Paul had no answer for Bashir.
Three months later, in the Baradna Valley, Paul was chasing Bashir into Pashto Khel after the morning firefight. The provincial police had just relieved Paul of the responsibility of guarding the wounded POW’s, and the colonel was hot for Paul to get Bashir the hell out of the village.
Paul and Z started to move toward the village. With his rifle at the low ready, Paul picked his way over the small dikes in the marijuana field. There was a cluster of bereaved relatives of the dead standing by a wall. They got closer and closer to each other as Paul walked in their direction.
Paul eyeballed them as he approached. There were two veiled women, an old man, and two small girls in little ornate dresses. Paul saw in his halo that Z was right behind him, in trail. He briefly called up an overhead view of the dispositions of Second Company with his halo. They were ahead of him in the village, and a cluster of men were inside of a house.
Paul recognized the house, of course. It was the place they had been drawing so much fire from before, during the dawn firefight. He clicked back off the view. At least he knew what was waiting for him around the corner, dead ahead.
And he saw, with diamond clarity, the gauntlet he would have to run by the corner. No, it wasn’t armed opposition. It was a couple of girls and an old man. They were keening, wailing. Paul could and would face bad guys trying to kill him. Why was a little group of pathetic civvies bothering him so much?
Paul stepped over a swiftly running small irrigation ditch and neared the corner. To his right was the looming building with the girls; to his left was a street and the village wall that he had sheltered and fought behind earlier. Drooping dinosaur trees overcast the entire street; they shaded the length of the road.
As he stepped onto the road, he cast a glance at the girls on the corner. Their tear-streaked eyes cursed him. One little girl, about five years old in a green dress with orange henna-dyed hair, drew his attention in particular. She had beautiful, tear-streaked, dark eyes that followed him, uncomprehending.
The old man behind the little girls, however, stared at him with a fullfledged hate stare, his eyes burning like coals. Fuck you, Paul thought. Fuck you. Flinch, you old bastard, and I’ll shoot you in the face, you fuck.
His mind and eyes shied from the girls, however. He couldn’t face what they were telling him: you murdered our father. Paul had never felt so small, so angry, so like an invader from outer space, a creature. In fact, that was what he was—a destroyer of worlds, in this case the destroyer of the little world these girls had inhabited. Without a single word passing between the two groups, Paul and Z in one group and the little girls and old man in the other, Paul fled toward Bashir.
Bashir was easy to find. All you had to do was listen for the cursing and the crashes dead ahead, at about seventy-five meters. It looked to Paul as he walked up on the scene that Second Company was trashing and looting the house the dissidents had been firing from. Paul walked through a sticky puddle of blood and strode toward the house. His grip tightened on his rifle.
Yeah, he thought, maybe Second Company has the right to do this. But damn it, it was the province police’s job to search and question people. Bashir and his boys were fucking up the program by looting and pillaging. The colonel wanted the bullshit to stop.
So Paul would stop the mayhem. One thing about tinnitus, at least Paul was getting far enough away from the girls on the corner that he couldn’t hear them anymore, not over the ringing in his ears. It was a relief not to hear their wails.
But he was getting closer to the house. A Juneau soldier walked past him, holding women’s clothing. Paul’s mouth tightened. Bashir and his men had to act like professional soldiers, not like kids at a riot.
When Paul stopped in front of the house, he was pissed. Worse, he knew Bashir was pissed, too. You can’t fight and spill blood and not lose it a little.
That was the key: losing it a little was to be expected; losing it a lot was unacceptable. In combat, you had to keep yourself in an iron grip. What Paul was seeing, standing among loose shell casings and blood smears, was a breakdown in discipline. The bullshit had to stop.
At the front of the house, Bashir was having a screaming row with a provincial policeman; it looked as if they were going to draw down on each other at any second.
A piece of furniture flew out of a window; gunfire sounded from in the house. There was a streak of blood on the bullet-pocked wall outside. Paul gave a shout.
