“You got a nicer unit, I see.”
“They had me move out of our two-bedroom when you left for the military. They bumped me up a little, though. The old neighborhood is falling apart, you know. Every time there’s a riot, they turn off the power and stop giving out rations—every single time. I got so sick of sitting in the dark without food for days on end.”
She pats the chest of my uniform tunic and runs a finger across the ribbons above the breast pocket.
“I’m so glad you don’t have to worry about any of this anymore, Andrew. All people ever do around here is watch the Networks and bitch about all the stuff they don’t have. Now come inside, will you? Just don’t mind the mess. I gave the help a month off.”
Mom’s new apartment is neater and more modern than the old one, but less than half the size. It’s still palatial compared to my berth on the Intrepid. There’s a living room with kitchen corner, a separate bedroom, a bathroom, and a large hallway closet. Not even the commanding officer of a supercarrier has this much personal space. I look through the rooms briefly, and see that Mom has put up a little collage of pictures on her living room wall, mostly low-res prints of photographs I sent her through MilNet. There’s even a shot of me and Halley, taken two years ago on our joint leave back on the fleet rec facility on Mars.
“I don’t have much in the way of food,” Mom says from the kitchen nook, where she’s filling two glasses of water from the tap. “They cut the rations by another thousand calories two months ago. Now I can’t even put away anything for the riot outages. Not that I can heat anything when they cut the power.”
“Don’t worry about food, Mom. They said I can bring a dependent to the government canteens. We can take the train up to South Station. Their canteen’s pretty decent.”
“You think? Oh, that would be fabulous.”
“Yeah. Shouldn’t be a problem. Want to go right now? I’m sure they’re serving dinner. The day shift is about to clock out. It’ll be pretty crowded, though.”
Mom looks out of the windows to gauge the level of remaining daylight.
“Oh, let’s go, then,” she says after a brief moment of contemplation. “Before it gets too dark out there.”
After five years of hopping around from colony to colony, wide-open skies and empty landscapes, being back in the concrete warrens of my old hometown feels claustrophobically confining. There’s a sense of danger and casual malevolence to the dirty cookie-cutter architecture of the Public Residence towers and the unkempt streets and sidewalks now. Outside, the shadows have grown long.
Mom and I step out of her residence tower, and I check my surroundings the way I used to do back when I grew up here. There’s a group of kids sitting on the curb in front of the residence tower across the street, swigging some orange concoction from a clear jug they are passing around. There’s a demarcation in age and demeanor when the young hood rats graduate from hit-and-run vandalism and blowing off steam to actively prowling for stuff to steal and people to harm, and from what I know about my youth days here, these kids are right on that cusp.
For a moment, I consider heading back into the residence tower behind me. Then I think about the fact that I’ve spent the last five years shooting at people and fighting Lankies in much worse spots than PRC Boston-7. The public-transit station is only two blocks away, and there are cops nearby.
“Let’s go,” I tell Mom, and steer her up the road. I glance over to the group of kids as we walk off briskly, and I can see one of them looking over to us and staring.
“You don’t have your gun on you, do you?” I ask Mom.
“Of course not. It’s in the kitchen, on top of the food warmer.”
I glance over my shoulder and see that the group of apprentice hoodlums is now looking over at us, and there’s an animated but hushed discussion going on between them.
“Walk faster,” I tell Mom.
We’re halfway down the block before I hear them trotting up behind us.
“Yo, soldier boy, wait up, man.”
Mom looks around and opens her mouth to reply, but I shake my head.
“Keep walking,” I tell her. They’re younger and scrawnier than I am, but there’s five of them and just one of me, and I’m unarmed. A block and a half away, the public-transit station’s bunker-like new architecture looks more inviting than it did earlier. There are cops milling around in front of a hydrocruiser by the entrance, but they’re out of shouting range. We pass the mouth of an alley to our left, and as we do, the five hood rats rush up on the sidewalk next to us and nudge us into the alley, out of the view of the few people who are walking around on the street this evening.