The Price of Peace

by Mike Moscoe

  He told the story, in immense detail, and every time something important happened, Ruth got the credit for it. The first time Trouble did that, Ruth laughed. Second time, she started to detect a pattern; she kept a very straight face as Cindy’s fawning smile took a turn for the puzzled.

  “Didn’t you do anything?”

  “I was just along for a walk in the woods. Ruth here’s the one who had the guts to let the jerks know the first time that we weren’t theirs for the taking. She got us fires, turned their greed loose on the fungus.” He turned to her. “Saved my life when she kicked away the controller. What kind of school do they send girls to out on the stations?”

  Cindy started to say something, but they had come upon their first set of marines. Ruth and Cindy hung back as Trouble did his officer thing. The marine was two men in one skin. Talking to his marines, he was formal, even curt, speaking quickly, then listening as his troops replied just as tersely. But they all looked like kids as he promised one hell of a beer bust when things calmed down.

  Trouble also didn’t seem to hear the parting whisper about the lieutenant having a new girl, maybe two. Cindy grinned. Ruth found herself wondering what it would be like to be a marine’s wife. Did marines even have wives? Was Trouble already married? That didn’t seem to matter to Cindy. To Ruth, raised on the stations where a marriage, a family, and a farm were as close to one institution as was possible, it did very much.

  She wasn’t paying a lot of attention to what was going on, her mind jumbled with questions, even as she tried to recognize the woman Trouble kept making her out to be to Cindy. She wanted to take a walk by the creek, listen to the wind, figure out who she was and who this stranger walking beside her might be.

  She came full attention to the now when Cindy suggested lunch with her grandmother. On the stations, you only took a guy to the grandfolks when you were serious. She’d heard city folks were a lot looser. Could a girl work this fast?

  Trouble set a fast pace; they must have covered half of Hurtford City by noon. Cindy never ran out of brew pubs to point out. But after the third detachment, Trouble’s attitude toward Cindy changed. Gunny led that team. His report included several recent tries made to recruit…more like seduce…marines to stay. Trouble listened, his eyes looking straight through Cindy. After that, his answers to her were short and clipped. Still, he didn’t change lunch plans.

  Grandmother’s large house was near the center of town; or rather, the town had grown up around it, then long past it. Today, it was crowded. Ruth quickly concluded Grandmother was one of the Elders that had moved so quickly to tackle the new challenge. It probably took Trouble less time; he acknowledged the city manager and several of the elected Elders. Just leaving. They had the look of boys who’d been taken out behind the barn and talked to real good by their pa and his belt. That the tiny grandmother who presided over the dinner table could get that reaction from grown men told Ruth much.

  Cindy served lunch—soup, salad, and sandwiches. But the main course was talk; Grandmother served it with questions.

  “What do you think of our world?” she asked the marine.

  The marine left his soup untouched to study the woman. “The land is good.”

  Grandmother smiled at the half answer. “And the people?”

  “The mixed bag I’ve found most places.”

  The old woman chuckled dryly. “Yes, no matter where people go, there we are with our wants and needs. Some people seem to have more wants than others.”

  “Yes, ma’am, that’s why I’m a marine. A few folks need reminding of what they can reach for. And what they can’t.”

  Grandmother leaned back in her chair, eyes closing. “That was the hope of my father, and his father when they came here. That a new world would have so much to reach for, folks would remember what belonged to others. We wanted people free to reach as far as their grasp could go. On the old worlds, people were always swatting your hand for reaching instead of letting you have what you needed. Here, in our corner of the galaxy, we turn our eyes away from the problems that freedom brought in the past, focus on the reaching, each man and woman for herself. Some activities just don’t deserve notice. You know what I mean?”

  “A smart officer knows what not to see and hear. But it seems to me, even on the short visit I’ve had here, that maybe too much was watched with a blind eye.”

