by Marko Kloos
“If it’s okay with the platoon, sir.”
Sergeant Sobieski hacks away at the keyboard with two fingers, an activity he clearly finds distasteful. Then he taps a button on his terminal’s touchscreen and leans back in his chair.
“I’m the platoon right now, Miss Jackson, and I don’t care. God knows you’ve all earned a few days of drinking and whoring around for that clusterfuck in Detroit. Go over to the company clerk and give him the dates you want for your leave.”
“Thank you, sir,” she says and salutes again.
“Now get out and stop bugging me,” the Sergeant says as he returns her salute casually.
The next morning, Jackson puts on her little-used Class A uniform instead of the far more comfortable ICUs. She’d much rather wear the fatigues—the Class A looks a lot more presentable, but feels a lot more stifling—but she obeys the regulations and puts on the dress smock.
After breakfast, she walks across the base to the aviation section. A soldier on leave can hitch a ride on military transports, provided they have a free jump seat in the cargo hold. Some soldiers spend a good chunk of their leave waiting for rides, but Jackson has no problems getting a sear on an eastbound transport shuttle right away.
She spends the morning hopping across the eastern half of the continent on a succession of shuttles. Finally, after stops at TA bases in Kentucky, the Chicago metroplex, and upstate New York, she finds herself at Burlington, a small TA air base on the shore of Lake Champlain. The base has a public transportation link right in front of the main gate.
As a soldier, Jackson gets certain perks in the civilian world. She can eat at any government facility with a chow room—military bases, public administration centers, transit worker canteens. She can also ride the maglev system for free just by scanning her military ID in place of a regular ticket.
She walks into the terminal building, past the uniformed security guards at the door. Her TA smock gets her respectful nods. She has no doubt that coming up here in her old, ratty civilian clothes would have meant a security inspection and on-the-spot interview instead, to make sure she has a good reason for being up here, and a form of payment sufficient for a maglev ticket. She pulls a ticket with her ID and gets on the regional maglev to Liberty Falls, just ten minutes away.
The town is clean, tidy, middle-class. No high rises anywhere in sight to spoil the view of the Green Mountains which surround the town. It looks like a different world from Dayton, never mind Detroit.
Jackson came to Liberty Falls with only a last name for a lead. The military-issue PDP in the pocket of her uniform trousers only talks to the MilNet, which doesn’t interact with any of the civvie data networks. She can check obscure news from backwater TA units, or look up any number of regulations and manuals, but the PDP won’t let her so much as bring up a schedule for the hydrobuses berthed outside the transit station. She’s almost ready to ask a local to borrow their personal datapad for a moment and rely on the respectability her uniform seems to convey in this middle-class enclave, when she sees a public library up ahead at the corner of the green.
The library has public-access data terminals. She walks in, sit down in front of one, and brings up the public and private Networks directories. There are eight Net nodes in Liberty Falls belonging to people with the last name of MCKENNEY.
She half expects the search for the right McKenneys to require canvassing every address on the list of names she just brought up, but in the end, the resolution is quick and simple. She plugs Anna McKenney’s full name into the heuristic search to see what comes back. The data terminal blinks for second, and then spits out four screens of search results. Jackson opens a few to see if they refer to the right person, and the very first hit is her yearbook entry from her school, Miguel Alcubierre Polytechnic Public High School. The girl in the picture is unmistakably a young version of the woman in the image of the military awards ceremony Jackson has saved on her PDP. She never got a long look at Anna McKenney’s face back in Detroit, but she has had plenty of time to study her picture since she unearthed it on her PDP back in the chow hall yesterday. There are many more references to her in the public news repositories filed away for posterity, and after a few more minutes of digging, Jackson finds the name of her parents, embedded in a picture of the proud family at Anna’s graduation from Alcubierre Polytech back in 2188.
ANNA MCKENNEY, CLASS OF ’88, AND HER PARENTS, JENNIFER AND ROBERT MCKENNEY.
She checks the list of addresses she pulled from the public directories and sees the entry for MCKENNEY ROBERT & JENNIFER near the bottom of the list. They are on a private network, Datapoint, but their listing isn’t locked, and their Net node number is followed by their street address: 4408 Copley Circle, Liberty Falls, NAC/VT/056593.
It’s only when she looks at the address of the parents of the woman she killed when she realizes that part of her wanted to come up empty, to hit a dead end out here in suburban Vermont, and go home to Shughart with an excuse to stop digging. Now, with the address right in front of her, she no longer has the option to return to the way things were before Detroit, no way to rationalize keeping herself in the dark.
According to the city map, Copley Circle is a street in a residential neighborhood two kilometers from the library. Jackson transcribes the directions to the notepad on her PDP, does a hard reset of the terminal to clear all the screens, and leaves the library to go and maybe find a measure of absolution.
Chapter Four
Vermont
Copley Circle is a neat neighborhood. The houses are small, but there’s space between them, and they all have little front yards with patches of artificial grass. The uniformity of the neighborhood reminds Jackson of a military base, rows of largely identical buildings lined up like a TA company at Morning Orders. There are hydrocars parked in front of many houses—personal transportation, an almost inconceivable luxury in a PRC.
