,” she says. “Well, no shit. We’re about to throw every last thing we have against more Lankies than we’ve ever fought before.” She leans her head against my shoulder and exhales. “I feel the same way. But honestly, it feels like we’ve been on borrowed time ever since Versailles. I don’t want to die just yet. But if I have to die, I want to have my hands on throttle and stick, and my finger on the launch button.” She plants a kiss on my cheek and puts her head on my shoulder again. “Besides, Mars is not your biggest worry right this second.”
“What do you mean?”
“We all get staggered leave before Mars. I’m on a medical chit right now anyway. I told my parents we’d come see them before the deployment. To clean the slate.”
I let out an involuntary groan. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“Not even slightly,” Halley murmurs with a little smile. “We’ve gone to see them once since we got married. We need to go again and settle our affairs with them before Mars. In case we don’t come back.”
I groan again, the forlorn sound of a man who has just been told he will face a firing squad at dawn. “Until just now, I’ve never actually wished for an emergency-deployment alert.”
She chuckles softly. “You’ve faced Lankies in battle a hundred times. You can face my parents again.”
“I’d rather be in a drop ship on the way to the surface of Mars right now,” I say, and I’m only half joking.
CHAPTER 7
’BURBER THEME PARK
Before the Exodus and the first Lanky incursion a year ago, you could hopscotch your way across the continent on the maglev network by taking various regional lines to their hubs. Between the metroplexes, the maglev does four hundred kilometers per hour, so it was a reasonably efficient way to travel long distances. Since the Exodus, however, the network is fractured and fucked all to hell. There’s a crescent of what we now call dark territory, areas burned down in the riots or out of the control of the NAC government, where police were driven out, Lazarus Brigades haven’t moved in yet to restore a semblance of order, and the remaining HD battalions don’t dare to tread there. The swath of dark territory cuts right across the midsection of the country and then curves down through much of the southeastern NAC. The trains now stop short of entering dark territory, because there’s no security, and nobody in their right mind wants to go i
nto the massive conglomeration of out-of-control PRCs anyway.
Luckily, the dark territory cuts the northern maglev routes off from the southern ones, and Halley’s parents live on the other side of it. Unluckily, they live in San Antonio, which is still under full NAC control because it is the southern military hub of the NAC Defense Corps. It’s the site of one of our recruit depots, and it hosts Joint Base Lackland, the biggest air/space facility in the southern NAC. That means it’s not hard at all to get there by military air transport. So three days after the mess on Greenland, Halley and I leapfrog our way south on a succession of military shuttle flights, to visit her parents in their safe little enclave.
“I feel like a crate of combat rations,” Halley half shouts to me when the transport shuttle lurches in rough air for what feels like the fiftieth time since we left HDAS Norfolk on our third hop toward San Antonio.
“Doubt it,” I reply. “Combat rations can’t get queasy. You look a little green. Are you sure you’re a pilot?”
“It’s like driving,” she says. “I’m fine when I’m behind the stick. Put me in the back, and I get motion sickness. Especially in these flying dump trucks.”
We can hitch rides on military transports as a perk of our status, but that perk comes with a few snags. The shuttle fleet is mostly cargo haulers, so if you don’t have one of the personnel movers going where you want to go—which is going to be most of the time—you ride in the windowless cargo hold, strapped into a ratty sling seat next to a few tons of priority military freight. It’s faster than the maglev trains, but that’s about the only good thing about this ride. If we could have taken the train to San Antonio, I would have preferred that mode—both for comfort and the fact that it would have taken another day before I have to put up with Halley’s parents again.
The shuttle lurches again, more violently than before. My stomach does a little backflip. I don’t ever regret having lunch at Chief Kopka’s place, but right now I wish I hadn’t had the maple pudding for dessert. When I tell Halley this, she laughs.
“I can’t see how anyone could have turned that down. He had real maple syrup. I hadn’t had any in years.”
“My first time,” I say, and try to ignore the roiling feeling in my midsection. “I swear to you, if we crash into a dark PRC, I’ll give you no end of shit for this.”
The PDP in my pocket buzzes to notify me of an incoming message. I pry it out of the pocket of my CDU trousers with a feeling of dread. Halley reaches for her pocket at the same moment, so I know her PDP buzzed at the same moment as mine.
“Shit,” I say. “Here goes.”
I turn on the screen and read the message I just received. It’s not a priority alert ordering us to report to the nearest regional military assembly point. I read the brief text, two paragraphs in total, and the relief I feel mixes with irritation. I hold the screen out to Halley so she can read it.
“I don’t believe this shit. Of all the priorities.”
Halley looks at my screen and then shoots me hers. She got an identical message, with just a few words differing from the one on my screen. Both messages are from NAC Fleet Command. Both are boilerplate notifications. Halley and I manage to curse at precisely the same time.
Our messages notify us that we have been awarded decorations for valor for our actions on Arcadia. The only difference in the messages is the award name: mine is a Silver Star; Halley’s is a Distinguished Flying Cross. According to the documentation, both were put in by the CO of the ground operation: Major Khaled Masoud, fleet Special Operations Command.
“It’s only been a month,” Halley says. “Why the hell would they ram this through so quickly?”
I erase the message from my inbox and stuff my PDP back into its pocket. “Fuck that.”
“You can’t turn it down. It’s already part of our personnel files.”
Once upon a time, they used to do award ceremonies—they’d have the highest ranking officer of your battalion or division pin the medal onto your CDU blouse. Since the Lanky business kicked off, medals get awarded through the computer system, and nobody bothers sending out physical medals anymore. If Halley and I wanted the actual tin, we could pick it up at the supply unit on base, same way you’d get a new pair of boots or a clean set of sheets. They’d check our personnel files in the system to verify and hand them over without any pomp or ceremony.
