by Marko Kloos
“Sorry about that,” she says. “I shouldn’t have left you with that pack of morons.”
“It’s okay,” I say.
“I needed to walk off some anger.”
“Did it work?”
“Not completely,” she replies.
Behind Halley, her mother walks into the living room, with a facial expression as if she had just bitten into a freshly cut lime.
“Diana,” she says. “That was very much the height of rudeness.”
“I concur,” Halley says, her voice dropping to the same temperature as the refrigerated air coming from the AC vents on the walls. “You are absolutely the rudest bitch I’ve ever known.”
“Honey,” her father says in an imploring tone. Halley holds up a finger to interrupt him, her eyes never leaving the face of her mother, who looks like she’s just been doused with cold water.
“How dare y—” she begins, and Halley cuts her off harshly.
“How dare you,” she says. “How fucking dare you indeed. We come home to see you two because we are about to ship out to Mars, and you throw a goddamn social event without telling us.” She looks at me and then back at her mother, barely suppressed fury in her eyes. “You invite the guy I dated in college, seat him right next to me, and then bitch passive-aggressively for two solid hours about how much you think our jobs suck, and how uncouth all this soldiering business is. You disrespect my husband and his background while he’s sitting right in front of you, trying to play nice for your idiot friends.”
Her mother looks like she wants to say something but can’t think of anything cutting enough to use for a retort. Maybe she’s intimidated by Halley, who projects an air of contained fury and danger without moving from her spot. Instead, she just glares at Halley, but I notice the little sidelong glances she’s giving me and her husband, as if she’s hoping one of us will rein Halley in.
“We are in the corps,” Halley continues. “That’s what we have chosen to do. You think that’s not a respectable career choice. You’re having your goddamn dinner parties and your social-status bullshit games while poor kids from the PRCs are dying by the fucking thousands to keep your ass safe from the Lankies, and you think they’re vulgar trash. I’ve seen plenty of those kids die for you. And any one of them is worth twenty of you.”
Halley’s mom makes a strangled sort of noise in her throat, and her cheeks flush with anger. Her father takes two steps toward Halley, hands outstretched, and Halley glares at him. Her dad stops in his tracks.
“Don’t touch me without permission.”
“Honey,” he says. “I was just going to—”
“I know,” she says. “But I don’t want you to. You’ve been cleaning up the fallout from her shitty games for too long. I’m not going to let you get her out of this one.”
“This is my house,” her mom says slowly, enunciating every word very clearly. “How dare you talk to us both that way.”
“Oh, I dare,” Halley says. “I should have dared years ago.” She glances at her father again. “But I didn’t want to break Dad’s heart. You don’t have one to break.” Then she looks at me. “Would you mind getting our stuff, Andrew? I think it’s best if we leave now.”
“You don’t have to leave,” her father says. “Please.”
“I think that’s a grand idea,” Halley’s mother says. “Now that you’ve told us what you really think of us. Your parents. The people who raised you. Gave you all these opportunities.”
“And that burns you, doesn’t it? That I took all those opportunities and turned them into a uniform? That I’m not married to Kenneth and working a nice nine-to-five somewhere nearby so you can keep meddling with our lives? That I married someone from the PRCs instead?”
Halley looks back at me again, and her expression softens. Her dad is standing off to the side, looking from her to his wife and giving me the impression that he’d love for the ground to open up and swallow him right about now. I’ve never seen another person look so awkwardly uncomfortable and helpless.
“We’re going to leave now,” she says to her mother. “You’ll never have to put up with me again. We’re probably going to die on Mars in a few weeks. But even if we don’t, I don’t want to see you anymore.”
Halley smiles back at me, a sad but affectionate little smile, and I return it almost reflexively.
“If we come back, I want to start a family with Andrew. I know I said I’ll never want kids, but I think I’ve changed my mind. If we make it back from Mars, I think I want to work on that with him. I want to make sure I have a piece of him to continue on, because I hate the thought of him being gone from the world for good.”
