The Great Beyond

by A. K. DuBoff

  I couldn’t help but visualize the ‘shuttle port’ on Calloway. The bleak expanse of vitrified rock on the coast near the town. Would they really all take the time to come out to greet us?

  A huge longing swept through me to see the family again. To return to them, alive, the risks of military service to body and soul vindicated, bringing the literally lifesaving bio-processors, which were in storage at Ensylas, waiting for payment.

  All the emotions I’d kept locked down for so long started to seep out, and my eyes blurred up.

  Bjorn bumped shoulders gently. “Betcha looking forward to the expression on your old Uncle Nikolai’s face, aren’t you?”

  I had to laugh through the tears.

  “Nah. That would be childish,” I said. My least favorite family member had bid me farewell by saying he never expected to see me again. That I was just running away, and I wouldn’t amount to anything, anywhere.

  Maybe I was looking forward to him eating his words, a little bit.

  Bjorn had cheered me up and I gave him a one-armed hug. Not too much. I had kind of a thing about him, but, well, he was probably bad news. Not a bad man, but not a good bet, if you get my meaning. And maybe almost as much as I was for him.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go watch the parades.”

  —

  Earth was humanity’s home, but not home for the Frontier Brigade, which might be why we didn’t get to touch the planet that we’d spent six years fighting for. Or maybe they thought that we’d all jump ship and disappear into the teeming billions of Earth’s population.

  Probably that, because it was the heart of the problem all over.

  Earth and the closer Inner Worlds wanted to export their excess populations and import raw supplies in exchange for their advanced technologies.

  The Margin wanted more people, but only the ‘right’ kind. And they didn’t want to export their resources—couldn’t, in some cases.

  And lastly, there was the Frontier, the furthest reaches of human expansion, the most desperate colonies. No one wanted us, except to fight their wars.

  It’s a sore point out on the Frontier.

  Anyway, the military decided to keep the Acid Penguins in orbit, aboard the Ganga, the huge military transshipment station.

  In the Ganga’s cavernous concourse, we watched while the Terran Volunteers paraded. There were speeches. Presentations. Medals. Buffets with champagne for the senior officers. Beer for the rest of us.

  When the celebrations ended, the Terran Volunteers were paid off and shipped planet-side on the space elevator, leaving the Frontier Brigade to wait for our transport home.

  The Wingate had already left, gone to get the next shipload from the Dimitras Sector, and the military didn’t have enough transport ships to visit every part of the Frontier, so they contracted merchanters whose cargo pods could be temporarily converted to barracks.

  While the transports fueled up and got a shakedown from our Brigade engineers, the Terran Marines put on a last-minute recruitment show for anyone interested.

  They had a good turnout.

  Yeah, they were offering free food and alcohol.

  And the show was slick, I’ll give them that.

  New, higher-powered armor. Glossy visors with improved tactical information. Better comms. Working active camo. The latest Mark 5 Tactical Assault Weapon.

  Very impressive.

  It was like a line had been drawn down the hangar. One side the Terran Marines, all clean uniforms, fresh faces and unmarked armor. On the other side, us.

  We’d been requested to assemble in our battle kit, bar the helmets, and we looked more like a ghetto gang than an infantry company.

  We’d spent the war shedding bits of malfunctioning suits, experimental equipment and surplus gear, sloughing off decorative coatings while gathering scars, dents and mods, until we’d emerged like a new sort of metallic insect: hard-shelled, dark, with the sort of dull sheen that comes from unremitting use, but everything functional and deadly.

  I’d worked on every inch of my equipment, right down to the power servos and the slick mechanisms of my Mark 3 Tactical Assault Weapon, as if my life had depended on it. Because it had.

  All that pretty kit on the other side wasn’t going to impress us, and the marine recruiting sergeant didn’t get much interest until right at the end.