  Grandmother’s eyes came open. “Unity was not something we foresaw. We did what we had to do to satisfy folks whose stomachs were far too big. And whose eyes saw further than ours did. These mining contracts—who would have expected that what we signed here could be sold so quickly and so far?” Grandmother sighed. “I thought when we hired Mikhail that we had acquired a snake charmer. We need to open ourselves up. Not just to seekers who come to share our vision, but to those who question it as well. We need more snake charmers, like you.”

  “I think this is the second job offer I’ve gotten in the last week,” the marine chuckled. “I admit yours is a lot more attractive, and I appreciate the delivery much more. Still, ma’am, I’m a marine. Born one. Raised one. I’ll live one and probably die one. There’re lots of guys who’ve been beached in the last few months. I’m sure I can get in touch with some good ones. Send them your way if you want me to.”

  Grandmother drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly as her head shook. “We know you. We have seen your work. We’d rather trust you to be our eyes. Trust you to know what to see, what not to see. You rather than someone we don’t know.”

  The marine just shrugged.

  “Then I guess one trusted by one I trust will have to do. Your soup is getting cold. It is best eaten warm. Cindy, get this young man a fresh bowl.” Lunch followed quickly after that.

  Fed, they were leaving Grandmother’s when Trouble took Cindy’s elbow. “I’m not available for recruitment.”

  With a shrug, she produced a map chip, located the marines on it, and took her leave. Ruth expected to be told to get lost too, but the marine never got around to it. Instead, he got her talking about the stations. “Farming can’t be that good.”

  “Oh, but it is,” she shot back, and only stopped talking during the next hour when he checked his marines. She wouldn’t have kept talking, but he kept listening. Somewhere in all those words, Mordy came up. That did end her cascade of words.

  “I thought the farmers figured out how to avoid the draft.” Trouble was puzzled.

  “We did. But the first orders were pretty threatening, and Mordy said he’d rather show up for induction than be the one they hung to impress the rest. He went with about twenty others, mostly young boys who really wanted to see what the rest of the world was like, but there he was too.”

  “He didn’t come back?”

  Ruth found herself looking for a crack in the sidewalk to fall through. It took her a long while to get the single syllable out. “No.”

  “No death notice?”

  That “No” was easier to get out.

  “Did you check on him?”

  “How could I?”

  The marine came to a dead halt. “The records are here.”

  Ruth kept quiet; she knew the records had to be somewhere. Just where, she wasn’t sure. But considering how bad things had been before Mordy left, did she really want to find him? Was she the kind of woman to go hunting for a husband who didn’t want to be found? Trouble headed straight for City Hall.

  Ruth followed, letting the silence stretch. Her throat was too choked up to let the words out that would have stopped this quest. She knew she could stop the marine with a simple plea. The marine would listen to her. But she couldn’t say that word.

  At City Hall, Trouble slid into an unoccupied workstation and quickly accessed the military records. Ruth spelled out Mordy’s name and date of birth. In less than a minute, Mordy’s military record on Hurtford Corner covered the screen. With a “hmm,” Trouble summarized it. “Previous military training, space experienced, they shipped him off-planet two we
eks after he reported in. Nothing after that.”

  “Nothing,” Ruth echoed, tasting the finality in the marine’s word. Probably just as well. But now what?

  “Let me check the Patton. Good, it’s overhead; this won’t take but a minute.” It didn’t. “He survived the war and was discharged.” Trouble sounded like he was giving her good news.

  “Where?”

  Trouble snorted. “Doesn’t say. A lot in Unity records don’t match the peace treaty’s requirements. Troops mustered out but no location, ships scrapped, but no record where or by whom.”

  “Mordy’s alive.” Ruth let the words roll around her mouth, unsure how they tasted.

  “Yes,” Trouble agreed, not embarrassing her with the question of why he wasn’t home yet.

  “I could,” the marine went on, “have the Patton search the net directories, see if we can locate him.”

  Ruth let that hang in the air between them, desperately wishing she knew what she wanted. Mordy back? Mordy gone from her life for good? Mordy the husband she’d dreamed of? How do you live your life if you don’t know what you want?

