by Marko Kloos
“I haven’t seen snow this clean since before you were born.”
She raises her hand to her mouth and touches the snow on her palm with the tip of her tongue.
“Tastes like nothing,” she proclaims.
“Colony planet I was on last year, their planetary winter lasts three years,” I say. “All rocks and dust in the summer years, and forty below in the winter. Lousiest place I’ve ever been. Your suit malfunctioned, you’d be dead of exposure in a few hours.”
“We went up to central New Hampshire the year before you were born,” Mom says, as if she hasn’t heard my little anecdote. “We went up Mount Washington. There was snow up there, in early October. Most beautiful place I’ve ever been. No cities for miles, just mountains and trees as far as the eye could see. Just this big blanket of orange and red and green, stretching all the way to the horizon.”
“Was that your honeymoon with Dad?”
“Uh-huh. The month after, we moved out to PRC Seven, because they had a two-bedroom unit available. And then everything started turning to crap.”
Mom has changed a lot since I left. I’m not used to her introspective side. Before I joined the military, I was convinced that my mother was just like all the other welfare drones in our PRC—glued to the Network screen all day and not giving much of a shit about anything but show schedules and ration day. Part of the reason why I didn’t try harder to get some leave time down on Earth was my conviction that my mother wouldn’t have anything interesting to say anyway.
“Did I mess things up for you? I mean, when I was born?”
She looks at me and shakes her head with a sad little smile.
“Oh, no, honey. I messed things up for myself. Your father helped a lot, too. But it was mostly me. Marrying your dad was just the wrong thing to do. But I was nineteen, and I didn’t know anything about anything.”
She drops her handful of snow and wipes her wet hand on the outside of her jacket. It’s cold out here in northern Vermont, and Mom’s jacket doesn’t look like it’s adequate for the climate, but she doesn’t seem to mind the cold.
“He said he was going to get into the service. Said he’d muster out after five or ten years, and we could take the money and buy a little house in the outskirts, away from the tenements. ‘Just a few years,’ he said.”
She shakes her head with a chuckle that doesn’t sound the least bit amused.
“Instead, he came home after two years. Kicked out for failure to follow orders. Not a dollar to his name. So he moved back into our unit, and the five or ten years in the tenement ended up twenty-five. I’m pretty sure I’ll live in that place until I die, just like your dad.”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I say, and I mean it. I’ve never felt so much sorrow for my mother in my life, and I’m ashamed when I realize it’s because I’ve never seen her as deserving of empathy. I simply never considered that my mother had a story of her own, and that she wasn’t an apathetic welfare rat just like all the rest of them.
“Don’t be,” Mom says. She reaches out and touches my cheek with her snow-cold hand. “At least you won’t be stuck here doing the same thing we did. And don’t think for a second that I’ve ever thought you were ‘messing things up for me.’ You’re the only good thing that came out of that marriage. You’re the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. Without you, I would have gone up on the roof of our old high-rise and jumped off it fifteen years ago.”
I remember all the times when I sent out my weekly messages to Mom a few days late, and the times when I skipped them altogether, and I feel a burning shame that makes the tears well up in my eyes. I take Mom’s hand off my cheek and place it between my own hands, to rub away the cold of the snow she was holding earlier.
“I’m sorry for being such a self-centered little shit all those years,” I say. “I guess I wasn’t much of a help to you.”
Mom smiles at me, and shrugs.
“Andrew, you were just a kid. That’s what teenagers are, don’t you know?”
We stand together like this for a little while, Mom with her hand between my hands, both of us enjoying the sedate sounds of Liberty Falls waking up all around us—hydrocars gliding past, soft music coming from a few of the shops opening, people talking to each other in low voices as they walk past the little green and into the transit station. It’s as if we have stepped off the train and into a different time and place altogether.
“You want to go and see if there’s a place that’ll feed us some breakfast on my fancy government ID?” I ask Mom, and she nods.