“Ohh betchaa!” Paul yelled. It was a standard Farsi greeting among friends. The furious Pashtuns looked over at Paul. With Paul’s shout, the spell had been broken between the two men. The cop shuffled off into the house, and Bashir came walking over, looking exhausted. Instead of combative, as Paul had expected, Bashir was simply tired.
“My friend,” said Paul, and he meant it. “My friend, call your boys and let us leave this cursed-of-God place. My heart is weary; let us go.”
Bashir nodded, his shoulders slumped. “I hate this village,” was all that he said. Bashir pinged Second Company’s halos, and the soldiers started to leave Pashto Khel with their loot.
Paul wiped his face and thanked God on high.
Paul thanked God on high for the look on Sergeant First Whitehead’s face when he told him he was denying reenlistment—that cheese dick.
“Well, why are you doing this, Trooper Thompson? The force needs every soldier they can get, especially armored infantrymen. And I think you have the makings of a pretty good soldier.”
Paul lied. “Well, I just want to try out life on the outside, Sergeant First. I’m glad I had the chance to serve, but now I want to do things for myself. Besides, like you say, there’s no guarantee I’ll stay here in Ottawa if I stay in, and I’m going to marry a local girl.”
Whitehead frowned. “Listen, son, you’re not going to like this, but listen.” Paul, unfortunately, had already set himself to blow off whatever came out of Whitehead’s mouth, whether it was good advice or not. What did a crusty lifer like Whitehead know, anyway?
“Trooper Thompson, about twenty years ago I was in a similar boat to you. I had met a great girl too, on Montevideo 2, and I figured I’d get out and stay there—just like you.” He paused and looked off into the distance.
“Well, we had a two-week-long field problem right before I got out. When we came back into cantonment, I got a halo ‘Dear John.’ She didn’t even have the good grace to tell me to my face we were through.” Sergeant First Whitehead sighed.
“The way I figure it she did me a favor, lookin’ back on things. Now, I’m not sayin’ this is going to happen to you and your girl. I wish you both nothing but happiness and rainbows. Imagine, Trooper Thompson, if I would have stayed there, given up my chance to go back to Earth, and then she decided she liked something else better.” He paused for emphasis. “That would have been a fine kettle of fish.” Whitehead leaned back in his cheap government chair and looked at Paul for what seemed the longest time.
“What say you, Thompson?”
Paul couldn’t even contemplate Darlene doing something like that. The way he saw it they were made for each other. “I say I’m getting out, Sergeant First. I’ve got some things I want to do, and the force ain’t a part of that.”
Whitehead looked at him for just a bit longer. “Well, Trooper Thompson, you are well past your majority, and you’ve made a decision. And yes, Ottawa 6 is as nice a world as you are going to find. Please sign this.” A separation document showed up in Paul’s visual. He clicked on it, looked it over, and digitally signed.
“OK, you’ve made the call to get out,” Whitehead continued. “I respect that; you’ve served the federation well and honorably. Now, here’s the next thing, and I won’t allow you to answer today. In fact, I won’t see you for a week because you are on block leave as of today.” He peered at Paul and linked his hands behind his head.
“I want you to think—really think—about throwing away your chance to return to Earth. Don�
��t. Do. It. I’m giving you a week to think about it. Return here next week today, same time, and either accept a trip home or opt to stay here. It’s your call.” Paul just stood there. A whole week’s block leave? Just to think? What the hell? “Don’t just stand there, Thompson. I said to leave and think. What—would you rather polish latrine knobs?”
Paul was gone in a flash. In somewhat less time than that, he was off into Hope to see Darlene. Of course, Paul didn’t do a whole lot of thinking for the next week. He was too busy for that. When he did go back to Sergeant First’s office, he signed the waiver for his return ticket.
Sergeant First Whitehead sighed, and then he countersigned the halo document. Whether he was ready or not, Paul was about to become a resident of the city of Hope, Ottawa 6.
