Measures of Absolution

Chapter Three Liberty

Don’t make me find you some bullshit job,” Sergeant Sobieski says when Corporal Jackson walks into his office and renders a salute. The platoon sergeant is a stocky man with a graying buzzcut and a permanent frown on his face.

“Negative, sir. I came to check if I can get a few days of leave. Since I am limited to bullshit jobs right now anyway.”

Sergeant Sobieski looks at her, his frown increasing in severity as he undoubtedly ponders whether to consider her repetition of his swear word as borderline insubordination. Then he raises an eyebrow.

“Leave? What the hell you going to do with that, Jackson? Got yourself a civvie boyfriend in town?”

“That’s a negative, sir. I feel the need for some fresh air all of a sudden.”

Sergeant Sobieski studies her face for a moment, his own expression sour as always. Then he shakes his head and sits down behind his desk.

“I sure as shit can’t use you for anything before Battalion gets around to your psych eval and lets you near a gun again.”

He consults the MilNet terminal on his desk.

“You got five days accrued, Jackson. You want to take ’em?”

“If it’s okay with the platoon, sir.”

Sergeant Sobieski hacks away at the keyboard with two fingers, an activity he clearly finds distasteful. Then he taps a button on his terminal’s touchscreen and leans back in his chair.

“I’m the platoon right now, Miss Jackson, and I don’t care. God knows you’ve all earned a few days of drinking and whoring around for that clusterfuck in Detroit. Go over to the company clerk and give him the dates you want for your leave.”

“Thank you, sir,” she says and salutes again.

“Now get out and stop bugging me,” the Sergeant says as he returns her salute casually.

The next morning, Jackson puts on her little-used Class A uniform instead of the far more comfortable ICUs. She’d much rather wear the fatigues—the Class A looks a lot more presentable, but feels a lot more stifling—but she obeys the regulations and puts on the dress smock.

After breakfast, she walks across the base to the aviation section. A soldier on leave can hitch a ride on military transports, provided they have a free jump seat in the cargo hold. Some soldiers spend a good chunk of their leave waiting for rides, but Jackson has no problems getting a sear on an eastbound transport shuttle right away.

She spends the morning hopping across the eastern half of the continent on a succession of shuttles. Finally, after stops at TA bases in Kentucky, the Chicago metroplex, and upstate New York, she finds herself at Burlington, a small TA air base on the shore of Lake Champlain. The base has a public transportation link right in front of the main gate.

As a soldier, Jackson gets certain perks in the civilian world. She can eat at any government facility with a chow room—military bases, public administration centers, transit worker canteens. She can also ride the maglev system for free just by scanning her military ID in place of a regular ticket.

She walks into the terminal building, past the uniformed security guards at the door. Her TA smock gets her respectful nods. She has no doubt that coming up here in her old, ratty civilian clothes would have meant a security inspection and on-the-spot interview instead, to make sure she has a good reason for being up here, and a form of payment sufficient for a maglev ticket. She pulls a ticket with her ID and gets on the regional maglev to Liberty Falls, just ten minutes away.

The town is clean, tidy, middle-class. No high rises anywhere in sight to spoil the view of the Green Mountains which surround the town. It looks like a different world from Dayton, never mind Detroit.

Jackson came to Liberty Falls with only a last name for a lead. The military-issue PDP in the pocket of her uniform trousers only talks to the MilNet, which doesn’t interact with any of the civvie data networks. She can check obscure news from backwater TA units, or look up any number of regulations and manuals, but the PDP won’t let her so much as bring up a schedule for the hydrobuses berthed outside the transit station. She’s almost ready to ask a local to borrow their personal datapad for a moment and rely on the respectability her uniform seems to convey in this middle-class enclave, when she sees a public library up ahead at the corner of the green.

The library has public-access data terminals. She walks in, sit down in front of one, and brings up the public and private Networks directories. There are eight Net nodes in Liberty Falls belonging to people with the last name of MCKENNEY.

She half expects the search for the right McKenneys to require canvassing every address on the list of names she just brought up, but in the end, the resolution is quick and simple. She plugs Anna McKenney’s full name into the heuristic search to see what comes back. The data terminal blinks for second, and then spits out four screens of search results. Jackson opens a few to see if they refer to the right person, and the very first hit is her yearbook entry from her school, Miguel Alcubierre Polytechnic Public High School. The girl in the picture is unmistakably a young version of the woman in the image of the military awards ceremony Jackson has saved on her PDP. She never got a long look at Anna McKenney’s face back in Detroit, but she has had plenty of time to study her picture since she unearthed it on her PDP back in the chow hall yesterday. There are many more references to her in the public news repositories filed away for posterity, and after a few more minutes of digging, Jackson finds the name of her parents, embedded in a picture of the proud family at Anna’s graduation from Alcubierre Polytech back in 2188.

She checks the list of addresses she pulled from the public directories and sees the entry for MCKENNEY ROBERT & JENNIFER near the bottom of the list. They are on a private network, Datapoint, but their listing isn’t locked, and their Net node number is followed by their street address: 4408 Copley Circle, Liberty Falls, NAC/VT/056593.

It’s only when she looks at the address of the parents of the woman she killed when she realizes that part of her wanted to come up empty, to hit a dead end out here in suburban Vermont, and go home to Shughart with an excuse to stop digging. Now, with the address right in front of her, she no longer has the option to return to the way things were before Detroit, no way to rationalize keeping herself in the dark.

According to the city map, Copley Circle is a street in a residential neighborhood two kilometers from the library. Jackson transcribes the directions to the notepad on her PDP, does a hard reset of the terminal to clear all the screens, and leaves the library to go and maybe find a measure of absolution.