“I’m starving. This clean air is making me hungrier than I’ve been in forever.”
We walk down the sidewalk of Main Street in search of a government canteen, or at least an automated eatery that has the government logo among the accepted payment methods stickered to the front door.
As we walk down the street, a man steps out of a door twenty yards ahead of us. He’s wearing a white chef’s uniform, and he carries an old-fashioned blackboard and easel, which he sets up on the sidewalk in front of his door. We watch as he sits on his heels in front of the blackboard to write on it with a piece of green chalk. As we get closer, I can make out the first few lines he has written:
Eggs Benedict—CD150
Frittata—CD125
Lumberjack Hash Browns—CD175
By now, I have roughly a million Commonwealth dollars in my government account, but I can’t access any of it, and I don’t have a single dollar of hard currency on me. I scan the line of payment symbols on the door, but “FED ID” is not among them.
The man in the chef’s uniform notices us and gets up from his crouch. When he turns to face us, I can tell that he’s doing just a little bit of a double-take at the sight of my dark-blue fleet uniform. From the way his gaze shifts to the beret on my head and then the ribbon salad above my breast pocket, I suspect that he knows what he’s looking at. I nod at him in greeting, and he returns the nod with narrowed eyes.
“Combat controller,” he says, a statement rather than a question. He’s a tall, lean guy, and he looks like he’s in very good shape. His hair is a closely cropped buzz cut that is streaked with gray.
“Correct,” I say.
He looks at my shoulder boards and raises an eyebrow. “I’m not too good with the new ranks they came up with. You a sergeant?”
“Staff Sergeant,” I correct. “E-6.”
“Doesn’t seem right, fleet NCOs going by those army ranks now,” he says. “When I left, you would have been a petty officer first class.”
“You a navy vet?”
“Damn straight. Twenty years in the fleet. Took my retirement just before the Lanky business started. Back when they still called it the navy.”
“That was about the time I joined up,” I say. “Got into the fleet a year before they unified the services and gave everyone army ranks. I was a petty officer third class for about two months, before they took away the chevron and called me a corporal.”
“Well, how about that,” he smiles. Then he wipes his right hand on the apron he’s wearing and holds it out to me. “Steve Kopka, Master Chief Petty Officer. Retired,” he adds, with a hint of regret in his voice.
“Andrew Grayson,” I reply, and take the offered hand. His handshake is firm and businesslike. “This is my mom.”
“Ma’am,” he says to her with a nod.
“Pleased to meet you,” Mom replies.
“So,” he says, eyeing Mom’s clean, but obviously welfare-sourced clothes. “Out for a stroll this morning? You on leave?”
“Yeah, my tub’s in for a refit, and I took some time off between assignments.”
“I worked with you combat controllers a bunch when I was in. Only my beret was maroon back then, not scarlet.”
“You were Spaceborne Rescue?” I ask, and he nods.
“God knows what color their beanies are these days.”
“Still maroon,” I say. “They took away all the fleet ranks and gave everyone new shoulder
boards, but they didn’t mess with the podheads’ beret colors. Guess they were afraid of the riot that would have followed.”
“Damn straight,” Master Chief Kopka says. “You of all people know how much fucking sweat goes into earning one of those. Pardon my language, ma’am,” he adds in Mom’s direction.
“Not at all,” Mom says. I can tell that she has no idea what we’re talking about, but I also know she’s pleased to witness our exchange.
“Master Chief Kopka here is a former Spaceborne Rescue man,” I explain to Mom. “They have the only job in the fleet that’s more dangerous than calling nukes down on your own head. They’re the guys who launch in ballistic drop pods to rescue crashed pilots.”
“Oh, my,” Mom says with a smile. “And you made it all the way through your service doing that? You must have been good at it.”
“That was before the Lankies,” Chief Kopka tells her. “We just tussled with the Russians and the Chinese every once in a while. Your son here has a tougher job than I ever had.”