  “So what you going to do?” he asked us, leaning against the table with all the food and alcohol. “You’ve spent six years getting good at being soldiers. Now you’re back off to the farm and the factory, richer, but still scratching a living in the Frontier. Or you could join the Terran Marines. Do what you know best, but with the latest, finest equipment, dedicated support, and supply divisions.” He paused. “And the way things are going, you probably won’t even have to fight.”

  He smiled when he said it, and we smiled back, because by this time, we all knew that was bullshit. You didn’t recruit like this for peacetime.

  “Who the hell are they going to war with?” I whispered to Bjorn.

  He just shrugged.

  The recruiter saved his best argument for last. “Oh, and there’s a new law been passed this week in the Terran Council,” he said. “After a five-year stint in the Terran Marines... you get citizenship.”

  It was like a shockwave flashed through our ranks. Hellfire, that was some bribe.

  And while my mouth was still open in shock, I got Gunny hissing quietly in my ear. “He doesn’t mean you, Skelling. Or your partner in crime.”

  Bjorn and I turned around together.

  “Crime? Gunny, that’s libel,” I said, with my innocent, shocked face on.

  “Not unless I write it down,” she replied. “And anyway, it would still be true.”

  Gunny was okay. She’d been assigned from the Terran Marines to teach us something, anything, about being soldiers when we’d signed up. We didn’t hold that against her, and she’d stayed with us the whole six years, bad times and good.

  “You holding grudges?” Bjorn asked her, smiling that smile that could sell vacuum to a spacer. At a premium.

  She didn’t smile back. “No. The opposite.”

  She passed on, muttering in other people’s ears.

  “Sort of an anti-recruiting sergeant,” Bjorn said, an unfamiliar frown creasing his face.

  For the first time, I saw reflected in his eyes the worry that had been eating away at me.

  If a new conflict broke out before we were officially demobilized, that small print clause said we would have to stay in the Frontier Brigade. There would be no way to get payments out to Ensylas, let alone get the bio-processors shipped to Calloway. And the way these conflicts went, by the time it ended, it would be too late for Calloway—people would die and the colony would collapse.

  —

  We sweated through the next few days.

  Half the brigade decided to sign up for a tour in the marines, so the transports had to be reassigned. More delays. An ominous notice appeared on our pads, reminding us that we were still in the Frontier Brigade until demobilized and, as per regulations, we were responsible for packing all our equipment onto the transports when boarding.

  As if we were being deployed.

  Gunny refused to say anything other than that; as far as she knew, the fifty of us from the Ensylas Sector would be demobilized as a group on Ensylas and await onward transportation, as stated in our contracts. She had an expression on her face that would blister bulkheads, so conversations were short.

  Did she really know something? At the recruitment show, had she been telling us to get out as fast as we could?

  Bjorn and I couldn’t decide what to believe.

  The Dimitras Incursion had been incredibly unpopular on Earth, with riots erupting every time casualties were brought home. Surely the Council didn’t want another war?

  On the other hand, the Terran Marines didn’t recruit soldiers to stand around and look pretty. They’d taken on a thousand, just from the first trans
port to return. Was that just because we came back first? Why had they ignored the Terran Volunteers?

  While we argued it, transports left for every Sector in the Frontier, and ours kept being re-scheduled.

  The day eventually arrived and, maybe because we were the last to ship out or because there were no 1st Frontier officers joining the Ensylas transport, Gunny elected to come with us. In addition, we had a handful of surly military police and a civilian official from the Terran Council’s Military Oversight Commission who’d been tasked with officially demobilizing us.

  I didn’t believe our transport would really leave, until I heard the docking clamps retract.

  And even then, I still wasn’t sure we’d be released when we got to Ensylas.

  The journey itself was agonizingly slow: the merchanter was sound, but the navigation and sensor systems were so old that it had to emerge from Chang space at every intervening star to check its bearing and velocity. Every recalibration and adjustment took time.

  Every pause, every day, made me more anxious.

  —

  Despite my fears, twenty-three days later, we disembarked into the Orion’s Wheel, the space station that orbited the planet of Ensylas.