“I’m not adding that star to the ribbon,” I say. “Didn’t do a thing to earn it.”
“That’s bullshit, Andrew, and you know it. Don’t talk out of your ass.”
I want to tell her how many people my platoon lost in the assault I ordered, but she already knows. I want to tell her that the mission would have failed without Major Masoud and his SEALs pulling the trigger on their nuclear surprise for the renegade leadership, but she knows that, too. I can’t argue that she didn’t earn her second DFC—her flying saved the lives of two platoons, after all—but I refuse to accept a reward for losing a third of my platoon. I don’t want to look at the star on that ribbon and be reminded of the unlucky private that was blown apart by an autocannon burst five meters in front of me. Or Lieutenant Dorian, who saved our asses as our drop-ship pilot several times before that Shrike shot him out of the sky, just a few minutes before the surrender of the renegade garrison.
“He knows I hate his fucking guts,” I say. “Why would he put me in for a valor award?”
“Maybe because he thinks you earned it,” she says. “Maybe because he wanted to give the brass some motivational items for the fleet news. Maybe both. Who cares?”
I decide to drop the subject, but the whole thing has made me cranky. Getting a Silver Star should be a momentous occasion in a military career. It shouldn’t feel like I just got used by Major Masoud once again for his own ends.
“I hope I see him on the ride to Mars, so I can tell him to stick it up his ass,” I say.
We descend into Lackland an uncomfortable hour later. When the ramp of the shuttle opens, it lets in a gust of warm air that smells like aviation fuel. Halley and I unbuckle our harnesses and gather our gear bags. I’ve never been more glad to get off a military craft.
“You want to get lunch here on base before we head out into the city?” Halley asks.
It’s midafternoon, and we haven’t eaten since we left Liberty Falls this morning, but the motion sickness has killed my appetite comprehensively, and I shake my head.
“I’ll come if you want to grab something.”
“Nah,” Halley says. “It’s just going to be shit chow anyway. Let’s go see the folks. I’m pretty sure they’re planning to feed us good food tonight.”
“Last meals are usually pretty good,” I say.
Joint Base Lackland is a sprawling facility on the outskirts of San Antonio. It houses an HD air base, four battalions, a fleet spaceport, and half a dozen training commands, including one of the four NAC Defense Corps Recruit Depots. It takes us almost an hour just to get from the airfield to the main transport hub on the base, and the place is as busy as Gateway Station when half a dozen capital ships dock there at the same time.
The train ride into the city is uncomfortable. The train cars are in good shape and clean, but they are packed with people at this time of the day, and Halley and I have to stand at the back of one of the cars with our alert bags and luggage between our legs. The people streaming into the city after work on the base are half troops in uniform, half civvies, and a good portion of those civvies look like military personnel who have changed into civilian garb. Most of the troops in our car are junior enlisted, with a few sergeants here and there, and a first lieutenant sitting two rows in front of us. Ordinarily, the officer ranks on our shoulders serve to create a little respect bubble, but the train is so packed that there’s no space for that courtesy, and we stand shoulder to shoulder with privates and corporals who studiously avoid looking at the officers among them.
Halley’s parents live in the ’burbs in San Antonio’s northeast, and Joint Base La
ckland is in the southwest of the city, so the ride takes almost another hour of frequent stops and the constant shuffling of passengers onto and off the train, Halley and I swaying in the human current like trapped driftwood. By the time we reach the station for Olmos Park, I am tired and even more cranky than I would normally be at the prospect of a stay at the in-laws’ place.
“Too many people,” Halley grumbles as we drag our stuff off the train and make our way up the escalator to the surface part of the station. “That was worse than chow time in the mess hall on a frigate.”
Out here, the ratio of civvies to uniformed military personnel is considerably higher than out at Lackland. There are very few people in camouflage in the crowd of well-dressed civvies. The station is clean and well lit, and I can even smell some deodorizing aerosol in the air. Olmos Park is an upscale suburb, and the station looks nothing like the public transport hubs in a PRC. Instead of vendor stalls, there are shops and restaurants with glass fronts. The floor is made of granite tiles, and the walls are clad in decorative stucco. Even the windows are glass and have decorative elements, something that wouldn’t last three minutes in a PRC transit station before getting smashed into a thousand pretty shards.
“I feel a little out of place here,” I tell Halley.
“Welcome to the club,” she says. “I’ve been feeling out of place here since I was twelve.”
We walk through the concourse and out of the transit station into bright sunshine. I notice that there is barely a security presence here—a few civilian cops with sidearms and stun sticks are standing by the door, and there’s a pair of police hydrocars parked outside in front of the station, but I see no HD troops in armor, no automatic weapons, no helmets. The civvie cops give us curt nods as we walk by with our alert packs, which contain more firepower each than the little gaggle of cops carries among them in total. San Antonio needs no riot cops, because San Antonio gets no riots. Its status as a military hub and a defense-industry center means it’s a secure enclave, separate from the Dallas and Houston metroplexes nearby. There are no PRCs dominating the city skyline. Transportation into San Antonio is screened and controlled, and no penniless PRC rat would ever get within twenty kilometers of the outer ring of suburbs. There’s a whole swath of Old Texas that’s dark territory now, but San Antonio is as firmly in ’burber hands as it was before the Exodus. If the end of the world is around the corner, you wouldn’t be able to tell from going into San Antonio.
