Lines of Departure

^{CHAPTER 6} LIBERTY FALLS, VERMONT

Mom studies the train schedule like someone perusing the menu at a fine restaurant. Up here, where the private rail network trains are, the security is even tighter than down in the public station. The public trains are free, but the private regional trains cost real money, and there’s no way for a welfare rat to sneak a ride on one. There are guards checking boarding slips and ID cards, and the private security goons look even more cantankerous than the public transit cops and HD troopers in the station below.

The Regional Express station is the only part of South Station that gets to see any sunlight. It’s perched on top of the many subterranean layers of the public-transportation system. Above ground, everything is a little cleaner, brighter, and less noisy than below. Technically speaking, the regional maglev network is public as well, since it’s subsidized by the Commonwealth, but the trains bear private corporate logos. Riding the maglev out of the city costs money—real currency, not public-assistance credits on government cash cards. Back when I was a civilian, I never really thought about the reason for that, but now I know it’s a way to keep the welfare rats from spilling out of their habitat.

“Where should we go?” Mom asks. The options before her seem to have stunned her into paralysis. The regional maglevs go all the way up to Halifax and down to the old capital, DC, and there are dozens of ways for paying customers to get out of Boston.

“What do you want to see, Mom? Mountains, ocean, big metroplex, or what? Sky’s the limit.”

“No big city,” Mom says. “Somewhere where they have some trees left, maybe.”

She studies the pictogram for the different regional routes again for a few moments, and jabs the screen with her finger.

“There. Let’s go there.”

She points at one of the northern stops of the Green Mountain transit line—a place called Liberty Falls, Vermont, right between Montpelier and Burlington.

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I’d like to go see some mountains and trees.”

“Okay, then. I’ll get us some tickets.”

The departure hall is palatial compared to the cramped and perennially crowded underground platforms of the public system. The ceiling up here is thirty feet high, and there are tall picture windows lining the walls that are obvious projections, because they show a lightly clouded blue sky above Boston, instead of the shroud of smog and dirt that has been covering the city for as long as I’ve been alive. The back wall of the departure hall is taken up by a huge display listing destinations, departure times, and platform numbers. Underneath the display, there are rows of automatic ticket dispensers and a pair of information booths. We walk over to the info booths, and I speak our destination.

“Liberty Falls, Vermont.”

A moment later, the screen in front of me displays an itinerary and a direction diagram. A pleasant female voice speaks out the text on the screen.

“I suggest the Green Mountain Line to Burlington, with stops in Nashua, the Concord-Manchester metroplex, Hartland-Lebanon, and Montpelier.”

I select the “ACCEPT/PAY” button on the screen. The display flips to show me a variety of payment options: “CREDIT CARD,” “GOVERNMENT ID,” “FOREIGN CREDIT (EUROS, ANZAC DOLLARS, AND NEW YEN ONLY),” “OTHER.” I choose the second option, scan my military ID, and enter “2” in the field labeled “NUMBER OF PASSENGERS.” The terminal spits out our plastic boarding slips, and I snatch them out of the dispenser and hand them to Mom.

“Courtesy of the Commonwealth. Tomorrow morning, you’ll be breathing some clean mountain air.”

The maglev system was built long before I was born, back when the Commonwealth didn’t yet spend every available dollar on colonization. That makes the newest trains in the system forty or fifty years old, but they’re in much better shape than the ones used in the public system. The maglev train cars have compartments, each with seating for six or eight people, and there’s a small restroom at the head of each car. The public trains smell of burnt rubber and piss, the seats are nearly indestructible polymer shells, and their ride is bumpy enough to shake loose ceramic tooth fillings. The maglev train cars merely smell like aging fabric, the seats are comfortably upholstered with antiseptic nanofiber, and the ride is so smooth that I can barely tell we’re in motion. We claim one of the empty compartments, and have it entirely to ourselves.

The Boston metroplex stretches all the way to the New Hampshire border. For the first thirty minutes of our ride, all we see outside is a dark landscape of concrete, row after row of tenement high-rises, broken up in regular intervals by the dimly lit intersections of the planned street grids, like clearings in an urban forest. The maglev rides on titanium arches that rise thirty feet above the forest of concrete. As we get closer to the outer suburbs and away from the tenements, the buildings get smaller, and the streets wider and better lit. It’s not until we’ve crossed the state line into New Hampshire that we see the first large patches of green between all the urban sprawl.

