Lines of Departure

CHAPTER 5 GOING DOWN TO EARTH

I have two bags for clothing and equipment in my issued inventory. The larger one is a huge duffel bag with sewn-in polymer stiffeners. It’s big enough to hold most of the contents of my shipboard locker. The duffel is mostly used to haul gear around between duty stations. Mine is worn and frayed after five years of skipping from post to post, ship to ship. The smaller one is called the furlough bag, and it’s just big enough to hold enough clothes and a personal kit for a few days. The furlough bag is mostly used for going on leave, and mine is virtually pristine.

Since our trip back home takes a week, I have plenty of time to square away my gear and say my good-byes to my friends on the ship. By the time the Intrepid engages the docking collar at Gateway, I am ready to step off the ship and move on. I leave my heavy duffel on my rack for transfer pickup, and take my furlough bag to start my two weeks of leave. Against all my pessimistic expectations, CIC does not announce combat stations, and nobody whistles me back when I step past the security detachment at the main docking hatch to leave the ship for good. As I walk out into the hallway of Gateway Station beyond, I pat the last bulkhead frame of the ship in passing.

Farewell, NACS Intrepid CV-1941. May you die of old age in the decommissioning docks thirty years from now.

Gateway Station is the main hub for all military traffic from and to Earth and Luna. It’s an orbital base and spaceport rolled into one huge, hulking structure, perpetually suspended in high orbit. There’s a constant stream of people and material passing through this station, and it has been in need of an overhaul since well before I even joined the service.

It’s a long hike from the outer ring where the carriers dock to the main concourse where I can claim a seat on a Luna-bound personnel shuttle. I walk through the familiar narrow corridors toward the central part of the station, swimming with the crowds of people going in the same direction. Whenever a carrier docks, hundreds of people end up clogging the same narrow intersections on Gateway at the same time, and it takes forever to get anywhere.

The main concourse is as crowded as I’ve ever seen it. There are fleet crews and Spaceborne Infantry troopers everywhere, most of them in the Class A smocks that are required wear for transfers to a new duty station. I take a quick visual survey and notice that most of them are junior enlisted personnel, likely fresh out of Basic and heading for Fleet School or SI’s Infantry School. Many of them are wearing the same unsure expression I undoubtedly had on my face when I stepped off the shuttle and onto Gateway for the first time. As I pass through the crowd, I notice some of the new privates glancing at the modest collection of ribbons and badges on my Fleet Arm Class A smock and the scarlet beret on my head.

I elbow my way to the main row of Transportation Coordinator booths on the main concourse, where I stand in line behind half a platoon of SI troopers. When my turn comes, I step up to the booth and hand over my military ID for the desk specialist to scan.

“Where to, Sergeant?” the specialist asks, his gaze flicking from the screen of his terminal to the scarlet beret I have now stuffed underneath the left shoulder board of my uniform. The color is an ancient privilege—combat controllers are one of the few occupational specialties allowed a beret color other than the standard Homeworld Defense green, Fleet Arm black, or Spaceborne Infantry maroon. It’s a hard-earned badge of office, but it does tend to make one stick out in a crowd.

“I need to hop up to Luna for a few days,” I say. “Visiting an old friend in Fleet School.”

“Shuttles to Luna are fleet priority until Saturday,” the specialist says, not the least bit apologetic. “You want to go up there before then, you need to have valid orders for Luna.”

“Well, crap. That’s five days from now. Don’t make me waste half my leave in the TPU.”

“Sorry, Sarge. You can see that the place is popping at the rivets right now. All three recruit depots just let out a new batch of trainees this morning, and we’re hauling them up to Luna as fast as we can. Come back Saturday and I’ll get you on a shuttle, but right now every seat is fleet priority.”

“Can you get me down Earthside at least?”

“Down to Earth? Sure. I have twenty empty shuttles going back every hour to haul up new people. Where do you want to go?”

“Closest spaceport to Greater Boston, I guess.”

“That would be Cape Cod HDAS. Hang on, let me check what’s going down that way.”

