by Marko Kloos
“You seem a little glum,” Halley says. “We have two weeks of leave ahead of us. Perk up a little.”
“I got deployment orders yesterday,” I say. “Directly from Colonel Cut-Throat.”
She looks up at me from her crouched position on the grass and squints.
“Not another tour of Mars.”
“It’s not Mars.” I look past her and down Main Street, where the civvies are going about their days, unaware of all the shit that’s going on millions of kilometers away to keep them safe.
“Got assignment to a new ship,” I continue. “Masoud gave me their special tactics team, so it’s got to be at least a space-control can.”
“You got orders and you don’t know where they’re sending you?”
“I know this drill,” I say. “It’s a brand-new ship. Classified name and hull number. But Masoud says it’s not going to Mars, so I have no clue. If I had to bet, I’d put money on either training for something new and stupidly dangerous, or going out of system.”
“Going out of system is stupidly dangerous, too,” Halley says. “The Archie has an Alcubierre drive now, but there’s no way they’ll pull the only battleship we have left off Earth defense duty. So whatever you’re going in, it’s going to be Lanky bait.”
Archangelsk, still under SRA command, is now the cornerstone of our planetary defense. We have Orion batteries, of course, but the number of missiles is limited because each of them requires hundreds of nuclear warheads. The civvies on Earth need the security of being able to check the Network news feed and see that battleship moored at the SRA station or doing orbital patrols. She’ll never leave the solar system without backup or replacement, even if she does finally have the ability. Her sister ship, Agincourt, is well on the way out of the solar system by now, with a destroyed drive system and no crew left on board. She took a hit from some seed ship wreckage at the Battle of Mars and went on an unrecoverable trajectory at flank speed, so the skipper had no choice but to give the Abandon Ship order.
“So I’ll go be XO in a carrier’s transport squadron, and you’ll be off doing shady stuff for Masoud,” she says. “Hey, maybe they’ll put us on the same ship again.”
“We’ve had that luck twice. Three times, if you count Regulus. Lightning’s not gonna strike four times in the same spot.”
“You never know,” Halley says. She gets up from her crouch and wipes her hand on her jacket. “Fleet’s not that big anymore. They retired a ton of the old cans we used for Mars. Too expensive to run, and they won’t do any good against the Lankies anyway. We kind of blew most of our powder at Mars.”
“This is the military, remember? You get a luck budget. And I think we’ve overdrawn ours by a lot already.”
“Maybe,” she says and blinks into the sky, where the snowflakes are drifting down in the cool breeze. “But mathematically speaking, you start with the same odds every time. Just wait and see where the chips fall. There’s no point fretting over it because we can’t do shit about it anyway.”
We’ve almost reached Chief Kopka’s restaurant, which probably has the first breakfast guests already, enjoying their coffees and their omelets made with real eggs and cheese. Halley doesn’t go to the front entrance. Instead, she goes around the building to use the back door, the one that leads to the upstairs guest apartment.
“We’ll get lucky again,” she says with confidence. “But just in case we don’t, let’s get the most out of this shore leave.”
She uses the biometric pad to unlock the door and nods at the staircase.
“Get your ass up there and join me in the shower, Captain. And then let’s have a decadent brunch, go for a hike, and not talk a word about the fucking Fleet for a week straight.”
“Tailpipe One, copy five by five,” I say.
CHAPTER 5
EARTHSIDE
When you are stuck on a starship on interplanetary transit, a week and a half usually seems like a tedious eternity. When you’re on leave, the same span of time flies by so quickly you’d swear someone held down a finger on the universe’s temporal fast-forward button. It’s late November, and winter is making its approach known with occasional snow flurries that don’t stick on the ground yet. It won’t be long before they do, but I’ll be away on my next deployment by then, and I’ll miss the snow again, for the third year running.
Halley and I spend our leave in the usual manner. We go for long hikes in the quiet autumn landscape around Liberty Falls, expanding our bubble of known geography a little every time, eating the lunches we bring along while sitting on fallen logs or granite ledges. Not only is the food far better than anything in the Fleet, but the setting for these meals is as different from officer wardrooms as possible. I’ve had meals outside while on planetary deployments, of course, but this isn’t the same. Instead of eating cold rations while under the stress of combat, I have warm meals from thermal lunchboxes, sitting next to my wife under a cloudy autumn sky and looking over a wooded valley or babbling mountain brook with no other people in our field of vision. After a few days of open skies and the quietness of nature, I feel my tension and fatigue ebbing away as if this place had opened a relief valve in my brain.
We hike during the days. We come back in the evenings for dinner, which the chief leaves for us in our guest room upstairs in insulated to-go boxes. Then we go back out for strolls down Main Street whenever the weather is still agreeable. It has become our unwritten rule that we don’t sleep with each other in the guest room while there’s still someone downstairs in the restaurant—not because Mom or the chief would ever come up and bother us, but because it doesn’t feel right. But once the place closes and they take off for the night, we drop our restraint.
“Do you remember what you told your mother last year, the last time we went to see them?” I ask.