“So many people,” Mom muses. She has been studying the world outside of the double-layer polycarb windows since we left South Station. “Think about all the people living on this patch of ground.”

“Sixty million,” I say. “And that’s just Boston and Providence. New York’s up to over a hundred million now.”

“Oh, I know the numbers,” Mom says. “It’s just one thing to read them on a screen, and another to actually see it with your own eyes.”

“The whole Eastern Seaboard is like that,” I say. “One metroplex blending into another. We got too many for little old Earth. The colonies are mostly empty, still.”

“What’s it like up there? Do you ever get to spend any time on those planets?”

“I’ve been to most of ours, and a lot of the Chinese and Russian ones. It’s different. Wild, barren. Harsh places to live.”

“I used to put our names in the hat for the colony lottery every year, you know,” Mom says. “Until they shut it down. I can’t believe they stopped the colony flights.”

“We’ve lost more than half of our colonies to the Lankies, Mom. I think Team Red didn’t fare much better. You don’t want to be a colonist right now. Those things show up in orbit, everyone on the planet is dead four weeks later. You can’t fight back, and running and hiding won’t do you any good. They just gas every city, like a bunch of rat nests.”

“Maybe we deserve it,” Mom says darkly, and looks out of the window again, where the city of Nashua is sleeping a restless slumber. Even little Nashua, with its million and a half residents, has a sizable public tenement on its outskirts, unmistakable clusters of tall, starkly utilitarian residence towers bunched together on the shittiest real estate in town. “Maybe we should all be gassed like rats. I mean, look at what we’ve done to this world, and now we’re spreading out to others.”

“Everyone wants to live, Mom. They’re just a little better at spreading out than we are.”

“You think they’ll come all the way to Earth?” she asks. Her expression tells me that she’s not particularly afraid of that prospect.

I consider her question, and shrug. “Probably. I don’t see why they’d stop, now that they’re on a roll.”

I gaze back out at nocturnal Nashua, one ant hive among tens of thousands on this continent alone, stuffed to capacity with human beings who are just barely clawing out an existence. I imagine a Lanky seed ship in the sky above, raining down pods of nerve gas onto the city streets below. The Lanky nerve gas acts so quickly that people fall over dead just a few seconds after inhaling a milligram or two, or getting just a microscopic droplet onto their skin.

I want to disagree with Mom, but part of me concurs that a Lanky invasion of Earth would be a mercy killing of our species. We’ve spent most of our history trying to exterminate each other anyway. This way, we’ll at least have some dispassionate outside referee settling all of humanity’s old scores permanently. No more generational feuds, no more ancient grudges, no more pointless revenge carried out against people who inherited some old guilt from their great-grandparents. We will all just go down the path on which we’ve sent so many species ourselves, and we’ll just be a note in someone else’s xenobiology textbooks, listed under the header “EXTINCT.”

It’s not the first time I’ve wondered if there’s a point to our struggle against the Lankies, but as we glide through the night above the sea of barely fed, discontented humans in the city spread out underneath the maglev track, I conclude for the first time that there probably isn’t.

We both fall asleep in our comfortable seats before the maglev reaches the Concord-Manchester station. When I wake up again, the world outside is a tapestry of green and white, and the sun is just peeking over the horizon. I check the moving map display on the wall of the compartment. It’s almost seven o’clock in the morning, and we’re on the last leg of our trip, fifteen minutes from the stop at Liberty Falls. We’ve slept through Concord-Manchester, Hartland-Lebanon, and Montpelier.

Mom is still asleep in the seat across from mine. Her head is on the padded headrest, and she looks peaceful and relaxed. There are more lines in her face than I remembered, and her hair has gray streaks in it now. Mom’s only forty-five years old, but she looks like she’s pushing sixty. When you have access to private hospitals, your life expectancy is over a hundred years, but welfare rats tend to die at younger ages, due to the cumulative effects of bad nutrition and the stress of day-to-day life in the tenements. The public hospitals have long waiting lists for anything more serious than a nosebleed. When Dad died of cancer, they just gave him a bunch of DNA-coded painkillers to make his transition to recyclable biomass easier.

I reach out and touch Mom on the shoulder to wake her up. She opens her eyes slowly, and looks around.

“Are we there already?”

“Almost, Mom. Fifteen minutes to go. Check it out—it’s snowing out there.”

