Measures of Absolution

Chapter Two After

The drop ship doesn’t go back to Shughart. Great Lakes is closer, and Grayson and the Sarge are in bad shape. Jackson keeps looking over to where the crew chief and the combat medic are stabilizing Grayson, who looks as ashen as the gunmetal paint on the bulkhead. Sergeant Fallon lies next to him, conscious but doped to the gills with painkiller, what’s left of her leg tied off with a tourniquet. Then there’s the rescued drop ship crew, and Priest and Baker. There are more wounded than able-bodied in the cargo hold.

Jackson feels helpless. She can’t help the medics do their job, and there’s nothing around to kill up here at ten thousand feet. She has to fight the urge to unbuckle and go up to the drop ship’s armory to refill her magazine pouches and grab a bunch of weapons to replace the ones she left behind on the street in Detroit.

Three years of combat drops all over the country and across the world, and the squad has never received a mauling like this, not even close.

What the fuck went wrong? Jackson wonders. She looks at the leaking bodies of her squadmates and the dozens of impact marks on the outer shell of her armor.

Everything, she concludes. Ain’t a damn thing that went right tonight.

She reaches into her magazine pouch and fishes out the set of dog tags she plucked off the dead rioter just a little while ago. The services all have their own formats for dog tags, and these are rectangular, with rounded edges and a horizontal perforation right across the middle. Jackson isn’t sure, but she thinks they’re old Navy tags, a kind they haven’t issued in a while.

Military weapons. Squad tactics. Run-of-the-mill welfare rioters don’t chew up a hardened infantry squad. They don’t blot heavily armored drop ships from the sky. You need a certain kind of training and mindset to pull that off.

Jackson puts the dog tags back into the magazine pouch before anyone can see what she’s looking at.

Right then she resolves to find out who’s responsible for this ambush—for half her squad laid out bleeding or dead on the deck in front of her. Find the bastards, and kill them.

When the drop ship lands at Great Lakes, the medics swarm the cargo hold before the tail ramp is fully on the ground. They haul off Grayson and Sergeant Fallon, then the dead bodies of Stratton and Paterson. They come to check her out as she unbuckles herself.

“I’m fine,” she tells them. “No holes in the armor.”

“Let’s get you inside anyway,” one of the medics replies. “Just to make sure.”

They take the combat knife off her harness. She has to suppress the impulse to break the fingers of the medic who unfastens her blade and removes it.

Let them have it, she thinks as they lead her outside toward a row of waiting stretchers. Like I wouldn’t know how to kill someone without that. Dumb fucks.

She just has a few minor scratches, so they clean her up and put her on a shuttle back to Shughart. They won’t let her see the rest of the squad. The flight back to base all by herself is the loneliest trip she has ever taken in the military.

Back in the squad bay at Shughart, the ghouls have already cleaned up. Two of the bunks in the room are stripped down to the bare mattress pads, and two lockers stand open and empty. Jackson walks over to what used to be Stratton’s locker and looks inside. The gear is all gone, and someone wiped down the whole locker with an antiseptic cleaner that left behind a faint lemon smell. They even peeled off the adhesive name tag that used to be on the locker door.

She runs her fingers across the optical sensor of the locker’s latch, the flaky DNA reader that would refuse to read Stratton’s thumbprint sometimes, usually when they were running late for something. Her fingertips glide through a thin layer of cleaner residue. There’s nothing left of Stratton in this room, not even his fingerprints. Twelve hours ago, they geared up for a mission in this room together, and now it’s like he never even existed.

Battalion doesn’t seem to know what to do with her. They put her on light duty, but they don’t actually give her anything to do, so she cleans her gear and stows it, then takes it out and cleans it again. She doesn’t want to do maintenance. She doesn’t want to patch things up, she wants to break them. She wants to go out and kill people. It seems strange to be angry at being the only member of your squad to escape an ambush without injury, but Corporal Jackson is. In fact, she’s fucking furious.

She doesn’t feel like eating at all, but her stomach reminds her that she hasn’t had any food since before last night’s combat drop, so Jackson walks over to the chow hall for lunch. For the first time, nobody from her squad sits down with her at the table. She pokes around in her lunch—spaghetti and meatballs—and gets her PDP out of her pocket to read up on the battalion news while she eats. There isn’t a word about last night’s clusterfuck. The battalion S is probably still trying to figure out how to package the events in terms that don’t make it look like the brass screwed the pooch. Like the grunts don’t talk.

The dog tags from last night are in her pocket now. Jackson takes them out and puts them on the mess table in front of her, next to her plate of spaghetti. Then she enters the name on those tags into her PDP and runs a MilNet data search.

It takes a lot of digging to find any references to her MCKENNEY A in the archives. Jackson has no access to the personnel files anywhere, so she can’t just punch in the military serial number on the tag and pull up a name. Instead, she has to do full-text searches on all the open databases on the MilNet—all the sanitized press releases for public consumption, and the thousands of individual unit news nodes updated by the data entry clerks in every autonomous unit in the Armed Forces.

After thirty minutes of increasingly customized searches on increasingly obscure data repositories, her spaghetti and meatballs are cold, but she finally finds a reference to a Navy sailor named MCKENNEY, ANNA K. It pops up in a reference to an awards ceremony, and she instructs her PDP to ferret out the related file. A few seconds later, her PDP returns an article from a base news bulletin, titled TWO RECEIVE NAVY COMMENDATION MEDAL ON NACS CATALINA. There are pictures of the event attached to the file, and the second one she pulls up makes her sit up straight in her chair with a jolt.

The picture shows two sailors shaking hands with a Fleet officer, presumably their commander. The sailor in the middle is the woman she shot last night in Detroit. In the picture, her long hair is neatly tied into a braid, and she’s wearing a Class A Navy smock with petty officer chevrons on her sleeve.

She looks at the picture for a while. She tries to imagine what her voice sounded like, or what her smile looked like.

Petty Officers Third Class Anna McKenney and Pete Willis accept their Navy Commendation Medals from their Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Commander Alan Carreker, the caption of the picture reads.

Anna McKenney will never age past the way she looks in that picture. All that’s left of her is the collection of bytes that make up this picture in some forgotten nook of the MilNet, and the stamped steel tag on the table in front of Jackson.

The article lists Petty Officer McKenney’s home town as Liberty Falls, Vermont. A quick cross-reference with MilNet tells Jackson that Liberty Falls is a small city near the state capital Montpelier. Its population is only thirty thousand, which is a shockingly low number to her. There are more residents than that in any five blocks of tenement buildings of any PRC.

When the military lists a soldier’s hometown, they always mean the place of enlistment. Corporal Jackson very much doubts that Anna McKenney traveled all the way to that little Vermont town just to visit a recruitment office, and she’s willing to bet that some people in Liberty Falls still remember her name.