Stark's Command

by John G. Hemry

  A very long time ago, it seemed, blurred by intervening years and intense experiences since enlisting in the military. Stark tried conjuring up memories. I used to think about going places. Anywhere I wanted. Yeah. Walk out the door, go across town or across the country. No big deal. Did Vic grow up that way? No. Mil kids grew up on Forts and Bases. Walls around them. Gates. You go a lot of places, but they're all on the Fort, and even there are a lot of other places that are off-limits.

  He had something there. I think that way now, too, right? The world has fences around it. I live inside the fences. Outside, if I get sent overseas, there's people who're trying to kill me. If I'm at home, people still want me inside the fence. Even the kids, he now realized. Never met one, but we told jokes about them. Saw a few, didn't I? Can't remember, now. But I never talked to one. They were different. Huh. So you grow up thinking everybody outside the fence doesn't want you, and when you're all grown up and go outside on your own they want you even less.

  That's it. At least part. Mil grows up inside. Civs don't want them. But what about civs? Hell, my life wasn't perfect. Freedom. Do whatever I want—as long as I have the money to pay for it. Money makes the civ world go around. Got a lot and people listen to you. Don't got a lot, and . . . nothing you do really matters.

  He sat up, face unfocused as memories came to life. High school. A teacher, given the thankless task of instructing teenagers on American history and civic responsibilities. Stark remembered, suddenly clear, as if he were sitting in that uncomfortable chair again, bored, almost automatically downloading bits of data into his brain so he could spill it out during the mandatory learning standards exams and then delete it all to make room for the next batch of trivia. Funny how your mind could learn to do that. No wasted effort, and no bother trying to understand the mass of detail they were expected to "learn."

  The teacher, his name lost somewhere in the past but his face still clear in Stark's mind, had been sitting at his desk. Like most teachers, his eyes spent most of their time on the display built into the desk, reading out the learning standards for the day. This day he'd suddenly stopped, looking up at his students, who'd taken a few moments to realize that fact, and look up from their own displays where the same data scrolled by.

  "What does all this mean?" he'd asked.

  A pause while students frantically searched their displays for the answer and came up negative. "Sir?" one of the girls finally ventured. "Where's the answer?"

  "Inside you. Or, it should be."

  Blank stares, until one of the boys raised his hand. "Do we have to know this if it isn't going to be on the tests?"

  The question made the teacher shake his head slowly and sadly. "No. That's rather odd, isn't it? I mean, here I am supposed to be teaching you about civic responsibilities, and yet nothing I teach you really matters unless it matches one of the test questions, does it? I guess that means your civic responsibilities are limited to passing that test, doesn't it?"

  Silence, students eyeing one another now. Stark recalled going through the emergency drill in his mind, wondering if the teacher was about to go violent on them.

  But the teacher simply stood, looking around pensively. "Now, there's tests and there's tests. Some tests you take on a terminal, punching in whatever answers we've previously spoon-fed you. That way you get a diploma, the school looks good, and we get teaching bonuses. Everybody wins. But there's other tests. Tests of citizenship. Someday, you'll be eligible to vote. How many of you are planning to do that?"

  A few hands raised tentatively, bringing a weary smile to the teacher's face. "You see, we teach you all sorts of trivia about something called civic responsibility. But the fact of civic responsibility, the duty of voting, somehow doesn't get taught, does it? Do you know how many of your ancestors died so that you could vote?" He leveled a finger toward one student. "How many of your ancestors died fighting for freedom?"

  "Fighting? You, mean, like, in the military?" The student seemed scandalized at the concept. "We're not . . . my family wouldn't do that."

  "I'm sure they did, once. Listen to me. All of this information you're supposedly learning means nothing if you don't make use of it. You, what's the difference between someone who doesn't vote and someone who can't vote?"

  "Uh, I . . . that's not on the test."

  "So why should you know the answer?" the teacher asked rhetorically. "Let me ask this. You will be able to vote when you reach your eighteenth birthdays. It's not very hard. You can do it on-line, from the comfort of your home or office. They've made it very easy to vote, but very few people bother. Why?"

  "Why bother?" one of the students had shot back, sparking laughter. "I mean, it don't mean nothing."

  "Nothing? The ability to choose the most powerful and influential humans on Earth means nothing?"

  Another student piped up. "It's all rigged. Big money chooses the candidates. It doesn't matter what we vote. Everybody knows that."

  "Why do you have to vote for those candidates? Why not vote for whoever you think is best instead of letting someone else choose?" The teacher's voice had risen, becoming more agitated. "You, Mr. Stark, do you agree with your classmates?"

  "Yeah. I guess so. Why bother voting? I'm not rich, so I'm not important. Politicians don't care what I think, so nothing I'd do would matter."

  The teacher's head sagged for a moment, and he spoke softer, so the students had to strain to hear. "If you truly believe that, it has a way of coming true. If you do not try, you can never succeed. No one can take your right to vote away, but you can give it away." When he looked up again, his eyes had been glistening with something Stark and his classmates had been shocked to realize were unshed tears. "You are citizens of the United States of America. What you think and what you do are important! Every one of you can make a difference if you just work at it!"