I point out of the window, where the wind is making bands of fine snowflakes dance among the trees as we’re passing through rural Vermont at two hundred kilometers per hour. The train could cover the distance from Boston to the fringes of Vermont in less than two hours at full throttle, but they have to go slowly through all the urban centers, and New England is all urban centers until you’re right on the edges.

“Well, will you look at that. I haven’t seen this much snow on the ground in ages.”

The snow that falls in a PRC is already dirty before it hits the ground because of the perpetual layer of smog and dirt in the atmosphere above the big cities. Out here, the snow looks pure and white—clean, untouched, inviting. The world outside looks like a snapshot from a long-forgotten past: untidy rows of trees covered in white, and only the very occasional wireless power transmitter spoiling the scenery.

“Beautiful,” Mom says. “Like an old oil painting. I had almost forgotten that the world isn’t all covered in concrete.”

“Most of them aren’t, up there,” I reply.

Liberty Falls is so small that we pass through the outskirts only a few minutes before we reach the station. There are no tenement high-rises here, just neat rows of single-family houses lined up on tidy streets.

The train glides into a clean and well-lit station that has a transparent roof. I see patches of snow on the polycarb dome above us, and a blue and gray sky beyond. The sun is mostly above the horizon now, and the clouds are painted from below in a pale shade of pink.

The transit station is an airy structure, widely spaced support struts with large windows in between. There is plenty of daylight, and unlike the windows at South Station, these aren’t projection screens that give people the illusion of a clear sky outside. We step out of the train and into the station. There’s no heavy security out there, just a bored-looking civilian guard loitering on the platform and a pair of smartly dressed city cops standing at the entrance to the station. They give us friendly nods as we walk past them into the street.

When we walk out of the station, the air is so clean and cold that it hurts my nose. I had only been back in Boston for a few hours, but my nose had gotten used to the bad air in the metroplex again. Out here, it smells as clean as it did out at NACRD Orem, my Basic Training depot in the middle of the Utah desert.

Liberty Falls is a mix of old and new architecture. Out on the street in front of the transit station, the buildings are a blend of brick houses from the last century or the one before it, and modern polycarb-and-alloy structures. The older houses are well kept, renovated and restored, not crumbling and covered in spray paint like their counterparts in Boston. There’s a snow-covered green in front of the station, and it has real trees on it. The streets here are lined with little stores—books, groceries, auto-serve restaurants—and few of those stores have a security guard at the door. There’s no litter on the sidewalks, and the people walking around look better fed than the government employees at South Station. We’re only two hundred miles from the Boston metroplex, but this place feels like a different world altogether. Now that we’re out here, I’m once again glad to be wearing my fleet uniform, because my old civvie clothes would have me sticking out like a dirty rag on a dinner table.

Mom wanders over to the little green in front of the transit station and walks across it, ignoring the cleared sidewalks that line the green. The snow on the green is knee-deep in spots, but Mom plows through it, undeterred. I join her as she makes her way across the green, leaving a narrow rut in the clean snow. When we reach the other side of the green, she stops and leans against one of the trees that stand around the edges of the green like an orderly row of fence posts. She bends over, scoops up a handful of the pristine snow, and holds it out for me to see.

“I haven’t seen snow this clean since before you were born.”

She raises her hand to her mouth and touches the snow on her palm with the tip of her tongue.

“Tastes like nothing,” she proclaims.

“Colony planet I was on last year, their planetary winter lasts three years,” I say. “All rocks and dust in the summer years, and forty below in the winter. Lousiest place I’ve ever been. Your suit malfunctioned, you’d be dead of exposure in a few hours.”

“We went up to central New Hampshire the year before you were born,” Mom says, as if she hasn’t heard my little anecdote. “We went up Mount Washington. There was snow up there, in early October. Most beautiful place I’ve ever been. No cities for miles, just mountains and trees as far as the eye could see. Just this big blanket of orange and red and green, stretching all the way to the horizon.”

“Was that your honeymoon with Dad?”

“Uh-huh. The month after, we moved out to PRC Seven, because they had a two-bedroom unit available. And then everything started turning to crap.”

Mom has changed a lot since I left. I’m not used to her introspective side. Before I joined the military, I was convinced that my mother was just like all the other welfare drones in our PRC—glued to the Network screen all day and not giving much of a shit about anything but show schedules and ration day. Part of the reason why I didn’t try harder to get some leave time down on Earth was my conviction that my mother wouldn’t have anything interesting to say anyway.