She looks at her mother again, who seems to be out of good retorts.
“If I get pregnant before we finish our service, I’ll have the embryo frozen until I make it out of the corps alive. If we both die in the service, I’ll have it destroyed. I’ll run naked through a Category Five PRC waving commissary vouchers before I let you get your hands on that child and fuck it up like you tried to fuck me up. I’m done with you for good.”
Halley’s dad looks like he’s about to break into tears. Her mom just stands there, with a stony expression, jaw muscles clenching visibly, but Halley pays her no more attention. Instead, she turns to her father.
“Dad, you can give us a ride to the transit station if you want. If not, we’ll walk. No big deal. But we are leaving for Lackland. We’ll stay on base in the Transient Personnel Unit and get a ride back north tomorrow morning.”
Her father elects to drive us back to the transit station. Neither Halley nor I say good-bye to her mother, who disappears upstairs anyway while we get our gear bags and put them by the front door.
When we pull up to the transit plaza, Halley’s dad starts crying quietly. She puts a hand on his arm and leaves it there for a few moments.
“I meant it, Dad. I don’t want to see her again. But you can still message me through MilNet if you want.”
“Don’t blame me for her,” he says. “Your mother has never been an easy woman to live with.”
“I don’t blame you totally,” Halley says. “She’s a hard woman to stand up to. But when you stand by while she’s trying to fuck with my marriage, you’re not helping, either.”
She leans over and kisses him on the cheek.
“Good-bye, Dad. I’ll keep you posted if I can. Maybe you can visit us up in Vermont after it’s all over. But come by yourself, because she’s not welcome.”
When her dad’s hydrocar disappears in the distance, Halley lets out a long, shaky breath, as if she had just relieved herself of a terrible burden. I want to make a quip about how the day has improved, something to break the tension and share some levity, but I don’t feel that it’s appropriate right now. In any case, Halley preempts me. With her father’s car finally out of sight, she hugs me firmly and breaks into tears. And for a few minutes, I do the only thing I can do right now. I hold my wife and let her come to terms with what happened.
“Thank you,” I tell her when she has dried her eyes on the sleeves of her uniform.
“Can’t promise I’ll always take your side on everything,” she says, and kisses me. “But I can promise you that I’ll stand with you every time. Against anyone.”
We sort ourselves out and shoulder our bags to go back into the transit station for the ride back to Joint Base Lackland. The TPU quarters we’ll share tonight will be far less luxurious than the guest bedroom back at the house we just left, but I know I’ll be sleeping infinitely better tonight despite the hard and narrow military cots and the crummy chow waiting for us there.
CHAPTER 8
FINAL DAYS
It’s strange to think of any place on Earth as home again after all this time moving around for the corps, but I’ve come to think of Liberty Falls that way, even if it is a middle-class enclave and nothing like my old neighborhood. I don’t feel shame anymore for enjoying the ’burber amenities—real trees, grass, decent food, and
safe streets. It’s the very tail end of fall, and the nights are cold, but the air is clean, and I know there will be snow any day now.
Halley and I are sitting in a booth in Chief Kopka’s restaurant, drinking coffee and sharing some pancakes for breakfast, when our PDPs buzz with incoming message alerts at the same time again.
After having the damn things in your pocket constantly for over half a decade, you are attuned to them beyond the different vibration and sound patterns for critical or routine alerts. The haptic engines in the PDPs can only vary the strength of the vibration and its length, but every troop will swear that some alerts feel weightier than others. Halley has been moved back to active duty and flight status since we got back from San Antonio, so whatever is going on right now will draw in both of us.
Halley and I look at each other as we take our PDPs out of our pockets.
“Deployment orders,” she says.
“Probably just admin shit,” I counter. “Change of menus at the chow hall.”
“You wish.” She smiles and turns on her device, and I follow suit. We both look at our incoming messages for a few moments.