He taps the screen of his terminal a few times while I swallow my disappointment at the delay of my reunion with Halley. I had planned to go up to Luna before visiting Mom, but now it looks like I have to flip my schedule around if I don’t want to be stuck here on Gateway for a few days.

“Ah, here we go. Shuttle FA-2992, 1700 hours. Check with the loadmaster at lock Alpha Three-Niner.”

“Thank you, Specialist.”

I step away from the counter and shoulder my furlough bag again. It’s 1540 hours right now, which gives me over an hour to fight my way across Gateway to personnel lock A39. Mom’s scheduled MilNet access day is not until the weekend, and I have no other way to get in touch with her to let her know I’m coming down to Earth early, but I have her new address, and I can use all transportation networks free of charge. It’s been five years since I last set foot on my homeworld, but I very much doubt that it has changed so much that I can’t find my way around without an escort.

Between the time I step off the shuttle at Cape Cod HDAS and the time I arrive at South Station in the middle of the Boston metroplex, I get stopped four times by various military police patrols. Every time, they scan my ID to verify my “ON LEAVE” status. The military presence is dense, even in the civvie section of the transit system. There are armed MPs at just about every entrance and intersection, and in every train along the way. Five years ago, the MP venturing out into the civilian world carried electric crowd-control sticks and nanoflex handcuffs. Now they carry those and sidearms and submachine guns besides. The magazines of the submachine guns are made of translucent plastic, and the rounds stacked up inside of them are standard infantry issue: armor-piercing, dual-purpose antipersonnel rounds.

“You guys expecting Chinese infiltrators?” I ask of the leader of the fourth patrol to stop me for my ID, and nod at the PDW slung across his chest. He’s a stocky staff sergeant whose buzz cut is turning gray at the roots. He opens his mouth for what I can already tell will be a humor-free reply. Then he looks at the unit flashes on the upper arms of my smock, and exchanges a look with the corporal next to him.

“Fleet Arm, huh? Been a while since you’ve been Earthside?”

“Five years,” I say.

“Place ain’t what it was five years ago,” he says. “Not even close. Where you headed, anyway?”

“PRC Boston-Seven. Going to visit my mother.”

“You’re going to walk into a PRC in a Class A uniform?”

“Don’t have any civvie threads left. Why?”

“Oh, boy.” He exchanges another look with his corporal and scratches the back of his head, pushing up his green HD beret.

“Tell you what, Sergeant. You’re just twenty minutes from the Cape. If I were you, I’d head back to the base and see if they can dig you up some civvie clothes. Uniforms aren’t too popular in the PRC right now.”

“I grew up in there. I know where the bad spots are. I’ll be fine.”

He snorts a humorless little chuckle.

“It’s all bad spots now.”

Mom’s new address is in a pretty good spot, as far as desirable real estate in a tenement cluster goes. She’s only two blocks away from the civil administration center, which is surrounded by the safest and cleanest section of the neighborhood.

I’ve been through this station many times when I still lived here, but when I walk up to the surface from the underground platform, my first impulse is to turn around and get back on the train, because it feels like I’ve gotten off at the wrong stop. The transit station looks completely unfamiliar to me. The Columbia Station I knew was a dingy 150-year-old building with water spots on the walls and paint flaking off exposed ceiling beams. The Columbia Station I step into is a new structure, stark-naked concrete everywhere. There are no water stains or flaking paint, but somehow the old, dilapidated structure looked more inviting. The new station looks like a concrete bunker, and that impression is enhanced by the scores of armed police I see all over the place. When I left this place five years ago, city cops didn’t even wear helmets; now their outfits aren’t much less advanced than the battle armor I wore in the Territorial Army. The cops are standing around in clusters of three and four in the entrance hall of the station, not bothering to move for the civilians that are streaming around them. I notice that the people walking past the cops keep a healthy distance. As I walk past a group of police officers, one of them glances at my uniform and gives me a semicourteous nod. I take the opportunity to stop for some information.

“Whatever happened to the old station?”

“Burned to the ground two years ago,” the cop who nodded at me replies. “They torched it. Killed twenty-six officers that night, too.”

“Welfare riot?”