“Did I mess things up for you? I mean, when I was born?”

She looks at me and shakes her head with a sad little smile.

“Oh, no, honey. I messed things up for myself. Your father helped a lot, too. But it was mostly me. Marrying your dad was just the wrong thing to do. But I was nineteen, and I didn’t know anything about anything.”

She drops her handful of snow and wipes her wet hand on the outside of her jacket. It’s cold out here in northern Vermont, and Mom’s jacket doesn’t look like it’s adequate for the climate, but she doesn’t seem to mind the cold.

“He said he was going to get into the service. Said he’d muster out after five or ten years, and we could take the money and buy a little house in the outskirts, away from the tenements. ‘Just a few years,’ he said.”

She shakes her head with a chuckle that doesn’t sound the least bit amused.

“Instead, he came home after two years. Kicked out for failure to follow orders. Not a dollar to his name. So he moved back into our unit, and the five or ten years in the tenement ended up twenty-five. I’m pretty sure I’ll live in that place until I die, just like your dad.”

“I’m sorry, Mom,” I say, and I mean it. I’ve never felt so much sorrow for my mother in my life, and I’m ashamed when I realize it’s because I’ve never seen her as deserving of empathy. I simply never considered that my mother had a story of her own, and that she wasn’t an apathetic welfare rat just like all the rest of them.

“Don’t be,” Mom says. She reaches out and touches my cheek with her snow-cold hand. “At least you won’t be stuck here doing the same thing we did. And don’t think for a second that I’ve ever thought you were ‘messing things up for me.’ You’re the only good thing that came out of that marriage. You’re the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. Without you, I would have gone up on the roof of our old high-rise and jumped off it fifteen years ago.”

I remember all the times when I sent out my weekly messages to Mom a few days late, and the times when I skipped them altogether, and I feel a burning shame that makes the tears well up in my eyes. I take Mom’s hand off my cheek and place it between my own hands, to rub away the cold of the snow she was holding earlier.

“I’m sorry for being such a self-centered little shit all those years,” I say. “I guess I wasn’t much of a help to you.”

Mom smiles at me, and shrugs.

“Andrew, you were just a kid. That’s what teenagers are, don’t you know?”

We stand together like this for a little while, Mom with her hand between my hands, both of us enjoying the sedate sounds of Liberty Falls waking up all around us—hydrocars gliding past, soft music coming from a few of the shops opening, people talking to each other in low voices as they walk past the little green and into the transit station. It’s as if we have stepped off the train and into a different time and place altogether.

“You want to go and see if there’s a place that’ll feed us some breakfast on my fancy government ID?” I ask Mom, and she nods.

“I’m starving. This clean air is making me hungrier than I’ve been in forever.”

We walk down the sidewalk of Main Street in search of a government canteen, or at least an automated eatery that has the government logo among the accepted payment methods stickered to the front door.

As we walk down the street, a man steps out of a door twenty yards ahead of us. He’s wearing a white chef’s uniform, and he carries an old-fashioned blackboard and easel, which he sets up on the sidewalk in front of his door. We watch as he sits on his heels in front of the blackboard to write on it with a piece of green chalk. As we get closer, I can make out the first few lines he has written:

By now, I have roughly a million Commonwealth dollars in my government account, but I can’t access any of it, and I don’t have a single dollar of hard currency on me. I scan the line of payment symbols on the door, but “FED ID” is not among them.

The man in the chef’s uniform notices us and gets up from his crouch. When he turns to face us, I can tell that he’s doing just a little bit of a double-take at the sight of my dark-blue fleet uniform. From the way his gaze shifts to the beret on my head and then the ribbon salad above my breast pocket, I suspect that he knows what he’s looking at. I nod at him in greeting, and he returns the nod with narrowed eyes.

“Combat controller,” he says, a statement rather than a question. He’s a tall, lean guy, and he looks like he’s in very good shape. His hair is a closely cropped buzz cut that is streaked with gray.

“Correct,” I say.

He looks at my shoulder boards and raises an eyebrow. “I’m not too good with the new ranks they came up with. You a sergeant?”

“Staff Sergeant,” I correct. “E-6.”

“Doesn’t seem right, fleet NCOs going by those army ranks now,” he says. “When I left, you would have been a petty officer first class.”

“You a navy vet?”