Five months later, Paul was thinking maybe he had made a mistake. He had landed a job in the Purplewood forest trimming trees and was generally working his tail off. Yeah, he made an OK amount of creds, but the work was ball busting for seemingly little reward.
And most disturbingly, Darlene kept putting off the date of their marriage. Paul was paying for their little place out in Sunnyside, north of Hope, and Darlene seemed to leave for a couple of days each week to go to her parents’ place.
She kept saying that she wanted to go to school to be a hairstylist, but there never seemed to be enough money. Also, Paul usually came home dead tired after a day of trimming trees, so the romance had dropped off a bit, as well.
Before Paul had gotten out of the service, it seemed they almost never fought. Now it seemed like they fought more often than not.
Paul loved Darlene’s fiery red hair, but sometimes the disposition that came with the hair (or so old wives’ tales had it) wore on him.
The fateful day was no different. Paul had just worked overtime and was looking forward to a nice hot bath to ease his aches and pains, and a beer. As soon as he came home, he knew something was off.
Darlene’s parents’ ground-car was sitting in front of his and Darlene’s apartment. Paul wondered what was up. Her folks almost never came out to their little place. Paul walked up the little set of steps into the apartment and walked in the door.
Darlene was sitting there, her eyes all puffy and red from crying. Her mother, a shrew of a woman with pinched features and dishwater hair, spoke up. “Well, look what the cat dragged in.” It was definitely not said in a nice tone of voice.
“What’s going on, Darlene?” Paul asked, poleaxed by the situation.
Her mom spoke up. “You haven’t been treating my daughter right, and I’m taking her home.”
Darlene continued to stare at the floor. Paul looked out the window and noticed that the ground-car was piled with her stuff.
“What the hell is this?” Paul tried to keep his voice down but was failing. “Darlene, are you going to let your mom do all the speaking for you? What have you been telling her?”
“She’s told me enough, young man, and right now, you need to get out of the way. We’re leaving.” Darlene’s mom grabbed her by the arm and pulled her up. Darlene kept her eyes on the floor and started to move toward the door. Paul knew better than to grab her and beg her to stay, to demand of her that she tell him what the problem was. In the mood her mom was in, the police would be at the house so fast his head would spin, and then there’d really be trouble. Paul still didn’t know why this was happening. There must have been a lot said when Paul was at work that didn’t make it to his ears or to his halo.
As the two ladies left, Paul yelled at their backs, “Darlene, wait! Are you going to let your mother run your life? Aren’t you going to say two words to me?”
Darlene paused, turned, and looked at him for the first time since he’d come home. Her face was twisted in a sneer.
“Two words: Good. Bye.”
With that, the mother and her daughter got into the ground-car and left, gone from Paul’s life.
Paul sat down on the front steps and watched their ground-car recede in the distance, on the dead-straight road that led to Hope. After half a kilometer, the car disappeared behind a stand of Purplewoods.
Paul was stuck on Ottawa 6 with nothing to show for it. He proceeded to fall apart, right there on the steps.
Paul was getting edgier by the day, here in his fifth month on Juneau 3. He walked up some steps leading into a village. Second Company was engaged in a “hammer-and-anvil” sweep of one of the villages in the Belt.
The tactics behind this sweep were as simple as a stone. The colonel, on the eastern side of the Zudnok River, was sitting there in his suit with First and Third Companies. The companies across the river formed a blocking force: the “anvil” of the hammer-and-anvil metaphor.
On the western side of the river, encircling several villages, was a mixed force of provincial police and Second Company, sweeping on-line through the villages toward the river. This mixed force was the “hammer.” The objective was to flush dissidents into movement, where one force or the other would crush them.
So far, there had been mixed results, according to the data Paul’s halo had given them. Along several fording spots on the river, Juneau forces had picked up some squirters and were questioning them. But there hadn’t been any shooting yet.