4408 Copley Circle sits at the end of a long cul-de-sac. Out here, there are air filtration units in the windows as well, but as Jackson steps into the walkway that leads from the road to the front door of number 4408, she notices that their environmental unit isn’t even running. The air is so clean out here.
She presses the button for the doorbell, and once again, she feels a bit of hope flaring up—hope to have her ring unanswered, hope that the McKenneys are out to visit friends for the day, or down in the clean air of Panama for the season, so she can turn around and get back onto the train to Burlington with a somewhat intact conscience. Then she hears the sound of footsteps inside.
The door opens, and Jackson finds herself face to face with a tall man who looks to be in his sixties. He has thinning red hair that’s gray in many spots, and the soft-edged look of a government employee, someone who has regular access to something other than soy patties and recycled sewage. They look at each other for a moment, and he studies her uniform with an expression of mild distaste on his face.
“How can I help you?” he asks, in a tone that makes clear that he rather wouldn’t. Jackson takes a deep breath, and then finds that she has no idea what to say to the man whose daughter she killed two days ago.
“My name is Corporal Kameelah Jackson,” she says. “Are you Anna McKenney’s father?”
He looks past her briefly, as if he expected more people to have come with her. Then his gaze flicks back to Jackson—or rather, her uniform.
“You’re not on official business,” he says, and it’s a statement rather than a question. “They’d never send just a junior NCO all by herself.”
“No, sir. I’m here on my own.”
“I was hoping I’d never see another one of those fucking uniforms for the rest of my days,” he says. The swear word comes out as if he doesn’t use it very often. “What do you want?”
“I wanted to talk to you about Anna,” she replies.
He looks at her for a long moment, the distaste still etched in his face. Then he purses his lips and opens the door a little wider.
“Well, come inside before you let all the bad air in. And wipe those awful boots.”
The table in the dining room has two sets of used dishes on it. Mr. McKenney pulls out a chair and motions for her to sit down before picking off the dirty plates and carrying them off. She takes the seat and looks around in the dining room. There are framed prints on the walls, black-and-white photographs of untouched landscapes long gone. There’s a little china cabinet in a corner of the dining room, and a small collection of framed pictures on top of it. Jackson recognizes Anna McKenney in numerous stages of her life—basic school, polytech, proud college grad adorned with the obligatory gown and cap. From the lack of other children in that little picture shrine, she deduces that Anna was an only child, which makes the dread she feels even worse.
“You’re not one of Annie’s buddies,” Mr. McKenney states matter-of-factly when he returns from the kitchen, holding two brown plastic bottles in his hands. As he sits down in the chair across the table from her, he pushes one of the bottles across the polished laminate. She picks it up and sniffs the open mouth of the bottle.
“It’s just beer,” he says. “You can have one, since you’re not on official business.”
“Thank you.”
She takes a sip and lets the liquid trickle over her tongue. She’s never been much of a beer drinker—hard liquor is much more cost-effective for welfare rats, and much easier to make in large batches—but the bitter flavor of the cold beer is pleasing after the long walk in the warm sun.
“How do you know I’m not?” ask him.
He nods at her uniform and points at the green beret with the Infantry badge tucked underneath the left shoulder board of my jacket.
“You’re TA. Annie was Navy. Military Police.”
Jackson doesn’t know how to interpret his use of the past tense, and she doesn’t have a way of clarifying his statement without playing her own hand, so she just shrugs.
“So what do you want?” Mr. McKenney says. “If she owes you anything, you’ve come to the wrong place. She hasn’t been home in two years. I haven’t even talked to her on vid in a month or two.”
“It’s nothing like that,” she says. She takes refuge in action and pulls the dog tag out of her pocket. She puts the tag in front of Mr. McKenney, and he glances at it for a moment before picking it up. Jackson watches as he turns the worn steel tag between his fingers slowly.
“Where’d you get this?” he says after a few moments. “I didn’t even know she still had hers.”
She could tell him that she yanked the tag off his daughter’s neck after she shot her dead, two days ago and almost two thousand miles away. She has come all the way from Shughart to deliver that battered little piece of sheet steel, and maybe find a measure of absolution in the process. She doesn’t feel shame for having killed Anna McKenney—she tried to kill Jackson’s squad mate, after all. Jackson is sorry she had to kill her, this man’s only child, but she’s not ashamed, because she did what she had to do to save Grayson’s life. When she came here, she fully intended to come clean and tell her parents what happened to their daughter that night in Detroit, and that she won’t ever come home again. Now that she’s sitting here, across the table from the man who changed Anna McKenney’s diapers when she was little, the man who probably taught her to ride a bike and tie her own shoelaces, she just can’t bring up the courage to face his reaction.
“I found it,” she tells Mr. McKenney instead. “On the street, in Detroit, a week and a half ago.”
He shifts his gaze from the tag in his hand to her, and then back to the tag.
“Is there more to that story, or an I supposed to believe you came all the way out here just to return this thing?”
“No, I didn’t,” she admits.
“Didn’t think so. Where are you stationed, anyway?”
“Shughart, sir. It’s just outside of Dayton, Ohio.”