“Damn straight. Twenty years in the fleet. Took my retirement just before the Lanky business started. Back when they still called it the navy.”

“That was about the time I joined up,” I say. “Got into the fleet a year before they unified the services and gave everyone army ranks. I was a petty officer third class for about two months, before they took away the chevron and called me a corporal.”

“Well, how about that,” he smiles. Then he wipes his right hand on the apron he’s wearing and holds it out to me. “Steve Kopka, Master Chief Petty Officer. Retired,” he adds, with a hint of regret in his voice.

“Andrew Grayson,” I reply, and take the offered hand. His handshake is firm and businesslike. “This is my mom.”

“Ma’am,” he says to her with a nod.

“Pleased to meet you,” Mom replies.

“So,” he says, eyeing Mom’s clean, but obviously welfare-sourced clothes. “Out for a stroll this morning? You on leave?”

“Yeah, my tub’s in for a refit, and I took some time off between assignments.”

“I worked with you combat controllers a bunch when I was in. Only my beret was maroon back then, not scarlet.”

“You were Spaceborne Rescue?” I ask, and he nods.

“God knows what color their beanies are these days.”

“Still maroon,” I say. “They took away all the fleet ranks and gave everyone new shoulder boards, but they didn’t mess with the podheads’ beret colors. Guess they were afraid of the riot that would have followed.”

“Damn straight,” Master Chief Kopka says. “You of all people know how much fucking sweat goes into earning one of those. Pardon my language, ma’am,” he adds in Mom’s direction.

“Not at all,” Mom says. I can tell that she has no idea what we’re talking about, but I also know she’s pleased to witness our exchange.

“Master Chief Kopka here is a former Spaceborne Rescue man,” I explain to Mom. “They have the only job in the fleet that’s more dangerous than calling nukes down on your own head. They’re the guys who launch in ballistic drop pods to rescue crashed pilots.”

“Oh, my,” Mom says with a smile. “And you made it all the way through your service doing that? You must have been good at it.”

“That was before the Lankies,” Chief Kopka tells her. “We just tussled with the Russians and the Chinese every once in a while. Your son here has a tougher job than I ever had.”

“So what are you doing now, Master Chief?” I ask him. “You trade in your beanie for a chef’s hat?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Took my retirement money and went in with a friend to open this place. He died last year, so it’s all mine now.” He looks at the old but clean brick building with obvious pride of ownership.

“Good for you, Master Chief. Pleasure to run into you.”

“Are you two in a hurry? I’d like to make you some breakfast, if you’ll let me. Don’t run into a fellow podhead too often, and I have a ‘free meal’ policy for the old brotherhood.”

“Oh, no, we couldn’t—” Mom says.

“Absolutely,” I say at the same time.

“What’s a podhead?” Mom asks in a low voice as Master Chief Kopka leads us into his little restaurant.

“Fleet special ops,” I tell her. “Spaceborne Rescue, combat controllers, Space-Air-Land teams. The rest of the fleet calls us that because we use the ballistic drop pods a lot.”

“That’s what you do?” Mom asks, disturbed. “I thought you were sitting at a network console somewhere in a starship. You never told me about drop pods and nuclear weapons.”

“That’s ‘need to know,’ Mom. And you didn’t need to know.”

In front of us, Master Chief Kopka lets out a low chuckle.

We walk into a cozy little dining room. There are maybe a dozen tables in the room, all decked with the same kind of cream-colored tablecloths, and each adorned with little flower vases. Mom looks around with an expression that couldn’t be more bewildered if she had just stepped off the Gateway shuttle and onto the big spaceport on Luna.

“We’re not open until eight,” Chief Kopka says over his shoulder. “My waitress won’t be in until quarter ’til, but I have the kitchen fired up already.”

He leads us to a corner table that’s right by one of the streetside windows and pulls out a chair for Mom.

“You folks sit down, and I’ll bring you some menus. What would you like to drink?”

Mom takes her seat and looks up at the chief.

“Gosh, I have no idea. Coffee, maybe?”

“Good call. I got in some fresh beans the other day. One coffee, coming right up. What can I get you, Sergeant?”

“I’ll have one, too,” I say. “Don’t waste the top-shelf stuff on us, Master Chief.”

“You leave that up to me,” Chief Kopka says.

He walks off toward the kitchen, and Mom gives me a look that is equal parts bewilderment, excitement, and amusement.

“Does that happen to you a lot?”