“So what are you doing now, Master Chief?” I ask him. “You trade in your beanie for a chef’s hat?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Took my retirement money and went in with a friend to open this place. He died last year, so it’s all mine now.” He looks at the old but clean brick building with obvious pride of ownership.
“Good for you, Master Chief. Pleasure to run into you.”
“Are you two in a hurry? I’d like to make you some breakfast, if you’ll let me. Don’t run into a fellow podhead too often, and I have a ‘free meal’ policy for the old brotherhood.”
“Oh, no, we couldn’t—” Mom says.
“Absolutely,” I say at the same time.
“What’s a podhead?” Mom asks in a low voice as Master Chief Kopka leads us into his little restaurant.
“Fleet special ops,” I tell her. “Spaceborne Rescue, combat controllers, Space-Air-Land teams. The rest of the fleet calls us that because we use the ballistic drop pods a lot.”
“That’s what you do?” Mom asks, disturbed. “I thought you were sitting at a network console somewhere in a starship. You never told me about drop pods and nuclear weapons.”
“That’s ‘need to know,’ Mom. And you didn’t need to know.”
In front of us, Master Chief Kopka lets out a low chuckle.
We walk into a cozy little dining room. There are maybe a dozen tables in the room, all decked with the same kind of cream-colored tablecloths, and each adorned with little flower vases. Mom looks around with an expression that couldn’t be more bewildered if she had just stepped off the Gateway shuttle and onto the big spaceport on Luna.
“We’re not open until eight,” Chief Kopka says over his shoulder. “My waitress won’t be in until quarter ’til, but I have the kitchen fired up already.”
He leads us to a corner table that’s right by one of the streetside windows and pulls out a chair for Mom.
“You folks sit down, and I’ll bring you some menus. What would you like to drink?”
Mom takes her seat and looks up at the chief.
“Gosh, I have no idea. Coffee, maybe?”
“Good call. I got in some fresh beans the other day. One coffee, coming right up. What can I get you, Sergeant?”
“I’ll have one, too,” I say. “Don’t waste the top-shelf stuff on us, Master Chief.”
“You leave that up to me,” Chief Kopka says.
He walks off toward the kitchen, and Mom gives me a look that is equal parts bewilderment, excitement, and amusement.
“Does that happen to you a lot?”
“This is the first time. I’ve never gotten anything from anyone for wearing this outfit.”
The chief returns a few minutes later. He’s carrying a little serving tray with two coffee cups on it. Mom watches in wide-eyed wonder as he puts the cups down in front of us. He takes a small creamer off the tray and places it on the table in front of us.
“That’s some local cream, from actual Vermont cows. I have an arrangement with a dairy farm just down the road.”
He adds a little bowl of granulated sugar to what is already a hundred-dollar breakfast without any food in the mix, and puts down two leather-bound menus. Then he winks at Mom and points to her coffee cup.
“You go ahead and enjoy that coffee while you pick out something to eat. Disregard the headers that say ‘Lunch’ or ‘Dinner.’ I can make you anything you see on that menu. I’ll be back in a few to take your order.”
With that, he walks off, leaving Mom sitting in slack-jawed amazement.
The coffee is much better than the powdered stuff we get to drink in the fleet, and it bears very little resemblance to the atrocious instant-coffee-flavored soy powder they include in the BNA rations. Mom carefully assembles her cup by adding two spoonfuls of the sugar and a small splash of cream. She handles the creamer like the ChemWar guys would handle vials of nerve gas, as if one spilled drop would be a catastrophe. When her coffee has reached the right color and sweetness, she dips a finger into the milk container and sticks the fingertip into her mouth to taste the pure cream.
“Oh my God,” she says after a moment of closed-eyed bliss. “That stuff is so rich. You could stand a spoon up in it. This is incredible.”
“Easy with the dairy, Mom,” I warn her. “If you’re not used to it, too much will screw up your plumbing. And don’t ask me how I know this.”
“It would be worth it,” Mom says. She takes a sip of her coffee and lets out a sound of utter contentment.