Paul and his men kept moving toward the river, through villages, rice and cotton fields, and scrubby brush. Once again, Paul and Z were moving unarmored. Before dawn, Second Company’s ground-cars had brought the force to the western road and dropped them off. The men lined up abreast on the road and began to sweep toward the Zudnok River in the east.
Paul was expecting a firefight to break out at any moment. He kept constantly checking his micro feed, courtesy of the colonel, and examining their relative positions.
As they approached a village that only had a number on his halo feed, “6,” he felt as if a pall of menace had descended on him and his crew. With every step closer to the village in front of them, he waited for the shot that would ring out, the bomb that would explode, the antiarmor rocket that would announce its presence with two booms: one boom for the firing, the second boom for whatever it hit.
The crude antiarmor rocket they made locally here on Juneau was a copy of an Old Earth design—the weapon looked like a joke. If it was a joke, however, it wasn’t funny. The launcher was an ugly thing that looked like a pipe with a glued-on trigger mechanism. Its reloadable warhead was a bulbous-shaped charge that incinerated whatever it hit.
Of course, it had been Paul’s experience that the things were pretty inaccurate. But compared to its effect on target, that was small consolation. Yeah, an armored infantryman might be hard to hit, but the ugly pipe thing would kill a suited soldier with a solid hit. Therefore, the local antiarmor pipe was a weapon to be feared. For an unarmored soldier like Paul, that applied doubly.
Trauma-weave cams or not, Paul felt naked approaching the village. As he passed by a row of dinosaur trees in front of the collection of walled compounds, Paul heard a vicious barking up ahead.
Z-man pinged him. “Oh man, sir, I hope them dogs are tied up. I fuckin’ hate dogs.”
“Shut up, Z, and keep station,” Paul shot back. He didn’t need bullshit distractions when approaching a hostile village that could be full of bad guys. Checking his halo, Paul saw that Z-man was where he should be, to Paul’s rear and left, about five meters back. Bashir was to Paul’s right, and he was keeping his guys more or less in on-line formation via halo link.
Even the civvy halos Bashir’s guys were using were good for this type of work. So far, the Juneau Army had been issued few of the mil-grade sets. FORSCOMJUN was rightfully apprehensive that if they widely issued the mil-grade sets, the halos would end up in the hands of the dissidents in short order.
With what Paul had seen so far, he agreed with FORSCOMJUN. Every piece of equipment that was entrusted to the Juneaus seemed to walk with Jesus, sooner or later.
Paul concentrated again on the job at hand. They were only about fifty meters from the village. The vil
lage wall had three openings facing the approaching Second Company. Bashir designated a couple of soldiers to stay behind for rear security, and a platoon each would enter through the gaps in the village wall.
Paul stayed with Bashir, who had chosen to enter through the central gap. The barking of the dogs reached a fever pitch. Paul heard people yelling at the dogs; they quieted down a little.
As Paul went through the gap in the wall, he held his rifle at the ready and flowed through quickly. Z-man did the same.
A gap in a wall, a doorway, or any other feature people use to gain entrance to a structure is known as a “fatal funnel.” It’s easy for a person waiting on the other side to shoot people as they come through the gap, door, or window. A lesson learned by Paul long ago: never stop in a fatal funnel. As soon as Paul cleared the gap in the wall, he knew his chances of being hit went down a little.
There was nothing like coming up on a hostile village to get the heart racing, to get the cottonmouth feeling going. Paul’s “fun meter” was close to pegging out. Bashir’s men moved to dominate the strong points on the village streets. It was eerily quiet within the town. A quick search ensued. Paul and Bashir hung out by a dinosaur tree along the village street; his men found nothing, and there were no squirters by their location.
Within twenty minutes, the village was tentatively cleared, and via halo link Second Company started to move out of the village back toward the river. Bashir and Paul worked to get the men back on-line while the provincial police behind them occupied the just-cleared village for a more thorough search. Paul and Z-man moved behind Bashir while the company sorted itself back out. They were moving along a low wall and a drainage ditch filled with a sludgy-looking effluent.
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