“Deployment orders,” I concede.
I am ordered to report to Joint Base Coronado for predeployment fitting of a new bug suit, after which I am to report to a new command: SOCOM Task Force Red.
“What the fuck is SOCOM Task Force Red?” Halley says when I show her the text on my screen. I scroll through the message until I find the deployment location.
“Embarked on NACS Phalanx,” I read. “One of the Hammerhead space control cans.”
“Pod drop,” Halley says matter-of-factly, and I nod.
She flips her PDP around so I can read her orders. She has to report to Assault Transport Squadron Five on NACS Pollux (CV-2153) to take command of the squadron’s Alpha Flight. ATS-5 and Pollux are part of Task Force Purple, whatever that is.
“Looks like we won’t be riding to Mars in the same bus,” Halley says.
“Nope.”
I don’t dispute her determination of our deployment target, even though the orders make no mention of it. We all know where we’re about to go and what we are about to fight.
We both look at our screens for a few moments without saying anything. Then Halley puts her PDP facedown on the table and picks up her coffee mug.
“That’s in three days. I suppose we don’t have to rush breakfast.”
In a way, it’s freeing to know our date and time of deployment precisely, to be able to count down our remaining time on Earth to the hour and minute without having to anticipate the alert buzz of the electronic leashes in our trouser pockets.
The Lazarus Brigades are now semiofficial ancillaries of the corps, but they’re not so tightly integrated that I can reach Sergeant Fallon easily via MilNet. We do, however, have backdoor channels for exchanging updates, and I send my old squad leader a status update to let her know when we’re going to Mars even though I’m sure that Lazarus’s intelligence network is already aware of the news. Sergeant Fallon sends me a message back a few hours later through the shadow account we set up just for communications between us.
>Better you than me. I’d tell you to be careful, but you’re in the business of seeking out shit to stir. Good luck to you and your wife, and God help the Lankies. See you on the other side.
All my best,
Briana
I wish I could get Sergeant Fallon to serve under me again, but she’s not qualified to do pod drops, and I doubt that a division of SI could pry her out of her PRC and get her to go back into space. And in all honesty, I’m glad she’ll get to sit this one out.
On the day after we receive the deployment orders, we do something we’ve never done before in our time here in Vermont. The chief packs us some food for lunch, and we go for a hike up into the mountains that surround Liberty Falls. Neither Halley nor I feel like carrying twenty kilos of extra kit up and down the hills, so we decide to piss on the regulations and leave our alert bags locked up in Chief Kopka’s office along with our PDPs. It’s a crisp, cold day, and the otherwise well-groomed hiking trail is covered in dry brown leaves, remnants of the gorgeous fall we never got to experience because we were 150 light-years from the Green Mountains a month and a half ago when all the colors turned. We are wearing our CDU cammies and weather shells and only carry sidearms and a bag with our lunch and water. I can tell the hike strains Halley much more than it would have before she got injured, but I know that she wants to prove to herself that she is up to the challenge despite not being healed up completely yet. If she can’t hike a small hill on Earth in ideal conditions, she’ll have no chance if she gets shot down on Mars and has to make an escape through much worse terrain.
“Will you look at this view,” Halley says when we reach the top of the trail two hours later. We’re at the top of a tall ridge, and Liberty Falls is nestled in the valley below, a few kilometers away.
“Bet you it was something else back in October,” I say. The deciduous trees here in the mountains have shed their leaves, and the hills are brown and gray. I’ve learned a lot about trees in the last year or two, coming down here regularly.
“It’s still something else. Just listen.”
“I don’t hear anything.”
“Precisely,” Halley says.
The town below is quiet. No noise makes it up to where we are standing, where the trees are swaying and rustling softly in the cold wind. I am once again struck by the difference between small-town ’burber life and the PRCs. The residence clusters just swallow the landscape, blanket it and take it over. Liberty Falls, manufactured and manicured as it is, just kind of nestles in the valley, molding itself to the shape of the landscape. None of the buildings in the town are taller than four or five floors. There’s a stream running through the town, and the water is glittering in the rays of the sun that’s poking through the holes in the cloud coverage. The solar-cell pavements of the residential neighborhoods have almost the same color as the river water, muted tones of dark green and blue.