I add some cream and sugar to my own coffee and take a sip. It’s so rich and flavorful that it makes the fleet coffee seem like bilge water.
“So what are you going to eat?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Mom says. She opens the menu in front of her carefully and picks up the corner of the first page with her fingertips. “I’m sure everything is very good, and that whatever I order will be the best thing I’ve eaten in five years.”
Five minutes into our breakfast, Mom revises her opinion, and lets me know that Chief Kopka’s food is the best thing she’s ever eaten in her life. The menu has meal options and price tags that seem like a cruel prank to a welfare rat from the tenements. The dinner menu has steak and shellfish dishes listed, and the price tags next to them have four digits before the decimal point. Not wanting to take shameless advantage of the chief’s generosity by ordering a $1,500 cut of meat, we pick some moderately priced items from the brunch menu. I order the lumberjack hash browns, which are a glorious mess of real potato cubes mixed with bits of corned beef, and topped with a fried egg. Mom picks the eggs Benedict, which have a heart-shaped poached egg artfully stacked on a muffin, along with a thick slice of bacon, and a piece of avocado underneath. As far as I can tell, there’s not a single bit of soy in either meal.
When our plates are nearly clean, Chief Kopka comes out of the kitchen and walks over to our table. He is clutching a leather-bound book.
“May I join you for a few minutes?” he asks. “I have something I’d like to show you, Sergeant.”
“Sure thing, Master Chief. Pull up a chair. It’s your place.”
The chief sits down at our table and puts the book on the linen tablecloth between us. I open it to the first page and see that it’s a collection of photo printouts and mementos from the chief’s time in the fleet. As I leaf through the album, I see that a lot of the pictures seem to be from the chief’s senior NCO days, as if he had only started the whole collection once he got close to retirement. A few pages in the book are dedicated to unit patches from ships Chief Kopka has served on: NACS Independence CV-606, NACS Nassau FF-476, NACS Wainwright CA-41, and a half dozen others. There are pictures of the chief hanging out in the mess or rec room with his petty-officer buddies, and some shots of scenery from colony planets, with unmistakable prefabricated colony housing units in the background.
“Let me ask you a question, Sarge,” the chief says after a while. “You’re up there all year long
, and you’re on the ground, not flying a console. How bad is it?”
“You know I can’t tell you details, Chief.”
“I’m not asking you to violate OpSec. Just give me a quick sketch. Whatever news we get on the Lankies, they’ve put it through so many cleanup cycles that it’s as bland as that shit they feed people in the welfare cities.” He looks at Mom and gives her a sheepish smile. “Pardon my French, ma’am.”
“Not at all,” Mom says, smiling back. “It is pretty bland shit, after all.”
“I don’t think I’m giving anything away,” I say, “but we’re getting our asses kicked. There’s nothing left to defend past the Thirty. They’ve taken it all away from us.”
“Holy crap.” The chief sits back in his chair and exhales sharply. “They keep saying we’re ‘engaged’ past the Thirty.”
“Well, they’re not lying. We’re doing what we can to be a pain in their asses, but it’s all hit-and-run raids and nuclear bombardment. Even if we could kick them off our colonies again, it wouldn’t do us any good in the long run. First thing they do, they wreck our terraformers and set up their own. If they ever restart the colony program, we’ll have to do all the work from scratch again.”
“Figures.” Master Chief Kopka shakes his head in disgust. “Twenty years in the fleet, and I go into retirement just before the real fight starts. I picked one hell of a time to get out.”
“I’d say you picked the perfect time, Master Chief,” I say. “We struggle on the ground, but at least we get our licks in. Those ugly things are tough as shit, but you can kill ’em. Their spaceships? Forget about it. We’ve never won a ship-to-ship engagement with a Lanky seed ship. Every time we’ve stood and fought instead of running away, they’ve hammered our cap ships to scrap. Being in the fleet, flying a console—that’s almost as dangerous as ground combat now.”