“That’s a pretty long way from Detroit.”
“We were on a call. Didn’t you hear about it on the Networks?”
Mr. McKenney raises an eyebrow.
“Hear about what?”
“We were called in to put out a welfare riot,” she says. “”Broke a bunch of stuff.”
“I haven’t heard squat about that. There hasn’t been a big welfare riot since Miami last year, and they say the Chinks started that one.”
“Well,” Jackson says, “I can assure you there was one, because we were right in the middle of it.”
“Anyone get killed?”
She instantly recalls the dozens of bodies strewn in front of her squad’s position after they opened fire on the surging crowd that had seemed determined to kill them with their bare hands. She remembers Stratton and Paterson, cut down in an instant by heavy weapons fire, and crumpling to the pavement like carelessly tossed duffel bags. She thinks of the apartment building Grayson demolished with a MARS rocket. She has no idea how many civvies their TA company killed that night, but if the other squads were only half as busy as theirs, they filled a lot of body bags.
“Yeah,” she replies. “A few people got killed. You mean it wasn’t in the news at all?”
“They don’t usually advertise it when they send you people in to beat up on some welfare rabble,” Mr. McKenney says. “Can’t blame ’em, really. People might get the impression that the civil authorities can’t control the PRCs.”
She opens her mouth to tell him that they were the ones who took the beating that night—eight troopers dead, one drop ship lost, and dozens of wounded—but when she reconsiders the equation, it seems like she’s about to complain of bruised knuckles after having beaten someone to death. They may have had a rough time on the ground, but the squad dished out much more hurt than they took.
“’You people’,” she repeats. “You don’t care much for the military, do you?”
“Sure I do,” he replies. “The real military. The Marines, up there.” He gestures to the ceiling. “The ones that keep the Chinks and the Russians from kicking us off our colonies. You people,” he says again, and nods at Jackson’s uniform, “you’re not military. You’re just cops with bigger guns, nicer uniforms, and less oversight.”
“Your daughter was Navy,” she points out, and she’s briefly satisfied by the hint of pain in his face.
“Yes, she was,” he says. “I could have gotten her in with the Commonwealth, a nice shot at a public career. And she has to go off and play sailor. I tried to get Annie to resign, but those contracts you sign, they’re one-way tickets. She served out her first enlistment, and she took the money and got the hell out, like anyone with half a brain would.”
He puts down his bottle and picks up his daughter’s dog tag again. Jackson watches as he slowly turns it between his fingers, rubbing his thumb over the raised letters of his daughter’s name and service number. She knows what would be going through her head in his place, and she wants to avoid having to answer the question he’s bound to ask sooner or later, so she seizes the initiative again.
“Do you know where I can find her?”
He looks at her and chuckles. It sounds like a stifled cough, entirely without humor.
“Like I’d tell you,” he says. “For all I know, you’re a lieutenant with Intel, and they just put you in a corporal’s uniform to go and sniff around. What do you want from my daughter, anyway?”
“I don’t really know,” she admits. “Well, for starters, I’m pretty sure she was shooting at me, and I’d like to find out what the hell was going on that night.”
“She was, huh?”
“Half the city was. Lots of them had military weapons. They shot down one of our drop ships.”
“Are you sure you should be telling me that stuff?” Mr. McKenney says. “I’m not sure I want to know about that. If they don’t want to see it on the Networks, you probably shouldn’t be talking to me about it, don’t you think?”
“I don’t think I give much of a shit, sir. No offense,” she adds when he looks at her
in surprise. “I want to know what the hell was going on that night.”
“Now that’s interesting,” Mr. McKenney says. “A TA soldier who wants to know why they send her out to shoot people.”
She’s getting tired of his hostility, and for a moment she considers coming clean, just to see the amused smugness on his face disappear. Then she gets a hold of her emotions and pushes the chair away from the table to get up.
“I’m sorry I bothered you,” she says. “I guess I ought to be going. Thanks for the beer.”
“Oh, sit down and relax,” he replies and gets up from his own chair. “You’re going to have a thicker skin than that if you want to make it to retirement. The government is full of cranky old jerks like me.”
He walks off again, in an unhurried gait. Jackson studies the silk-screened label of her beer bottle while Mr. McKenney rummages around in a drawer in the next room. Then he walks back into the dining room, an old-fashioned paper notebook in his hand.
“I don’t have an address for her, just a node number. You can try to get in touch with her yourself. My guess is that she won’t be interested in talking to you, but who knows?”
He leafs around in his little notebook for a few moments, and then puts the open book in front of her, his finger pointing to a handwritten Net node address. The rest of the page is filled with notes, written in blue ink, in a neat cursive hand.
“That’s the number she gave me last time I talked to her. I’m pretty sure it’s someone else’s node. Annie’s just been sort of drifting from place to place since she got out of the military.”
Jackson pulls out her PDP and transcribes the node address into the notepad.
“Thank you.”
“You may want to be careful with that,” he says. “If there’s something going on the government wants to keep a lid on, they’ll sic military intel on you if they notice you poking around.”
She shrugs noncommittally and slips the PDP back into my pocket.
