by Marko Kloos
“That was three fucking years ago,” Captain Beals replies. “Bad shit happened. People died. On both sides. We all just did what we were told. You want to pick a fight over this now? It’s done, Captain. All done. We all bled together at Mars after.”
He bends over and picks up his meal tray. I have to fight the urge to take a step forward and drive my knee into the side of his head and then beat him with that tray until he no longer moves. But then I’d take up residence in the brig and spend a decade or more in Leavenworth, which would be far more punishment than this yes-sir fighter jock got for killing NAC troopers. And the amnesty means that we’re all back on the same team now, absolved of all the awful things we did to each other.
“Captain Grayson,” Halley says behind me. I hadn’t noticed her leaving her table and walking up behind me. “Cool your jets for a bit and back off. That’s an order.”
I look back at Halley and take a deep breath.
“Yes, ma’am,” I reply. Then I take a few steps back from the counter, and Halley steps into the space I just vacated.
Captain Beals puts the tray back onto the counter and takes another plate, ignoring the mess I made with his food tray just a few moments ago. He looks at me and shakes his head with a tiny little smirk that raises my blood pressure all over again.
“You, too, Captain,” she says to Captain Beals. “Grab your tray and find a quiet corner. And if you see either Captain Grayson or me in the wardroom in the future, I’d suggest you sit as far away from us as possible.”
“With all due respect, you can’t tell me where to sit in the officer’s wardroom, Major,” Captain Beals says. “You’re the XO of the second drop ship squadron, not the XO of this ship.”
Halley closes the distance between them until they are standing almost nose to nose.
“And three years ago, when you were trying to shoot down my husband and his platoon, I was on your six in a drop ship and blew your ass out of the sky. You almost made me a widow. You damn near killed thirty-six mudlegs. I don’t give the slightest shit about wardroom etiquette when it comes to you. I don’t care if you go crying to the XO. If you see my face in spitting range, you give me a wide berth, Captain. Now beat it.”
Captain Beals looks at Halley, then me. He probably realizes that he can’t win a physical confrontation—Halley alone could probably put him in the infirmary, and my mood is foul enough for me to help put him into an ICU back at Gateway—and he can’t pull rank because Halley is a major with the clout of an executive officer. My confrontation with Captain Beals is a clear violation of wardroom etiquette, but both he and I know that protocol won’t keep me from breaking his nose. He takes his tray, turns away, and walks off to the other side of the wardroom without giving us another look. The conversations in the room pick up again gradually.
Halley lets out a long, sharp breath. Then she looks at me.
“Come with me, Captain,” she says and nods to the wardroom hatch.
Outside in the passageway, she turns around and fixes me with an angry glare.
“You need to control yourself a little better than that, Captain,” she says, with heavy emphasis on my rank. “You know I wouldn’t have shed a tear if Sergeant Fallon had shot that smarmy fucker on Arcadia. But the rest of the officer corps doesn’t know what went down between us. You can’t physically assault another officer. Not in full view of everyone else, in the wardroom.”
“I didn’t assault him. I just smacked the tray out of his hands.”
“You were two seconds away from grabbing one of those trays and planting it in his skull.”
“Edge first,” I say. “You remember that day, back on Arcadia? Blackfly Three shot all to shit? Lieutenant Wood and the crew chief dead, and three of our grunts with them.”
“That wasn’t Beals’s bird,” Halley says.
“No, but it was one of his squadron buddies. And he would have made the strafing run, too.” I pound my fist against the nearby bulkhead.
“All of this was a mistake,” Halley says. “The amnesty. They should have kicked them all out. Now we have half the Fleet holding a grudge against the other half.”
She holds my gaze with hers and shakes her head slowly.
“But you have got to mind yourself. Whatever happened when you were with the Brigades, whatever shortened your fuse and removed that safety catch from your mouth and fists, you are still a Fleet officer. You can’t start a fucking tavern brawl in the officer’s wardroom. That’s not you, Andrew.”