Halley wraps one of my arms around herself and places it against her stomach. We’re lying in bed spooned against each other, limbs comfortably entangled, listening to the noises out on Main Street. It’s a Friday night, and people are out, despite the low temperatures.
“I try to forget that visit,” Halley says. “What part do you mean in particular? The one where I called her a spiteful bitch?”
“The part about maybe having kids. You told her that if you got pregnant, you’ll have it tubed until we get out of the service.”
“Oh, that.”
“Are you really thinking about it?”
“What, getting pregnant? Not really.” She looks at me over her shoulder and then rolls over to face me.
“I mean, you know the regs. They won’t even deactivate the birth control implant as long as I’m in a spacefaring billet. I’d have to apply for shore duty and then get permission to get pregnant. And then we’d have to tube it anyway. Until we’re done with our service.”
“Unless you resign your commission and get out early.”
“And give up all the separation money. All those years for nothing.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That wouldn’t be smart.”
“I can’t say it’s at the top of my list right now,” Halley says. “Having a kid. Bringing another person into this shitshow. We’ve got a handle on the Lankies, but you and I both know they could be back any day.”
“What about after? When we’re out of the service and sitting on our back pay?”
Halley is silent for a few seconds. Then she lets out a small sigh and shrugs.
“I want to, eventually. Because I want a piece of you and me to continue if one of us buys it out there. Pretty selfish, huh? Three hundred billion of us, and I think the two of us are so special that we need to add to that number.”
“Why shouldn’t we? They don’t have that moral dilemma in the PRCs. They get absolute shit to eat, crime is through the roof, they get free birth control, and they still have children.”
“Anything true to the rumor that the Commonwealth puts birth control in the drinking water there?” Halley asks.
I chuckle.
> “I don’t think so. Have you seen the birth rates? They are filling up the housing as fast as we can build it. But that rumor has been around as long as I’ve been alive. People believe what they want to believe.”
“Can’t really blame them. I’d have a hard time putting it past them. Not after what the old government pulled when they packed up and left for their galactic resort.”
We lie in silence for a while. After more than a week of being back in our leave routine, my brain has conditioned itself to make me sleepy at the end of our regular sequence of activities, and there’s a great deal of comfort in that predictability.
“Yes, I want children with you,” Halley murmurs, obviously starting to drift off just like I am. “When we’re no longer riding the bullet every day anymore. When we’ve pried those spindly fucks out of our solar system. But for now, let’s put our energy into not getting killed.”
“Fair enough,” I reply, even though I know that it’s not even a little bit up to us. But it helps to have at least the illusion of control.
Halley’s leave is shorter than mine by a day because she didn’t save up as much as I did. I could stay in the Falls and spend that day by myself, but I know I’d be bored out of my skull down here alone. So when Halley packs her gear bag and gets back into uniform, I do the same.
“What are you going to do?” Halley asks as we’re tucking our civvie clothes back into the dresser drawers in the guest room. “You’re not due to report to Luna until Sunday.”
“I’ll come to Falmouth with you and see you off,” I say. “After that, maybe take a train trip and see what’s up at Shughart. I’ve got the time.”
“Not that I don’t like you coming along on the train ride with me, but you have a screw loose, Andrew. You could goof off here for a whole day instead. Catch the shuttle from Burlington to Luna and be there in two hours.”
“Nah,” I say. “This is our place. Doesn’t feel right when we’re not here together.”
“That’s sweet.” She leans in and kisses me on the corner of my mouth. “Dumb, but sweet. If it were me, I’d be crawling back into bed right now and sleeping until the last possible minute.”
Our ride back to Boston is probably the least tense we’ve ever taken together on the way to new assignments. Until we took out the Lanky seed ships above Mars, every deployment was a crisis, the fire brigade rushing to a massive conflagration and head-on into mortal danger. Ever since then, it’s different. We’re both still anxious because you never know what can happen out there, but the Damocles sword of imminent extinction is no longer swinging over our heads by a fraying thread.
When we reach South Station in Boston, I accompany Halley down to the government level of the station to get on the military-only train out to Falmouth, where she will hitch a ride up to Gateway and then on to her new command. I’m not much for public good-byes, but I also want to stay with her until that good-bye is inevitable.
We see each other off in our usual way—firm hugs, short kisses, and no drawn-out ceremony. I may be back here in a month or three or six, and there’s no telling when we’ll see each other again until we both get to our new commands and figure out just where the hell we’re going and what we’ll be doing. We may even be in the same place for the holidays, which would be a first. We have parted under far more dire and desperate circumstances, headed out for much more dangerous assignments. This feels so routine and low-key that it seems almost unnatural.
“See you on leave, Andrew,” Halley says, and flattens the wrinkles on my CDU blouse’s chest with her palm. “Don’t get killed, or I’ll be pissed.”
“Staying away from Lankies and malfunctioning equipment. Yes, ma’am.”