I sit down on a fallen tree trunk nearby, and Halley joins me. The walk up was just strenuous enough for both of us to break a sweat despite the low temperature. We enjoy the view in silence as we catch our breath again.
“Feels weird,” I say. “I don’t think I’ve ever been out in the field without a rifle and a pack.”
“We’re not in the field,” Halley says. “We’re in nature.”
“Never heard of it. That’s what this is? Nature?”
“Smart-ass.” She looks up into the sun poking through the clouds and closes her eyes. “Remember Arcadia? All those trees. You never saw it from the air the way I did from the cockpit. Lakes. Forests. Grassland. Like a little Earth, only without all the people.”
“I remember,” I say. “And then we set off a nuke on it.”
“We didn’t. The SEALs did. Major Masoud. And we’d be dead if he hadn’t lit up that terraformer.”
“Yeah, I know. Still seems like a shit thing to do, though. Four settlements on that rock, and one of them is now irradiated.”
“They can be glad he didn’t just hit the trigger on all of them. We can build more towns. Lots of space left on that moon.”
The Arcadia mission is still gnawing on my mind. As a small-unit covert action, it was one of the most successful ones in NAC military history, mostly thanks to Major Masoud’s planning and ruthlessness. We lost thirty troops and three advanced black-ops drop ships, but we seized an entire colony moon and half a million tons of top-of-the-line fighting ships. More importantly, the success of the mission restored a sense of justice among much of the NAC population. The new government—made up largely of veterans—gained a lot of goodwill and respect for hauling the renegade former NAC president and his entire circle of conspirators back to Earth in the brig of a supercarrier. It showed the people that the old elite was still subject to our laws, and that we will go 150 light-years and fight our own to drag them back to Earth if they betray us.
But most of the thirty troops who died fell in the final assault on the admin complex in Arcadia City, and that mission was my initiative. I have tried to take Sergeant Fallon’s advice about not second-guessing myself, but that sentiment is hard to reconcile with the rows of body bags that rode home with us on Portsmouth.
“What are we going to do after we get back?” Halley asks me. “Do we come back here? Live the ’burber life?”
“Well, we sure as shit aren’t going to be anywhere near your folks,” I say. “Not after last week.”
Halley makes a little grimace at the mention of her parents. Then she looks back at the valley and the tidy little town tucked away in it.
“I suppose this isn’t the worst of places to put down roots,” she says. “If we’re going to come back from Mars, that is.”
“We will,” I say.
“Oh?” Halley smiles and blinks into the sun again. “You got strategic intel you’re not sharing? We’re about to assault a colony world with thousands of Lankies on it. A dozen or more seed ships in orbit. And we’re going into battle with whatever was left in the scrapyard.”
“Well, there’s a few stars in the lineup. Thanks to Major Masoud. As much as I hate to give that little bastard praise for anything.”
“You think that’ll make a difference?”
“No,” I say. “Not the extra ships. Although they’ll be nice to have.”
I open the lunch bag Chief Kopka packed for us and go through the contents. There are sandwiches with turkey and cheddar—real stuff, not the soy shit they use in military mid-rats—and two thermal cups of soup. I pop the lid on one to check the contents. It’s potato soup, thick enough to make a spoon stand up in it.
“That smells good,” Halley says.
I hand her the container and a spoon from the bag and get another one out for myself.
“We’ll win because it’ll be all of us against all of them,” I say. “The Russians, the Chinese, the Euros, the Africans, the South Americans, and us. And nothing but Lankies on the receiving end. No bullshit skirmish over some clump of dirt somewhere past the Thirty. No traitors. No questions about who needs shooting and why.”