“I know, I know.” I exhale sharply and unclench my fists. “But seeing him there, flight suit and all, getting chow . . . They didn’t even reduce him in rank. My guys may have to rely on close-air support from him if we get into a fight.”
“He was an O-3 when we ran into him on Arcadia,” Halley says. “He’s still an O-3. He’ll never pick up major. You know that the renegade fleet people got bumped down to the bottom of the lists for promotions. And if he fucks up on the job, he’ll lose the wings and count screw washers for the rest of his career.”
“If he fucks up on the job, people get their heads blown off by cannon shells,” I say.
“And if that happens, I’ll put my boot between his shoulder blades to hold him down while you shoot him in the back of the head,” Halley replies. “And we’ll go to Leavenworth together. But until then, let the shithead do his job.”
She glances back at the wardroom hatch.
“He’s had a big fat scarlet letter on the back of his flight suit since Arcadia,” she says. “And he’s standing still in his rank. That’s enough punishment for now.”
I think back to Arcadia, to a cool morning on the grassy plains of that beautiful moon where Blackfly Three, shredded by a dozen cannon shells, was burning so fiercely that we couldn’t even get the bodies of the pilot and the crew chief out of the ship. I remember the blood-smeared, green body bags that held the three grunts from Third Platoon who bought it on that same strafing run. Two seconds of pressure on a Shrike’s trigger button, and five lives snuffed out. Lieutenant Wood, Blackfly Three’s pilot, got a Distinguished Flying Cross and a promotion to captain posthumously, and he’ll stay at that rank forever now as well. It’s laser-etched into the tiny stainless-steel plaque that’s affixed to his burial slot.
“That’s the point,” I say. “It’s no punishment at all. It’s just a fucking number freeze in a personnel file.”
Halley looks at the wardroom hatch again. Two lieutenants step out and give us brief curious glances before walking off down the passageway.
“He’ll get his in the end,” she says. “One way or another. Karma is a metric bitch.”
CHAPTER 9
TALKING STUFF OUT
The worst stress in the military is not the kind you feel in combat. Everything is so fluid and hectic in battle that you don’t have time to dwell on things or take an inventory of your emotions. You mostly just react. It’s not even the aftermath of battle, when you lick your wounds and count your losses. The worst stress is the kind that builds up over months and years of combat ops, the low-level shit that grinds you down slowly but steadily until you find that you can’t fall asleep anymore without popping pills or having a few drinks. But every ship in the Fleet has a doctor to hand out pills and a psych counselor for working out mental aches. I usually have Halley as a sounding board, but some of the stuff going on in my head is best left to a neutral party to sort out. So the day after I almost brain Captain Beals with a mess tray and get reprimanded by my wife for it, I seek out the psych counselor in the medical department on Ottawa. I don’t care about pissing off the brass anymore, but the shrink appointment was Halley’s advice and insistence, and she’s about the only person other than my mother I don’t want to upset needlessly.
The medical corps psychologist looks too young to be in the military, let alone a graduate of any medical school. She’s wearing her auburn-tinted hair in a bob cut that falls down to chin length. On the street in Liberty Falls, I’d peg her for a
college student, but she has a doctorate diploma on the wall of her office, and she’s wearing second lieutenant pips on the spaulders of her Fleet uniform. Her name tag says “SAULTS, M.”
“I have to say that you’re not exactly what I expected here,” I tell her.
“How so, Captain?” She smiles at me, revealing straight and even ’burber teeth.
“Well, most Fleet shrinks are twenty years in, burned out, and looking forward to that retirement payout.”
“You’re worried about my experience,” she says. “I get that a lot.”
I shake my head.
“No Fleet shrink has combat experience anyway. You’re all trying to fix conditions you’ve never seen for yourself.”
She leans back in her chair and looks at me with a slight smile.
“Then what are you doing here, Captain Grayson? Why did you ask for an appointment?”
“Because it helps,” I say. “Talking stuff out. Sometimes.”