  This system was the Frontier’s local sector capital, and they had a welcome for us that was supposed to be an imitation of the ceremonies on the Ganga, including a parade from the Acid Penguins.

  Not what we were good at, but this was our last parade and we did our best for Gunny.

  Campaign medals. Salutes. A speech from the governor of Ensylas.

  The Commission’s official took the stand.

  My heart was in my mouth.

  Surely we couldn’t be recalled now?

  Blah. Blah. “...and I now declare this troop to be honorably discharged...”

  With cheers we broke ranks. To hell with parades and speeches. Suddenly we were civilians again, and it seemed all my worries had been groundless.

  I didn’t remember too much after that. There were celebratory drinks. Bjorn and I drifted off from the others and ended up in a bar somewhere. Lots of drink. Some dirty dancing.

  I may have got a bit short with some stationers who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  There might have been some pushing and shoving.

  I was doing fine, but then Bjorn noticed, and after that, the pair of us won, big time.

  Which meant that when the station police arrived seconds later, we were the only ones standing and of course we got zapped. And, naturally, by the time we came around from that, every other person in the bar had identified us as the people who’d started it.

  Sore losers.

  Like an idiot, I was expecting to get bailed and put in the brig, before remembering that I had become a civilian a few hours before my arrest. The army had no obligations or loyalty to me.

  Stupid. Stupid.

  I came out in a cold sweat. What had we done? Had the army already booked us tickets to Calloway? Would we miss the departure?

  We couldn’t get messages in or out. The police wouldn’t even talk to us.

  A lawyer eventually turned up. He said he would get a message to Gunny, but he didn’t seem interested in our situation or our guilt. His job was to explain our options: if we took the rap, we would get a fine or a sentence of one month of station maintenance and cleaning. If we took it to court, given the ‘evidence’ against us, almost certainly a year and a fine and the likelihood that the ‘victims’ would be awarded compensation from our assets.

  We gritted our teeth and took the month.

  By that afternoon, we were chasing burnt-out circuits in the maintenance tunnels wearing fetching yellow coveralls and necklaces that would deliver a shock if we goofed off or tried something stupid.

  They relied on their necklaces and the fact that we had nowhere else to go. We were sent off to work alone with our own keys to access the tunnels. An inspector would occasionally come check on us. We were not allowed to communicate with anyone.

  Long hours with nothing to do but work, eat, sleep and regret.

  The lawyer never returned, and after two mind-numbing weeks, it came as a genuine shock to find myself in the meeting room at the jail, dressed in my off-duty fatigues, no prison necklace, with Bjorn and Gunny.

  “Sorry, Gunny,” I said, while wondering what the nova she was doing still in the system, let alone getting us out.

  She looked as pissed as I had ever seen her, and I guessed we deserved it.

  “Wasn’t us started it,” Bjorn said.

  “I don’t care,” she said. “That’s the least of your problems. Shut up and listen.”

  My heart skipped several beats.

  Her eyes flicked up to the left and right before coming back to bore into mine.

  Got it. The room was not secure. There could be recording devices operating.

  What the hell is going on?

  “You’re booked as passengers on a merchanter, paid by the military as per your contracts. Departure is scheduled tomorrow,” she said. “I have opted to pay your fines to the station to allow you to catch that ship, because there’s nothing else on the boards scheduled to go to Calloway. The amount of the fine will be deducted from your pay.”

  Bjorn and I twitched at that, but, hey, I’d had enough of station maintenance and, as she implied, we could spend a long time waiting for the next merchanter heading to Calloway.

  It was okay. We had ’til tomorrow to pay for the bio-processors and load them on board. As long as we’d been paid...

  “The remainder of your back pay and demobilization bonus has been paid into your accounts.”

  With an expression like she’d chewed on a lemon, Gunny checked her pad and read out the sums we’d received. In Terran credits.

  No!