  Trouble filled her silence with his lopsided grin. “Then again, maybe not. We’ve got almost two hundred billion people on file, from Earth to Pitt’s Hope. But some of the frontier nets don’t follow standard protocols. I’m not sure I’d find you on the net. If he’s some place like here, or in transit, or…”

  “Or just doesn’t want to be found.”

  “Yes.” They left City Hall with that word echoing in Ruth’s head. The marine had a few more teams to visit. Words got kind of few and far between. Ruth was lost in questions. Why hadn’t Morty come back? Did she want him back? What was wrong with her? As a wife? As a woman?

  “Why’d you become a marine?” tumbled out of Ruth’s mouth before she even thought of the words.

  “I was born a marine. Raised by the Corps. Never thought of being anything else. Don’t know how to be anything else.” The words came at Ruth like automatic weapon fire. Trouble didn’t even look at her; his eyes stayed locked straight ahead. A moment passed into silence before he posed his own question. Now his voice was little more than a whisper. “Why’d you become a farmer?”

  “I was born one. Raised one. You know the rest.”

  “Yes.”

  “You married?”

  “God, no. No woman deserves a marine for a husband. No kid rates a marine father.”

  “That’s strange, coming from you.” He had her attention. She really couldn’t understand the puzzle this man had become.

  “I grew up waiting for my old man to come home. The five-month cruise that took nine months. Getting to the new post just in time for him to ship out. Always wondering when he’d come home. If he’d come home.” The marine’s eyes squinted, seeing beyond the street ahead and into some past only he knew. “No, ma’am, the Corps is a great place to live, but you never want to visit. You going to divorce Mordy?”

  So quickly, the marine changed the subject. “I don’t know. We don’t divorce out on the stations.”

  “No divorce?”

  “Out there, we’re a farm, a family, and I guess we’re a couple last. How do you split up a farm? How do you take care of the kids? Folks don’t stay single very long. Take the Henderson place. He came from off-world. He and Maggie couldn’t seem to get along. He chased after a gal, brought her home. She got on with the hired man. When they come to the dances, nobody knows who’s going to be dancing with whom, but the kids are being raised and the farm is making it. That’s what matters.”

  That brought Trouble to a halt. “Remember what I said this morning, about me understanding farming and you not understanding marines?”

  “Yes.”

  “Forget it. I don’t think either one of us will ever understand the other’s world.”

  “So how come my pa came from off-world and he and Ma get along fine?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Me neither.”

  Trouble’s comm link beeped; he lifted his hand to his mouth. “Trouble here.”

  “Skipper wants you back topside. We need to insert a fire team to help the civilians chasing around the hills.”

  “When?”

  “Captain’s gig is on its way down to get you.”

  “I’ll get out to the runway as soon as I can hitch a ride.”

  “Out.”

  “Out,” Trouble repeated.

  “Inn laid on a feast for us tonight,” a forlorn Ruth reminded him.

  “Guess I’ll have to take a rain check. Wonder who’s headed out to the port.”

  “Maybe we can borrow a rig. I could drive it back.”

  “You don’t mind running me around?”

  “No.”

  An hour later, Ruth watched the gig rocket back to orbit. Fate had brought another off-worlder into her life, and was rushing him out of her life much quicker this time. Probably just as well. Still, the marine was a lot more interesting than Mordy had ever been. Much more complex, too. In love with the Corps, and hating it at the same time. She wondered if he knew that. Probably not. The marine seemed to understand her and Mordy better than she did. Why did you need to stand back to understand what you had to live close up? She put the truck in gear; now, how would she put her life in gear?

  SEVEN

  IT WAS NOT a good picture that greeted Trouble back aboard the Patton. “Whoever those bastards are down there, they got more tech support than they deserve,” Igor summed up his sensor feed. “We’ve set the locals up for two ambushes, and the bad guys sidestepped both of them. They’ve got to have heart monitors, not as good as ours, but they got them.”