“That’s an unusual attitude,” Dr. Saults says. “From a podhead, I mean.”
“How so?” I echo her earlier question.
“The more gung-ho and macho the occupational specialty, the less you guys are likely to talk about what bugs you. Like it’s a sign of weakness. Like it’s something you should be able to handle yourselves.”
“I used to think that,” I say. “Until a few years ago.”
“What made you change your mind?”
“I got married,” I say, and she grins.
“And I had a few rough patches,” I continue. “Not with the marriage. With the combat drops. Scraped past death a few too many times, in really bad ways. And then a mission went sideways, and I lost a lot of guys under my command. But I had my wife to talk to. And it helped. But she’s in the Fleet, too, and when we’re deployed, I don’t have a sounding board. And there’s stuff I don’t want her to know. Stuff I don’t want to burden her with.”
“Well, that’s what we Fleet counselors are here for,” Dr. Saults says. She gets up and walks to the beverage dispenser in the corner of her little office. “Can I get you some coffee, Captain?”
“That would be great. As long as it’s not decaf.”
“Decaf is an abomination, and serving it to someone should be considered a human rights violation,” she says. Then she puts two cups into the dispenser. The machine hisses and fills the cups. Dr. Saults takes them and puts one in front of me as she sits back down.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. And now let’s talk about what’s bugging you so much right now that you come to a Fleet psych counselor without having been ordered by your CO.”
“Is that so rare?” I ask.
“For podheads? Oh yeah. I see ten to twenty people a week. Three-quarters of them are nuggets on their first real deployment who are scared and homesick. Some people just want to chat over a cup of coffee. But you’re only the fourth SOCOM guy I’ve seen in a year. And the first one that showed up voluntarily.”
“This boat has a few thousand people on it, and only thirty-five SOCOM personnel,” I say. “I’d be surprised if you saw another one of us on this deployment.”
“Well, I guess I’ll have to get the most out of this visit,” Dr. Saults says, and takes a sip of her coffee. “What do you want to tell me, Captain?”
I tell the Fleet shrink about almost having planted a mess tray in Captain Beals’s head and then say, “I was hoping he’d make a move and try to hit me first. So I’d have an excuse to pound him into the deck. Truth be told, I would have done it anyway if my wife hadn’t been there to stop me.”
“And does that bother you?” Dr. Saults asks.
“Nope,” I say. “The only thing that bothered me about the whole incident, from start to finish, was the way my wife reacted. That’s why the little bastard still has a full set of teeth in his mouth.”
“What did he do that made you despise this guy so much?”
“Well, that’s a longer story,” I say.
“I’ll be here all day,” she replies. “You want to share it, go ahead.”
I backtrack to the Arcadia mission to give her the proper context. I talk her through the whole timeline, including the battle we fought at Arcadia City to try to capture the former president, and Major Masoud’s surprise nuking of the city’s main fusion plant. I thought that three years would be plenty of time to start forgetting some of the details, but as I recount the whole mission beat by beat to Dr. Saults, I find that it’s all still just as easy to recall, as if it had happened last month. She listens to my monologue, asks the occasional clarifying question, and looks appropriately concerned and disturbed at all the right places in my narrative. When I’m finished telling her about the Arcadia mission, my cup is empty, so Dr. Saults gets us both refills from the dispenser.
“That’s why I wouldn’t lose any sleep at all over Captain Beals’s death or if he lands in the infirmary,” I conclude. “He went with the renegades. He willingly killed my comrades. And when he had the chance to fix his shit, all he did was pick the side he thought had the best chance of winning.”
“You take it personally. Because he tried to kill you.”
“And my wife. But she turned out to be a better pilot. Shot his ass down.”
“You said there’s stuff you’re not telling her. That you don’t want to burden her with. Did that stuff happen at Mars?”
“Mars was a shitshow,” I say. “Everyone went through the same wringer there. Everyone who came back, anyway.”
I take a long sip from my cup. It’s the standard shitty Fleet coffee, and I am not particularly fond of that swill, but holding the mug gives my hands something to do.