“No, they were just peacefully assembling,” the cop says, with ironic weight on the last two words. “I’m sure those flaming bottles were just an accident.”

“Sorry,” I say. “Haven’t been able to stay on top of things up there. They don’t let us watch the Networks much, and the news is always a month out of date at least.”

“They censor all the juicy bits anyway. What are you doing here on the ground? Come to Boston for a vacation or something? Space not dangerous enough?”

The other cops laugh. They’re all in a weird mood—most of them haven’t stopped fingering the handles of their crowd-control zappers since I spotted their group, and I decide to be jovial.

“No, just visiting my mom. Got two weeks of leave, but I don’t think I’m going to spend it all down here.”

“I don’t blame ya. Well, take care, and stay off the street at night. Nothing good ever happens out there after sunset.”

“Will do. You guys be safe.”

I adjust the strap of my furlough bag, give the group a friendly nod, and walk on.

“Sergeant,” the first cop calls after me, and I turn around again.

“Yes, sir?”

He motions for me to come back, and I return to the group. When I’m standing in front of him again, he lowers his voice.

“How’s it going up there? How are we doing?”

I look at the anxious expressions on the faces of the cops gathered around me. I want to say something upbeat, give them some inside scoop that will cheer them up a bit, but I know how badly we are getting mauled, and I can’t bring myself to make up a cheery pep talk.

“Well,” I say, and shrug. “We’re trying to hold the line, you know? Just digging in, and holding the line.”

I can sense their disappointment, but I can tell that they’re happier with honesty than obvious rah-rah bullshit.

“Yeah, I hear you,” the first cop says. “It’s the same down here.”

The streets outside are littered with garbage. In front of the transit station, I see the scorched husk of a hydrobus, pushed against the curb and stripped of everything usable. Near the station, there’s a little concrete booth where they used to hold the monthly commissary voucher lottery, but the polyplast windows are shattered, and there are long streak marks of soot on the concrete above them. It looks like nobody has bothered to pick up garbage or issue vouchers here in a good while. The sun has already started to set, and the shadows of the gray and worn-down buildings are turning the street in front of me into a maze of dark and dangerous spots. I walk the two blocks to Mom’s new tenement building as quickly as I can without breaking into a run. Soon, darkness will fall, and then the rats will come out in packs.

Mom has moved up a little in the world since I moved out. Her new apartment is on the second floor of a tenement building that looks roughly half as old and twice as clean as the one where we both lived for over ten years. I don’t have an ID card to scan at the front door’s access panel, so I ring the buzzer labeled with her name: GRAYSON P.

The access panel has a little vid screen, for the mutual verification of identities. The one in our old building was broken or coated with crap most of the time, but this one is working fine. When Mom answers the buzzer, her face shows up on the little armored display, and even on the low-resolution screen, I can tell that she has aged ten years in the last five. She squints at the camera mounted above her own little screen, and her eyes widen in surprise.

“Andrew!”

“Hi, Mom. I got in early. Let me in before they mug me out here.”

Mom presses the button for the door opener in lieu of a reply, and I step into the building, mindful to check over my shoulder for anyone trying to follow me in to rob me in privacy.

I take the stairs instead of the elevator. Our old staircase smelled like stale vomit and fresh piss most of the time, but this one only smells like floor cleaner.

When I reach the second floor, Mom is waiting in front of the elevator door. She turns around when she hears the staircase door, and I give her a little wave.

“You know I always take the stairs, Mom.”

“Andrew!” she says again. Then she rushes to meet me and gives me a fierce hug. “What are you doing here already? You said you were going to be here on Monday. I haven’t even cleaned the place up yet.”

“Don’t worry about it, Mom. I had something on my schedule that fell through.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have walked here. It’s too dangerous. I would have met you over at the civil center.”

She stops her attempt to crush my rib cage and holds me at arm’s length to examine my uniform.

“That looks pretty good on you. My, you’ve filled out, haven’t you?”

“Lots of running and lifting. We don’t exactly sit around all day.”