“This is the first time. I’ve never gotten anything from anyone for wearing this outfit.”

The chief returns a few minutes later. He’s carrying a little serving tray with two coffee cups on it. Mom watches in wide-eyed wonder as he puts the cups down in front of us. He takes a small creamer off the tray and places it on the table in front of us.

“That’s some local cream, from actual Vermont cows. I have an arrangement with a dairy farm just down the road.”

He adds a little bowl of granulated sugar to what is already a hundred-dollar breakfast without any food in the mix, and puts down two leather-bound menus. Then he winks at Mom and points to her coffee cup.

“You go ahead and enjoy that coffee while you pick out something to eat. Disregard the headers that say ‘Lunch’ or ‘Dinner.’ I can make you anything you see on that menu. I’ll be back in a few to take your order.”

With that, he walks off, leaving Mom sitting in slack-jawed amazement.

The coffee is much better than the powdered stuff we get to drink in the fleet, and it bears very little resemblance to the atrocious instant-coffee-flavored soy powder they include in the BNA rations. Mom carefully assembles her cup by adding two spoonfuls of the sugar and a small splash of cream. She handles the creamer like the ChemWar guys would handle vials of nerve gas, as if one spilled drop would be a catastrophe. When her coffee has reached the right color and sweetness, she dips a finger into the milk container and sticks the fingertip into her mouth to taste the pure cream.

“Oh my God,” she says after a moment of closed-eyed bliss. “That stuff is so rich. You could stand a spoon up in it. This is incredible.”

“Easy with the dairy, Mom,” I warn her. “If you’re not used to it, too much will screw up your plumbing. And don’t ask me how I know this.”

“It would be worth it,” Mom says. She takes a sip of her coffee and lets out a sound of utter contentment.

I add some cream and sugar to my own coffee and take a sip. It’s so rich and flavorful that it makes the fleet coffee seem like bilge water.

“So what are you going to eat?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Mom says. She opens the menu in front of her carefully and picks up the corner of the first page with her fingertips. “I’m sure everything is very good, and that whatever I order will be the best thing I’ve eaten in five years.”

Five minutes into our breakfast, Mom revises her opinion, and lets me know that Chief Kopka’s food is the best thing she’s ever eaten in her life. The menu has meal options and price tags that seem like a cruel prank to a welfare rat from the tenements. The dinner menu has steak and shellfish dishes listed, and the price tags next to them have four digits before the decimal point. Not wanting to take shameless advantage of the chief’s generosity by ordering a $1,500 cut of meat, we pick some moderately priced items from the brunch menu. I order the lumberjack hash browns, which are a glorious mess of real potato cubes mixed with bits of corned beef, and topped with a fried egg. Mom picks the eggs Benedict, which have a heart-shaped poached egg artfully stacked on a muffin, along with a thick slice of bacon, and a piece of avocado underneath. As far as I can tell, there’s not a single bit of soy in either meal.

When our plates are nearly clean, Chief Kopka comes out of the kitchen and walks over to our table. He is clutching a leather-bound book.

“May I join you for a few minutes?” he asks. “I have something I’d like to show you, Sergeant.”

“Sure thing, Master Chief. Pull up a chair. It’s your place.”

The chief sits down at our table and puts the book on the linen tablecloth between us. I open it to the first page and see that it’s a collection of photo printouts and mementos from the chief’s time in the fleet. As I leaf through the album, I see that a lot of the pictures seem to be from the chief’s senior NCO days, as if he had only started the whole collection once he got close to retirement. A few pages in the book are dedicated to unit patches from ships Chief Kopka has served on: NACS Independence CV-606, NACS Nassau FF-476, NACS Wainwright CA-41, and a half dozen others. There are pictures of the chief hanging out in the mess or rec room with his petty-officer buddies, and some shots of scenery from colony planets, with unmistakable prefabricated colony housing units in the background.

“Let me ask you a question, Sarge,” the chief says after a while. “You’re up there all year long, and you’re on the ground, not flying a console. How bad is it?”

“You know I can’t tell you details, Chief.”

“I’m not asking you to violate OpSec. Just give me a quick sketch. Whatever news we get on the Lankies, they’ve put it through so many cleanup cycles that it’s as bland as that shit they feed people in the welfare cities.” He looks at Mom and gives her a sheepish smile. “Pardon my French, ma’am.”

“Not at all,” Mom says, smiling back. “It is pretty bland shit, after all.”