  Neither Stark nor any of his classmates had believed a word of it, of course, sitting silent as the teacher left the room. He'd been back the next day, reading from his display once again, his face and voice a little duller than before.

  Wonder why I haven't thought of that since it happened, but remembered it now? But that's what it's all about. And the mil kids never saw that, 'cause growing up they could pretend being isolated was actually being in some special club. He slapped the light on, then keyed his comm unit, waiting impatiently while it buzzed several times before being acknowledged. "Campbell?"

  "Yes." Unlike Stark, the civilian Colony leader obviously hadn't been having trouble sleeping. "Who is . . . Sergeant Stark?"

  "Yeah. I need to see you and talk about some things."

  "We can schedule something in the morning—"

  "No. Now. How soon can you be over here?"

  "It'll take a lot of time to assemble my assistants at this hour."

  "No assistants. Just you and me." Stark paused, reconsidering. "On second thought, there oughta be a larger audience. Bring Sarafina. I'll bring Reynolds."

  "What is this about?" Campbell demanded. "Getting along. I'll have an escort meet you at the main entrance to the military area and bring you to my room. Just a nice, low-key, informal get-together." Where I'm gonna rant and rave at everyone present.

  "Very well, Sergeant. I'll be there as soon as I can." Less than an hour later, two rumpled civilians sat irritably confronting two rumpled military personnel. Vic appeared torn between annoyance at Stark and disdain for the civilians, though she did greet Sarafina with a thin smile. Stark paced restlessly for a moment longer after the door sealed, then glared at his companions. "Let me say this right off. Neither the civs, the civilians, or the military are angels. Both are screwed up in their own ways." He pointed a finger at Vic as she started to speak. "Wait'll I've had my say. Now, you, Campbell, and you, Sarafina. Deep down, you don't trust us because you don't trust anybody with any power over you. You're looking for our angle. You figure we've got to be planning to screw you, because that's all that's ever happened to you. You know people with power in t
he civilian world, politicians and corporate types, can be bribed if all else fails, but you don't have the money to do that with us anymore than you did with them. And anyway, military like us don't play by those rules, which is something you don't understand either. And you're scared. You're scared because you don't think you can really manage to do this right because all your lives everybody and everything has told you that you don't matter, that the game's always rigged so you lose. That's been life for little guys in the U.S. of A. for a long time. You got something to say, Campbell?"

  The Colony Manager glowered back for a moment. "This is a very difficult, very dangerous situation. It's prudent to be cautious. I might add that in the last several years we've devoted a tremendous amount of effort to gaining better treatment for the Colony."

  "Uh-huh. And how much better treatment have you managed to get for the Colony in all that time? Don't get madder, for Christ's sake. You're smart. You're sharp. You just didn't have leverage. Now, you got leverage. Us. The best damn military force on or off Earth. And we can't be bought, unlike just about everything else these days, because if money really mattered to us we wouldn't be doing this job in the first place. But if you keep us at arm's length because you don't think you can really win, then you will lose."

  Sarafina's face was a carefully composed mask, but her words carried some acid. "You are saying we suffer from some sort of inferiority complex?"

  "Whatever you want to call it. If you don't think you matter, then you don't. I've been there. I remember being a civ, seeing all these great things I could supposedly do, and knowing I was really in a big glass box so I could see all that stuff but never reach it. I knew that, but maybe what I knew was way wrong. Think about it."

  Stark turned to Reynolds. "The mil's a little different, but basically we're also sure we're gonna get screwed. We live inside walls and everyone outside the walls is against us. Especially the civs, right? But you know what? We've got something they don't understand. Everybody in the mil figures they make a difference. We figure we're doing something important. It doesn't make any sense because most of the time we're just being used and we know it, but even when we're being used we're still proud of who we are and what we do. We take an oath! Civs don't take oaths, except the politicians and everybody knows how much they believe in their oaths."

  Vic eyed him, face as guarded as Sarafina's. "What's your point?"

  "The point is that they," Stark pointed at Campbell and his aide, "don't understand that. Don't understand people who believe they make a difference. It scares them to see people devoted to a cause they don't understand, so they're always a little scared of us. Sure, they're scared of our guns, too, but guns are just tools. It's the people who use them that don't make sense to civs. And civs are all stepped on every day by people with big money, or people working for people with big money, so there's nobody else for them to look down on but us. So we get used, for a lot of reasons. But these civs won't use us, Vic, because they need us too bad. We're the only thing that'll ever let them break out of that glass box I talked about. We can blow it into little tiny fragments for them."

  "So they need us. Why do we need them?"