The military train announces its imminent arrival with a gust of air that blows out of the train tube and across the platform. A few moments later, the train glides into the station and comes to a stop gradually and almost silently. The doors slide open with a soft hiss. Halley plants a last kiss on my lips, grabs her gear bag, and steps onto the train. I take my own bag and start walking back to the escalator without looking back, which is how we like to part, pretending that the next few months of separation are no big thing. But when I get to the bottom of the escalator, I turn around anyway and glance at the train car, and I can see that Halley is looking back at me. I shake my head with a grin, and she smiles back at me, a small and wistful-looking smile. Then her train departs and glides off into the tunnel, and a few junior enlisted walk past me up the escalator, careful to give me a respectful berth. I sigh and shoulder my kit bag. Then I follow the privates and corporals upstairs, back to the public section of the station.
With almost two days until I have to report in at Luna, I have plenty of time on my hands. From Boston, the maglevs go north, south, and east, and I can take any of them for free with my military ID. I take the Lakeshore Line, which goes from Boston to Buffalo and then down to Cleveland and Toledo, where my old HD base is located.
There are still stretches of dark country, where the police and HD troops have no control and where the maglev tracks and stations are unsafe, but ever since we banished the immediate threat to Earth three years ago, those pockets have gradually shrunk in size as the Brigades pacify PRC after PRC with the help of the SI and the new government. The PRCs will never be peaceful utopias, but with the Lazarus Brigades doing the job of police and SI, the pacified ones are more calm and orderly than I have seen them in my lifetime. The Brigades keep them that way with a velvet-gloved fist, making friends and allies when they can and pummeling would-be warlords and gang kingpins when they have to. I spent months with the Brigades training the nucleus of their special operations group, and then I went into battle with them and saw half of my trainees become casualties. I used to think that nothing was as difficult and dangerous as a pod drop onto a Lanky world, but I know now that the people who volunteer for the Brigades do a duty that’s every bit as hazardous, and they don’t even get good food or special leave for it.
The train glides over the urban labyrinths of the many PRCs stretching east from Boston, each ring of housing clusters newer, bigger, and slightly less grungy than the one before it as we go east. Then we’re in the ’burbs, which is obvious because there’s a buffer of artificial greenery between the maglev track and the neighborhoods it passes by, and the noise-protection walls on either side of the tracks are adorned with murals or advertising instead of street art and scrawled obscenities.
My old home, the PRC in Boston where I grew up, was an older cluster, a Category Three, organically evolved from a bunch of poorer suburbs. A lot of the new ones are centrally planned and built from scratch. The Category Five PRCs are absolutely massive, even from a distance. The NAC government built towers a hundred floors high and clustered them in groups of four, with walls between the towers to turn each group into its own neighborhood. On my way east, I see more Category Five PRCs than ever before. They form the outer ring of the Boston metroplex, cluster next to cluster, fifty kilometers deep. The pattern repeats itself as I cross the country toward the Great Lakes.
Every time the train speeds toward another metroplex, there’s a ring of neat and clean suburbs, then green belts and security zones, then Cat5 PRCs. Even closer to the city core, the Cat5s give way to Cat4s and 3s, then the old Cat2s and 1s, the ones that were always poor neighborhoods to begin with but were allowed to evolve at their own pace. And then come the inner cities, like bubbles of order and structure in the middle of a sea of unruly bustle, commerce, and living spaces for those who can afford them. And I’m gliding above it all at three hundred kilometers per hour, looking at the world below through thick polyplast barriers that are supposed to keep the noise inside the maglev track and bullets out of it. It occurs to me that I don’t really know this world anymore. I grew up in a Cat3 that I left ten years ago. And I only spent two years of my adult life in that PRC, relatively sheltered years in a fairly low-crime section without many gangs. Every time I come back to Earth, the place seems more
foreign to my eyes, and I feel more and more like a stranger, an alien on my own planet. As we fight the Lankies and each other among the stars, life down here goes on. But the more time I spend up in the black, in the regimented and artificial environment of military starships, the more doubts I have that I’ll be able to fit back in again down here one day.
I drift off for a while in my empty compartment, and my dream is dark and unpleasant. I am back on the street in the PRC, and I’m trying to find someone or something, running through dark alleys and derelict intersections with the dreadful feeling that I am too late for something. I smell gunpowder and drop ship exhaust in the air, and there are sounds of battle all around me, but I run through the darkness without seeing anyone, as if I am following the action a step too late at every turn. I don’t have battle armor or a TacLink helmet, no way to see my squad that’s just somewhere out of sight in the warren of alleyways nearby. I clear corners and dash from alley to alley, but no matter how quickly I move, I can’t seem to catch up.
When a noise yanks me out of my restless sleep, I startle violently. Before my eyes are even fully open, I have my hand on my sidearm, and by the time I realize that I was dreaming, it has already cleared the holster halfway. I look to my left, where someone is standing in the door of my compartment. It’s a transit police officer, dressed in medium blue fatigues and wearing a lightweight helmet with a data monocle in front of his left eye.
“Whoa there, soldier. Everything okay in here?”
I stick the pistol back into its holster all the way and let the automatic retention lock engage.
“Yeah,” I say. “How about on your end?”
“Just doing my walk-through. Didn’t mean to startle you, Captain. Have a good evening.”