“I don’t think I’m giving anything away,” I say, “but we’re getting our asses kicked. There’s nothing left to defend past the Thirty. They’ve taken it all away from us.”

“Holy crap.” The chief sits back in his chair and exhales sharply. “They keep saying we’re ‘engaged’ past the Thirty.”

“Well, they’re not lying. We’re doing what we can to be a pain in their asses, but it’s all hit-and-run raids and nuclear bombardment. Even if we could kick them off our colonies again, it wouldn’t do us any good in the long run. First thing they do, they wreck our terraformers and set up their own. If they ever restart the colony program, we’ll have to do all the work from scratch again.”

“Figures.” Master Chief Kopka shakes his head in disgust. “Twenty years in the fleet, and I go into retirement just before the real fight starts. I picked one hell of a time to get out.”

“I’d say you picked the perfect time, Master Chief,” I say. “We struggle on the ground, but at least we get our licks in. Those ugly things are tough as shit, but you can kill ’em. Their spaceships? Forget about it. We’ve never won a ship-to-ship engagement with a Lanky seed ship. Every time we’ve stood and fought instead of running away, they’ve hammered our cap ships to scrap. Being in the fleet, flying a console—that’s almost as dangerous as ground combat now.”

“Yeah, well, I’d rather be manning my post up there. All I got down here’s a wall rack full of kitchen knives, and a stun gun in my desk back in the office. Kind of hard to go on with life as usual when you know what’s out there and you know that you won’t be able to do a damn thing but kiss your ass good-bye if they show up.”

I want to tell the chief that those are pretty much our options out on the colonies as well, but I understand his point. One of the reasons why I signed the reenlistment form was the dread I felt at the thought of not being able to control my own fate anymore, not even in whatever small measure afforded to me by my armor, weapon, and tactical radio sets. As things stand right now, I have at least some influence on events, and some purpose in life. If I had to sit down here on Earth, knowing how bad things look at the moment, and condemned to spend my days with mundane tasks, I’d probably feel exactly the same way.

“Well,” the chief says. “You two enjoy the rest of your meal. Thanks for the heads-up, Sergeant. I have to get the place ready for the rest of my crew.”

“No problem, Master Chief,” I reply. “And thank you for the food. It beats the living hell out of anything I’ve had since day one in Basic.”

“You’re welcome. Do you think you could pass on a message or two once you get back to the fleet? They won’t let civvies onto MilNet, except direct dependents. I’d like to let my old crew know that the old master chief is still kicking.”

“Sure thing. Give me a few names, and I’ll send it on. I won’t be able to pass on any replies, though.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” the chief says. “I’d just get depressed anyway if I knew what fun they’re having without me.”

“I’ll do it,” Mom offers, and the chief looks at her in surprise.

“What’s that, Mom?”

“I’ll pass on whatever it is you want to send back. Just send it to my mailbox with your weekly mail, and I’ll send it on to the chief.”

“They won’t let you copy anything off the MilNet terminals,” I remind her. “And the automatic censor will strip out all the last names and ship names.”

“So you’ll keep the messages short,” Mom says. “I’ll go straight home, type them into my public net terminal, and send them on to the chief here. No big deal. Least I can do for all this fantastic food he’s been feeding us.”

I exchange glances with the master chief, and we both smile at Mom’s eagerness to skirt regulations.

“Well, I’d sure appreciate that, ma’am,” the chief tells her. He pulls a menu out of his apron, opens it to the last page, and puts it in front of Mom.

“Hope you saved some room for dessert.”

When we leave Chief Kopka’s little restaurant half an hour later, Mom walks out of the place with a slight stagger, like someone who has had just that one drink too many.

“I think I just had more calories for breakfast than I’ve eaten all week,” she says to me, glancing over her shoulder at the restaurant we just left. “I can’t believe he fed us all that food for free.”

“I can’t believe we ran into a fellow podhead,” I say. “Aren’t too many of those around, in the service or out of it.”

While we were eating our opulent breakfast inside, the sky above Liberty Falls had turned from mostly blue to mostly gray, and as we walk down Main Street again, snow starts falling in thick, white flakes that swirl around us silently in the morning breeze. Mom squints up into the sky, a serene smile on her face.

“I wish I could just drop dead on the spot, right here and now,” she says.

Five years ago, I would have been appalled at that sentiment, but now I know exactly what she means.