  “So, Lieutenant, take them down,” the skipper ordered.

  “No trouble, ma’am,” Trouble snapped, then studied the board to make sure he was right. “We drop a fire team outfitted with scout suits and spoofers ahead of them, go in fast, and put them down. What do we do with them?”

  “I want prisoners to chat with. These folks are way too smart for dumb thugs. Who sent ’em to school? I want answers to my questions. I want to take these guys with us when we leave.” The skipper pulled at her ear. “How am I going to do that?”

  Stan hardly let her finish the sentence. “Skipper, I had our legal clerk look into what the local folks call their laws. Turns out Hurtford Corner doesn’t have much law. Most crime is handled informally, and not the way they did it this morning.

  “However, Joe told us our bad guys have been using rockets to break down doors. A few hours ago, one of them tossed a surface-to-air missile at our Condor. Missed, but got me thinking. Maybe HC has no laws restricting access to weapons. Society’s Law Code doesn’t require a sovereign planet to have any such laws, but it does demand and require that the importation of such weapons be in accordance with its code. Whoever imported that SAM did not pay the taxes.” There was a general chuckle at this. Stan went on.

  “So, what we need is an agent of the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Administration. It so happens our personnel clerk is authorized to swear in anyone who might volunteer for such an appointment, not to exceed one year. Joe, you interested in being the lieutenant’s cop?”

  “Would I have to go off-world?”

  “Nope,” Stan answered. “Just file an affidavit and cover everything else from your farm. As soon as you arrest them, you can turn them over to our custody for transport to a marshal.”

  Joe Edris scratched the bridge of his nose. “Sounds like something I’d like to do. So, now we catch them.”

  “Piece of cake,” Trouble assured him.

  “I had a sergeant tell me that once.”

  • • •

  “The parasail almost flies itself,” the Jump Master assured the newest ATF agent in human space. “We’ve picked a five-meter hole in the forest canopy for you, logged its GPS coordinates in your suit and it’ll swing you right down into the target hole. If you think you’re headed for a tree landing, just control the sail the usual way.” The Ju
mp Master was very confident.

  “He’s never made a jump before,” Trouble informed him.

  “Oh.” The assurance was replaced by a visible gulp. “Well, sir, if it looks like you’re headed for a tree, you probably aren’t, so you just let the system land you.”

  “What else do I need to know?” Joe asked Trouble.

  “The scout suit is pretty sophisticated. I’ve reprogrammed it to respond like the body armor you used in the LornaDo army.”

  “Thanks. Bet I haven’t forgotten a thing in the last twenty-five years.”

  Trouble let the man have the laugh he deserved. “I’ve set most of it for auto anyway. Cooling will keep the surface of the suit at ambient temperature. To night vision, you’ll look just like the next tree. Don’t worry when these hoppers drop off.” Trouble thumbed the bumps that speckled the armored suit. “They’ve got the jammers for the heart monitor. They feed off the chemical heat sink.” The look in Joe’s eyes told Trouble the man hadn’t understood a word. “You’ll see, once we get down there.”

  Joe shook his head as the tech settled the helmet on him. “And I thought qualifying on the M-6 was all this job took.”

  “Your drop is behind the rest of us. You stay low, and all you’ll have to do is read ’em their rights.”

  “Right.”

  • • •

  There was something beautiful about a plan clicking into place. In zero gee, Trouble’s marines glided rather than marched to their places in the drop shuttle. Still, the scrape of armor, the creak of weapons on harness, the snap as men and women strapped themselves in brought a rush to Trouble. Good troopers, doing what they did best. You had to love it.

  Liberty Launch Four was the only one on the Patton rigged for a combat drop. As soon as Trouble reported them rigged for drop, the pilot dropped out of orbit, then went to aerospike, cruising well south of the target at thirty thousand meters. The suits would take care of breathing. They went out the drop ports by the numbers, falling in a pattern through the freezing evening air.