That kind of personal disclosure requires a tit for tat. I take my own personal pouch out of my leg pocket and open it. It has my military ID in it, the last letter I got from Mom, and two pictures of Halley. I take out the one of her in her flight suit, the one I’ve been carrying around since she sent it to me back before I even joined what was still the navy back then.
Looking at her smile and that rugged short haircut of hers gives me a momentary ache that’s far worse than what I’m feeling from my healing nose or the bandaged hand. I give the picture to Dmitry, who raises an eyebrow and nods in appreciation.
“She is pilot,” he says. “Good pilot?”
“Good pilot,” I confirm. “Instructor at Combat Flight School.”
“What is she pilot of? Big piece of govno with big gun for shooting Russian marines? What do you call, Shrike?”
“Not a Shrike. Wasp and Dragonfly drop ships. Small piece of govno with smaller guns for shooting Russian marines.”
Dmitry chuckles, his eyes still on the picture of Halley. “Show me other one.”
I hand over the second picture, which is one of Halley and me at a fleet rec facility two years ago. We’re both wearing dress blues, and Halley’s fruit salad of medal ribbons is slightly but noticeably bigger than mine.
“Girlfriend? Wife?”
“Fiancée,” I say.
“What is fiancée?”
“We’re getting married,” I reply. “Once I get back. If we get back.”
Dmitry reaches into a different pocket and produces a small metal object, which he holds up and turns slowly with his fingertips. It’s a stylized eagle holding a wreath in its talons. The wreath has the Roman numeral III in its center. The eagle’s wings are stretched out behind it, a raptor in the middle of a high-speed dive for its prey.
“Another present,” he says. “I have these for fifteen years. Now I give to you.”
He hands the eagle badge to me. I put it on my palm and look at it.
“Are these jump wings?”
“I get at spaceborne training course. Is for dress uniform, to look pretty. Not for battle dress. You keep, maybe give to fiancée. You can tell her you took off body of dead Russian.”
“I can’t take your damn jump wings, Dmitry.” I put the eagle badge on the table and carefully slide it over to him. If the Sino-Russian marines put half as much value on their original set of jump wings from their version of a School of Spaceborne Infantry as our own SI troopers do, he just gave me the most sentimental thing he owns aside from the picture of Maksim.
“You take, or I punch color from your hair again, Andrew,” he says without smiling, and his expression makes it pretty clear that he won’t brook an argument. “Is poor trade for left hand, I know. But you take anyway.”
He pushes the eagle back across the table. It certainly looks like it has been worn for fifteen years. The gold enamel on the wreath in the eagle’s talons is rubbed off in spots, and all the high points of the relief stamping are worn smooth. I wonder if that little set of jump wings has been on a contested planet with its owner while I traded shots with him at some point.
“Fine,” I say. “Now shut up about the whole thing. Like you said, I was just making sure our ticket back didn’t get yanked.”
I open Dmitry’s bottle again and put another splash into my coffee. Then I hand the bottle to Dmitry, who accepts it without hesitation before taking a long swig. Then he caps the bottle and puts it back on the table.
“We are same, you and I. Both duraky. Fools. Idiots. They tell us, ‘Go here, shoot this man, call missile on this building,’ and we do. Shoot at each other for many years, kill each other’s comrades, and get little pieces of metal with colorful ribbon. We should not be here. We should be home, you and I. Back home with Maksim and . . . what is name of your fiancée?” He pronounces the new word deliberately.
“Halley,” I say. “Her first name is Diana, but she hates it, so she’s just Halley to everyone.”
“Halley,” Dmitry repeats. With his Russian accent, it sounds like “Challey.”
It almost seems like a cliché from an old war movie, I think. Enemies get together, have a drink, exchange trinkets, and show off pictures of each other’s sweethearts, and then they realize that they have so much in common that they don’t want to fight each other anymore. The futility of war, young men and women ordered from above to kill each other for stupid reasons, and all that. But I don’t feel ennobled or enlightened by any of this. Mostly, I just feel like I’ve wasted most of the last five years of my life killing people who didn’t need or want to be killed, as part of a big stupid machine that has been chewing up the very assets we needed to fight the Lankies, the real threat. A little numbered cog in the meat grinder, ready to turn on command. And now the same people who pulled the handle on that grinder over and over are probably getting ready to walk away from the mess, hands clean, to leave the rest of us to our fates.
“Duraky,” I say.
Dmitry smiles sadly and gets up from his chair. “I will go sleep now, or maybe learn more secrets of fancy imperialist spy ship. Enjoy distilled fermentation,” he says.
I watch as he walks out of the NCO mess, which is now once again empty except for me and the bottle of Russian contraband ethanol on the table.
I eat the rest of my sandwich without much enthusiasm. My hand has started hurting again, so I pull out the bottle of pain meds and open the cap. Then I pop two of the little white pills into my mouth and wash them down with a swig of my spiked coffee. If I am going to check out of reality for a while, might as well do the job all the way.
The mess hatch opens, and two of the SI troopers walk in, Corporal DeLuca and Sergeant Acosta. I quickly take Dmitry’s bottle and stick it into the leg pocket of my jeans. Every second we move along on Red Route One toward the transition point means another few thousand kilometers of vacuum between me and Halley again. I know I made the right decision, but right now every passing hour increases my resentment of myself, and I need to take the edge off a bit. I nod at the newcomers and vacate the table to head back to my berth for some more warm and fuzzy narcotics-assisted alone time.
CHAPTER 17
“Goddammit, easy on the stern thrusters. Half a degree more positive angle. Keep the bow up.”
The XO is in the middle of the CIC pit, the center of the room with the big holotable that is the brain of the ship, coordinating the docking attempt like a conductor in charge of a small orchestra. Everyone is tense, none more so than the helmsman, who is in charge of keeping Indy’s four thousand tons in perfect synchronicity with the SRA anchorage not thirty meters off our port side. This is docking attempt number four in as many hours, and what was supposed to be a two-hour affair from start to finish is turning into an all-day event.