She looks around at the mess all around her. “Four years of research in this place. You’d figure I would have had some time to get some sort of organization into place. It’s not like there are a lot of distractions around here.”
“Ever heard of digital storage?”
“Yeah, yeah,” she says with a dismissive wave of her hand. “I’m old-fashioned. I like to mark up my pages while drinking coffee. It’s how my brain works best. Most of it is scanned and in the data banks.”
“So I’m guessing you are evacuating with us tonight.”
“Damn right I am.” She pulls a small notebook out of a stack of loose printouts and tosses it into the nearest transport bin. The stack loses its cohesion, and papers slide onto the floor. Janet pushes them aside with her foot.
“I’ve been here for forty-seven months. I’ve not seen my family in well over a year. I don’t have any kids that were born here. My family’s back on Earth, in Pennsylvania. I’m already six months past my original contract commitment. You bet your ass I’m taking the last ride out of here. I don’t think there’ll be much need of astrophysics research here in the future.”
“They’re at Mars,” I say. “The Lankies. They’ve wiped out the colony. I saw it when we flew by. No telling when they’ll move on Earth, but they will.”
“Then that’s all the more reason to get home. I’d much rather die with my husband and my kids than out here by myself.” She picks up another small stack of notebooks and flings them into the bin next to her. “Piece of advice, Andrew. If you ever get married and have kids, and they offer you a job that will take you thirty fucking light-years away from home, tell them to smooch your taint. Even if they offer a hundred percent monthly bonus. You can’t read good-night stories to your bank account, or brush its hair, or teach it how to ride a bike for the first time.”
I don’t have anything to pack except for the set of battle armor I left in Constable Guest’s office. The tall chief constable is behind his desk when I walk in. Unlike Dr. Stewart’s environment, his is orderly and neat, and he is not in the process of packing up things.
“Staying here,” I say, not a question but a statement of fact.
“Of course I’m staying here,” he says. “This is my home.”
I don’t even consider trying to talk him out of his decision because I know I would get precisely nowhere. He has lived here for ten years by choice, both his daughters grew up here, and he’s an essential member of this community. If things are about to end for humanity, they will end right here in this place for him, and he is perfectly fine with that prospect.
“I don’t think we’ll see each other in a few weeks,” I say. “So I guess this time it’s a genuine farewell.”
“In the classic, literal sense,” he says. Then he gets out of his chair and extends his hand. “May you fare well, Sergeant Grayson. Not just for the trip, I mean. With whatever comes after for you.”
I shake his hand, which is about twice the size of mine.
“And you, Constable Guest.”
I gather my armor and leave the office. Constable Guest sits down again and returns to whatever paperwork he was working on when I walked in, steady and predictable as the sunrise.
I spend the rest of the day taking one last walk on the Ellipse and letting the chrono tick down to 1800 hours. On the Rocks is as busy as it was yesterday, but this time I give the place a wide berth. Just the sight of the little plastic tumblers they use to serve their drinks is making me feel queasy again.
In the midafternoon, I run out of places to walk. I’m anxious the way I always am before a really big event—shipping out for boot camp, or preparing for a combat drop. I put on my armor in the admin center and stroll out through the surface doors into the sunlit and snow-packed streets of New Longyearbyen. We fought a battle here against our own allies, a little over two months ago. I walk over to the corner where we had one of our autocannon emplacements set up. The concrete barriers we used for cover have long since been removed, but I can still remember exactly where I stood and what I did when the SI troopers tried to force a landing here in front of the admin center. On the thick walls of the building behind me, deep craters still bear witness to the strafing runs from the Midway’s Shrikes. On the other corner just to my left, we lost half a dozen HD troopers to that cannon fire. I’ve never been able to revisit a site where I fought a battle before, and it’s a strange, detached feeling. That building behind me is so solid that it will survive this generation, and the next one, and then the one after that. It will even survive a Lanky attack if they come and take this place. In a hundred years, those marks left by the armor-piercing grenades from the Shrikes will still be in that wall, long after everyone who has fought in this battle is dead and forgotten, and nobody knows about the little skirmish that took place here, a minor footnote in a very short chapter of colonial history.
We’re in one of New Svalbard’s perennial daylight phases, so when I get to the airfield for the last batch of pickup flights, it’s still bright and sunny outside. The cold is tolerable enough that I am not wearing my helmet. Overall, it feels a lot like the day I set foot onto this moon a few months ago when we arrived on Midway, before all the local trouble started.
There are fewer drop ships on the ground than when I arrived this morning. A flight of four Wasps is standing on the VSTOL pad in a single row, tail ramps down, with refueling probes in their fuel receptacles. I can still see the hastily repaired damage on the tarmac where the missiles from Midway’s Shrikes blew up the underground aviation fuel tank. The drop ships are refueling from mobile bowsers on tank-like treads.
There are maybe fifty civilians waiting in the nearby main building that houses the control tower. Some are families with children. All have luggage with them, standard cargo boxes and a motley assortment of personal bags and polyplast suitcases. Considering the civilian population of New Svalbard, which is somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand, I had expected more takers for the evacuation offer.
Standing in the group is Dr. Stewart, looking a little lost in her oversized cold-weather clothing. She has a wheeled tote next to her, and she is fidgeting with a PDP in her hands. Then she looks up and spots me, and I give her a smile and a nod that I hope to be reassuring. If I feel anxious at the prospect of running a Lanky blockade, I can’t imagine how these civilians must feel.