My mother seems smaller than I remember her, more slight and insubstantial. She has lost the extra few pounds she had been carrying around for years, but instead of looking fit and lean, she just looks thin and used up. Her mousy brown hair has many gray streaks, and there are deep wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth that weren’t there before.

“You got a nicer unit, I see.”

“They had me move out of our two-bedroom when you left for the military. They bumped me up a little, though. The old neighborhood is falling apart, you know. Every time there’s a riot, they turn off the power and stop giving out rations—every single time. I got so sick of sitting in the dark without food for days on end.”

She pats the chest of my uniform tunic and runs a finger across the ribbons above the breast pocket.

“I’m so glad you don’t have to worry about any of this anymore, Andrew. All people ever do around here is watch the Networks and bitch about all the stuff they don’t have. Now come inside, will you? Just don’t mind the mess. I gave the help a month off.”

Mom’s new apartment is neater and more modern than the old one, but less than half the size. It’s still palatial compared to my berth on the Intrepid. There’s a living room with kitchen corner, a separate bedroom, a bathroom, and a large hallway closet. Not even the commanding officer of a supercarrier has this much personal space. I look through the rooms briefly, and see that Mom has put up a little collage of pictures on her living room wall, mostly low-res prints of photographs I sent her through MilNet. There’s even a shot of me and Halley, taken two years ago on our joint leave back on the fleet rec facility on Mars.

“I don’t have much in the way of food,” Mom says from the kitchen nook, where she’s filling two glasses of water from the tap. “They cut the rations by another thousand calories two months ago. Now I can’t even put away anything for the riot outages. Not that I can heat anything when they cut the power.”

“Don’t worry about food, Mom. They said I can bring a dependent to the government canteens. We can take the train up to South Station. Their canteen’s pretty decent.”

“You think? Oh, that would be fabulous.”

“Yeah. Shouldn’t be a problem. Want to go right now? I’m sure they’re serving dinner. The day shift is about to clock out. It’ll be pretty crowded, though.”

Mom looks out of the windows to gauge the level of remaining daylight.

“Oh, let’s go, then,” she says after a brief moment of contemplation. “Before it gets too dark out there.”

After five years of hopping around from colony to colony, wide-open skies and empty landscapes, being back in the concrete warrens of my old hometown feels claustrophobically confining. There’s a sense of danger and casual malevolence to the dirty cookie-cutter architecture of the Public Residence towers and the unkempt streets and sidewalks now. Outside, the shadows have grown long.

Mom and I step out of her residence tower, and I check my surroundings the way I used to do back when I grew up here. There’s a group of kids sitting on the curb in front of the residence tower across the street, swigging some orange concoction from a clear jug they are passing around. There’s a demarcation in age and demeanor when the young hood rats graduate from hit-and-run vandalism and blowing off steam to actively prowling for stuff to steal and people to harm, and from what I know about my youth days here, these kids are right on that cusp.

For a moment, I consider heading back into the residence tower behind me. Then I think about the fact that I’ve spent the last five years shooting at people and fighting Lankies in much worse spots than PRC Boston-7. The public-transit station is only two blocks away, and there are cops nearby.

“Let’s go,” I tell Mom, and steer her up the road. I glance over to the group of kids as we walk off briskly, and I can see one of them looking over to us and staring.

“You don’t have your gun on you, do you?” I ask Mom.

“Of course not. It’s in the kitchen, on top of the food warmer.”

I glance over my shoulder and see that the group of apprentice hoodlums is now looking over at us, and there’s an animated but hushed discussion going on between them.

“Walk faster,” I tell Mom.

We’re halfway down the block before I hear them trotting up behind us.

“Yo, soldier boy, wait up, man.”

Mom looks around and opens her mouth to reply, but I shake my head.

“Keep walking,” I tell her. They’re younger and scrawnier than I am, but there’s five of them and just one of me, and I’m unarmed. A block and a half away, the public-transit station’s bunker-like new architecture looks more inviting than it did earlier. There are cops milling around in front of a hydrocruiser by the entrance, but they’re out of shouting range. We pass the mouth of an alley to our left, and as we do, the five hood rats rush up on the sidewalk next to us and nudge us into the alley, out of the view of the few people who are walking around on the street this evening.

