I don’t want to be awake when we pass Earth again for our ride back to Fomalhaut. I don’t want to see my home planet and Luna through the optical feed, close enough to make out continents on Earth and man-made structures on the moon, because I don’t want to be tempted to just jump into one of the escape pods and shoot myself Earthward. Luckily, I am so fatigued that knocking myself out completely takes no effort at all.
Back in my berth, I take twice the instructed dosage of the pain meds that Corpsman Randall gave me. Then I lie down on my rack, close my eyes, and wait for the warm and fuzzy sensation of the narcotics to flood my brain.
When I wake up again, my body seems to have lost all desire for independent locomotion. With the privacy curtain drawn, I’m in a little box that feels comforting and predictable. It lets me pretend that there isn’t a larger world beyond that curtain, tedious days spent standing the watch on a ship hurtling through the hostile vacuum of space, always just one major hull breach away from oblivion, in a galaxy full of genocidal aliens and a human race that isn’t much better in the ethics department.
I check my chronometer to find that I’ve slept for thirteen hours. I should be rested, and the overwhelming fatigue is no longer weighing on my brain, but instead of refreshed I just feel drained.
I get up and put on a fresh set of CDU fatigues. The ones I am wearing right now are from the supply chain of the carrier Regulus, as is my armor set hanging in its spot in the wall locker nearby. I’ve attached a name tape and rank insignia, but no unit patches. I’m not sure where I belong at this point. The fleet? The New Svalbard militia? The rebellious HD battalions? The crew of Indy? It doesn’t feel proper to declare membership in one of those groups above any of the others, so I claim no affiliation at all on my uniform right now.
I don’t want to go back to CIC and stare at a holographic globe for hours on end that shows me to the tenth of a kilometer just how far I am away from Halley and Earth again, and how fast I’m going the other way. Instead, I fasten the locks on my boots and wash up one-handed in the bathroom nook of my berth. Then I step out of the hatch and turn left, toward the NCO mess.
I am intimately familiar with Indy’s limited menu selections. There are two kinds of sandwiches: the standard service bologna, which is only half soy and actually has some meat content, and peanut butter and jelly, which doesn’t. Even considering all the gross combinations and throwing in a slice of soy cheese, there are only seven or eight ways to recombine the selection. Then there are standard field-ration packages, reheated in the galley. Those come in six different entree options, all of which are just half a degree more edible than the standard Basic Nutritional Allowance rations I used to choke down in the PRC back home. We haven’t had anything other than the prepackaged-ration stuff for weeks now, and it’s amazing how much the lack of food variety can drag down the general morale of grunts and sailors. The pain meds suppress whatever appetite I may have had left, but I can feel my stomach rumbling, so I grab a meal tray despite my lack of gusto and put a bologna sandwich and a cup of coffee on it.
I’m halfway through the coffee and two bites into the mealy sandwich when Dmitry walks into the NCO mess. He sees me sitting by myself in a corner of the room and crosses the mess hall. There’s a bottle in his hand, and he puts it down on the table in front of me as he sits down.
“Present,” he says. “From distillery on Kiev.”
“What is it?” I ask. The stuff in the bottle looks clear and innocent, like tap water.
“Is distilled fermentation,” he says.
“Fermented what, exactly?”
“Is best not to ask,” Dmitry replies. He pops the plastic seal of the bottle open with his thumb and pours a bit of it into my coffee before I can yank the mug away.
“You try. Is not so bad.”
“Your assault carrier actually has a distillery.”
“Is Russian ship. You will not find Russian ship anywhere in SRA fleet without engineer who knows how to make proper drink in secret.”
“And here I thought all my preconceptions about Russians were wrong,” I say. “You get twenty pounds of personal gear to bring with you, and you take along alcohol?”
Dmitry shrugs. “Is useful sometimes, no? Better than box of medals or playthings.”
I bring the mug up to my nose and take a smell. The familiar, slightly sour scent of the standard fleet soybean coffee substitute now has a slightly acrid quality to it. I take a sip, expecting to gag on the spiked blend, but it actually has a tolerable flavor, and I enjoy the slight burn on my palate.
“Not bad,” I say, and take another sip. Dmitry smiles and pushes the bottle all the way to my side of the table.
“You take. Keep for useful purposes.”
“This is serious trade currency, Dmitry. You can probably trade that to the galley cooks for a week of field-ration picks.”
“I pay you for what I owe,” he says. Then he nods at my bandaged hand. “You trade hand of yours for enemy battlespace coordinator.”
I open my mouth to tell Dmitry that that isn’t quite the case, but he waves me off impatiently.
“Yes, yes. I have codes for transition point. Was not personal favor. You save yourself and ship so we can go back to Fomalhaut.” He pronounces the system’s name with a -ch sound in the middle. “But is no matter why. You still lose fingers, and I still put air in lungs. Maybe—if things do not go all shit again—I go home one day. Because you hold hand in front of gun and make shots go down and not here.” He taps at his forehead and chest.
“You got anyone at home? Family?”
He blinks, as if my question has thrown him off a little. Then he reaches into the pocket of his lizard-pattern fatigues and fishes out a little personal document pouch. The SRA version looks much like the ones we carry around, just a tiny waterproof sleeve big enough for a handful of ID chips and maybe a letter hard copy or two. Dmitry reaches into his pouch and takes out a print image. He puts it in front of me almost gingerly.
“Maksim,” he says. “Husband. Big, dumb, but good heart.”
The image shows a soldier about my age. He has an aggressive buzz cut, and he’s dressed in the same lizard-pattern SRA battle dress tunic Dmitry is wearing. The undershirt is striped horizontally in alternating white and blue, and the beret under his shoulder board is sky blue.
“He’s a marine, too?” I ask.
“Like I say. Big and dumb.”
I grin and hand his picture back to him. Dmitry takes it and slips it back into his document pouch carefully.