  "To give us a reason! What's the cause, Vic? Who're we protecting? What's the oath? The mil needs a reason for being, something more than just killing people who want to kill us and trying to stay alive in the process. Otherwise, we're like priests without a religion. We can go through the motions all we want, but none of it means anything and none of it makes sense. The only way we do make sense, the only way we're complete, is if we're part of a whole. Part of them. Maybe it's different in some other countries, but we're American soldiers." He pointed to the civilians. "Unless we're working for them, we got no reason for being."

  Reynolds sat silent for a long moment, then quirked a small smile. "I've been trying to figure out our endgame. Our objective. Can't just hold the perimeter for the rest of our lives. We can't set an objective on our own, can we, Ethan? We're not trained for it, we're not supposed to do it, so even when we could do it something holds us back. And I sure miss fighting for 'we the people.' " She looked over Campbell and Sarafina. "It's our job to do what we're told. So, what do you need us to do?"

  The civilians stared back, momentarily thrown off-balance.

  "You're asking us for instructions?" Campbell finally wondered.

  "Not instructions. Orders."

  "But . . . you're the ones with all the power. Sergeant Stark is absolutely right about that. You should be giving us orders, just like he did yesterday when that naval battle was going on over the Colony."

  "We're mil," Vic explained patiently. "American military. Push us hard enough, and even we'll break eventually, but we won't be happy or proud about it. Ethan Stark is right, something that happens more often than I can account for. We don't give orders to civilians. We don't run the country. We take orders, even orders that don't make much sense. It's not that I trust you, because I don't. I fully expect you to use us for your own purposes. But that's your right. What is it you want us to do?"

  Campbell looked baffled. "We don't know what we want, yet."

  "We're used to that." Vic looked up and over at Stark. "You got everything mapped out for the civs?"

  "No." Stark finally sat, enjoying the sensation. "That's their call. I'm here to give advice."

  Sarafina stared at him. "And what is your advice to us?"

  "You got a lot of power, now. Use it. Use it smart. There's nothing wrong with the American system. There's a helluva lot right. We just let the wrong people take over running it." Stark canted his head toward Reynolds. "Like voting. Nobody in the mil votes. We figure we're hopelessly outnumbered."

  Vic uttered an exaggerated sigh. "Ethan, we are. There aren't very many mil. There's a whole lot of civs. We can't outvote them."

  "You don't have to." Stark switched his gaze to Campbell. "How many people vote in elections? Back home?"

  "You mean what percentage of eligible voters actually vote?" Campbell questioned. "The average runs between twenty and thirty percent these days."

  "Like when I was a kid," Stark confirmed. "Vic, we're not competing with every civ, just those who vote. And it only takes one vote to win."

  "That does improve the odds," she admitted. "But, right now, voting is no help. We're felons. If the civs join us, they're felons."

  Campbell glared back defiantly. "We have rights, rights which have been trampled for too long. Sergeant Stark, you're a much shrewder man than I had estimated. I promise you, I'll get my advisers in line soon and arrange a vote within the Colony which will hopefully give me a mandate to officially join with you."

  "I'll take your word for it," Stark stated, "but I'll be blunt. I don't trust Trasies."

  "I know he's been very difficult during our meetings—"

  "That's not what this is about. I don't like him, but I can work with people I don't like. Trasies feels wrong to me."

  Campbell glanced at Sarafina, who shook her head tiredly. "Sergeant Stark, we have checked repeatedly for any evidence that Chief of Security Trasies has acted against us or against you. We've found nothing."

  Vic chuckled. "Did you really expect to find evidence in your files? If Trasies was working against you, the files wouldn't have been kept in the civ systems where anybody could trip over them. They'd have been protected in—" She stopped speaking abruptly, then swore. "They'd be in the military systems someplace."

  "Wouldn't we have found them already?" Stark demanded.

  "No, no, no. We've got a gazillion files in long-term memory, Ethan. And security documents would be protected by passwords, fake file names, firewalls, and special security compartments. Just finding the damn things would take a special effort, and if you didn't know they were there you'd never think to try looking for them."

  "If there's anything there, I'd certainly like to see it," Campbell advised softly. "You realize, of course, any derogatory information would be questioned. Files can be faked."
>
  "We don't have anybody who can—" Vic bridled, then broke off. "Maybe we do," she conceded. "Hell, probably we do. But we won't fake anything."

  "You understand people will suggest that anyway."

  "Yes, but if we just wanted to fake files to implicate Trasies why wouldn't we have done that right off the bat? Why wait until now?"

  "That's true," Sarafina agreed. "And your Sergeant Stark couldn't pull off such a deception, I believe," she added with a smile. "He is not a good liar."

  Vic grinned. "Well, we agree on one thing, at least. That and getting our officers sent home."

  Private Murphy lay strapped onto a wide bed, well-cushioned despite the low gravity, his right shoulder and side rigidly locked into a gray box with gently blinking lights and bundles of tubes snaking into outlets in the wall. His face, drawn and pale, lit with surprise and happiness as he caught sight of Stark. "Hey, Sarge! I mean, uh, Commander." His words came rapidly, as if from a recording played back too fast, reflecting a metabolism sped up to accelerate healing.