“After Mars, I spent a year and a half Earthside. Down in the PRCs, with the Brigades. Mars was a nightmare, but it was just a forty-eight-hour nightmare.”
I put my coffee cup down in front of me and look at the diploma on the wall behind Dr. Saults’s head.
“When I got there, we were still raw from Mars. But I still felt like a Fleet officer. I knew my slot. I spent time training people for the Brigades. But then I got roped into combat missions, because there’s no such thing as a neutral observer when the bullets start flying down there.”
“Who did you fight? I thought the Brigades had everything well in hand now?”
“They do. In the cities they control. And they’re gaining ground every day. Block by block. But some of those gangs are hard cases, and they don’t want to let go of their turf.”
“I see. And you went to battle against the gangs.”
“Eighteen months,” I repeat. “And for the last six months, I did stuff every day that would get me a court-martial if I had done it in the Fleet. I killed people who didn’t deserve to die. Let people live who damn well needed a bullet between the eyes. And at the end, I didn’t feel like a Fleet officer anymore. To be honest, at the end I wasn’t sure whether I was pointing my gun at the right people.”
She studies my face as I talk, and I know that she’s looking for telltale behavioral signs from her Psych 101 textbook: averted eyes, changed volume or tone of voice, halting delivery, that sort of thing. But I mostly feel exhausted and numb when I think about the Brigades and my time in the PRCs, so I keep a carefully neutral expression. I know this game because the Fleet shrinks already put me through that wringer after I returned to regular service, and I could tell they were searching for evidence that my mental pottery had cracked irreparably.
It should feel weird to be sitting in this office and telling all this stuff to someone who looks like I have ten years of life experience and eight years of service on her. But I know that this is her job, and it feels better saying these words in front of a live human who can at least feign empathy than keeping them percolating in my skull unsaid, or writing them down in a PDP file that nobody will ever read.
“What did you do after you got back?” Dr. Saults asks. “You had a psych eval, obviously.”
“You know I did. It’s probably
right there in my file.” I nod toward the transparent frame of her terminal screen. “And I lied my ass off. I was just glad to get back to the regular Fleet. Took a month off at home in Vermont, but then I went right back to it.”
“You’ve done a lot of combat missions,” she says. “More than most. More than anyone I’ve seen in this office this year, I think.”
“I’ve been in for nine years,” I say. “Seven as a podhead. I was up to over three hundred drops before Mars. And I’ve done five or six Lanky patrols a week over Mars for a year. I’ve kind of lost count of the total, to be honest.”
Dr. Saults looks at her screen and zooms in on a data field.
“Five hundred and twenty-nine,” she says. “That’s just official corps numbers. Not counting whatever you did for the Brigades.”
I let that number roll around in my head for a few moments. I went into combat for the NAC over half a thousand times, and I’ve spent almost my entire adult life in the military. Many of those missions were milk runs, with no shots fired and clean rifles turned back into the armory. Many were dangerous, my team going up against SRA marines or Lanky concentrations. Some were so stressful and hair-raisingly scary that they each probably took a year off the rest of my life. But the ones I get to revisit in my dreams most often are the dark and bloody ones, the events your brain insists on playing back to you in high definition whenever you encounter a sound, smell, or sight that reminds you of them.
“They got us by the balls, don’t they?” I say.
“What do you mean?” Dr. Saults asks.
“I don’t know how to do anything else. I know how to direct air traffic. Use and fieldstrip every small-arms system in the corps. Call down airstrikes. Do a spaceborne drop onto a barren rock from a hundred thousand klicks away. But that’s it. I know how to break shit and kill people. Lankies, too. But give me two weeks of shore leave, and I’m barely functional.”
“What do you do when you’re on shore leave?”
“Go home to Vermont. Sleep a lot. If my wife and I get leave together, we go hiking in the mountains. You know, anything where you don’t have to breathe filtered air or listen to fusion engines while you’re going to sleep. You want to hear something odd?”