“Got no dope or vouchers,” I say to them, much more calmly than I feel. “Just going down to the station with my mother. Want to let us pass?”

“The fuck are you doing, coming down here in that?” one of them says, and points to my uniform jacket. He’s a lean kid—all of them are—and his teeth are in bad shape even for a PRC resident.

“Don’t have any other clothes right now,” I tell him. I’m trying to gauge the right moment to go from appeasement to sudden violence as he steps closer. He’s half a head shorter than I am, but he has four of his friends behind him. I’ve been killing SRA marines and Lankies for five years now, but out here, in my going-out dress blues and without any weapons, I’m vulnerable. I find that I don’t like the feeling of powerlessness at all.

“What’s in the bag?” he asks my mom. She takes it off her shoulder with a resigned expression, as if she has gone through this particular routine many times.

“Nothing you want,” she says. She hands it to him, and he takes it as casually as if he’s helping her out with her groceries. His four friends have fanned out in a semicircle around us. I don’t see any weapons yet, and I resolve to deck the first of these kids who produces one.

The kid with the bad teeth opens Mom’s bag and pulls out a rolled-up rain cloak. He drops it on the ground, rummages around in the bag, and makes a disappointed noise when nothing in there is to his liking.

“Hey,” I say, anger welling up inside me. He looks up at me. There’s neither concern nor curiosity in that gaze, just boredom and dull hostility.

“You may want to pick that up and hand it back,” I say.

“Oh?” He looks at his friends and smiles thinly. The way they are standing, I can probably take down two or three of them if they don’t pull out any weapons.

“Let’s say I really don’t wanna,” he says. Then he lifts the bottom of his ratty shirt and flashes the taped-up handle of what looks like a homemade pistol.

“Don’t,” Mom says behind me. “Just don’t.”

There’s a popping sound, and the kid with the bad teeth jerks convulsively. Then he drops to the ground. Behind him, on the sidewalk by the mouth of the alley, stand three cops in full riot gear. One of them has his stun stick aimed over his forearm. The other four hoodlum apprentices turn around. Two of them freeze in place. The other two take off down the alley like panicked rabbits.

“Dumbasses,” one of the cops says, and takes off after them, barreling past us in his riot armor like a fleet frigate at full speed. The other two cops walk into the alley, stun sticks aimed at the hood rats who just tried to rob us. In front of me, the kid who took Mom’s bag lies twitching, the electrical probes from the cop’s stun stick right between his shoulder blades.

“Oh, look,” the cop says. “Gun.”

The homemade pistol has slipped out of the kid’s waistband and onto the dirty asphalt. In a very casual motion, the other cop aims his stun stick as well, and shoots another pair of probes into the back of the prone hood rat, who convulses again.

“Look, he’s down already,” Mom says.

“He’s lucky I didn’t shoot him in the back of the head,” the cop says. Their appearance has saved us from a mugging or worse, but for some reason I feel more of a threat from their casual use of force than I did from the blustering of the hood rats.

The cop stoops down and picks up Mom’s bag. Then he hands it to her.

“Thank you,” she says.

He turns to the other two kids, who are standing very still with their arms raised and their hands on their heads.

“That guy’s in the fleet,” the cop says, and nods in my direction. “He keeps those giant ugly aliens from coming here and gassing us all to death. He’s worth a hundred of you shit-eating wastes of calories.”

They don’t respond, just stare ahead, as if they don’t want to give the cop the slightest excuse to use that stun stick on them. They’re shitheads, but not terribly dangerous. The cops standing around us, on the other hand, radiate danger.

“Now get out of here,” the first cop says to me. He raises the visor of his riot helmet, and I see that he’s the sergeant I talked to earlier, back in the transit station. “Told you nothing good ever happens here after sunset. You’re lucky we spotted you.”

“Thanks,” I say, but I’m not sure that I mean it.

“Let’s go,” Mom says, and we walk out of the alley quickly, as much to leave the cops behind as the kids who just tried to casually mug us.