  My mouth moved without making any sound. It made no sense. There had to be some mistake.

  The Terran dollar was humanity’s standard electronic currency, but Earth controlled and tried to restrict it. The Terran credit was a promise that if you visited Earth, it would be exchanged for a dollar from the account that it was raised against. It actually was almost as good as a dollar for the closest Inner Worlds, but its value depended on there being constant trade and frequent travel between wherever you were and Earth.

  For Ensylas, out in the deep Frontier, credits were only really useful on the infrequent occasions you could catch a merchanter that was heading all the way back to Earth. And even then, he’d know he had you over a barrel.

  Gunny’s face told me there was no mistake.

  There was an utter, chilling silence as it seeped into us how completely we’d been screwed. We couldn’t pay for the bio-processors using credits. They’d laugh at us.

  People on Calloway would die.

  Bjorn was about to go full berserker, but it wasn’t Gunny doing this. I gripped his arm, held him back.

  “How?” I managed to say, but her eyes flicked up again. Recording devices.

  We got out of the jail, stumbling like zombies. My heart was pounding so hard in my ears I could barely hear Gunny’s explanation.

  The Terran Council had created the Military Oversight Commission and taken the lowest bid to run it, ‘saving taxpayers money’. Our pay, in dollars, went into the Commission’s account. The Commission issued credits against that, and expedited the demobilization so that the maximum number of troops would be at the wrong end of space when they got paid. Unredeemed credits would become bonuses for the Commission’s members.

  It was a stinking scam.

  At the same time, the Terran Marines were going all out to increase their numbers because Military Intelligence said the conflict in the Dimitras Sector wasn’t finished, but the Council only allowed them funding to recruit people from the Frontier. Because Frontier troops dying wasn’t as ‘politically sensitive’ as Terrans dying.

  Mad as I was, I was still holding onto Bjorn because he was liable to do something that would get us back into trouble. However little we could
do to fix this, it’d get worse if we were back in jail.

  “I am also required to inform you,” Gunny ground out formally, “that I will be relieving you of any working military equipment, which is to be returned.”

  I blinked. In the time it took my eyelids to sweep back up, I had worked out ten ways to temporarily disable my entire battle kit, right down to the weapons. There would be no working military equipment for her to repossess, and she already knew it.

  Gunny, you star!

  The kit was worth something, as a whole, or in parts. Nothing like enough to offset my loss on the back pay, but something, at least.

  I got Bjorn to look at me and he nodded, grim-faced, to show he understood: do what we could and work from there.

  —

  The next hours passed in a blur.

  We marched double-time to retrieve our combat kit from the storage facility and assembled it in front of Gunny.

  “See?” I said, flexing the arms manually. “The servos must have blown. And the TAW stopped working during the last assault.” I pointed at the disassembled weapon. “No supplies available to replace the mechanism.”

  Gunny grunted.

  Out of habit, she slid a finger across the weapon’s internal firing actuator.

  I snorted. She’d find enough oil to feel oily, not enough to actually wipe off. It wasn’t like I was some kind of raw recruit.

  “Worthless crap,” she snarled. “If you were still signed up, I’d dock you for poor maintenance.”

  She turned away to mutter notes to her InfoPad.

  “You’re booked out on the merchanter Karakun, Captain Satybal,” Gunny filled in as she started inspecting Bjorn’s armor. “Departs tomorrow noon, station time.”

  She paused to mutter again, reading off the serial numbers and then dropping the apparently malfunctioning armor.

  “According to the clearing office, you have one other ex-mil passenger on the Karakun. A pilot from the 5th Frontier Wing.”

  I raised my eyebrows. The 5th was a ground attack wing. To us grunts, the ground attack wings were legendary. Mainly because, like legends, you only ever heard about them in stories from long ago. But the battle for Rhea 4 had been different, and the 5th had been true legends for us then. They’d stopped supporting us eventually, but only when they’d run out of everything. Including most of the pilots.