From the looks of it, I’m not the only government employee to bring a dependent to dinner. The government canteen at South Station is packed from wall to wall, but only half the people in the room are wearing uniforms or government ID badges around their necks. Despite the crowd, the food issue counter works almost as efficiently as an enlisted mess at watch change on a warship. Mom and I only stand in line for five minutes before we both take possession of our food trays. There’s no buffet option like in the service—everyone gets the same tray, with the same items, in equal amounts.

The food is lousy. It’s merely a slightly more flavorful version of the processed soy crap in the BNA rations. Compared to military food, it’s barely edible, but Mom tucks in like it’s a gourmet meal. I eat a little bit to give my stomach something to work with, and then mostly push the food around on my tray while I watch Mom eat.

“Do they feed you like this every day?” she asks between two big bites of soy chicken. I haven’t eaten a piece of processed soy since I joined the service, but I don’t want to remind my mom that we get to eat actual food while she has to live on this recycled and reconstituted garbage.

“Yeah, kind of,” I tell her. “We burn a few more calories than civvies, ’cause we run around with guns and armor a lot.”

“Last time I got a commissary voucher, beef was up to five hundred dollars a pound,” she says. “That was over a year ago. God knows what it’s up to by now.”

“I saw what they did to the voucher booth. So what, they just don’t issue vouchers anymore?”

“They don’t do anything anymore,” Mom says. “Trash only gets picked up once or twice a month now, and they skip it altogether when there’s a riot. You hardly ever see a cop anymore, either, except when there is a riot. Then they show up by the hundreds. It’s like war every month. People get shot on the street corner, and nobody picks up the bodies for days.”

“They don’t do safety sweeps in the tenements anymore?”

Mom shakes her head.

“They’re afraid to walk the streets. It was pretty bad for a while with the hoodlums, but it’s a little better now. You can buy security escorts now, you know. A thousand calories for a day, you get a guy with a gun to walk around with you. The cops don’t care anymore.”

“Jeez, Mom. Who’s keeping the peace now?”

“Nobody,” she shrugs. “Everybody, I guess. Everyone’s got guns now. Hell, I got one. I keep it in the apartment, though. It’s not like I get to go out much anyway, except over to the civil center to read your mail, and they still have gun detectors at the door there.”

When I still lived at home with her, Mom hated guns. I suspect that if she had ever caught me with one, she would have turned me over to the public-housing police herself. If Mom is keeping a gun in the apartment in violation of the law and her old philosophies, things must have become very grim indeed.

We finish our meal and clear the table for the people waiting in line for seats. As we walk out past the two security guards checking ID cards at the door, Mom looks around in wonder.

“You know, I’ve never been up here. Above the public platforms, I mean.”

“Really?”

“Really. I’ve lived here for almost twenty years now, and I’ve never had a reason to come up these stairs.”

“You’ve never been out of Boston, Mom?”

“Oh, sure,” she shrugs. “When I first met your dad. Before you. We went down to the Cape for the day a few times. He took me to New Hampshire once. But we took the hydrobus back then. The one that used to leave from North Station.”

I turn around and go back to the security guards at the entrance to the canteen.

“Excuse me, sir,” I address the higher-ranking one, a thin, sour-faced guy with a sergeant’s shoulder boards. I outrank him, but this is his turf, and he wields more clout down here than I do. The HD sergeant raises an eyebrow.

“What can I do for you, Staff Sergeant?”

“I’ve been off-world for too long,” I say. “Could you tell me what the rules are these days for taking relatives with you on private transportation?”

“That your mom over there?”

“Yeah, she is.”

“Dependents can ride along for free, up to five thousand kilometers per year. She’s gotta be on your card, though.”

“What does that mean?”

“That means,” he says, in a tone that reminds me of a drill sergeant explaining something obvious to a slow recruit, “that she has to be in the files as your official dependent. No pals, no girlfriends, no other relatives.”

“She’s on my card,” I say. “Thank you, Sergeant.”

I walk back to where Mom is standing.

“What was that all about?” she asks.

“You want to go up one more level to where the private trains are? If you’re not in a hurry to go back home, we can go for a little ride.”